May 21 2013

Leaving the EU will not only fail to secure what Eurosceptics desire but would likely make the UK’s position worse

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Seamus NevinSeamus Nevin argues that the UK would still be strongly influenced by the EU even if it were to leave, contrary to what many Eurosceptics imagine. Moreover, it would find itself with much less power on the outside, which is important when considering that the EU is far from perfect and in need of reform. To ensure a bright future, the UK must be at the forefront of a dynamic and successful EU.

A leader who once warned his party to stop “banging on about Europe”, last January UK Prime Minister David Cameron made a speech in which he committed to an in/out referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. Four months on, Cameron’s attempt to seize the initiative on Europe in response to a restive backbench and growing support for UKIP has neither failed to quell Tory MPs’ discontent or halted the rise of UKIP. Not just that, the Conservatives and UKIP are no longer the only ones pushing for a referendum.

Nigel Lawson’s letter to The Times last week is perhaps indicative of the gains that Eurosceptics hope to make through a UK withdrawal from the European Union. In his letter, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer stated that “the EU has become a bureaucratic monstrosity” which imposes substantial economic costs on all member states and that “escaping” the EU would be a major economic plus for the UK.

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May 20 2013

It is time for more action on the issue of mental health

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Richard-Layard-thumbIn the developed world, mental illness causes more misery than physical illness. Yet, as Richard Layard explains, there is far too little attention focused on this important problem. New treatments have been developed to treat mental illness but more priority needs to be given to the attack on mental illness.

“If you had a billion dollars to make the world a better place, how would you spend it?” My answer is always the same. I would spend it on modern evidence-based psychological therapy for people with depression and crippling anxiety, and for children with disordered conduct. Why?

First, this is a truly massive problem which wrecks the lives of over one in 10 people worldwide. In rich countries, it is the biggest single cause of misery, accounting for more misery than physical illness does — and much more than is caused by poverty or unemployment. Second, it imposes huge costs on the rest of society. Among adults of working age, mental illness accounts for nearly as much sickness absence and welfare expenditure as are due to all physical illnesses put together. And among children, conduct disorder is the best predictor of a life of crime.

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May 20 2013

Who makes EU policy in the Conservative party?

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Simon-Usherwood-80x108

The EU continues to be a central issue for the Conservatives, dividing and distracting the party. Simon Usherwood argues that Cameron’s assorted pronouncements are a reflection of his need to maintain some semblance of unity, rather than any actual engagement with the issues. The sense amongst the eurosceptic backbenchers is that they have the advantage, that their course is right and that their leader is biddable, which he is to an appreciable degree.

Last week might fairly be described as less-than-perfect for the Conservative party and their EU policy: a well-backed amendment to the Queen’s speech, sniping from both sides over the direction of travel and even the recently-reinstated Nadine Dorries – who one might have expected to be more circumspect – wondering aloud about a running on a joint Tory-UKIP ticket. All of it looks very much like a party in disarray. However, it is much more emblematic of a party undergoing a long-term shift in its position.

In the 1990s, when the European issue was last so prominent, the Tories were a more balanced party, in terms of having a significant body of pro-EU members, many of whom had been personally involved in taking the UK into the EEC in 1973. The debate then was thus between pros and antis, the latter mobilised as much by their idealisation of Thatcher as any particular personal views on European integration. As time progressed, the pro-EU element became more and more marginalised, as the elder figures retired or died and local branches selected more and more sceptics to contest seats. This became particularly apparent at the 2010 general election, when there was a big turnover of MPs, and the entry into Parliament of significant numbers of backbenchers with both visceral views on European integration and a propensity to rebel against the whip.

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May 19 2013

Book Review: The Population of the UK

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Ludi Simpson

The Population of the UK explains the geographical differences in key socio-economic variables – like education, health, and work – that illustrate the UK’s stark social inequalities and how these affect everyone’s lives. Ludi Simpson thinks this book is commendably rich in quantitative evidence, although it has a subjective approach which emphasises human responsibility for maintaining or changing patterns of inequality.

populationoftheukThe Population of the UK. Daniel Dorling. Sage. November 2012.

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Here is a tussle with social policy that will engage general readers, despite the exercises, key points and other aids characteristic of an undergraduate textbook. The Population of the UK is not a book of theory or methods, but an examination of spatial social patterns, that rails against inequality as much as it portrays it. In each chapter the reader is asked to consider maps and charts that show how people are socially sorted, with text that builds up a picture of unequal decisions and outcomes from cradle to grave. Our moves around the UK, as well as into and out of it, are shaped by our place and our jostling in this sorting, creating the human geography of Britain. This prolific author is a relatively young veteran of Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds, Sheffield and now Oxford Universities.

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May 19 2013

Book Review: Justifying New Labour Policy

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Justifying New Labour Policy presents a detailed empirical analysis of the ideas, language and policy of New Labour. Politicians often appeal to moral principles and arguments in their efforts to win support for new policy programmes. Yet the question of how politicians use moral language has so far been neglected by scholars, and Judi Atkins aims to fill this gap, with chapters on welfare reform, the Iraq war, and ASBOs. Reviewed by Andrew Crines.

Justifying New Labour Policy. Judi Atkins. Palgrave Macmillan. April 2011.

