³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

The Christmas quiz is as traditional as bread sauce and brandy butter in my house. I have been busy compiling this year's offering for domestic consumption, so I thought I would offer it as a bonus feature to loyal readers.

My challenge is to find questions that work for all ages, all interests and for contestants who may be slightly lacking in concentration after a full Christmas dinner.

My solution is numbers.

1) Divide your guests into two or three teams.
2) Each team in turn can guess at the correct number answer to a question.
3) The closest wins the point - three points if they are on the button.
4) If two teams both choose the correct number or are equidistant from the right answer, both teams get the points.
5) That's it.

Some questions are easier than others - the idea is not to make people feel totally stupid.

What might be fun is for people to post a 2008 number question of their own so this blog becomes a source of endless seasonal diversion. Merry Christmas!

Questions:

1) How many complaints did the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ management receive regarding the Russell Brand show broadcast on Radio 2 in October?
2) How many were received from offended listeners before the Mail on Sunday highlighted the programme?
3) How much of our money did the British government use to bail out the banks this year?
4) How many votes were cast over the entire series OF 'X Factor'?
5) How much did Nathaniel Rothschild claim Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne tried to solicit from Oleg Deripaska aboard the Russian oligarch's yacht?
6) Team GB finished fourth in the medals table in the Beijing Olympics. How many medals did the British get in total?
7) In April, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle published their tax return. In dollars, how much did the couple earn in 2007?
8) What does Arsenal FC claim is the average attendance at The Emirates for Premier League games this season?
9) According to the WWF, how many Sumatran tigers are left in the wild?
10) According to the most recent published figures, the average house price in the UK in October was £203,539 -7.4% lower than in October 2007. But what was the average UK house price in the year 2000?
11) What is the recommended retail price (RRP) for a packet of 3 Gogo's Original Crazy Bones?
12) Last year's Doctor Who Christmas special Voyage of the Damned had a record audience. How many watched?
13) This year The Circus by Take That became the fastest selling album and one of the fastest selling ever. How many days did it take to sell a million copies?
14) Lewis Hamilton became the youngest ever F1 Champion. How old was he when he crossed the finishing line in Brazil?
15) The average debt of a working-age British adult is more than double what it was in 2000. How much does the average person owe?
16) Britain's Nicole Cooke crossed the finish line to win Olympic gold in the women's cycling road race. After 120 kilometres and three and a half hours, what was her margin of victory?
17) Between July and September last year, there were 1,082 MRSA infections in England. How many in the same period this year?
18) The prime minister recently announced that the number of British troops in Afghanistan will rise. How many will there be in the country after the increase?
19) Net migration into the UK last year rose 25% on the previous 12 months, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). How many more people arrived than left in 2007?
20) With the death of Oliver Postgate this month, bucket-loads of nostalgia for 'Bagpuss'. But how many episodes of the programme were ever made?

Answers:

1) 42,851
2) 5 from the general public and one from Andrew Sachs
3) £37²ú²Ô
4) 16,469,064
5) £50,000
6) 47
7) $4.2m (mostly from book sales)
8) 59,983
9) 400-500
10) £101,550
11) £0.99
12) 13.8 million
13) 19
14) 23 years 300 days
15) £40,000 (total £1.5 trillion)
16) 4/100th of a second
17) 725
18) 8,300
19) 237,000
20) Just 13

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

When the angry young man kicked me, I couldn't help but think of the irony.

His mate was busy punching my cameraman as others stamped on and smashed up his equipment. But despite the panic and the pain, the situation felt otherworldly: a curious, dramatic postscript on the story I was writing - how we have become frightened of our children.

The incident comes to mind as I reflect on the events of 2008. The last year, among other things, may well be remembered for exposing deep and dangerous contradictions in the relationship between generations in Britain.

The attack happened last March at the scene of a fatal teenage stabbing in North London. I had gone there to illustrate a television report on young people. Time magazine had just produced a front cover proclaiming that Brits were scared of their kids.

As the flashing fury in my assailant's face exploded in spittle-laden expletives, I understood the fear.

I had inadvertently trespassed into a gang's private mourning. A public street was their private territory. One of the "crew" had died from a blade less than 24 hours before.

Tearful young women comforted each other beside fresh flowers laid at the spot. Brooding men sat on a wall, shock and bewilderment in their eyes.

