The news that ‘green’ beliefs could be afforded the same protection under the European Convention on Human Rights as religious beliefs – as they can be considered as ‘thought, conscience and religion’ (see ECHR article 9) – opens up a whole can of worms. But not the worms that the commentariat and the responders to comments are thinking about. As far as I can tell, many are conflating science or knowledge of the world, and ethics or what we should do in the world. And, as ever, many are also ignoring the many real world examples of how legislation has protected and has not protected.

I’ll address that second point first, as it’s the less complicated! For some, the idea of protecting people from maltreatment due to their views is a bit nuts. They characterise the protection as creating a set of people who cannot be criticised, and can bend jobs and society to their views whenever they like. This is a common critique of multiculturalism. However, the reality is that the rules are changed or made by weighing up lots of factors. The regular hoo-ha over the vegetarian/Muslim who doesn’t want to handle pork in his supermarket job, or air stewardess who wants to wear a crucifix, are sometimes handled in the sensible way of first seeing if it makes any difference. In a supermarket there are plenty of other jobs to do, the crucifix won’t get in anyone’s way. But in the case of someone refusing to do a substantial part of the job, then it’s OK to sack them, or perhaps make them redundant. If there’s a job that absolutely requires working a particular day, then you can’t employ someone whose beliefs say they can’t work that day. A good place to start if you are interested in this is Bhiku Parekh’s Rethinking Multiculturalism. Here he goes through the classic example of the exemption for Sikhs wearing turbans from wearing helmets (243). At the time checks were done to see if the protection was equivalent (it was), and thus it seems likely that any group or even individual could provide evidence that the equivalent headgear that their deeply held beliefs lead them to is good enough then they could get an exemption too.

The more substantial point, however, is the idea that making ‘green beliefs’ and ‘religious beliefs’ equivalent either makes global warming just a faith and not a scientific theory, or reduces deeply held religious philosophies to the status of a testable scientific theory.

The important thing to note is that issues of religious discrimination are rarely about the belief in God. For one thing, you can’t tell from the outside whether someone believes or not. Even if someone doesn’t like believers, what they will discriminate on is the outward manifestation of this belief. And of this outward manifestation, there are parts of which it is nonsensical to discriminate, parts which it makes sense to discriminate, and those borderline parts of belief where people discriminate when they probably shouldn’t.

It’s nonsensical to discriminate on say belief in God. Someone can believe or not believe in God but act in, say, a Christian moral framework (and vice versa*). They might even be willing to do prayers and hymns – that’s true of non-believing vicars – so the actual belief in God is irrelevant.

But the set of people who believe in the same God may have very different outlooks. Some might believe it guides all their decisions, others none. It might lead to believing in a final judgment (coming soon), a meeting with God at death, or in a distant non-(and never-) interventionist God. The moral framework arising out of different positions is likely to be different, but the relationship is not a necessary one. Some believe that they should work hard to create the best world here, others believe it doesn’t matter.

Many of these beliefs have no relevance in the vast majority of social situations. If someone believes that homosexuality is a sin, then surely their first priority is not be gay themselves. There are few jobs where being gay is a requirement. But if that person believes that they need to try and convert people away from being gay, then they shouldn’t be employed as a gay rights worker! If there is a requirement for a particular set of moral beliefs to be in operation, then it should be OK to disbar people without them.

However, it’s the grey area beliefs between these that end up in the news. When someone believes that their belief in God requires them to wear a headscarf it can be seen by others. So there’s the potential for others to prejudge on the basis of (assumed) religion. But unless the headscarf issue actually matters (perhaps it’s a barrier to being a hair model), then it shouldn’t be an issue.

What’s important here is not the belief in God, but the beliefs and actions that lead from that belief. The ontological framework (whether God exists, whether God created the Earth, whether the Earth exists) is less important than the ethical framework (how to live a good life). The same is true for ‘green’ beliefs.

