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How much do you worry about the problem of middle-aged women hanging around shopping centres?

Or groups of pensioners huddling together near the post office? Fifty-something businessmen massing by the wine bar?

Now let me ask you a different question. In your neighbourhood, how much of a problem are teenagers hanging around on the streets? That is what the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office asked 47,000 adults living in private households in England and Wales for a report on perceptions of anti-social behaviour [].

And the answer is that "around one in three (31%) perceived teenagers hanging around to be a problem".

One of the defining features of teenagers is that they "hang around". That is what they do. I did it. I suspect you did too.

The other questions in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office survey relate to conduct which might reasonably be described as anti-social: vandalism, graffiti, damage to property, drug dealing, drunkenness, noisy neighbours or loud parties. If teenagers are hanging around and doing these activities, then government ministers might consider actions to encourage better behaviour.

But community anxieties about young people simply standing around tell us more about the anxious community than they do about the teenagers.

You may remember the recent which found that more than a third of people agree that "it feels like the streets are infested with children". "Infested"?

Almost half of adults (49%) said that they regarded children as increasingly dangerous, both to each other and to their elders. Almost as many (43%) felt that "something has to be done" to protect society from children and young people.

In that context, the group of teenagers is regarded in the same way as, say, a pack of wolves or a plague of rats circling the shopping arcade.

I find it telling that official research assumes our young people are a "problem", even when all they are doing is hanging around being young people.

Perhaps the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office might like to do a youth survey asking how worried people are about the anti-social problem of adults treating teenagers like vermin.

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• - What's this?

How could anyone do those unimaginably cruel, inhuman things?

That is the question that, to most people, immediately flows from hearing the ghastly details of both and, of course, .

We seem to have any number of inquiries and investigations now under way into trying to find what went wrong, but I wonder whether the real answer lies buried in that initial question.

The 56-year-old Sheffield businessman who raped his children and the woman and two men who tortured a baby in Haringey would all appear to fit the definition of sociopaths: individuals with a deficit or absence of the social emotions (love, shame, guilt, empathy and remorse), but with a clear facility to deceive and manipulate others.

Mr X, as the rapist was known, refused to attend court to hear his sentence but said: "I haven't got any regret over what has happened. It's too late for that. It shouldn't have happened."

Also referred to as "anti-social personality disorder", the behaviour of such people is beyond comprehension to most people because it does not equate with our understanding of what makes us human.

Academics calculate that sociopaths account for about 3-4% of the male population and less than 1% of the female population. from the University of British Columbia is one the world's experts on sociopaths and psychopaths. He writes of people "completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others".

He describes how "they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret".

Such people are, however, very difficult to spot.

In her book The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless vs. the Rest of Us, American clinical psychologist explains why she thinks this is:

Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience that they seldom even guess at your condition.

The individuals that society puts in the front line to try and spot the threat from sociopaths could hardly be more different. Social workers, doctors and teachers are, usually, natural carers - people who empathise easily with others. They are wired to see the best in people, to develop trust.

And most of the time, that is exactly what we want such professionals to do - to support and to help people through their difficulties. But we also demand that they retain a deep cynicism about the individuals they work with - constantly questioning and imagining the very worst.

Sometimes they must make professional judgments about people who are wired completely differently to themselves - people who do not share the basic qualities that define humanity as they understand it.

In his report [] into in Haringey in 2000, Lord Laming wrote of the need for "respectful uncertainty" when dealing with a child's family and of "critical evaluation" of what professionals are told. He has spoken of the "over optimism" he encountered, the way in which social workers tend to "travel with hope".

When one reads the appalling details of 25 years of abuse and suffering in the Sheffield case, it does seem incredible that it went on for so long and without anyone in authority noticing.

But perhaps it is the very incredibility that explains why.

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• - What's this?

To some, it will be seen as a busybodies' charter - thousands of WI members tutting over the small ads in the local paper before penning angry letters to the editor.

To others, it is a creative way to deal with the unacceptable face of the sex trade - mobilising the citizenry to help fight the evil criminal gangs which profit from people trafficking.