I should have realised before stumbling in. I was alien. From another world. And like the immune system fighting infection, they rose up to defend themselves.

It was a metaphor for the disconnect I see between young and adult in this country: a generational segregation that breeds distrust and fear. Children are taught to see every adult as a potential abuser. Adults are encouraged to see every teenager as a potential mugger.

We gasp with horror at the abuse and torture of a small boy in North London. We wring our hands at the violence of teenage gangsters in South London. Perhaps the two are related.

As I look back on the past twelve months, our contradictory responses to children are exemplified by those two moral panics - knife crime and child abuse. Bad kids and evil parents.

The United Nations this year identified a . The Time magazine headline read: "Unhappy, Unloved and Out of Control - an epidemic of violence, crime and drunkenness has made Britain scared of its young".

"Compared to other cultures", the article suggested, "British kids are less integrated into the adult world and spend more time with their peers. Some children are bound to be left in the cold".

A fortnight before that report came out, I read an inspection report from .

"The scale of the centre's difficulties," inspectors said, "was illustrated most starkly by the staggering levels of use of force by staff". Over nine months, force was used on children 757 times. On 500 occasions, this involved the highest level of restraint requiring at least three members of staff, with one holding the child's head.

Teachers working inside the centre were said to be "frightened and intimidated" in an "embattled" atmosphere. The inspectors suggested that the centre be closed down.

It was just a nib of a story: it didn't attract much attention. But it is indicative of a breakdown in relations between adults and children in this country.

Apart from increasing the use of physical force, we seem to have run out of ideas on what to do.

From Shannon Matthews to Baby P, we despair at the cruelty to children, but then casually describe young people as behaving like animals, as vermin which infests our streets.

As the young man's swinging foot connected with my leg, I winced. He had hurt me. But not nearly as much as our society hurts some of its children.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

The highest homicide rate since the mid-Victorian period? Some contributors have questioned my assertion yesterday that the UK has a level of murder and manslaughter equivalent to the mid-19th century.

Just to be clear, I was not intending to suggest that murder in Britain had suddenly shot up to levels unseen since Dickens as a result of knife crime in our inner cities. My intention was to offer some historical and global perspective on the issue.

Indeed, I suggested that the most recent data shows a flattening out or even a slight decline in homicide rates in this country.

But the raised eyebrows of some correspondents encourage me to explain further. For 20 years and more, academics have been attempting to offer an historical context for discussions of violence in society.

The problems are manifold. Changes in the intensity of prosecution, in the reporting of crime and in legal structures and the availability (or otherwise) of robust statistics all make the charting of trends in violence extremely tricky.

However, murder and manslaughter offer the best chance of saying something meaningful. Since the Middle Ages, notwithstanding historical changes in the legal system, the significance of unlawful killing has not changed that much.

Studies of medieval or early modern descriptions of the crimes have revealed that the vast majority of cases would still be seen today as culpable homicides and not, for example, as accidents or cases of involuntary manslaughter.

There are also a number of sources (court proceedings, autopsies, coroners' rolls) and since the late 18th to mid-19th Century, most Western states have collected reasonably reliable statistical information on homicides.

With all this data out there, there is broad academic agreement that it is possible to get an idea of the historical trends for murder and manslaughter.

The most recent work I can find was published by from the .

, you'll be taken to a diagram in Volume 1 of the International Handbook of Violence Research. The graph has a slightly abstract look to it, but the sweeping trend across Western European nations remains clear, I think.

In , there is a table [page 297 of this ] which may be an easier way of seeing the story.

For England, the risk of homicide falls from 1.7 (in the 1840s) to 0.7 (mid-20th Century) and back up again as we approach the present day. The Scottish data is even more pronounced - falling from 2.9 down to 0.7 and then rising to a level equivalent to the mid-19th Century.

Eisner also notes:

An increase in homicide rates over the past 40 years can be observed in all European states (with the exception of Finland). This increase by no means represents a return to the pre-modern frequency of homicide, but it is true that improved medical capabilities and changes in age structure - a lower share of younger age cohorts - tend to mean that the increase is underestimated.

If one looks at the J-shaped curve as a whole, one can see that England's murder rates are back to roughly where they were in the middle-to-late 19th Century, despite our improved ability to save lives and our smaller proportion of population made up young men.