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Under Ed Miliband’s leadership the Labour Party has begun to question its raison d’etre. Whether it even knows it is another matter. Today’s Labour Party is highly divided yet it is striving hard to appear united in the post-New Labour world. The divisions are highlighted with various colours and shades being co-opted to represent various ideological splinters. Black, Blue, Red, and Purple are just a few. Moreover, Next Labour, Reassurance Labour, New Generation Labour, Blue Labour, and now One Nation Labour have been thrown about as possible new directions for a party which increasingly looks uncertain about its identify.

New Labour provided something of an enforced stable environment for electoral gain at the expense of debates and divisions. Under such conditions, Labour members built up frustrations which have now begun to spill over, with only Socialist Labour appearing absent from the debate. Such was the victory of the Third Way that the Left are the Croslandite social democrats of old, and the Right now comfortable confirming a Disraelite tradition as Labour’s future.

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May 18 2013

True innovation in Higher Ed will emerge from faculty-driven, open-source projects, not start-up commercialisation

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leslieLeslie Madsen-Brooks is skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise. She highlights ways university faculty and staff are already driving thoughtful technological innovation through engaging in open source, open learning projects. Projects which focus on the individual and collective empowerment of students and communities, rather than commercialization will ensure lasting, productive disruption.

This article was originally published on LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog.

I’ve heard that higher ed needs to be “disrupted” because it’s not cost efficient, it treats students as learners rather than customers, it’s risk-averse and unproductive, it values research over teaching, it doesn’t offer enough flexibility to adult learners, it’s too focused on prestige and credit hours instead of broad-based student competencies, it’s done a lousy job of using technology to expand affordable access to degrees, faculty spend too much classroom time lecturing and faculty act as if we should be exempt from the sweeping technological change that has upended the newspaper and music industries.

I’m not opposed to disruption; rather, I’m skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise: “paradigm-shifting” technology that improves university teaching and learning. The truth is, many of these start-ups clearly have no idea what actually works in higher ed and know little about the direction university teaching and learning have moved in the last 10 years, because they’re trying to take us backward, not forward. Start-up and commercial tech are certainly proving disruptive—just in all the wrong ways.

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May 18 2013

Five minutes with Saskia Sassen: “The issue right now is not the lack of discipline in Eurozone economies; it’s the financialisation of everything”

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Has the Eurozone crisis undermined Europe’s place in the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Saskia Sassen discusses the role of finance in the crisis, the threat posed by transnational systems of surveillance, and the potential for public disorder to give a political voice to the powerless.

This article was originally published on LSE’s EUROPP blog.

In your view, what is the root cause of the Eurozone crisis?

I have great respect and great admiration for the project that is European integration. That respect comes not from the notion that we should all get together and create some sort of ‘super-state’, but from the foundational elements that drove the project: the belief in law and the belief in non-military solutions. But there is one big qualifier to that respect, which is that when the push to accelerate the adoption of the euro was taking place it was driven by corporations. The big winners from the euro were the big corporations who could become bigger and who could enter the global economic space more effectively. The ones that suffered were the smaller firms connected to subnational and regional markets.

Credit: Ash Violette (CC BY 2.0)

Now, I’m not against having an integrated currency – certainly for me, as someone who travels all over Europe, it’s fantastic – but the problem was the rush. I remember the debates that there was supposedly no way we could do it. Well, we got it done. Why? Because enormously powerful corporate interests were behind it and when they want to get something done, by God they get it done. The fact that most of these national economies are constituted by small enterprises, regional markets, and localised production – that was simply overlooked. And now I think we’re paying the price for that.

There are, of course, other issues that come into the picture. One is that by integrating on the continental scale, and by having a single currency, it became much more worthwhile for finance – which is very different from banking – to do its thing. If we still had separate national currencies then central banks sitting on top of the situation tightly would have prevented the scale-up that makes it worthwhile for global finance. When you have that level of integration, finance moves in and finance ‘financialises’.

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May 18 2013

France has almost entirely failed in its strategy to prevent English taking over as the lingua franca of the EU

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Prior to the accession of the United Kingdom to the European Economic Community in 1973, the French language held a privileged position as a lingua franca of the Community. David Fernández Vítores assesses the demise of the French language’s status and the failure of France to develop an effective strategy for preventing the advance of English. He notes that the country is now refocusing its efforts on consolidating the position of French in the legal sphere, one of the few areas where it still enjoys a privileged position in comparison to other official languages.

This article was originally published on LSE’s EUROPP blog.

France is not only one of the founding members of the European Community, but also one of the main drivers of the integration process. However, this does not necessarily mean that France has systematically allowed the erosion of its political identity as a result of European integration. In fact, it has done the opposite. France’s attitude regarding the position of the French language in the EU is a good example of its savoir-faire. Since the early years of the Community, France’s strategy for safeguarding its language has focused solely on adopting measures aimed at promoting the language or strengthening the privileged position it previously enjoyed in the institutional arena.

Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Public Domain)

Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Public Domain)

The main challenge to this privileged position came in 1973 with the accession of the United Kingdom, as well as Ireland and Denmark. In addition to concerns about the French language losing its importance on the European stage as a result of English becoming an official Community language, this first enlargement brought with it a proposal to reform the EU language regime. Interestingly enough, the proposal for reform did not come from the states in which French and English were spoken, but from one with a minority language in the Community: Denmark.

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