Even if we accept that climate change is a scientific fact, as proven as it can ever be, it does not necessarily lead to any particular ‘moral imperative’. One could believe that:

a)      human survival is the most important thing and so we need to reverse climate change and quickly

b)      human survival doesn’t matter, so we can allow the Earth’s life to adapt to new conditions (in this view climate change might further evolution)

c)      we should party like it’s 1999, because we don’t owe anything to future generations, let them sort it out

d)     we should hasten the floods as that’s when the ‘second coming’/ Armageddon/ end of the Mayan calendar/ start of paradise begins(delete as appropriate)

e)      we must, as individuals, reduce consumption as governments aren’t going to do it.

f)       there’s no point, as individuals, reducing consumption as we need government to take the lead

and so on and so on.

a) is the most common answer not because the scientific facts say we are causing climate change but because we have an ethical framework that puts the survival of people at the top. Looking at the judgement in the current case, Justice Burton wrote:

‘A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.’

The crucial part of this is the ‘and’. It is the moral framework and the resulting actions that are the crux of the case, not the belief in climate change itself.

This should apply to political beliefs too. Although ethics and politics have traditionally been separated out, if we put aside the technocratic side – how to achieve a particular aim – politics is a realm of life where competing visions of what is good are discussed. The question of whether the goods of society should be distributed according to need or according to effort is a moral one, that can’t be answered by reference to science. Politics is a kind of practical ethics (see Michael Sandel for more on this), and as such some political beliefs do have the same status as some religious beliefs.

So which beliefs or moral frameworks should count here. ‘Deeply held (religious or philosophical) beliefs’ is one such formulation. But this begs the question of who judges the depth of a belief, or whether it is religious or philosophical, as is the case here. The simple answer is to not make the judgement at all. All beliefs can lead to a desire or requirement to do something. If we take the issue of Sunday working, there are a whole host of reasons why someone might believe they shouldn’t work on a Sunday:

a)      it’s God’s day and one should be in church

b)      it’s a family day and one should be with them

c)      it’s a football day and one should be on the pitch (or on the terraces)

d)     it’s a day to celebrate anarchism, and one should be free from rulers

e)      it’s a day to celebrate Gaia, and one should be gardening

It’s the should that makes them ethical-like beliefs.

Using religious belief privileges a). Using religion and philosophical belief privileges a), d) and e), unless football is seen as a religion (a la Bill Shankley). Why privilege any? If it can be accommodated by the employer, then they should let the person not work Sundays. If it can’t then they shouldn’t. As long as the employer doesn’t discriminate on the basis of something irrelevant to the job, then I don’t see why there should be a problem.

I think this takes me back to a secular framework… however, it is one where individuals bring a set of beliefs to each social situation, not no beliefs. These beliefs may conflict with the requirements of the situation – in which case they need to be dealt with, reasonably – or they may be irrelevant. One of the tests that should be done is whether these beliefs lead to particular actions that conflict with the social situation. Football as a religion may reasonably lead to making Saturday (or more Sunday now) sacred, but a belief that one needs to wear football boots at work seems less reasonable. Similarly, a Christian belief might reasonably lead to a need to wear a cross, but perhaps not a Jesus Saves tattoo. These need to be argued out.

I suppose the problem our society has is that we don’t talk through stuff reasonably, but instead see these problems as a battle between religion and secularism, or the vestiges of a racist system, or part of an Islamophobic society. These issues are real, but the question of, say, whether a Muslim should get time off for prayers can be dealt with easily. Traditional arrangements didn’t include this time off as it wasn’t an issue. But instead people had tea breaks and fag breaks. Letting someone have a break at prayer time shouldn’t be any more of an issue than letting someone have a fag break. It’s not giving anyone a special deal, it’s not disadvantaging non-Muslims or non-smokers if they can also have a break when they want to. Personally, I’ll take my breaks to read the papers.