This is a fraught area and one cannot produce perfect statistics to make the point. (Can one ever?) However, I remain convinced that trying to get a bit of historical perspective into the debate is well worth the effort and that, broadly: yes, we have Victorian levels of murder in the UK.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

On an average day in Britain, two or three people will be murdered. The UK currently has a homicide rate equivalent to the mid-Victorian period.

The prevalence of murder seems a reasonable proxy for the health or sickness of a society and this deteriorating picture of our islands perhaps tells us something about the profound problems of social cohesion.

This Map of the Week is part of a fascinating project conducted by my colleagues at the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News website. In the absence of relevant statistical information, the team trawled through newspaper cuttings, police records and other sources to produce a map of violent teenage deaths in the UK this year.

If you click on the image on the right, you'll be taken to the interactive map, which you can zoom in and out of to move between individual incidents.

Each of the purple icons reflects an appalling individual tragedy with the associated pain and suffering for families, friends and all those caught up in the incident. But what is the bigger picture?

Centre for Crime & Justice Studies -

If we look at the murder rate from 1967 through to the turn of the millennium, it is obvious that the prevalence of homicide has been rising. There may have been a flattening or even a slight fall in the years after the graph but the likelihood of being killed by another hand is more than double what it was forty years ago. That thin black line shows we are a more violent society.

But it is not the whole story. While the murder rate has been rising overall, for most of the groups in the chart below, it has been falling. I am indebted to research published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies for this telling illustration of changing risk.

Centre for Crime & Justice Studies -

Here we compare murder rates by age and gender between 1981-5 and 1996-00. The most striking feature of the graph is that it reveals how the risk of homicide to women has fallen or remained stable for every age group with the exception of baby girls.

For men, it is the reverse, with rising risk for almost every age group. However, the real change is in a doubling of the risk for men in their early 20s and I would guess that more recent figures would see the line for teenage boys extending further too.

Who are the victims? Well, by and large, it ain't rich folks.

Looking at murder rates by wealth reveals how, in the most well-off areas, the murder rate has fallen 4-7%. But the poorer the neighbourhood, the more the risk has increased, with the most impoverished areas seeing a 39% rise.

Centre for Crime & Justice Studies -

Last from the UK, this chart shows how the method of murder also changes depending on the wealth of the area. Many victims of murder with a firearm are from wealthier areas, perhaps because it tends to be those with money who have shotguns and similar weapons in their homes.

Centre for Crime & Justice Studies -

Finally, a global perspective on murder. This map twists the world so that a country's size equates to its homicide rate.

Murders, manslaughter, and "lawful" homicide by territories of the world, 2002. Colours simply differentiate nation-states. Courtesy Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield.

The USA appears smaller than some might have guessed, while parts of South East Asia are very large. The UK looks bloated compared with continental Europe. As ever, I would appreciate your observations.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Within hours of this blog posting concerns about the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office's selective use of knife crime statistics, the government has been severely rebuked over the release by the official body which oversees such matters.

While he was at the Treasury, Gordon Brown's anxiety over lack of trust in government statistics led to the creation of the - an independent watchdog to ensure that official figures aren't used for political spin.

Now of publishing premature, irregular and selective statistics on knife crime in yesterday's press release issued through the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office.

The chair of the authority, , in , paints a picture of the prime minister's officials and advisors deliberately breaching protocol. The release claimed that the number of teenagers admitted to hospital for stabbing injuries fell by 27% in areas covered by the government's Knives Action Programme.

But the statistics had not been checked and quality assured. Sir Michael goes on to reveal how, in his words, "the statisticians who produced them, together with the National Statistician, tried unsuccessfully to prevent their premature, irregular and selective release".

He describes what happened as "corrosive of public trust in official statistics and incompatible with the high standards which we are all seeking to establish".

The authourity (motto: Building Trust in Statistics) is charged with overseeing a new code of practice enshrined by act of parliament. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office protocols under the code appear to have been breached on a number of counts.

Publication of statistics should be pre-announced; they should be orderly and planned to ensure no perception of interference and policy and operational staff need to be involved to ensure quality assurance.

It would appear that none of these conditions were met. Sir Michael's letter demands no repetition of this breach, but the damage may already be done - to the credibility of crime figures, to confidence in official statistics generally, and to trust in politicians.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office has been anxious about public confidence in published crime statistics, but some will wonder whether today they may have undermined their credibility.

Regular readers will know of my scepticism that we ever suffered an "epidemic" of knife crime this year, but I would urge extreme caution in drawing conclusions from .