What strikes me as interesting is that this is a rare example of the state looking to civil society for solutions to social ills.

The Minister for Women, Harriet Harman, and asked them for their help.

"Look at the adverts in your local newspaper," she exhorted the organisation's 200,000 members. "They advertise women for sale for sex. Many are young women tricked and trafficked into this country and forced into prostitution."

Ms Harman urged the institute's volunteers to write to local newspaper editors whose own trade organisation, the Newspaper Society, is committed to discouraging or banning such sleazy ads. The WI was only too happy to oblige.

It is not the first time that the organisation has been "recruited" by government. In 1938, the National Federation of Women's Institutes was asked to help with plans to evacuate children in the event of war.

And when conflict did come, the WI took on a wide range of responsibilities. Inevitably, they were asked to assist with the "fruit preservations scheme" (jam) but also to help with the "meat pie scheme", the "cod-liver oil scheme" and the "fruit juice scheme".

They lined coats with rabbit skins for use by troops in Russia and they also worked closely with the Board of Trade's "knitters scheme".

If they were good enough to take on the might of Hitler's Nazis, they are surely more than qualified to fight organised criminals in the sex industry.

However, the relationship between the state and its citizens changed markedly when the war ended. The creation of the welfare state meant that voters increasingly assumed that it was government's job to run the country and improve their lot.

The fight against crime, some would argue, is rightfully a job for police and the courts - not net-twitching do-gooders. Ministers may well be accused of passing the buck - abrogating their responsibility to deal with organised criminal gangs.

If a crime is committed, it might be suggested, the justice system should deal with it, not unelected, meddling amateurs.

A similar charge was laid at Douglas Hurd's door when he was home secretary in the early 1980s. Lord Hurd (as he is now) rolled out the scheme across Britain, having been impressed by the activities of the first project in Mollington in Cheshire. Today, more than 10 million people are said to be involved.

Central government is increasingly aware of its own limitations. Passing laws from the top often produces little or no effect on behaviour at ground level. The levers of power don't appear to be attached to anything.

Is harnessing the enthusiasm of the British people to improve their own neighbourhoods and communities the way to make a difference?

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• - What's this?

In an office in Whitehall, a team of government officials is charged with keeping tabs on racial tension across England.

The monitors at the were assembled amid ministerial fears that the pain of the economic downturn might translate into social strains and potential violence.

An academic study to be published by the next month (and which will appear ) finds that racial prejudice has been "declining sharply in Britain since the 1980s thanks to the greater tolerance of younger generations".

This week's Map of the Week tries to understand what is happening on the ground. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ has taken the leaked details of BNP members and applied them to a map of the UK.

The first thing to say is that BNP membership is very low but there are some areas where the party is more active. My interpretation of the map is that there is a spine of BNP support running down the Pennines from the former Northern English mill towns of Blackburn, Burnley and Bradford to Derby, Nottingham and Leicester in the East Midlands.

For data protection reasons, I am not posting the local detail, but it turns out that the place with the greatest concentration of BNP support is Morley, near Leeds.

There are also parts of East London and Essex with high numbers of BNP members but it is noticeable that the capital generally is not a breeding ground for far-right support, despite the highest levels of racial and ethnic diversity.

I wanted to know whether BNP membership was a proxy for poor race relations and so I have obtained some data from the DCLG tension monitoring team and applied them to a map of England.

The measure of social tension is based upon a huge survey in which residents are asked whether "people from different backgrounds get on well together" in the local area.

The map colours range between bright green (where 100% of the population think that "people from different backgrounds get on well") to bright red (where 40% or fewer believe the same). Broadly, green means good race relations while brown/red suggests tension.

I am indebted to the (CASA) at University College London for turning the numbers into a map. You can dive down into the data by accessing it .

Now, there are clearly some similarities between BNP membership and areas which suffer low scores on the cohesion measure. Once again, the Lancashire towns of Blackburn, Burnley, Nelson and Colne are highlighted. There are also poor scores in parts of East Anglia and in some neighbourhoods to the east of London.

But what is interesting to me is the apparent lack of social tension in the Midlands, despite high levels of diversity and BNP activity.