*One thing that has annoyed me in the past is the belief that without religion you can’t be moral. Of course you can have religion without ethics and ethics without religion. But it seems obvious to me though, that religion is more likely to generate ethical beliefs than science because that’s sort of the point. The ontological claims of religion (e.g. there is a God, bad people go to hell) are essentially untestable and don’t necessarily have an impact on society. It’s their moral claims that matter (e.g. killing people is bad). In science, this relationship is the other way round. We can prove certain physical laws but these don’t necessarily help guide our beliefs about what is good or bad. There is a relationship between the knowledge and the ethics but it isn’t a simple one.

Sorry this is short, when more detail would be useful… I was in a rush, and will rewrite over the weekend!

———–

At last I’m returning to the subject of my PhD, courtesy of an announcement by John Denham that they are going to start giving money to ‘connect with resentful white working-class communities in 130 wards across England and undercut rightwing extremism’ (Guardian). As usual the white working class are stereotyped as racist (and voting BNP because they are racist, as opposed to being concerned with immigration or seeing Labour as being too in bed with the rich).

I’m more inclined to believe this analysis, and I actually have government data to back it up. On the government’s own ’social cohesion’ measures the more deprived people are more likely to socialise with people who are of a ‘different ethnic or religious group’.

Of all white people, 4.6% of the least deprived ‘mix with different ethnic and religious groups’ at home or their home on a daily basis, compared to 9.7% of the most deprived (from the citizenship survey). My own experience is of places where people may use language that the middle-classes wouldn’t use, and might vote BNP on immigration issues, yet have no problem sitting in the pub with their black mates. And then there are middle-class people who are really careful about their langauage, but wouldn’t be happy if their daughter married someone who wasn’t like them.

Much of the UK media, and most of the people here to be fair, love to knock the EU. Perhaps this is sometimes justified, but many stories are exaggerated or re-spun to give it the greatest anti-EU, faceless bureaucrats* theme in order to allow us the feeling of righteous anger. Don’t ya just love it.

Recently I heard a piece on ‘Does 75 per cent of UK law come from Brussels?’ on Radio 4’s More or Less. Of course, this is very difficult if not impossible to answer reasonably. We could count the number of laws, the words used, or try to estimate each laws influence on people’s lives. As Tim Harford said, 40 laws on the regulation of car wheel sizes will be less important than a single law restricting the right to a trial by jury.

Often, though, the EU laws and regulations are misrepresented to the point of outright lie, and this is especially true where some people can make money out of the misinformation. Let’s take the humble lightbulb as an example. The news seems to be that incandescent bulbs are being banned, we’re all being forced to use the mini flourescent ones, so the EU is evil and we need to stock up now.

THE old-fashioned 100-watt incandescent lightbulb is to be phased out across the EU.

Countries will have to use energy-efficient compact fluorescent lamps instead. They use up to 80 per cent less electricity than standard bulbs and could cut a home’s annual energy bill by up to £37.

Experts say they will also help reduce carbon levels, curbing climate change. But some campaigners claim energy-saving bulbs may trigger migraines and worsen skin conditions. (The Sun)

I suppose the first line is true, but given that they’ve started with 100w bulbs I find this amusing, because I don’t think they get used much anyway. Most light fittings only take bulbs up to 60w, and we’ve got two years of 60w normal bulbs anyway. So there’s no need to panic… ‘Congratulations to anyone who can find 60 or 100W bulbs to hoard’ (contributer to BBC).

However, it’s the second line that is completely untrue. Old-style incandescent (i.e. a glowing filament) are going, but newer style incandescent lamps are perfectly fine (see  the EU document). So all the complaints about not being able to use dimmer switches, slow start-up times, or having a different quality of light are from people who misunderstand the law. Greenpeace would like to see these banned too, but given that the new bulbs can have a B or C rating, that won’t happen.

So given that we’ve got a little while of old-style bulbs yet, that we aren’t being forced to use the compact flourescents, and that the EU is encouraging new-style incandescents anyway, it seems this story is mainly being written in the dark.