Firstly, the new numbers are not official crime statistics. They will not be published by the , which is independent of government and supposedly ensures figures are free of political spin.

Instead, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office has rung up police forces and asked them for statistics to illustrate the effectiveness of their (TKAP).

"Serious knife crimes against young people (homicide, attempted murder, GBH with intent) fell by 17% between June and October 2008 in the ten TKAP areas," the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office press release proclaims.

Sounds good. But 17% actually equals, er... 17 incidents. In June, there were 98 serious offences. In October there were 81. In fact, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office confirmed to me this afternoon that in September, there were only 68.

This is statistical nonsense. Some papers may like to proclaim tomorrow that knife crime has "soared 19%" on the basis of the figures from the latest two months. But this would be equally misleading. When you get down to such small numbers, percentage change doesn't mean much.

And comparing figures month on month is also questionable, because crime is seasonal. Gangsters don't go out so much when it gets cold.

Here's another of their claims.

"In London, there were 18% fewer young victims (under 20) of knife crime between April and September 2008 than in the same period in 2007."

Odd to choose April to September, when their scheme only really got going in July. Sceptics might think this has something to do with the fact that recorded knife crime was already falling before their scheme.

Figures from the Met show that, despite public perceptions, in the year to June 2007 there were 11,642 knife crimes recorded in the capital. In the year to June 2008 there were 9,997 - a fall of 14%. Serious violence and assault with less serious injury was down 5.2% and youth violence generally was down 7.7%.

What about the rest of the TKAP areas? Well, we don't know the story elsewhere, because the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office only got the figures from the police on the understanding that they would not publish a regional breakdown. So we can't tell whether knife crime has gone up in one place and down in another.

We also don't know what figures the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Office may have been given but decided not to publish.

None of which is to suggest that these selective statistics don't offer some encouragement. If you increase targeted stop and searches by 10,000 per month and then see a halving of the proportion of those operations which uncover a weapon, it may mean that fewer young people are carrying knives.

But what today's announcement really looks like is an attempt to show cause and effect: politicians take action on knife crime and, within weeks, knife crime falls.

And realistically, it is not that simple. The intense level of activity is unlikely to be sustained. Changing behaviour and shifting crime trends are jobs for the long term.

Perhaps the Tackling Knives Action Programme reassures people that something is being done. It's also important that people have confidence in crime statistics.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

The architect of the modern welfare state in Britain, William Beveridge, wrote in 1942 that the long-term unemployed "should be required, as a condition of continued benefit to attend a work or training centre, such attendance being designed as a means of preventing habituation to idleness and as a means of improving capacity for earnings".

As an economist, Beveridge knew the dangers of a "something for nothing" culture. But he would not live to see how the boom-and-bust roller coaster of the 1970s and 80s led to a significant increase in "habituation to idleness" in the form of what became called "dependency" on the state.

Millions of people simply became detached from the workplace and reliant on handouts. Whatever hopes they might have had of one day returning to work were submerged in a blizzard of dole cheques and sickness benefits.

President Ronald Reagan saw a similar problem in the United States: a sizeable minority of Americans who lived on welfare could not or would not get a job. His answer was to make receiving benefits dependent on actively seeking employment, an idea first tried out in Wisconsin where the state governor implemented what became known as "workfare". A single mom with kids had to go to work or there would be no help from the state.

Government withdrew; welfare bills fell; employment rose - but the queues at local soup kitchens lengthened.

Nevertheless, the principle of encouraging welfare recipients back to work was strengthened by a body of academic research indicating the positive impact of employment on all but a very few of the adult population.

A cross-party consensus emerged in the US so that a national Welfare Reform Act was introduced by a Republican and signed in 1996 by a Democrat - President Bill Clinton - promising to "end welfare as we know it".

Ten years later and the same debate has swept Britain. The government's welfare advisor, businessman David Freud, recommended last year that "UK welfare policy applies its resources further towards helping and encouraging the least advantaged into work".

Initially suspicious, Labour ministers soon joined the Conservatives in embracing his ideas. The proposal didn't go as far as the Wisconsin model in time-limiting benefits, but there was a series of policies aimed at encouraging people with the most complex and demanding problems back into the labour market.