I suspect that membership of far-right groups is as much a factor of local organisation and targeting as it is of racial tensions.

In any event, the paper from the University of Manchester that I mentioned suggests that any gains the BNP might make in the short term will be ruled out by a much broader and long-term trend.

The study, due to be published in next month's , uses indicators of racial prejudice from the to examine prejudice against black and Asian Britons.

This graph paints a clear picture, I think, of the direction of travel, although it would be more helpful to have more recent numbers...

Figure I: Period trends in social distance
(a) Attitudes to an ethnic minority boss


Asked about their attitudes to having a boss who was Asian or black, the proportion of respondents who said they would "mind" fell from roughly 20% to less than 15% between 1983 and 1996. Among those who would "mind a lot", the fall is less dramatic; nonetheless, it is welcome.

, who headed the research team, says that social contact with black or Asian Britons is becoming increasingly unremarkable to white people in their 20s and 30s.

Racial attitudes in Britain, he concludes, are structured by generation, with a large decline in expressions of prejudice among those in the cohorts which have grown up since immigration began. "Consequently, levels of racial prejudice are falling and are likely to fall further."

Nevertheless, the team of DCLG monitors is keeping close tabs on a situation that may become increasingly volatile as unemployment levels rise in areas of significant immigration.

Update [Nov 25th, 1430]: Further evidence of the decline in racist attitudes among younger people may perhaps be found in on racist chanting at football matches. There were just 23 arrests during the whole of the 2007/08 season. That's the lowest ever recorded level - down 70% in five years. This is possibly a consequence of changing attitudes rather than simply of changing policing priorities. What is your experience?

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• - What's this?

Much has been said and written about how social workers should have taken Baby P into care much earlier.

It would have saved his life.

But whenever that decision is made, the agencies must calculate what is in the best interests of the child. Being taken away from your family and moved into the care system is to enter a world full of dangers of its own.

Today's on children's services reveals some of the short-comings of England's services for what are called "looked-after" children.

They found that around 7% of care homes were inadequate' in keeping the children safe. As the report notes: "Given the centrality of these services to children's lives and prospects, this is a high level of inadequacy."

Just imagine what that dry phrase means for a child who was suffering such a high level of risk at home that he/she was taken away from their family and moved into a community of strangers.

The promised sanctuary proves to be nothing of the sort.

When inspectors looked at private fostering arrangements they deemed that 16 of the 59 local authorities they visited were providing an 'inadequate' service. And those are only the one's that local council's know about with Ofsted reporting "serious concern" at how many authorities don't seem to know what private fostering is going on.

Inspectors highlight the lack of experienced and competent staff in the care sector. What is more, despite an ethos that puts the child at the centre of everything that happens, Ofsted found that children "feel it is hard to influence decisions that involve them."

Looked after children are falling further behind at school. Educational attainment and attendance, in the words of Ofsted "remain unacceptably low".

The inspectors found that children and young people "in most areas continue to experience frequent changes of social worker".The trusted adult assigned to be there for them throughout the trauma of this process is removed on a regular basis.

Much of the care system works hard to do the best for a group of very troubled and often very difficult children and young people.

Two-thirds of care is labelled good or better.

But a very significant proportion is only satisfactory or inadequate - and it is into this environment that at risk children are placed. Poor quality care options will impact on decisions to leave children at risk in families.

No wonder Ofsted argues that "there remains much to do, and to do with a sense of urgency".

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• - What's this?

We must never let it happen again".The phrase has been used again and again over the past week as more grisly details of the brief and tragic life of Baby P emerge.

But, sadly, it will happen again. In fact, it happened last night. And it will happen tonight and tomorrow too.

Baby P is not some isolated and extraordinary case of bestial cruelty. Small children are being beaten, tortured, abused and assaulted in Britain every hour of every day.

Looking at the figures for England and Wales, police recorded 5,300 cases of child cruelty and neglect last year. Ninety people were jailed for cruelty to children - 38 of them women.

These are not incidents of a clip round the ear to which police over-react. We are talking broken limbs, smashed skulls, cigarette burns and worse.

