Dangerous territory... politics

This is and has always been a learning blog. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that a general election is less than a week away, so I suppose it had to crop up at some point.

The Chairman of the Reed Group and my boss, James Reed has done some interesting little interviews of the three potential Secretaries of State for Work and Pension, which are posted on our jobsite. In them he asks each of the candidates the same five questions so you can compare their answers.

How on earth am I going to make this relevant to learning...?

Well, the thing that has been making my blood boil over the length of this campaign is the degree to which we are all complicit in allowing the three major parties to get away with adversarial positioning rather than actually testing their assertions.

A couple of quick examples:

Not safe in our beds: overall crime and nearly every individual type of crime has never been lower since records began. It has been falling consistently since 1996 (if you don't believe me go look at the British Crime Survey data). But you wouldn't know this from any of the major parties... Broken society? Words fail me!

This is going to hurt... but I'm not going to tell you how much. As Greeks are on the edge of open revolt against the further cuts in public sector pay and increases in taxes that are being placed on them as conditions of support from the EU, we in the UK blunder on naively assuming that our economy is much sounder than Greece's. Do you know how big the UK's structural deficit is? (If not click here). All the three main parties seem to be trading insults around the £6bn that Labour is accusing the Tories of threatening to cut straight after the election. Yet the Institute for Fiscal Studies has criticised all three of failing to disclose their real plans. (It's well worth reading Stephanie Flanders on the difference between British and Greek debt if the above worries you too much)

They are all behaving like embarrassed parents, who when confronted by a child who asks an awkward question they don't want to answer point into the distance and say, "Woo! Look at that! Shiny!"

My point is, if you are ever going to learn anything of value, don't accept what you are told. Go and check for yourself...

What happened to good old fashioned skepticism?

So, I'm another year older and, therefore, entitled to be grumpy. And today I'm grumpy with a capital GRR!

It seems that more and more people, particularly in the media, are prepared to accept things at face value without question.

1. "Fish Oil makes children smarter, study claims" is the headline in the Telegraph (I wouldn't mind if it was the Sun, the Sport or the Mail) despite the fact that if you read article you see the significance of the lurking comma. If you want to dig behind this story go to Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad science page.

2. I'm getting stupider as I get older. My elder niece got 10 A's in her GCSE's this year, of which, five had stars attached. I am very proud of her and would not suggest for a moment that she did not deserve these grades nor that the exams have got easier (I think I got one or two A's in my "O" levels. However, helping with her "A" level history at the weekend, I realised that she does not even have a cursory understanding of the difference between left and right wing politics. This despite the fact that she was being invited to address the reasons for the Labour government's loss of the 1951 election and the conservatives staying in power for over a decade.

Cut a long story short, why argue every year about standards falling, when demonstratively they have not. Ask about the standards themselves. If your yardstick is the percentage of pupils attaining 5 GCSE's graded A-C including English and Maths, then a growth in that is what you will get. Not a growth in the numbers of people who can think for themselves.

3. Blame the spivvy short sellers for the credit crunch. Even the Church denounced short sellers last week despite being happy to profit from it. I got into quite an entertaining discussion with my father at the weekend on this. I suggested that him blaming the hedge funds for the financial crisis is a bit like blaming the little boy in the story for pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. It couldn't be our fault for spending money that we don't have and perpetuating a myth of ever rising property prices, could it!?

He countered that his problem was really the "obscene" amounts of money earned by bankers and that at heart he was really a socialist. I suggested, fresh from my conversation with my niece, that the problem was the dialectic between equality (or if you wish to be British, fairness) and freedom and that you couldn't have both. The crime of the right is disproportionate wealth the crime of the left is disproportionate waste. (come on Andy K you know you want to argue that one...)

Ask more questions, argue and more interesting things come up. Don't believe everything you read in the papers or on the web.