Freud's philosophy echoed that of Beveridge 65 years earlier:

Governments have in the past shown a reluctance to engage with those furthest from the labour market. But the evidence is now overwhelming that employment is generally beneficial for individuals and their families. This corpus of evidence stands traditional government policy on its head. Far from being reluctant to engage, the government could on this evidence be accused of dereliction if it were to fail to do so.

Freud's approach was to use the free market: private and voluntary firms would deliver packages of "support" to help claimants re-engage with the world of work and would be paid by results.

puts flesh on those bones, but it is clear that the effectiveness of the measures depends on the quality of the individual help offered. The relationship between a "Personal Advisor" and a recipient of the newly-named Employment and Support Allowance will decide whether this new approach to welfare can achieve its lofty aims.

The government has an ambitious target to get 80% of the potential workforce into employment.

To achieve this, it needs to get a million people off the current Incapacity Benefit and 300,000 lone mothers back to work.

Success or failure will be decided in one-to-one conversations in Jobcentres and won't become apparent until well beyond the next election.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Where does Britain figure in a league table of nanny states? Well, according to boffins in the prime minister's Strategy Unit in 2004, about two thirds of the way down (see below). Some will argue we have moved rapidly up the league since them.

The government's recent interventions on smoking, access to benefits, junk food, gambling and prostitution reflect a philosophical shift in Whitehall that can be traced back to the turn of the millennium. Before I expand on that - a bit of context.

In 1848 the first British Public Health Act which brought water and sewage systems under state control was opposed as "paternalistic" and "despotic".

In the early 70s there was public resistance to the compulsory wearing of seatbelts. More recently, bans on smoking in public places were regarded as the epitome of the nanny state.

It has been a long process, but the government's role in encouraging behavioural change is accelerating. The signs of a rethink on the balance between state and individual responsibility emerged in the Treasury's .

It talked of the huge cost savings associated with having a "fully engaged" public. What it meant was that getting people to change their behaviour is far more cost-effective than doling out drugs.

"In absolute cost terms, the NHS currently spends around ten times as much on statins as it does on smoking cessation programmes. In cost effectiveness terms, smoking cessation has been estimated to cost between £212 and £873 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) compared to a range of £4,000 to £8,000 per QALY for statins."

The message was clear. "The achievement of major policy outcomes, requires greater engagement and participation from citizens - 'governments can't do it alone'." That was the conclusion of another Whitehall think-tank, the Strategy Unit working to the prime minister in the Cabinet Office.

In 2004 the unit published [pdf link] - effectively a blueprint for greater state intervention to influence public behaviour in areas like health and welfare. (The chart to the right can be found on page 13 of the report.)

The document surmised that "people in Britain appear fairly comfortable with the balance that UK policy has generally struck between state and individual responsibility." That balance, it suggested, put Britain mid-way through the nanny state league.

In the USA and Scandinavia, voters have tended to favour a shift towards more individual responsibility while people in Latin America, Japan and the former Soviet Union want government to exert greater control.

The British public doesn't seem too exercised either way and so, the strategists argued, the UK could afford to tilt more towards a state intervention model.

"It was once unthinkable to ban smoking on aircraft; now it is almost unthinkable to allow it," they pointed out. "Similarly, today's narrowly-balanced attitudes towards the state ban on prostitution reflect a steady softening in attitudes among the public over the past 20 years."

Within a few months of the document's publication, a . It is obvious how emboldened ministers had become.

The White Paper railed at the "sterile national debate... between those proposing a heavy handed nanny state on one hand, and those supporting inactivity bordering on neglect in the name of individual freedom on the other."

Suddenly Whitehall was awash with initiatives to change behaviour - on health, welfare, the environment and crime.

"Higher levels of spending and better-run public services can achieve improved outcomes. But in the long-run improvements depend as much on changes in personal behaviour" is the government's argument.

But do we want to be more like Austria or more like Moldova?

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

A look at the "hidden economy" - but first, .

The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.

I found this exchange in today's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on the .

A panel of MPs was trying to find out whether the taxman is doing enough to deal with an estimated two million people defrauding an estimated £2bn a year from the revenue.

MP: If one of my constituents was caught, say, stealing £5 from a post office, they would undoubtedly be prosecuted and there would be consequences of publicity. Yet if a barrister steals several hundred by avoiding his tax, then there is no publicity and he is allowed to carry on regardless. It does seem a trifle unfair, does it not?

Taxman: I can understand where you are coming from but we cannot prosecute everybody.