And the numbers are only for those the police get to know about. Academic studies into the experiences of children suggest a truly horrifying level of abuse.

One piece of work found 16% (1 in 6) of almost three thousand 18-24 year-olds reported suffering "serious maltreatment" at the hands of their parents or carers as children. If the figure bears any relation to the general picture, it suggests millions are suffering severe physical maltreatment every day. Millions.

Asked about sexual abuse,1% said they were abused by a parent or carer, 3% by another relative during childhood and 11% by people known but unrelated to them.

The calculates that a million children are being sexually abused at any one time.

Last year there were 27,900 children on the protection register or panel as it is now called.These are young people and babies that social workers deem to be at significant risk of harm.

But not all are rescued in time.

Child protection inspectors in England wrote to the government in July and revealed details of cases where local authorities had notified them of the possible need for a .

"Between 1 April 2007 and 31 March 2008, 281 serious incidents were recorded, which related to 189 deaths, 87 incidents of significant harm or injuries and five incidents where the outcome for the child was not known, for example where a child was reported to be missing following a serious incident."

What makes the Baby P case different is not the cruelty. Not the fact that he died. The difference is that we have been confronted with the details.

The pornographic descriptions of his terrible injuries juxtaposed with the innocent little blue-eyed boy staring up into the face of an adult are almost too much to bear. But many, apparently, want this detail.

Perhaps by focusing and obsessing about one ghastly incident, we find it easier to ignore the pervasive and insidious nature of society's dark side.

Child abuse can be boxed up in a carton marked 'Baby P'. Inquiries will be conducted. Officials will face sanction. Systems and protocols will be tweaked. Fat reports will be written.

We have been here before and the consequence of a roll call of individual scandals has been child protection procedures that are already regarded as among the best in the world. However counter intuitive it might seem, other nations come to see how we do it and copy our systems.

That's not to say it is job done. Of course it should never happen again.Tragically, it will.

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• - What's this?

Amid all the talk of recession and today's particularly gloomy forecast from the , it is easy to forget just how much richer we have become in the last few years.

There is just one place, Caerphilly, where GDP is actually lower now than it was five years ago - down 2.7%.

But, despite the downturn, almost everywhere else in England and Wales has seen economic activity increase. In some places, very dramatically.

In Shrewsbury, for example, they have seen a 36% rise in prosperity. Winchester is 33% wealthier. And one of the poorest boroughs in London, Hackney, is 29% better off in GDP terms than it was in 2003.

It is not just a southern phenomenon. South Tyneside in the North East of England is 27.5% wealthier than five years ago. Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales has seen 28% growth. South Holland in Lincolnshire up 29%.

These numbers, providing important perspective amid the fiscal pessimism, are culled from my Map of the Week this week. is an excellent website for those who like to see data in spatial terms.

The company behind the map-style database, consultants
take the numbers published by the government and allow you to chart the situation geographically.They hope to add Scotland soon, incidentally.

There is a huge amount of information stored behind the maps and I would encourage anyone with an interest in how the downturn is affecting different parts of the country to find time to explore.

Looking at change in GDP since 2003 in England and Wales, there is no obvious geographical picture.

While the South East region has seen an increase of 17% over the past five years, so has the North East.

Wales and East England have done poorest in regional terms - 13% growth.
The downturn, so far, has only taken wealth back to where it was in the middle of last year. That's not to say it won't get a lot worse, of course.

There are places which seem to have missed out almost entirely on the economic expansion of the last five years. I mentioned Caerphilly's negative growth, but other places like Castle Morpeth, Redcar and Cleveland, Hyndburn and Croydon have not seen local productivity improve much.

What the map tries to do is assess the impact of falling GDP on employment - they estimate the economic contraction so far will translate into the loss of around 176,000 jobs across Great Britain, less than the impact suggested by some.

The analysts have factored in the likely impact on different industrial sectors. As they say in their explanation, "a place with only manufacturing and nothing else, would experience an impact very different from one with only financial services.

The mix will have an effect, as will the productivity of sectors, the exposure of them to foreign markets, the experience and skill of managers and so on."

