Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

When the news is largely boring as it often is in the summer months I sometimes flick over to Al Jazeera to see what they’ve to say about things.

Obviously it’s got more of an interest in middle eastern affairs so the mix of news is a bit different. However, for the most part the difference is more of a matter of depth of coverage much as CNN cover American news stories in more depth than the BBC do.

However, where it got more interesting was a week or so back when they were interviewing the boss of NASA.

Whereas most of us in the western world would consider NASA as a purely civilian outfit, the Al Jazeera interviewer seemed almost to consider it as a purely military outfit. Thus, he continually pressed Major General Bolden about the arms race in the 1960s that got America to the moon and about the military satellites which they launch and both of which Bolden evaded answering properly. Overall it seemed a very antagonistic interview.

The thing is though that although Bolden evaded both issues in fact were it not for the cold war in the 1960s it’s unlikely that America would have had the impetus to their space programme to go to the moon quite so quickly. The Sputnik flying unchallenged over American airspace certainly wasn’t appreciated when America had nothing similar at the time. Likewise, although NASA is a civilian organisation by and large, it does launch a number of military satellites and there seems little point in evading that issue. Indeed on their own website NASA are quite open about some of their military launches such as the GPS satellites.

It’s certainly interesting now and again to see just how different a viewpoint some in the Arab world have of what America gets up to.

By and large the UK regional governments have historically ploughed their own furrow largely in isolation from what’s been going on at the national level. Essentially they’ve aimed to make vote winning decisions as they’ve went along but that’s about to change in what looks like being quite a dramatic way.

Thus we have the national government saying that they will ring-fence health and, largely, education spending. A fine aim for sure, but both of those budgets are devolved to the regional governments which causes problems because those governments are financed by what’s called the block grant – essentially a big cheque to cover all of their bills.

The effect of this is that those block grants are what will be reduced (by anything from 25% to 40%) and it will be up to the regional governments to distribute those reductions amongst the areas within their responsibility. Taking Northern Ireland as an example we find that health and education take up around 60% of the total budget so if they are ringfenced by the regional government and the cut were 40% then all other departments would need to be closed down which is hardly a runner. Even at 25% that would mean a 60% cut in the other departments. Thus ringfencing health and education is hardly going to be possible, no matter how desirable it might be in principle.

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect some extremely difficult decisions from the regional governments in the coming months.

Prosperity for all is the aim but it’s going to be a long time before we get to that point as this budget is all about repairing the foundations of the economy that were so badly damaged by the previous Labour administration.

There’s a sensible capping of benefits almost across the board with probably the largest headlines to come from the cap on housing benefit. One suspects that the largest headlines to come will be from some of those in the million pound housing benefit mansions.

What it also cut was a whole raft of seemingly minor benefits which were introduced piecemeal over the course of the previous Labour administration. What all those different benefits largely did was to create a whole bureaucracy to administer them with little benefit for those who probably needed them most who never even knew they existed.

Increasing VAT to 20% after next Christmas is the single measure that paid for much of the changes. Notably this is a simple measure rather than the complex mix of additional tarifs that some recommended in terms of eliminating exemptions to childrens’ clothing or books.

With the announced substantial cuts in government spending there’s going to be something of a forced move from the public to the private sector for many. That’s going to need equally substantial retraining in many instances.

What this is intended to do overall is to get rid of what has become a crippling level of public debt in a remarkably short period of time. That rapid reduction meant a fairly harsh budget but one that should get us back on an even keel within the forseeable future.

Thus far in the fifth series the planting of forward links has been much more heavy-handed than we’d become used to though the era of the Harold Saxon arc which managed to place untold numbers of forward links that were easy to miss at the time but obvious in hindsight. This series has largely been a series of one-off episodes with little overall linkage other than the heavy handed crack to link them together.

Tonight’s episode had so many separate threads in it that it felt more like a 90 minute episode than the normal length one that it actually was. That’s quite a good thing and one or two of the previous episodes in this series have been quite similar. The linkages might have been too heavy-handed for my liking but it was great to have that “quart into a pint pot” feeling more than once during the series.

Tonight we finally saw a number of threads coming together or rather the Amy Pond and River Song threads starting to come together (although he hasn’t met her for the first time yet). We’ve even a fairly complete pantheon of bad guys in an alliance to save the universe which does seem to be asking for trouble in a seriously big way.

Oh well, only 7 days to find out…

Bullying policies are at the sharp end of schooling in that they are there to deal with situations that essentially schools and parents would rather not think about. After all, who wouldn’t like to think of children as being essentially good but maybe needing a little guidance now and again?

With that in mind many of the solutions proposed are based around showing the bully that they’re wrong and talking them back onto the right path. These involve everything from the simple talking to the child through to revealing to them the effect on the feelings of their victim in various ways. Whilst talking does seem the best platform to start with, moving to having the victim reveal their feelings can give a committed bully more ammunition to use against their victim which obviously is less than ideal in the enclosed environment that is a school.

In fact the most effective method of dealing with them appears to be simply telling on the bullies. Thanks to the intimidation that bullies create this needs to go so far as to create a “telling school” whereby everyone feels empowered to tell the teachers about bullying activities. Thus, the victim can rely on someone other than themselves to tell about the bullying they’re subjected to. Downsides are that it could lead to a tell-tale culture if taken to extremes and takes some getting used to.

The other problem that bullying policies can run contrary to some other policies in the school. For instance, what would you do if you saw a child being pounded by another one (ie not a fight)? Most of us would attempt to stop it verbally but that doesn’t always work with a bully so might find themselves needing to pull a bully off a victim but child protection policies often have a “no touching of a child by an adult” clause, so what do you do? That “no touching” clause can sometimes be so strong that if one were to apply it to the letter one would have to allow the bullying to continue until the bully decided to stop. That might sound crazy but is exactly how it’s applied in the school our little guys go to.

You might think that sense would prevail but that “sense” should really be built-in to the policies. After all, if a child were to pull out a knife and start stabbing other kids it seems obvious that you’d intervene to stop them. Doing so is directly contrary to the school policy on child protection though so strictly speaking you’d be required to let the child carry on until they decided to stop. Isn’t that crazy?

The basic problem is that many of these policies are single level with no escalation mechanism built-in. That seems to be largely down to the feeling that policies need to be easy to understand plus parents simply don’t even want to think about the potential of what are essentially junior thugs and how they might need to be dealt with though some process of escalation. In effect, they create policies to deal with their own nice children and don’t allow for those that might not be quite so nice.

What’s really required is an integrated policy with escalation processes built-in that protects victims and potential victims.