There are reasons, and I will come on to those - but when it comes to natural justice, it does seem that GBS was right when one measures the vigour with which the authorities prosecute the rich tax evader compared to, say, the relatively poor TV licence evader.

Q: How many people were prosecuted for TV licence evasion in 2005-6?
A: 157,452. (The Television Licensing Authority claims a 99.9% conviction rate.)
Q: How many people were prosecuted for tax evasion last year?
A: 69.

The amount lost through tax evasion is more times ten times that lost from people not paying their television licence. And the likelihood of a benefit fraudster being prosecuted is thirty times greater than a tax fraudster.

MP: Our friends in the Department for Work and Pensions are prosecuting 60 cases per thousand benefit fraud cases. You are only prosecuting two cases per thousand hidden economy cases. I am not suggesting that you should rise to the level of 60 per thousand but two per thousand is very low, is it not? This is a tiny chance of being prosecuted if you are in the hidden economy. These are people deliberately evading paying tax.

Taxman: It is a low number and we do have plans to increase it when we can apply the skilled resource to it.

The difference between tax evasion and TV licence evasion or benefit fraud is that it is hugely expensive to prove that somebody has defrauded the revenue. In fact, the revenue makes a loss on most cases: the cost of prosecution is around £30,000 and the average amount of missing tax detected is just £11,260.

Unless the tax involved exceeds £10,000 and the case has other features, such as involving a tax advisor or barrister, criminal prosecution will not be considered. The consequence, according to the PAC report, is that "there remains very little chance of someone in the hidden economy being prosecuted".

But just how assiduous is the revenue in prosecuting high-profile fraudsters like barristers?

MP: What... schemes are you going to use in the future to try and tackle the hidden economy, particularly at the upper end of the scale?

Taxman: We have got several things going on. We have got more than 20 projects. We are trying to do the same with builders and decorators and the like by matching publicly available information, maybe advertisements in the Yellow Pages or elsewhere, with our databases. That tends to be at the lower end. At the upper end of the scheme we have a project looking at barristers, for example 57 barristers who were in the hidden economy at some time in recent years.

MP: What, barristers doing legal work in this country perfectly normally are not paying any tax at all?

Taxman: Not paying any tax.

Builders and decorators are targeted then - and barristers too. How many of the 57 dodgy lawyers were prosecuted?

Taxman: The project that identified 57 barristers as failing to notify has not, at this time, led to any prosecutions.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Rhododendron ponticum has emerged as public enemy number one in the fight against the misnamed "sudden oak death" fungus which, it is warned today, threatens to devastate gardens and parklands across the UK.

Image of rhododendron courtesy of

The particular species of rhododendron was first introduced into Britain in the late 18th Century - loved by big country estates for its ornamental value and as cover for game birds.

But these days, R ponticum has few friends. It is already blamed for the destruction and abandonment of land - in the right conditions, it can grow to great heights and eliminate most native plants.

According to , "R ponticum destroys habitats and thus whole colonies of native plants and animals disappear."

Now it is accused of spreading two species of Phytophthora which, according to the and , "could be in every garden in the UK within twenty years". The charities warn of the severe impact on our lowland and upland heath without a wholesale cull of the invader.

My Map of the Week [click the link on the right] shows the government's latest published data on where the disease has been found and where it has been eradicated.

However, the latest maps do not include what the National Trust describes as a "deeply worrying development".

One species (Phytophthora kernoviae) has been found on bilberry on the Isle of Arran and at two sites in Cornwall.

According to the National Trust's lead advisor on the disease, Ian Wright, the discovery raises fears for the future of the UK's internationally important heathland habitats and for rare species including black grouse and capercaillie that the bilberry supports.

Mr Wright said: "The fact that Phytophthora kernoviae has made the jump to heathland is deeply worrying."

What the maps do show is how incidences of the disease in the wild have been found in particularly large numbers in Cornwall (the suffix kernovia is derived from Kernow, the Cornish word for the region).

But virtually nowhere south of Hadrian's Wall is immune and it is now clear that Phytophthora has breached Scotland's defences.

Both the species of Phytophthora, kernoviae and ramorum, are fungal-like diseases which can kill plants like magnolia, camellia, kalmia and viburnum and, most commonly, rhododendron.