—–

*Indeed, I’ve always loved the ‘faceless bureaucrat’ argument as it seems to be made by people who don’t understand how democracies work. Yes, the EU commission (bureaucrats) write the EU laws, and then the Parliament (an elected body) and the Council (the EU heads of state) have to pass them. But these laws can also be requested by the Parliament or the Council. And this is also how the UK system works… it’s the civil servants that write the laws as politicians don’t have time for the details. As far as I can tell, the usual is that a government policy commitment is given to civil servants to create green papers, white papers, and laws, and the ministers and eventually parliament sign them off (see this, or even Yes, Minister!). On occasion, for example where the police request new powers to deal with a particular problem, the initiative starts with the civil servants too. This looks much the same to me.

Today I noticed lots of flying ants in my garden, so looked them up to see how they work. I remembered there was a bit of a panic recently in Glasgow and Edinburgh when they were around, so I knew what they were, but didn’t know why they swarm as they do.

The wikipedia article was most useful:

In most species, the male ants also fly alongside them, although they are smaller and less noticeable… The queens fly for a while – sometimes being dispersed very long distances, and sometimes going only a few meters – then mate, and drop to the ground where they lose their wings, and attempt to start a colony^[1]… The mass of flying insects often attracts the attention of predators such as birds, and it is common to see flocks of feeding birds gorging on the readily available food… This phenomenon occurs in many colonies simultaneously when the local weather conditions are appropriate, to reduce the effectiveness of predation and to ensure that the queens and males from different colonies stand a chance of meeting and interbreeding.

However, I’m sure that the journalist who wrote about the ants for the Bucks Herald found it more useful:

Wednesday saw millions of the insects crawl up from out of the ground to follow their larger, more noticable queens…the queens fly for a while – sometimes being dispersed very long distances, and sometimes going only a few metres – before mating and dropping to the ground where they lose their wings, and attempt to start a colony… The mass of flying insects often attracts the attention of predators such as birds, and it is common to see flocks of feeding birds gorging on the readily available food. The annual phenomenon occurs in many colonies simultaneously when the local weather conditions are appropriate as they were with temperattures (sic) hitting as high as 27 degrees in the Vale today.

Does this count as plagiarism?

Even academia is going in for the ‘marketing hype’ route of getting across a message. And just as in the world of government and commerce, there’s no point letting the truth get in the way of a good story.

My dad’s wife told me today that a woman from Birmingham was on TV last night… “she’s got a PhD in texting”, and as I’d been reading an article in the current issue of Sociology on much the same I wondered if it were the same person.

Anyhow, the story in the papers is that ‘A student has become the first person in Britain to get a degree in texting.’ (Mirror) and ‘CLEVER Caroline Tagg has become the first person in Britain to get a degree in text messaging.’ (Express)

Now this seemed unlikely… texts have been around for a while, and the Ruth Rettie article in Sociology looked like it would have been based on her PhD. Luckily you can check a database of theses called EThOS at the British Library. And of course, the Rettie PhD on mobile phone calls and texts is listed there (2006) and a search on text messaging reveals two PhDs from 2007 (one on messages in Greek, and another on the social and psychological effects of SMS. So Caroline Tagg has not become the first person to get a degree in text messaging.

So where was the mistake made?

I’ve been away from my desk for a little while, staying in a lovely farmhouse in Derbyshire. I was interested to note that there were lots of non-white visitors, despite the reports that the countryside isn’t visited by ethnic minorities due to ‘passive apartheid’ or ‘rural racism’. A recent article by Sathnam Sanghera revisits this.

But what I also noticed was how middle-class the crowd was. The Sanghera article hints at some of the complications, and class is definitely one. We Brits choose our leisure pursuits through various cultural  and institutional forms, with economics as an additional barrier. So what one is ’supposed to do’ or enjoys doing determines holidays and day trips.

When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s we never went on holidays. We never went abroad, and we had one or two holidays to Butlins which we hated. Instead we went on lots of day trips, but mainly to theme parks and the seaside. One ‘institution’ was the annual trip with ‘the club’ (the local working men’s club), which alternated between Rhyl and Blackpool. We’d have trips to see the Blackpool lights too.

