Youth knows best

The Citizenship Foundation interview with 4000 British youths makes for very interesting reading. Since becoming Cabinet Member for Children's Services I have spoken to more youngsters in the last 5 months than I have since I actually was one myself. I am constantly impressed by the maturity, insight and simple recognition of basic realities that young people demonstrate. In a morass of mediocrity they are a cause for optimism.

Headlines from the survey:

• Two-thirds are likely to vote in the next election.



• Their main issues are the recession, the war in Iraq and the expenses scandal.



• They seem not to trust anybody in authority. They certainly don't trust politicians but, perhaps surprisingly, they trust business leaders, celebrities, religious leaders and journalists even less. They don't have a great deal of time for those who run charities either - I do wonder why that is. Young people seem to put their faith in family and friends, medical and educational staff and the police.



• And they realise that the media has more influence on the government than the public - whilst simultaneously realising that the public should be the ones with the most influence. In fact, young people do seem to realise just how little say they have in this increasingly undemocratic nation of ours with the biggest portion - 28% - saying they have no say at all and another third believing they don't have very much say.



• Not surprisingly, 44% realise their say in the thoroughly unrepresentative and undemocratic EU is non-existent with most of the rest believing that it is very little.



• The survey provides some comfort for the Conservative Party's electoral potential in 2010. 23% of the respondents said they would vote Conservative whilst 18% will opt for the Labour Party and another 18% for the Liberal Democrats. Given that they believe the Lib Dems might do more for young people their reluctance to actually vote for them shows a refreshing refusal to be pandered to.



• Some surprises: youth priorities are to reduce unemployment, invest in health, invest in education and be tough on criminals. The topic that so engages others - climate change - is 5th on their list.



• Asked what they are taught too much about they say: sex and drugs. Which, really, just confirms to me that the attempts to influence behaviour and attitudes through the blunt instrument of school education is as ridiculous as I have always thought it to be.



• What they actually want to learn more about is banking, personal finances, mortgages and, happily, politics. Which means they're preferences are for practical lessons they can apply to the lives they hope to lead.



• A view I found a little surprising (although some Redbridge youngsters I met a short while ago had come to the same conclusion) was the overall objection to the idea of lowering the voting age to 16. Over half said no. 31% were in favour.

No right way to inspect

I have previously commented on Ofsted inspections in schools and social services so the weekend controversy about a review of hospitals performance by the Doctor Foster organisation particularly caught my eye. Dr Foster found that 12 hospitals in England are significantly underperforming with over 5000 patients attending with low-risk treatments actually dying and more than 200 patients being left with 'foreign objects' inside them after surgery.

Why this makes the headlines though is not just the disturbing statistics but the fact that 8 of the 12 named Trusts were rated as 'Good' or 'Excellent' by official regulators, The Care Quality Commission.

The most telling phrase came from Roger Taylor of Dr Foster Intelligence, speaking on the Politics Show on Sunday:

There's no right way to measure a hospital.... The regulators look at a very broad range of things going across a whole hospital and make an overall assessment. We've looked at one very specific aspect of that which is patient safety... because we think is the most important aspect.

Which means, logically, that a hospital can be wonderful and awful all at the same time, depending on who's asking. Which is what some of the twelve seem to have managed to be.

Some public institutions live or die according to inspection results. It may well be that the official regulator - and the government - will be critical of the Dr Foster findings but they will also be wary that if something goes wrong in one of the hospitals marked by them as 'Good' or 'Outstanding' whilst Dr Foster found them to be failing then the official rating will be found to be doubly untrustworthy. Which means, I suspect, that the official regulator is going to have it in for all hospitals from now on.

This is what happened after Ofsted inspectors marked Harringey social services as 'Good' only to have the Baby Peter tragedy blow up in their faces. Then, Ofsted said Harringey managers mislead them and so they have 'tightened up' their inspection processes. The suspicion is that this 'tightening up' doesn't mean simply being more robust about their inspections but more wary of awarding positive marks even where deserved.

Inspections are, I think, carried out in a climate of fear. Social work managers fear the inspectors, the inspectors fear the government and the government fears the press. Somewhere in all this back-watching are the vulnerable children but the inspection process, I am told (and have anecdotal evidence to support), does not seek to challenge and improve a service but simply to catch it out. The cynic in me wonders if the fact that some children will be murdered by wicked people is considered regrettable but inevitable by the inspectors but so long as one can prove that one followed the processes then it's not so bad.

Since we refuse to tackle the social causes of violence and abuse against our children - and, instead, seek to blame process faults, social workers and department directors - it seems that optimism has little place in child protection and safeguarding.

Budget weekend

The weekend just gone was Budget Weekend (which happily turned out to be just Budget Saturday as we did Sunday's work on Saturday too). We - the Conservative Group - spent the day at Ley Street House in Ilford (and you thought we had a swanky hotel in Brighton, eh?) and ploughed through the Council's capital and revenue budgets.