They assume "a more or less direct relationship between jobs and GDP; that a 2% drop in GDP in a sector would result in a 2% loss in employment in that sector".
Obviously, there may be ultra-local factors, such as the impact of one big employer going under.

Nevertheless, the data purports to show where the downturn is biting most severely. In percentage terms, the East Midlands has seen the greatest regional change - 0.71% of jobs lost equivalent to 13,000 jobs in the past month. However, the area with the lowest proportion of workers affected, London at 0.61%, sees the greatest number - 24,500.

Dig down into the data and you find that Thurrock in Essex has the highest proportion of its workforce affected - down 0.93%, Corby is down 0.9% and Dartford down 0.86%.

In numbers terms, Westminster has lost the most jobs in a month - 3,600, Birmingham 3,300 and Leeds 2,600.

Burrow down even further and you look at the proportion of the a local workforce which is claiming Jobseekers' Allowance in areas of about 1500 people.

The highest rate I could find was near the University of Aston in the central area of Birmingham where 24% of the workforce is on the dole, although numbers get pretty small at this level.The proportion is equivalent to just 342 JSA claimants.

What recessionmap does is offer up to ten years of hard data - maps, numbers and graphs which remind us of just how much things have changed in a decade.

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• - What's this?

Confronted by the appalling suffering and tragic death of Baby P, our first response is shock. Anger quickly follows.Then the questions. How did it happen? Who is to blame? Why wasn't it prevented?

The dehumanised computer images of the anonymous tortured infant somehow serve to heighten the clamour for quick answers to these important questions.

But there are some who worry that, if we are not careful, the process becomes as much about seeking vengeance as understanding. We need someone to blame.

Press calls for "heads to roll" reflect public demands for swift justice to be meted out. The horrors of the last few days need a lightning rod before the matter can be put to one side, it seems.

Yesterday's apology from Haringey council was designed to offer something to the angry mob.

It was very different from previous statements which had defended Haringey's "three-star" services.

There was recognition of errors having been made, of their responsibility to protect the little boy and their failure. And they said "sorry" - still not the apology TO the father of Baby P that some had demanded - but the first expression of deep sorrow nevertheless.

But now the focus has shifted to politicians. have done more to save the life of Baby P?

It has emerged that a social worker from Haringey wrote to the then Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt in February 2007 warning that "child abuse victims were not being protected" in the borough. Nevres Kemal is no longer employed by Haringey and cannot speak about the events because of a court injunction.

It is a situation that prompted an immediate attack from the Conservative Children's spokesman Michael Gove.

"All that appears to have happened is the sacking and gagging of the whistleblower and bureaucratic buck-passing in Whitehall. We need a proper explanation of what steps were taken at the highest level to investigate the concerns raised."

Since that statement earlier today, the plot has thickened.

It now appears that the warning from the social worker was passed on to the body responsible for inspecting child protection services in England at that time - the .

But it was a quango in flux. Within weeks it would lose its responsibility for checking children in England were safe.That power would shift to Ofsted on 1 April 2007.

Despite the distractions of the handover, the organisation says its inspectors "acted upon the information in the letter and investigated Haringey's response to the allegations made".

Well it depends what you mean by "acted".The Commission confirmed to me this afternoon that they did not speak to Ms Kemal after receiving the warning that children in Haringey were in danger, instead, they put her concerns on the agenda of a regular meeting they were having with council officials a few weeks later.

The matter was discussed and the inspectors were "satisife with the assurances" they got from Haringey council. Case, apparently, closed.

Now comes the confusion.

The commission tells me that a "note" of the warning was sent over to Ofsted when they took responsibility for inspecting England's child services in April.

But Ofsted tell me "that letter did not come to us".

At the point of handover, they say, the "government's transition order" meant only matters that were "live on the 1st of April" became their responsibility.

The complaint from the Haringey social workers had been dealt with and "closed" by the Commission. And so, the spokesperson told me, Ofsted was not informed about it.
Where did the warning go?

It may have made no difference to what happened to Baby P. But scrutiny around the case is intense. With four separate investigations under way, one would hope the difficult questions will be answered.