Image of diseased leaves from Defra website []

The National Trust and National Trust for Scotland have written to environment ministers in London and Edinburgh asking for cash so they can cull the Rhododendron ponticum that seems to be the main cause of the spread.

comes to mind as one reads about disease-spreading R ponticum's move from gardens and nurseries into the countryside.

Its seeds are tiny and hence wind-dispersed. Each flower head can produce between three and seven thousand seeds, so that a large bush can produce several million seeds per year.

But established plants also spread by horizontal growth - a single plant may cover many metres of ground with thickly interlaced, impenetrable branches.

Image of rhododendron courtesy of

Some 15 National Trust gardens have had outbreaks of the virulent disease - spread, it is thought, by the rhododendron. Four National Trust for Scotland gardens in the west of Scotland have also been affected.

Jan Haenraets, head of gardens and designed landscapes at the National Trust for Scotland, said: "Without concrete action the spread of these diseases poses a real threat to our native plant and species in our gardens, woodlands and heathlands. This would have a serious knock-on effect for the environment and local economies."

According to Defra, since the mid-1990s, the disease has caused widespread death of millions of trees in forest environments in coastal California and Oregon in the USA. Because the most commonly affected trees that have been killed are tanoaks (not true oaks) as well as several true oak species, this extensive phenomenon is commonly known as "Sudden Oak Death" in the USA.

If you spot the disease you are encouraged to report it to the Plant Health and Seeds Inspectorate - if you , you can find your local inspector to whom people can report any suspected disease outbreaks.

Update [15:55 December 9th 2008]:

Hot off the press, Defra has sent me three new maps showing the spread of the Phytophthora fungus. They are still not up-to-date enough to include the outbreak on bilberry on the Isle of Arran, but are so new that they are not yet available on their website. I am delighted to offer loyal readers an "exclusive":
Ìý• Phytophthora kernoviae outbreaks in UK
Ìý• Findings of Phytophthora ramorum on plants growing in established gardens, woods and other wild sites in the UK 2002-2008
Ìý• Findings of Phytophthora ramorum on plants at retail and nursery sites in UK 2002-2008

Update [15:16 December 12th 2008]: The maps above as originally posted had headings that were potentially misleading and have been replaced with better ones. And those who wish to see the situation in Scotland are directed to .

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

There is something about the photograph of a child who has died which has a poignancy every time you look at it. There's the mixture of innocence, the trust in their eyes, the vulnerability and neediness, and above all the realisation that we couldn't offer the protection to see a child safely through to adulthood.

A few faces have affected the British public like that - Baby P, Victoria Climbie, James Bulger in the last decade or so. So powerless in life, so influential in death - their young features have moved mountains.

Such tragedies gnaw away at our trust in humanity which, in recent years, has resulted in wide-ranging political and legislative responses.

But are we really serious about reducing child suffering? Because if we are, surely the politicians should be reacting with the same vigour to the findings contained in as they did to the scandal of Baby P.

The scale of maltreatment of children in the UK suggested by the studies sounds incredible. "Every year, in the region of one in 10 children (about one million children in the UK) are maltreated but official statistics indicate that less than one tenth of this burden are investigated and substantiated by child protection services", one report indicates.

Included in the definition of maltreatment is physical abuse - "hitting with an implement, punching, beating or burning" - assaults which injure the child. The occasional light smack would not count but being belted or caned would.

If a child is bruised or injured in the previous 12 months as the result of deliberate abuse on at least one occasion, he or she is deemed to have suffered maltreatment.
The 'abuser' in these cases is most likely to be a parent.

The definition also includes sexual abuse. Analysing large-scale anonymous surveys conducted in a number of countries including the UK, the researchers conclude that between 5 and 10% of all girls and up to 5% of boys will experience the most serious sexual abuse at least once during their childhood.

Including non-contact abuse such as exposure sees the figures rise to at least 15% for girls and 5% of boys.

The most common perpetrators for this kind of abuse are close relatives and family friends.

The Lancet reports also assess emotional abuse which "affects around 10% of children each year". This form of maltreatment includes persistently being made to feel worthless, unwanted or scared to the extent that it damages a child's emotional development.

And the last and largest category is neglect, defined as a persistent lack of care for a child's safety: not enough food, warmth, education or love. "Neglect is at least as damaging in childhood and adult life as are physical or sexual abuse" the evidence suggests. Although neglect accounts for 44% of child maltreatment reported to agencies in Britain, it "fails to capture the attention of the press, the public, or researchers". Neglect is neglected.