It's a painful process and portfolio-holders like myself have to present budgets that other councillors are not always enamoured of. The last two weeks especially have been tense for me as numbers were revised and as I tried to get to grips with what is the council's largest spending department by far. There's quite a lot of detail to master - one doesn't want to be left gibbering in front of two dozen coleagues when somebody asks a fairly straightforward question.

As it turned out on the day one of my savings was badly mauled giving me a bit of a headache as I spent the rest of the afternoon emailing officers to see what we could do to repair the Children's Services injured revenue stream. It's still got a bit of a limp but I think we'll recover.

It was also my birthday Saturday so we celebrated that and end of Budget day in style. Well, Hobnobs in Gants Hill - with football blaring on the tv for some of the evening - and a Chinese afterwards. Actually alcohol is £2.50 a pop during the footie and the service is good so will definitely be making a return journey.

Myself and Cllrs Turbefield, Dunn, Hayes, Wilson and Chaudhary - with a short but sweet burst of both Cllrs Cole at the start of the session - had a great evening. I think Robin Turbefield probably slept best that night; Nick Hayes probably had the biggest hangover the next day and I had the pleasantest memories!

Yoo hoo

There's so much work on Children's Services that I'm spending this Sunday evening trying to get it out of my mind by relaxing with my good friends and drinking buddies Stella, Bailey and Sauvignon. The mix is probably doing more harm than good but I'm in a buy-now-pay-later kind of mood so the show will go on.

I've just seen a few clips of one of those tart-up-your-car programmes today where they take somebody's tired old car and turn it into a glistening, mega-charged beast of a vehicle with few (or any, I would suggest) of its original parts still intact. Then they wheel out the chap who owns the car and show him the transformed version and he goes wild, hugs anyone not quick enough to escape his clutches and lives happily ever after.

I think the programme's a bit naughty really in trying to convince you they souped up the old jalopy to make it the glistening dream car you now see because, in my not-so-humble, it's not the same car done up at all - it's a new car, the old one having had its individual parts replaced piece by piece until the vehicle before us has nothing in common - apart from its basic shape - with the old one. He has, in fact, a new car.

What intrigues me though is the human version of this. It's always fascinated me that a person replaces all his body's cells in an ongoing process so that, in 7 years, he has effectively been totally replaced. There's nothing about you now that physically existed 7 years ago. Yet you're still the person you were (give or take a few life experiences) so what is it that was retained once you'd shed your skin, so to speak?

In the first place, I've probably framed the question in a slightly misleading way because, unlike the car analogy, your cells are replaced with more or less identical versions of themselves. It's more like replacing a brick in your house each day with an identical brick. When they've all finally been replaced your house is essentially the same.

And 'you' - as in, the intangibles that make you actually you - originate in the brain and the brain, in the end, is as much of a physical construct as any other part of you. The gradual replacement of brain cells over the years with identical versions of themselves means the various neural pathways (which give rise to the brain states that are, in turn, your characteristics - memories, values, fears, hopes, beliefs, etc) remain. So it's probably fair to say that after the complete replacement of every cell in your body you haven't changed at all.

But this leads to separate - although related - question. If these brain states or, to be more precise, the arrangement of brain cells that bring them about, could be known and, even, copied into another person's brain then does that other person become you? If you scanned my brain and copied it onto yours would you be simply a less attractive (I'm drinking, remember) version of me?

More to the point, would I be in two places at once now?

If you - with my brain states inside you - eat a meal who's eating it - you or me? If you're watching television who's enjoying it - you or me? If you're tired and I'm not am I two things at once? If you and your Mrs - well, you get the point. (But would one of us be committing adultery?)

Could I be locked up for other me's crimes?

Could the other version of me have its own experiences and gradually change over time to be a different person to original me? Wouldn't our shared memories make us still the same person?

I think that if we ever were able to faithfully copy one person's personality to another then the importance of the physical body as part of personhood would have to be explicitly stated rather than simply assumed. 'You' would have to be defined as personality plus that body. Your personality in that other body would not be defined as you. Otherwise it all gets pretty confusing and you could be all over the place. Literally.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

Politicians create wars, our people fight them. Whether the war is just or not, our military should always be remembered.

In Flanders Fields

John McCrae (1915)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Go green

Lawks-a-lordy - okay!

Go blue...

Yes, I would blame the weather too.

Beautiful rain

I never mind the rain anyway (although these poor souls in Scotland are knee-deep in it at the moment) but with Mrs M out of the country I have to tend to her plants and the rain is helping me out no end.

If the plants die Cllr M follows suit and I don't think any of us need another by-election. So if Mother Nature could programme in a once-every-four-days shower I would be very grateful. I'll take care of the plants inside the house mind...