Social mobility: hopes and dreams
Nick Clegg's plan to make internships transparent is all very well, but for the government's real priorities, follow the money
It is easier to identify practices that block social mobility than policies that produce it. The sort of thing that does not help is the recent Conservative fundraising auction at which rich parents purchased internships for their children at top City firms. Less shaming but more typical are the three-month unpaid internships flagged on the Liberal Democrat website. As with voluntary experience on offer in barristers' chambers and other top workplaces, any graduate can apply, but graduates whose parents have large London homes and the means to support them will be more likely to do so.
Nick Clegg yesterday published a plan making the welcome if modest suggestion that Whitehall internships will be advertised properly, not dished out via family connections of the sort that he was immediately and churlishly taunted for having relied on in his youth. Beyond SW1, it is hoped that businesses will volunteer to untangle themselves from the old boy net. A few have made that promise, but there is no obligation on others to follow suit.
Internships can only be one tiny part of a response to the social sclerosis that politicians of all stripes routinely lament. Mr Clegg's document was similar in tone to several that Gordon Brown published. While the evidence on whether mobility is worsening is mixed, it is plainly too low, and that needs to be said. But what matters is how words translate to deeds. The cabinet's offer to go into schools and give pep talks to teens was deemed to merit a special box in the strategy paper, suggesting that real policies were in short supply. The Lib Dem funding premium for poor pupils has a valuable role, although in this climate it is more about alleviating the cuts than anything positive.
Steps up the class ladder take place over entire generations, so five-year governments know they cannot be judged by results. The Telegraph enthusiastically reported that the issue was as much middle-class kids as the deprived, and it seems mobility talk can mean all things to all men. The BBC's gently teasing brainbox Evan Davis asked minister David Willetts whether the plan amounted to the hope that all government policies would work well.
To see where the real priorities lie, follow the money. A decent settlement was this week offered on pensions, even though the elderly are as unlikely to climb the class ladder as they are likely to vote. Meanwhile, from today, working families will see tax credits snatched away faster as they earn, child benefit frozen and a huge cut in childcare support. The message of yesterday's separate strategy on child poverty was that there is more to life than cash. That's as may be, but for poor parents hoping their children might do rather better, every little helps.
Nick Clegg yesterday published a plan making the welcome if modest suggestion that Whitehall internships will be advertised properly, not dished out via family connections of the sort that he was immediately and churlishly taunted for having relied on in his youth. Beyond SW1, it is hoped that businesses will volunteer to untangle themselves from the old boy net. A few have made that promise, but there is no obligation on others to follow suit.
Internships can only be one tiny part of a response to the social sclerosis that politicians of all stripes routinely lament. Mr Clegg's document was similar in tone to several that Gordon Brown published. While the evidence on whether mobility is worsening is mixed, it is plainly too low, and that needs to be said. But what matters is how words translate to deeds. The cabinet's offer to go into schools and give pep talks to teens was deemed to merit a special box in the strategy paper, suggesting that real policies were in short supply. The Lib Dem funding premium for poor pupils has a valuable role, although in this climate it is more about alleviating the cuts than anything positive.
Steps up the class ladder take place over entire generations, so five-year governments know they cannot be judged by results. The Telegraph enthusiastically reported that the issue was as much middle-class kids as the deprived, and it seems mobility talk can mean all things to all men. The BBC's gently teasing brainbox Evan Davis asked minister David Willetts whether the plan amounted to the hope that all government policies would work well.
To see where the real priorities lie, follow the money. A decent settlement was this week offered on pensions, even though the elderly are as unlikely to climb the class ladder as they are likely to vote. Meanwhile, from today, working families will see tax credits snatched away faster as they earn, child benefit frozen and a huge cut in childcare support. The message of yesterday's separate strategy on child poverty was that there is more to life than cash. That's as may be, but for poor parents hoping their children might do rather better, every little helps.
In praise of… academic Wikipedians
Fresh means must be found to lure big brains into the world's biggest seminar
Net evangelists are most persuasive when they talk of tearing down barriers to knowledge – of a world where a farmhand can pick up a cheap laptop and freely pick from the freshest fruits of the human mind. A Library of Alexandria in which all humanity held a card would indeed be an institution worthy of Plato's Republic; but try to access contemporary scholarship with the actual web and you get tangled up. While the stated aim of academic journals is disseminating ideas, they throw barbed wire around themselves and keep the interested public out. If charges were needed to keep scholarly bodies and souls together this might be necessary, but contributors, referees and even editors are frequently unpaid. Experts publish in big-name journals to advance their careers, but they are reliably happy to email a PDF to anyone who asks for one, recognising this as the only way to get their papers read. Perhaps the ivory-tower publishing racket will one day come crashing down. In the meantime academics serious about public erudition must consider their options. Wikipedia offers them the same opportunity, and poses the same frustrations, as it does for everyone else. Many heroes do chip in for anonymous glory, as is evident from the briefest glance at the best of the entries. But too few scientists and particularly literary scholars are willing, so Wikipedia is undertaking a survey to get to the bottom of their reticence. Fresh means must be found to lure big brains into the world's biggest seminar.