These figures paint a thoroughly depressing picture of the way we routinely treat children in our society. I was struck by the evidence of the long-term damage such abuse does.

"In addition to feeling considerable pain and suffering themselves, abused and neglected children are at increased risk of becoming aggressive and inflicting pain and suffering on others, often perpetrating crime and violence. One paper on the cycle of violence reported that being physically abused or neglected as a child increased the likelihood of arrest as a juvenile (31% arrested v 19% of community-matched controls) and as an adult (48% v 36%)."

The research finds that maltreated children are more likely to suffer mental health problems, to commit suicide, to have drug or alcohol problems, to be obese and to be involved in prostitution.

The studies suggest a causal link with some negative outcomes: "maltreatment has damaging effects on educational achievement, school attendance, and behaviour in childhood and adolescence. Maltreatment in early childhood is particularly damaging for behaviour, but repeated maltreatment has cumulative effects" they say.

As if this wasn't serious enough, the research concludes that little research has been done as to what interventions actually work to stop abuse. "Although a broad range of programmes for prevention of child maltreatment exist, there is still uncertainty about which programmes are effective."

One controversial finding, however, suggests we are too slow to take some at-risk children away from abusive families. "Placing children in foster care and not reunifying them with their biological parents can lead to benefits for maltreated children", the report argues.

This wealth of international academic research, peer-reviewed and published in a reputably medical journal, poses some stark questions for our country and for our government.

If we are really serious about protecting children from suffering, don't we need to look at the big picture? Recognise the common-place nature of child neglect and cruelty? Fund research into what works? Invest heavily in schemes we know are effective? Not allow the beseeching face of an individual child to blind us to the scale of the real challenge?

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Are we watching Britain's communities dying?

An extraordinary and troubling story is told by comparing the maps below.

My Map of the Week is taken from new ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ-commissioned research () by academics at the . They interrogated census data from 1971 to 2001 to see how our community make-up has altered.

In particular, the study focuses on the concept of "anomie", a measure of people's sense of - or lack of - belonging to where they live.

What the maps reveal is, effectively, the fading away of traditional community life in every part of the UK. (Although Northern Ireland data for 1971 are unavailable, later census data show the same trend.)

Now, it could be argued that the shift simply reflects changing lifestyles, but social isolation and loneliness are implicit in the data, according to the Sheffield academics. My reading is that communities are less well-rooted than they were. And without a strong foundation of people and families who are committed to their neighbourhood, community life suffers.

Rising anomie is highly suggestive of a fall in "social capital", the glue which holds communities together. The result tends to be a decline in trust and an increase in fear.

It is worth explaining how social scientists calculate anomie. It is based on four measures of the population:
 Ìý• numbers of non-married adults multiplied by a weight of 0.18;
 Ìý• number of 1-person households multiplied by a weight of 0.50;
 Ìý• number of people who have moved in their current address within the last year multiplied by 0.38;
 Ìý• number of people renting privately multiplied by 0.80.

In a way, it is looking at what we might call Bedsit Britain - the drifting population in which no-one hangs their hat for long.

Numbers in this group have been pushed up by different factors: the increase in students with the expansion of higher and further education; the rise in itinerant labour, often migrants; greater numbers of people who have experienced relationship breakdown and fewer marriages.

But there are have also been social pressures on communities: the collapse of some of the traditional industries around which some of them were based; the increase in second homes, particularly in rural areas and the decline in the extended family with generations tending to drift apart.

When one looks at the data in terms of change, the map reveals four areas of the UK which have seen the greatest rise in anomie.

In London, the trend is likely to have been affected by large scale immigration. In the east of Scotland, I suspect the expansion in further and higher education will have been a significant factor.

Nottinghamshire surprises me but it may be that the collapse of the coal industry has meant that traditional colliery communities have taken a hit. Recent immigration to the East Midlands will have played a part. The south west of England has long argued that the increase in holiday homes is having a detrimental impact on communities already struggling in one of the most deprived regions of the UK.

I would be interested in your thoughts on all of this, particularly in whether you think it matters.

It could be argued that mobility is a strength in a society - that communities need to renew themselves. Perhaps the internet makes geographical location less important for social capital. You can have a look at the detailed figures in the spreadsheets below and find out what the data suggest has happened in your area:
 Ìý•
 Ìý•

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?