John.c.clarke

Portrait Of A Man Talking

There is a lot of debate, particularly fuelled by the political right and the tabloid press, about the extent to which unemployed people are genuinely looking for work.  People on the right argue that there needs to be a tighter sanctions regime so those who are failing to look for work are encouraged to do so.  People on the left claim that the problem is not lack of effort, but lack of vacancies.

To clear this debate up a bit, I thought I would share some interesting data from the Annual Population Survey (APS).  The APS is an exceptionally large dataset of over 300,000 people.  This means that anything found in the data is quite likely to be true of the wider population.

The APS asks a simple question to all its respondents: ‘Have you looked for paid work in the past 4 weeks?’.  If the right are correct, we might expect a decent proportion of unemployed respondents to answer ‘no’.  If the left are correct, we’d be expect a very low figure to answer ‘no’.

The number of unemployed not looking for work is tiny – 2%.

In total, 11,480 unemployed people answered this question.  Of this group, 98% (11,428) said they had looked for work and just 2% (232) said they hadn’t.  This suggests ‘idleness’ amongst the unemployed is a relatively small problem: just 1 in 50 of the total out of work.

Nevertheless, this is a slightly misleading – and exaggerating – number.  Much of the time, the right is generally focused on people who have been out of work for a decent period of time: those who have, in the jargon, been ‘parked on benefits’.

So what about the long-term unemployed?

Thus a better way to assess whether we have a ‘scrounger’ problem is to look exclusively at the job-seeking efforts of the relatively long-term unemployed, say those who have been out of work for 6 months or more.  Reducing the sample in this way gives us 6,148 long-term unemployed (54% of the total out of work).

Now, here is the interesting statistic. Out of the 6,148 people who have been out of work for 6 months or more, just 15 - yes, 15 - had failed to look for work over the past month.  This is 0.2%: or, if you like, a small enough group of people to make ‘idleness’ essentially non-existent amongst the unemployed.

If we extrapolate this to the wider population, this means that out of an estimated 1,400,000 (54% of the total unemployed) people might be long-term unemployed, just 2,800 have not recently looked for work.   And it is this small minority – rather than the 1.4 million mass of long-term unemployed – that Coalition rhetoric is almost exclusively targeted towards.

A non-existent problem

There will be obvious retorts here from right-wingers.  They might say people aren’t telling the truth; but they have no real incentive to lie as this is an anonymous survey.  They might also say that we don’t know how much job-seeking long-term unemployed people are doing, which is true and which could be answered with the proper data.  However, what we do know from the APS is that nearly every long-term unemployed person is actively looking for a job.  A fact that makes the current furore over the benefits system even more difficult – and infuriating – to understand.

Elena Kulikova

I’m not much on tabloid gossip as news content, but Reese Witherspoon’s encounter with an Atlanta police officer, in which she tried to prevent her husband’s arrest during a traffic stop by playing the celebrity card, brings to mind one of my favorite Baltimore police stories. I just gotta let fly. As to Ms. Witherspoon, [...]

Only a brutal demolition from the new director general can restore the glory of the British Betrayal Corporation

Nicholas Hytner recently complained that the BBC was "neglecting the arts". Melvyn Bragg has said that "I'm disappointed at the way the arts seems to be shrinking on the BBC."

But both Hytner and Bragg are one letter out. The "arts" conjures up images of committees of bores, worthily reverent exegesis, the horrors of dance, the misfit between opera and even a 42-inch screen, and ancient avant-gardist cliches – "ahead of its time", "ground-breaking", "controversial". Bragg and Hytner, the National Theatre director, would have been on the mark had they omitted the "s".

Yes, "art": television is capable of creating its own art, which is not dependent on other arts, or is at least a mongrel synthesis of them. It is capable of a sort of fabrication that is peculiar to the medium, of highly individualistic, highly crafted work that, like anything of merit, defies classification – although the very structure of the BBC's commissioning processes militate against the non-generic.

The commissioning is also too centralised. Channel controllers at the BBC enjoy an increasing autonomy that has resulted in decreasing diversity. The deluge of gardening programmes on BBC2 a few years ago was caused by the then controller's solipsistic assumption that the channel's audience was as entranced by the sod and the trowel as she was.

A brutal demolition is required. Simon Jenkins once observed that the idea that a newspaper is like an oil tanker and can be turned round only very slowly is false. A newspaper is like a speedboat. It is remade afresh every day. Television is necessarily slower, but change can be swiftly effected if the will and the wiles are there.

Of course programmes are formulaic, and of course ratings are relentlessly pursued, and of course they are regarded as the measure of value when the criteria are set by a senior management that has been recruited from such places as the marketing department of Coca-Cola, a product that has always to be the same. In the quarter century that I have been making shows for the BBC, its management has swelled in direct proportion to the diminution of programme budgets.

This management is a parasite that believes itself to be the host. It is a pusillanimous, jargon-ridden, self-perpetuating proof of Parkinson's law. (There are some things that even digitalisation cannot change.)

Tony Hall, who starts on Tuesday as the new director general of the BBC, ought to look back to Friday 13 July 1962: Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives. Don't worry Tone Boy, no one died. Supermac merely shafted a third of his cabinet. During his brief tenure in the job, George Entwistle had already begun to dismember the bloated structure installed by John Birt, the improbable beneficiary of the Mendips camorra of William Rees-Mogg and Marmaduke Hussey (those are the truly guilty men).

The BBC does not have to continue on the path that it wrongly chose after the dismissal of Alasdair Milne as director general. The way in which the licence fee, nothing more or less than a poll tax, is divvied up between channels demands urgent overhaul. There is no reason why a channel that drools out light "entertainment" should receive a disproportionately hefty slice simply because it has always done so.