However, government ministers had a duty to ensure that children in England remained protected during the bureaucratic reorganisation. At exactly the time the Commission was handing over responsibility to Ofsted, Baby P was being abused in north London.

Some will suggest the little boy may have slipped through the cracks.

The hunt for someone to blame goes on.

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• - What's this?

As the government is urged to introduce a minimum price for alcohol to curb excessive drinking, I wondered how clear the relationship is between cost and consumption.

My Map of the Week looks at the price of alcohol across Europe and allows you to compare that with consumption in each country.The years don't entirely match - the most recent consumption data is from
while the price comparison is from but I doubt the broad trends will have changed dramatically in those 36 months.

You can see that the priciest booze is in Norway - more than twice the European average. Alcohol in the UK is one-and-a-half times the average while France and Germany have cheaper than average prices.

Norway has the lowest consumption with France and Germany consuming slightly more per head than the UK. Luxembourg has the highest consumption and one of the lowest prices.

It is not a perfect fit, but there does seem to be a correlation between price and consumption. Average consumption is 9.1 litres per capita while the average price is set at a nominal 100.

Excluding the UK and Ireland, 14 of the 18 countries we have looked at see an inverse relationship between above/below average prices and above/below average consumption.

So is there something odd about the experience in Great Britain and Ireland? In both the Irish Republic and the United Kingdom, there are above average prices and above average consumption.

However, focusing on the UK, the story could hardly be clearer. This graph published in the (BMJ) shows the relationship between price relative to disposable income and alcohol consumption.

The , which is today calling for a minimum price for alcohol, discovered that not everyone is convinced by the data.

"We encountered some scepticism about the impact of price on drinking habits. The Head of Licensing for Asda, Rob Chester, told us that the UK has the second highest duty rates on alcohol in Europe but worse drink-related problems than most other European countries," their report notes.

Duty is not the same as price, and drink-related problems are not the same as per capita consumption. But does Mr Chester have a point?

I have dug out some on drinking habits among 15-16 year-olds which confirm, to some extent, our teenagers' reputation as binge-drinkers.

However, the link between price and problem drinking is not so obvious.

In the UK, 27% of 15-16-year-olds in the 2003 ESPAD study said they had been binge-drinking at least three times in the previous 30 days. (Binge drinking is defined as five drinks or more in a row.)

However, the figures for Norway and Sweden are not much lower, 24% and 25%, even though overall consumption is well below the British level. The figure for Germany and the Netherlands is 28%. In Ireland it is 32%.

At the other end of the spectrum, only 9% of French 15-16 year-olds were binge-drinkers, 13% of Italians and 8% of Belgians.

This suggests to me that while price does influence overall consumption, problem drinking is a cultural phenomenon and may not respond so readily.

Nevertheless, I suspect cost would be a factor for 15-16 year-olds hanging around the shopping arcade and a minimum price might well have some impact on the quantity consumed by young Friday-night binge-drinkers.

It would also, of course, mean additional expenditure for the millions of responsible citizens who enjoy the occasional beer or glass of wine as they face up to the consequences of the economic downturn.

UPDATE: 17:14

FormerScouser's question prompts me to post this amazing graph from the showing a hundred years of alcohol consumption in the UK. It appears it is wine and spirits that has pushed up the consumption figures in the last fifty years or so. But, I must say, I had no idea we drank so much back in 1900!

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• - What's this?

Reading 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' to my kids last night, I wondered what Mark Twain would have made of a black man in the White House.

In his tales of a mischievous boy growing up in America's south, you cannot avoid the issue of race. The setting, after all, is mid 19th century Missouri - a slave state.

The n-word is regularly employed to describe someone's "black man": the concept of ownership and the language itself required me to break off from the story to give my children historical context, perspective that seemed even more extraordinary as the United States queued to vote.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) was an abolitionist, but I suspect the election of Obama would have been unimaginable on two counts: not only is the President-elect black, he is mixed race.

The villain of the Tom Sawyer stories is the "murderin' half-breed Injun Joe". It is hard to think of a phrase more politically incorrect in modern America (or Britain) than that.

