Fairness, justice and common sense demand government commitment to reading and writing in prison

There is a literacy crisis in our prisons. The problem does not magically arise when people are locked up  (although for some incarceration brings help for the first time). And of  course, there are plenty of people who are illiterate and who never offend.

The prevalence of illiteracy – alongside high levels of poor physical and mental health, drugs and alcohol abuse and unemployment – found amongst the some 88,000 people in prison at any one time, reflects a broader crisis affecting some of our communities, particularly those experiencing poverty and deprivation.

Local democracy in England is in a troubled state. Swingeing cuts to local government, voter apathy and declining civic involvement all suggest a parlous state of affairs and with no let up in the economic gloom, the prospect of double dip recession threatens to sideline every other issue.

That at least is one take on the current state of local democracy. But here’s another: new forms of democratic expression and action are emerging and new networks and nodes of power are being created through the organising power of the internet.  These will both disrupt existing democratic norms and reconfigure them in ways that strengthen them.

To understand why this might be so, we need to step back for a moment and mark the emergence of three major trends evident in western countries and – as seen in the Arab Spring – in some non western countries.

The below is a slightly expanded write-up of the notes I made before speaking on a panel at the launch of Paul Mason’s new book, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, last Thursday at the Southbank Centre. The panel, composed of myself, Mark Fisher, Dan Hancox, and chaired by Ellie-Mae O’Hagan, was an opportunity to delve into some of the issues surrounding ‘horizontal networks’ and protest emerging from Paul’s book. What follows is no attempt at a comprehensive review, but one perspective in what felt like a discussion that could have profitably gone on for much longer.

In his book, and in a number of articles surrounding it, Paul has asserted that a ‘network can usually beat a hierarchy’, and this optimism is in some sense the fundamental claim of his book. I don’t share that optimism, or at least I see reasons to be cautious about thinking about victory as already-achieved – by any estimation, and in any sphere, 2012 is the year of retrenchment. That is as true for the countries of the Arab Spring as it is for anti-austerity activists in Europe, where initial success meets political inertia and neutralisation.

The fact British prime ministers have been getting younger when they assume office is obvious, but there has been almost no comment on the consequences of this development.

The relative youth of recent prime ministers may be the slow-acting result of the student revolts that erupted in 1968 across the western democracies including Britain. The ensuing so-called “counter culture” put the emphasis on youth and usurped the hegemony traditionally accorded to their elders and betters. Respect was to give way to celebrity, which by its very nature gives short shrift to seniority.

The second edition of the free newspaper Migrant Voice is published this week. This edition celebrates the contribution of migration to life in the UK and captures migrants’ ambitions and aspirations for the future, including those of Brits living abroad. It traces migrants in Europe’s royal households and blames Olympic flames for sparking romance between royals and their future migrant partners. It introduces us to migrants’ many talents in the food, music, fashion, sports and arts industries. It also highlights the impact of some of the newly introduced policies such as the cap on migrant workers, and the restrictions on students’ visa on both migrants and the UK economy.   

Over the past 10 years, public spaces have become increasingly policed by unaccountable officials bearing open-ended powers.

On-the-spot fines mean that police and other officials can punish people for a series of offences ‘on-the-spot’, without legal checks and balances. A criminal offence that would have been tried in a court room – the offence of causing ‘harassment, alarm and distress’, for example, or ‘disorderly behaviour while drunk’ – are now often dealt with like a parking ticket. 

This piece opens OurKingdom's new debate, "Uneconomics".

When economists Lucas Papademos and Mario Monti were parachuted in as Prime Ministers of Greece and Italy respectively in November of last year, this heralded a new era in the power of the economics profession. With questions still being asked about the failings of economics and economists in the build-up to the financial crisis, this technocratic rebuke to democracy was further evidence that this crisis is entrenching existing elite power, rather than weakening it. Not that you would hear any of this being discussed in an economics classroom.

In the same month, Harvard economics students staged a walkout from the classroom of conservative economist Greg Mankiw, accompanied by an open letter explaining why. As the letter argued: 

Harvard graduates play major roles in the financial institutions and in shaping public policy around the world. If Harvard fails to equip its students with a broad and critical understanding of economics, their actions are likely to harm the global financial system. The last five years of economic turmoil have been proof enough of this.

Elsewhere, the documentary, Inside Job, contained startling reports of how senior economics professors had been paid large consultancy fees to report that economies such as Iceland’s were fundamentally sound. From the 1990s onwards, a number of senior American economists repeatedly ‘discovered’ that financial derivatives were reducing risks within the financial system.

Myth, anger and principle collide around the question of capping Universal Credit at £26,000 per household under the Welfare Reform Bill. I’ve sat in the Lords, hearing real expertise blend with passion in opposing parts of the Bill. The Commons were always likely to reverse the Lords amendments, and now government looks set to quash them using Parliamentary rules. Universal Credit and the cap are coming, with effect from next year.