It is within the power of the director general to overturn this inverted order. Why are former footballers like Alan Hansen and the one who looks like a porky hairdresser paid more than Jeremy Paxman, the most authoritative broadcast journalist in Britain? Is it because they invent new units of measurement – "half a yard" – or model provincial disco clothes, or talk drivel about "role models"?

Were these dorks themselves "role models" as broadcasters they might learn to parse syntactically and grammatically correct sentences in comprehensibly accented English. (The BBC's eschewal of received pronunciation – RP – is inverse snobbery: it was a useful instrument of pan-British comprehensibility. The regional accents that have replaced RP are vocal manifestations of identity politics, of parochial apartheid.)

The fear of seriousness, and the assumption that seriousness is necessarily humourless, has to be overcome. There are manifold audiences. There is no evidence that the majority are as dull and backward as the BBC assumes them to be. The diet of gruesome "reality TV" (there is no such thing) and witless "lifestyle" shows is corrupting – it is a betrayal of the British. And I mean that.

As well as emulating Macmillan, Hall should also follow the example of another Scot, Lord Reith. Oh, I know: autres temps autres moeurs. But the BBC's capacity and duty to educate and to inform has been all but jettisoned in its hideously successful attempt to become just another commercial broadcaster.

Which has meant creating an ethos of gross sentimentality and predatory bullying. Such job descriptions as "magician and children's entertainer" should have set alarm bells ringing. So obviously should have lowlife freaks such as Jimmy Savile, long ago described by Anthony Burgess as "the most evil man in Britain". The BBC's managers were less perceptive than the great novelist. Their quality can surely be gauged by being the only people in the country who had not heard that Savile dated mortuary corpses, kerb-crawled in a camper van and was an enthusiastic nick-sniffer. Deaf? Cut off? Wilfully immemorious? Mendacious?

There's a lot of cleansing to do. Untermenschen who merely make programmes ought all to get behind Tony Hall as he takes his Karcher to managers and prescribes Depo-Provera to "entertainers".

Jonathan Meades's most recent book is Museum Without Walls

• This article was amended on 3 April 2013. The original referred to curb-crawling rather than kerb-crawling. This has been corrected.

On this day in 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge captured Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh and declared revolutionary Year Zero. After five years of bloody civil war, the conquering Communist guerrillas were welcomed as heroes by a relieved population desperate for peace – but the relief was to be short-lived. Within twenty-four hours, members of the deposed Lon Nol government, public servants, police, military officers, ethnic Vietnamese, Christian clergy, Muslim leaders and middle-class citizens were identified and executed. Schoolteachers, students, doctors and those who simply wore glasses or knew how to read were murdered for being “intellectuals”. Foreigners were expelled, embassies closed and the currency abolished. Markets, schools, newspapers, religious practices and private property were forbidden. The Khmer Rouge then set about evacuating the entire city of Phnom Penh: schools, hospitals, factories, offices and homes were raided at gunpoint and their occupants force-marched into the countryside. Soon, the country’s entire population was forced to relocate to the agricultural labour camps, the so-called “killing fields”, as part of Pol Pot’s master plan to transform the renamed Democratic Kampuchea into a self-sufficient Maoist agrarian state. And so began Pol Pot’s reign of terror – one of the most evil and brutal regimes of the twentieth century. In just three years and eight months, an estimated 3 million Cambodians would be annihilated by bullet, axe, shovel blow to the back of the head, plastic bag suffocation, unspeakable torture, or by starvation – the auto-genocidal victims of Pol Pot’s ruthless bid to “purify” Cambodia.

But lest we forget that U.S. military action against Cambodia was probably the single most significant factor in Pol Pot’s rise from leader of a small sectarian group with no popular base to tyrannical despot. Between 1969 and 1973, American B-52s dropped 2,756,941 tons’ worth of explosives in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites – more than was dropped by all parties in World War II. The secret and illegal bombing of then-neutral Cambodia by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger caused such widespread death and devastation that it drove recruits directly to Pol Pot. “[The Khmer Rouge] are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,” the CIA director of operations reported on 2 May 1973. “This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of young men.” New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg confirmed that the Khmer Rouge “… would point… at the bombs falling from B-52s as something they had to oppose if they were going to have freedom. And it became a recruiting tool until they grew to a fierce, indefatigable guerrilla army.” In dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a peasant society, Nixon and Kissinger killed an estimated half-a-million innocent people and verily ushered in Year Zero.

America’s Cambodian guilt does not end there. In the face of mounting evidence of Pol Pot’s atrocities, the U.S. government – still reeling from its Vietnam debacle – was suddenly not so very eager to stick its nose into Southeast Asia’s business. Unbelievably, the Khmer Rouge even enjoyed support from the United States because of its opposition to Vietnam. While the self-styled World Police ignored the Cambodian Genocide despite its obligation under the terms of the 1948 Geneva Convention, it was left to their old Vietnamese enemy to eventually overthrow Pol Pot’s murderous regime.

Oh the hypocrisy of selective American democracy.

Will the worlds of medicine and ambient music be more closely joined in the future? Via SPIN:

English doctors are instructing patients to heal themselves with Brian Eno’s restorative music.

Orthopedic surgeon Robin Turner has teamed with the hugely influential producer/sound wizard to create a “quiet room” where people can “think, take stock, or simply relax.” The £34 million private Montefiore hospital (in Hove, England) also features an Eno light and music piece in its reception area. Turner says he came up with the idea in 2010 after seeing how peaceful his normally “fidgety” mother-in-law became after visiting Eno’s audio-visual 77 Million Paintings installation.

“It seemed a natural step as I’ve been dealing with this idea of functional music for quite a few years,” said Eno, a firm believer in the idea that music can alter moods. “In the last couple of days I’ve met patients and staff who have said, ‘I really like that room, it makes a big difference.’”

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