Category Archives: Politics

Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

UK Government Policy is anti-family

SOCIETY

THE Observer’s editorial, on Sunday January 15, the sister newspaper of the Guardian, concerns how hostile the UK has become in families having children. The editor points to how parents are being forced to bring up their offspring in conditions that will have grave repercussions for society.

According to the old proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ That will have little meaning for many parents today, but the proper place for institutions outside the family in the birth and upbringing of our children is a pressing matter indeed. Recent evidence suggests that government is grievously failing parents in many ways.

Alarmingly, it starts even before birth. A report released last week from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), highlighted a worrying decline in women’s experiences of NHS maternity services in England. The trend comes in the wake of several inquiries into the very poor maternity care on offer in some hospital trusts, with more than 1,000 babies dying or who are left with severe injuries each year as a result of something having gone wrong during labour. The CQC has found four in ten maternity services are providing unacceptable levels of care. This goes well beyond the general resourcing and staffing issues within the NHS that have created a national crisis; it reflects more directly a cultural under-prioritisation of the care of women and their babies that has not been adequately addressed by successive UK governments.

Government policy, too, has a marked influence on the context within which parents bring up their children: the expense in having a child, the level of support on offer when things go wrong, and the difficulties of juggling childcare with maintaining a career. Political decisions made over the last decade has, undoubtedly, resulted in Britain becoming a more hostile place to bring up a family.

The cost-of-living crisis has pushed up the already high cost of raising a child to the age of 18 even further. An estimate provided by the Child Poverty Action suggest the average figure is now £160,000 for couples and £200,000 for lone parents. Even if both parents work full-time at the minimum wage, it is forecast they will fall more than £1,700 a year short of the income needed to attain a basic minimum standard of living. This reflects the fact that as wages have stagnated over the last decade, the cost of living – including housing, food and energy – has increased, and government support for low-paid parents has been significantly scaled back since 2010 through austerity.

Successive Conservative chancellors have reduced tax credits and benefits for low-income families with children while introducing generous tax cuts that have benefited the better off: a redistribution not just from the less to the more affluent, but from families with children to those without. This has undermined the financial safety net that was put in place for families by the last Labour government. It was a provision in recognition of the fact that Britain has too many jobs that simply do not pay enough for parents to be able to provide for their children. It should come as no surprise, then, that child poverty rates have risen since 2010, with almost one in three children in the UK living in poverty.

Long-term issues in the housing market have also introduced much greater uncertainty in relation to raising children. Rising house prices mean more parents will never be able to afford to buy their own home: one in five households now live in privately rented accommodation, up from one in 10, 20 years ago. This trend will continue to rise, with more children being brought up in rented homes. This not only has a huge impact on living standards – Britain has the most expensive rents in Europe – but on safety and security. More than a quarter of homes in the private rented sector do not meet the government’s minimum “decent homes” criteria. Also, a vast number of renters remain vulnerable to short-term tenancy agreements, at the end of which they can be evicted through no fault of their own. The law in England, in particular, has much to do to protect tenants from the uncertainties they face. The growing numbers of parents who rent property deserve to be able to achieve much greater stability for their children through controlled rents and long-term tenancies.

The other pressing factor for parents is childcare, a huge financial outlay, particularly for young children not yet at school. Recently released data shows that Britain now has the joint-highest childcare costs of any OECD country. Government support with these costs is generally erratic and it is harder still to access quality nursery provision in the least affluent areas. Yet, as studies have shown, high-quality childcare provision is associated with better educational outcomes, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, higher levels of parental wellbeing and better economic outcomes for women. Modelling by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) suggests that investing in universal free childcare for the under-fives would boost economic growth and result in a higher tax take.

The anti-family sheen of government policy and neglect mean that many parents cannot give their children the level of security they aspire to, affecting the rest of their lives. It will also put some people off having children, with wider consequences for the whole of society given the higher tax burden that Britain’s low birth rate will impose on future generations.

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Arts, Culture, Human Rights, Politics, Society

Book banning in the US is inspiring educational censorship elsewhere

CENSORSHIP

BOOK BANNING is spreading at an alarming rate in school districts across the United States. PEN America recently documented more than 2,500 books that have been banned stemming across 32 different states during the 2021-22 academic year.

These bans are not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated assault on public education that’s taking aim at the teaching of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities and US history.

Demands to ban books in American schools is not new. But book banning now has erupted into a national movement. Coordinated and highly organised activist groups have transformed school board meetings into political battlegrounds, threatening educators and undermining the freedom to learn.

These efforts to censor books are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. Equally worrying, however, is the fact that these patterns of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven’t had as much success there yet.

In the UK, officials are raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools – an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern – to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That’s part of what authors have described as a mood ‘shift’ in the UK – a budding ‘culture war’ that is leading to the censorship and removal of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children’s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.

Echoes of US-based group tactics are also manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books – again with LGBTQ+ content – and seeking to change curricular topics that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory.

The book banning movement has also gained the attention of politicians. Australia’s Senate voted against the inclusion of critical race theory in the country’s school curriculum in 2021.

Of course, educational censorship laws and book bans, particularly aimed at silencing certain peoples, religions, or viewpoints, are tactics that have long been used by governments.

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Asia, Justice, Philosophy, Politics, Society

(Philosophy) Justice

REDISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

WHAT does justice demand? The basic idea is that people should “get what they deserve,” whether in a court of law (criminals and victims), in broader society (the rich and the poor), or on the global stage (neo-colonial powers and the countries they’ve exploited). But what exactly do people deserve? And what principles can we use to ensure that justice is served, and in a way we might all find reasonable?

Anglo-American philosophy has long been dominated by debates about distributive justice: deciding which principles should determine how goods, opportunities, resources, rights, and freedoms are shared out between the members of a society, or even between different societies.

In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls imagined which principles of justice people would agree to if they were unaware of their position in society and other crucial facts about themselves. He theorised that they would prioritise equality and liberty and would only accept inequalities if they were required to create the greatest benefit to the least well-off in society (the “difference principle”). His colleague Robert Nozick responded in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) by suggesting that if people freely did what they wanted with their talents or other resources, this would produce inequalities that would not necessarily benefit the worst-off, but that would be justifiable given the required respect for people’s individual freedoms.

The American political theorist Iris Marion Young argued that the distributive justice paradigm fails to capture important features of public appeals to justice made by women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, and gay and lesbian civil rights movements. These groups are often excluded from political practices of collective evaluation and decision-making about institutional organisation and public policy, and so lack political representation or power. These exclusions constitute injustices, which Young insisted require philosophical analysis. She defined injustice in terms of “five faces” of oppression: exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Justice, through the eradication of its opposite, injustice, can only be achieved via a “politics of recognition” – acknowledging different groups’ experiences and political needs.

Justice in the legal-judicial sense is often understood as corrective or retributive – correcting criminals for their wrongdoing via means of retribution such as fines or imprisonment. The American activist and scholar Angela Davis argues wholesale against prison as a means to justice. She believes that in an age of mass incarceration, the abolishment of prisons is a central requirement for the achievement of justice in a democratic society. There are others, too, who advocate the principle of “restorative judgement” where criminals face their victims to understand the pain and hurt caused. Research suggests that when such an approach is used recidivism and rates of reoffending are dramatically reduced.

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