Goldstone report: the unanswered questions
Indiscriminate warfare, as opposed to deliberate killing, was undoubtedly Israel's state policy
It is difficult, in this digital world of instant claim and rebuttal, to say that you were wrong. But Richard Goldstone's retraction of one of the claims of the report that he chaired – that Israel targeted civilians in the war on Gaza as a matter of policy – is one such instance. Mr Goldstone deserves credit for honesty. It is another matter altogether to decide whether all the other claims of a 575-page report are now invalidated. The Goldstone report was a fact-finding mission, not a judicial inquiry. It was not a document of verdict, but put forward evidence for further investigation. So which facts caused Mr Goldstone to retract? Three, principally: that the shelling of a home in which 22 members of one family died was the consequence of an Israeli commander's erroneous interpretation of a drone image; that the officer was still under investigation; and that Israel has since investigated over 400 allegations of operational misconduct. Had he known then what he knows now, he concludes, the report would have been very different.
Two of the three other members of the mission disagree with their former chairman's change of heart. Hina Jilani, who served on a similar fact-finding mission on Darfur, said that nothing changed the substance of the original report, and Desmond Travers, an expert on international criminal investigations, still feels the tenor of the report stands "in its entirety". Mr Goldstone has parted company with the other members of his mission. It is therefore worth returning to the original report. The retracted allegation refers to the attack which killed 22 members of the Samouni family, who, following instructions from Israeli soldiers, were sheltering in a house in Zeitoun. But there are 35 other incidents that Goldstone's team investigated. It found seven cases where civilians were shot leaving their homes waving white flags; a direct and intentional attack on a hospital which may amount to a war crime; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; nine attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chickens farms, sewage works and water wells – all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. The key paragraph of the report states: "The Mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility." On the Samouni killings it states that even if it amounted to an operational error and the mission concludes that a mistake was made, "state responsibility of Israel for an internationally wrongful act" would remain. All of this still stands, as does the charge that Hamas's rockets deliberately targeted Israeli civilians.
Clear to one side the superheated flak of the debate today. It arises from Israel's current international isolation, of which the Gaza operation formed only a part. It is now said that the Goldstone report became the cornerstone of a campaign to delegitimise Israel. None of this is relevant to what happened in Gaza between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, events which led to the deaths of 1,396 Palestinians, 763 of whom, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, were not taking part in hostilities when they were killed. The report did not in fact claim that Israel set out deliberately to murder civilians. It said that Operation Cast Lead was "deliberately disproportionate" and intended to "punish, humiliate and terrorise". That charge stands unanswered. Indiscriminate warfare, as opposed to deliberate killing, was undoubtedly state policy. Shooting the messenger is always easier than dealing with the message itself. This time, the messenger had the grace to shoot himself. It does not change what happened in Gaza, nor what will happen the next time war breaks out.
Two of the three other members of the mission disagree with their former chairman's change of heart. Hina Jilani, who served on a similar fact-finding mission on Darfur, said that nothing changed the substance of the original report, and Desmond Travers, an expert on international criminal investigations, still feels the tenor of the report stands "in its entirety". Mr Goldstone has parted company with the other members of his mission. It is therefore worth returning to the original report. The retracted allegation refers to the attack which killed 22 members of the Samouni family, who, following instructions from Israeli soldiers, were sheltering in a house in Zeitoun. But there are 35 other incidents that Goldstone's team investigated. It found seven cases where civilians were shot leaving their homes waving white flags; a direct and intentional attack on a hospital which may amount to a war crime; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; nine attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chickens farms, sewage works and water wells – all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. The key paragraph of the report states: "The Mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility." On the Samouni killings it states that even if it amounted to an operational error and the mission concludes that a mistake was made, "state responsibility of Israel for an internationally wrongful act" would remain. All of this still stands, as does the charge that Hamas's rockets deliberately targeted Israeli civilians.
Clear to one side the superheated flak of the debate today. It arises from Israel's current international isolation, of which the Gaza operation formed only a part. It is now said that the Goldstone report became the cornerstone of a campaign to delegitimise Israel. None of this is relevant to what happened in Gaza between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, events which led to the deaths of 1,396 Palestinians, 763 of whom, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, were not taking part in hostilities when they were killed. The report did not in fact claim that Israel set out deliberately to murder civilians. It said that Operation Cast Lead was "deliberately disproportionate" and intended to "punish, humiliate and terrorise". That charge stands unanswered. Indiscriminate warfare, as opposed to deliberate killing, was undoubtedly state policy. Shooting the messenger is always easier than dealing with the message itself. This time, the messenger had the grace to shoot himself. It does not change what happened in Gaza, nor what will happen the next time war breaks out.
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