Middle-class friends didn’t go on these kinds of visits. As well as trips abroad, they visited the countryside and went on walks and to country pubs. I can’t imagine that my family would have ever seen the point of a country pub, as the local was good enough!

And obviously even trips abroad are different for each group. The middle classes are less likely to go to Torremolinos, as they don’t do sunbathing on the beach and are more into ‘activities’. The working class family is less likely to hire a cottage in Tuscany and spend time at art galleries.

So as Sanghera points out, some people don’t see the point of a visit to the countryside. Culture, including city cultures, ethnicity and country origin, and class, is important. And now the recession has everyone worried about their bank balance, the middle classes will spend time in the UK countryside instead of rural France. As more ethnic minorities become middle class, and inherit middle class values, we should expect to see a greater mix of faces in the countryside. But we still won’t see the urban poor, black or white.

We social scientists often like to compare: one place with another, one group with another, one time with another. So when we do quantitative analysis with large numbers of cases we can say ‘crime’s higher in X than Y’ or whatever. And even in qualitative work, when we have few respondents and long interviews, say, we can relate findings to some ‘common sense’ theory, or some assumption about the way of the world. But when events are of a kind that is extremely rare, there may be no comparison.

Which leads me to a most amusing quote. In Surrey a body has been found in a wheelie bin. A neighbour told the BBC:

“It’s a very quiet place, it’s where you bring up your family. I’ve lived here for 30-odd years and it’s the first thing like this that’s happened.” (BBC)

Really? The ‘first thing like this that’s happened’?

Where I live this kind of thing happens so often the council have added a new bin to our collection. Grey is for normal rubbish, green is for paper, glass and that, brown for garden waste, and the bright red bin is for corpses and body parts.

At least 7 million people in Britain use illegal downloads, costing the economy billions of pounds and thousands of jobs, according to a report. Shared content on one network was worth about £12bn a year according to the research commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. (Guardian 29 May 2009)

At least this research is done by a government body and not funded by the entertainment industry, so it’s likely to be a bit less biased. To be fair, I’d say that the ‘7 million’ figure is probably much too low. But, my argument is about the second part of their argument (the one the govt, and especially the Treasury is most interested in) and that is the billions of pounds and thousands of jobs this costs.

As the research is done within strict bounds, as most research is, it doesn’t have the reach to see where these jobs and money would come from, and what are the secondary effects. It just makes the assumption that if people weren’t downloading illegally, they’d be paying, and paying the current rate, for their music and video.

Now it is true that the record industry (from production to sale) has been losing jobs. However, this may well have happened without illegal downloads. Amazon has had a huge impact on record shop sales: I’d bet that this has had the most impact on the problems of HMV and Virgin Megastore. People can buy CDs and DVDs cheaper and easier, with greater choice, online. And these can be delivered with fewer jobs. Consolidation in the big record companies, and copycat artist development (as opposed to the lone A&R man) also requires fewer jobs.

Most importantly, though, is the question of whether total sales would have fallen anyway. CDs and DVDs are in no way a necessity: we buy them out of our spare cash or pocket money, when we’ve bought everything else. Given that there is now a larger choice of entertainment objects to spend this spare cash on, it would make sense for music and video (and other downloadable stuff) to lose market share. If people are spending £25 per month on a mobile phone and £20 per month on Sky, then this is £45 they can’t spend on CDs. The Guardian article’s argument rests on the assumption that if people couldn’t download for free, they’d spend enough money in the shops to get this music and video.

Indeed, many of the downloaders will be kids with no money: so they won’t be increasing GDP and jobs if they stop downloading. Unless the people with money are putting their CD spending money into savings, people who end up buying more CDs and DVDs will have to cut back on some other luxury. Using the Guardian’s figures, 7 million people are sharing content worth £12billion pounds a year, so they’d end up spending an average £1700 per year more on CDs and DVD. I find this unlikely. Even if they could afford it, they’d be switching the money from other purchases. So GDP wouldn’t be affected, and jobs gained in the entertainment industry would be lost in the restaurant or clothing sector.