And yet you don't have to go back very far to find the idea of mixing racial blood socially and legally unacceptable. As recently as 1967, sixteen US states from Delaware to Texas had laws banning interracial couples.

It took a Supreme Court ruling that year to spell it out: "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides within the individual and cannot be infringed on by the State".

Four decades later and arguably the most powerful person in the world has a white mother and a black father. In the same week, a young man of mixed heritage, Lewis Hamilton, becomes the Formula one motor racing champion.

Where once there was a shortage of obvious role models, today there are successful mixed race individuals everywhere you look.

England's football World Cup squad in 2006 this summer included six players of mixed ethnic heritage.

Marks and Spencer advertises its clothes with two mixed race models: the ubiquitous Mylene Klass and Noemie Lenoir.

When Tiger Woods went on Oprah to declare himself mixed race, not black, it caused outrage across the United States - he was accused of selling out his black heritage. But Woods came up with a new word to describe his Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian background: Cablinasian.

Tiger's need to create a new word is indicative of the difficulties around language and categorisation.

The term 'mixed race' first appeared on the British census in 2001 and there has been a recent consultation on whether the definition is already too narrow.

Mixed race is the fastest growing minority ethnic group in Britain. Half of those who were described this way in the last census were children. Schools in Lewisham in South London were recently found to have 11% of pupils from mixed race backgrounds.

But the term is so broad that the Office for National Statistics has been considering increasing the list of ethnic groups in the 2011 census from 14 to 21.

Parliament must decide but an official at the Equality and Human Rights Commission has described the current 'mixed' category as "nonsensical".

For data to be of value to planners and policy makers, it is argued, we need to know whether we are talking about a white British/black Caribbean person as opposed, say, to a white European/Chinese individual.The performance and experience of these sub-sets may well be very different.

One argument gaining currency is that we are moving to a 'post-race' environment where ethnic and racial groupings become far less relevant than data on people's social background.

We are not there yet, but there has been a sea-change in the way society thinks about people who have multi-ethnic backgrounds. As a child, I remember the offensive phrase "half-caste" being used without shame. These days, race and ethnicity are three dimensional concepts.

A British website which describes itself a "for the benefit of mixed-race families, individuals and anyone who feels they have a multiracial identity" has a page entitled . The only two photographs are of the late comedian Charlie Williams and the decathlete Daley Thompson.

As of today, they might like to put up a snap of the next President of the United States of America.

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• - What's this?

I have just stumbled across a new series of animating maps which tell a fascinating tale of how Britain is changing. Using data on life expectancy from 1992 to 2006, some clever people at the Office for National Statistics have illustrated how improving health has migrated northwards.

I have posted the start and finish maps here but I would urge you to look at the animation

The map for men is the clearer in showing the way longevity has crept up the country. The most recent data reveals how parts of Glasgow and the Outer Hebrides still suffer from life expectancy well below the rest of Western Europe, but overall the improvements are clear.

For women, it is broadly the same story with life expectancy moving northwards -although there are pockets in all regions where progress is slower.

Over the 14 years illustrated by the maps, life expectancy has consistently increased, rising from 73.4 years to 77.3 years for men and from 78.9 years to 81.5 years for women.

The largest increases over this period for both sexes have occurred in England and Wales. The smallest increase was in Scotland for males and in Northern Ireland for females.

In 2006 the local area with the highest life expectancy for both males (83.7 years) and females (87.8 years) was Kensington and Chelsea. In contrast, the local area with the lowest life expectancy in 2006 was Glasgow City (70.8 years for males and 77.1 years for females). Between 1992 and 2006 life expectancy within this area has increased by just 2.6 years for males and 2.1 years for females.

It is a startling fact that for every hour you live, your life expectancy increases by 16 minutes.

I was puzzled as to why the Outer Hebrides should have such poor life expectancy, apparently improving for both men and women at different times and then getting worse again. The region doesn't fit with the urban, industrial character of other places which suffer from premature death.

Looking at public health statistics for Scotland, one can see that smoking and excess drinking have a major impact on life expectancy. Is this the story in the Western Isles? Why not the same situation in the Orkney and Shetland Islands?

I would be grateful for any information or theories on that.

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