Why the passion for the cap? It’s not economics, for its savings are a smidgeon of the total the government hopes to save through its welfare reforms. UC is predicted to save 0.5 bn annually; the cap £580m in 2013-2015. (That doesn’t take account of the costs, particularly to Local Authorities, of abruptly relocating families.) The driver seems to be a mixture of righteousness and anger: in straitened times, it’s not right that some receive so much for ‘doing nothing’. It is the nature of the anger that worries me. It diverts and divides.

Take the mother-and-son team I meet as a Citizens Advice Bureau adviser. They are supporting three younger children. They don’t run a car or have a plushy house – I know the area. Though not disabled, they’re ‘challenged’ by life. They’re bitter against benefit scroungers, and dread others’ judgment.

David Cameron should respect the evidence and stop the unamendable Health and Social Care Bill, says former health minister Lord David Owen

The great majority of the bodies that speak for the health professions are now calling into question the fundamentals of the Health and Social Care Bill. Ever since I published Fatally Flawed on my website on 30 March 2011 (1), I have been waiting and hoping that most of the Royal Colleges would realize that the Health and Social Care Bill was quite unlike any other legislation on the NHS put forward for debate since 1946. The very size of the Bill and its complexity makes it unamendable.

As we come to Report Stage in the House of Lords it is crystal clear that despite the best efforts of all those concerned and despite the many amendments that will be passed, the fundamental structure will remain intact. The Chairman of the National Commissioning Board envisaged in the Bill, himself a distinguished academic and barrister, has described the Bill as “completely unintelligible” (2); one of the reasons that the complex inter-reaction of this legislation has taken time to come through to the health professions. Today the risks of going ahead with the Bill are now being professionally assessed by more and more of the Royal Colleges as being greater than the risks of stopping this Bill even in its last stages.

A glimpse of England's future as the Health and Social Care Bill, paving the way for NHS privatisation, returns to the House of Lords today

Living in a country without universal healthcare is difficult and complicated.

It means making a mental calculation every time you feel unwell: "Is this something I can afford to see the doctor for? Or can I tough it out?" Most of the people I know choose to tough it out. I am lucky to have a job that provides health insurance, but even so I am reluctant to see the doctor because it is never clear how much I will owe and how much the insurance company will pay.

The government’s ‘preferred bidders’ for contracts to house vulnerable asylum seekers are Reliance Security and two multinational security companies — G4S and Serco — best known for immigration prisons, forcible deportations and failings in their duty of care to vulnerable people.

One of our sad duties is to monitor the deaths of people in custody, and I am reminded of this today as I attend a meeting of the Ministerial Board on deaths in custody. When I took over as director some twenty years ago we highlighted the deaths of young people who were taking their lives in prison, and our action prompted an inquiry by the chief inspector of prisons which in turn led to promising changes to the care of vulnerable people in prison.

‘…the worst thing that can happen to one in the relations between man and man,’ wrote Rousseau, ‘is to find oneself at the mercy of another.’

According to republican political theory, liberty consists precisely in not living at another’s mercy. One lacks liberty when someone has a power to interfere in your life at their discretion, according to their whim. Liberty is the absence of this power, or what the political theorist Philip Pettit calls ‘non-domination.’

It helps to keep this insight into liberty in mind when thinking about the latest turn in the long ongoing story of the Coalition’s Welfare Reform Bill.

At the risk of being called “characteristically uncharitable” by Owly, a note is needed in OurKingdom’s part of the United Kingdom to mark the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne and her commitment to stay on it. The line that the Palace has decided upon to describe her achievement is that she is the “still, small voice” in our lives. “Lady Penn, a friend of the monarch since they were both 20, summed up her qualities in an interview with the BBC”. She said,

"She's got a very deep faith which is, I think, very important in her life. She's very kind. She has a lot of common sense and great wisdom, she really has. Somebody said to me the other day that she has been the still small voice of calm in a really social revolution in this country over the last 60 years - and she has."

Criminals are to be stopped from making claims for injuries, but criminals may be victims too.

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke wants to reform the taxpayer-funded Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme to ensure that a person with a criminal record will be able to claim compensation only in “exceptional circumstances”. The Howard League pioneered the principle of the state recognising that victims should get some financial recompense to go some way to mitigate their trauma and our campaign, led by one of my predecessors, led to the establishment of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme. So cuts to payouts to victims matter to us.

Let’s not be fooled into thinking that this is about principles, this is about money.

When the austerity budget was revealed in June 2010 it was quickly apparent that women would bear the brunt of the new Coalition government cuts. The likely impact was analysed at the time by Yvette Cooper who described the emergency budget as looking like “the worst for women since the creation of the welfare state”. Since then, the emerging catalogue of austerity measures: cuts to public sector, to public services, reductions in welfare measures, cuts to benefits including tax credits, have created a barren landscape for today’s women in conservative Britain.

Human beings have a need to associate, to feel they belong and to be part of wider groupings.

We all recognise this, but we also know some of the limits: the power and negativity of being in a gang, tribe or group, of including and excluding.

While decreasing homophobia is an uneven social process, considerable legal and social progress has occurred for sexual minorities in the UK in recent years. Highlighting the depth of these changes, new OfSTED guidelines now compel schools to actively promote the inclusion of sexualities. Government directives even recommend doing this through both discussing gay history and introducing students to gay role models.