More importantly for the economy, the stuff that can be downloaded costs next to nothing to distribute. Once a film or album has been made, digital distribution pushes the additional unit cost to zero. Apple doesn’t need to hire more people to sell more music through iTunes. Any sales that come over from illegal downloads can be almost all profit. And amusingly, none of this would add to the wealth of the UK. Even if GDP increased by £12bn (which I feel is unlikely), most of this money would be heading westwards and not providing wealth to the UK.

Just a snippet here, but don’t cha just love the way the papers can spin data about the populations voting intentions. Saturday’s Guardian began the article connecting the expenses scandals with the coming election with:

More than a quarter plan to reject mainstream parties in European vote (Guardian)

And along with the desire for a general election now, they ‘reflect deep-seated public anger over the way politicians have played the allowances system’. Or do they?

I ask this because in January 2007, the same poll showed 76% of voters wanted a general election that year if Gordon Brown was to take over from Blair, 10% more than are now saying that they want a vote this year. And the finding that 27% of people plan to vote for a ‘minority party’, that is not the big three, is unsurprising when in the last European election in 2004, 35% of voters plumped for minority parties.

If I could get the academic equivalent of a front page splash with analysis like this, then I wouldn’t be needing to do real research.

Once again MPs’ expenses have been deemed a disgrace, scandalous and so on. The Archbishop of Canterbury has ‘warned that a “culture of abuse” had developed in Westminster, claiming MPs only had themselves to blame’ (Guardian). Today’s Guardian also had experts deciding whether MPs’ claims were ethical, as every MP accused of having their snout in the trough has pointed out that what they have been doing is legal.

Of course, one of the main issues that arises in MPs allowances is that of the ’second home’*. The good thing about this is that it has an exact parallel in the rules for everyone else, in the law covering council tax.

It seems that the rules for distinguishing between the main home and second home are fairly lax for MPs. In the 2006 rulebook it said:

‘The location of your main home will normally be a matter of fact. If you have more than one home, your main home will normally be the one where you spend more nights than any other. If there is any doubt about which is your main home, please consult the Department of Finance and Administration.’ (Green Book 2006)

The ‘normally’ suggests individuals can swing it the other way, if they have a convincing case. The later version is even more lax:

Main home is the term used in the Green Book for the term “only or main residence” as used in the applicable Resolutions of the House and the relevant legal provisions. It is for a Member to determine where his or her main home is based on his or her circumstances. It must be in the UK. (Green Book 2009)

A member can determine where his or her main home is!!! Now let’s look at the situation for the council tax, which almost all of us pay. For this, it’s up to the local authority to determine the ‘main home’.

We have to establish the facts as far as possible and make a decision. This may involve asking personal questions about your relationships and lifestyle and we are sorry if this offends you. Documentary evidence may also be asked for.

[Long absence for work]…the Courts have decided that in such situations the time spent away from your main residence is largely irrelevant and that your main residence is where you ‘intend to return’ & ‘where you would live if not for the demands of your work’. This is generally where your partner and children (if any) live.(Thurrock council)

This should actually be quite simple, but might need checking after the fact. If someone lives in London, continues to live in London while an MP for Stoke, and continues to live in London after being an MP, then the Stoke home is their second home. If someone lives in Leeds, becomes the MP for Leeds, and stays living in Leeds when they give up being an MP, then any London place is a second home. Of course, people might move their family in the meantime, changing the main home, and this would require documentary evidence. Perhaps this should be for the courts to decide in the event of a dispute, just as it is if people dispute their council tax. ‘This may involve asking personal questions about your relationships and lifestyle and we are sorry if this offends you.’ Surely if one makes the rules, one should abide by them.

*For now I’ll ignore the fact that MPs are claiming for food and other stuff that they’d have to buy whether or not they were working. Something that isn’t allowed in any other job.