Friday 22 March 2013

NIFC and the Health and Wellbeing Board

The Nottingham Inter Faith Council recently hosted a talk by Colin Monckton, Head of Commissioning and Insight at Nottingham City Council.

Colin spent some time describing the Health and Wellbeing Board, which has the responsibility for reducing health inequalities and improving health and wellbeing. The board publishes the “Health and Wellbeing Strategy” (currently in a draft form) and one of the messages that Colin wanted to get across was that the HWB were keen for people to read the strategy, and feedback during the consultation process on whether they thought it was addressing the right issues.

The Draft Health and Wellbeing Strategy has four main priorities :

1) Prevention
Reducing the number of people who are drinking alcohol at harmful levels by 30% by 2020

2) Integration
Improving the experience of health and social care services for older people or those who have long term conditions

3) Early Intervention
Identifying more children with significant behavious problems earlier so that they can receive specific help

4) Priority Families
Effectively engaging with 1,200 targeted families with the aim of seeing improvements in school attendance, levels of ASB, levels of offending and levels of worklessness.

Other Comments
Colin described how the Board was trying to work more efficiently and more effectively, giving the example of how, previously, there were 6 (!) different support mechanisms for carers in the city and that these will be integrated into one single city-wide agency.

Another example given was the case of first-time homeless people. These had previously been housed with long-term homeless people and had often come out of the experience with more issues than when they went in, due to a “transfer” of problems from the long term homeless - so now the Board will commission accomodation which separates the first time homeless and those with low needs from those with complex needs.

A word of warning was sounded by Colin as he pointed out that increases in the need for some kinds of expensive interventions (e.g. taking children into care, which costs some £2k/wk per child) could make a big dent in the budget that the Board had to work to. Other challenges that the city faced included the high level of poverty in the city (65% of children in poverty) and the disproportionately adverse effect changes in local gov funding levels have had on the city

Penultimately, it is worth mentioning that the strategy linked to a number of other initiatives, such as the Vulnerable Adults Plan and the Children and Young Peoples Plan

And lastly, an important point that was mentioned was the existence of Healthwatch, which will be the “ the independent customer champion for the public, locally and nationally, to promote better outcomes in health and in social care”

Thursday 21 March 2013

This World - Iraq: Did My Son Die in Vain

BFTF recently watched a very sad BBC programme entitled This World - Iraq: Did My Son Die in Vain which looks at the story of Geoff Dunsmore who travels to Basra to see how the city has progressed in the years since his RAF reservist son Chris lost his life there in a rocket attack on a UK military base in 2007.

Geoff does not flinch from talking to people from all sides of the conflict.

A number of people comment on how brutal the Saddam regime was and that it opporessed large sections of the population.

A civilian witness to the arrival of British Troops in Basra commented that if the troops had seen a person on top of a building "they would see you as the enemy and they would shoot at you...we were screaming, we were so scared" while another described what happened next as being a situation where "There was no electricity, there was no Police force, the government has vanished, everything was destroyed, everything was looted"

Soon after the insurgency started, hard line militas were fighting each other for control of the city and thousands of civilians were dying each month in assasinations and suicide bombings. Mazin's brother in law was an Imam who spoke out against the killings - and was killed in that same violence.

Geoff's guide, Mazin Altayar, was a journalist at the time of the invasion and believed that the milita soon believed that the UK formces were trying to impose values on the Iraqi population and that this was was caused them to begin attacking the UK troops. Mazin commented that "They got rid of lots of the skilled people in Iraq, the scientists, politicians, religious, cultured people" while the narrator adds that some 2,000 doctors and 800 academics and students were killed in the violence.

For BFTF this seems to be the most stomach churning part of the whole disaster.

Incompetence, anger, revenge, bullying, mob violence - all these BFTF can understand, they are part of human nature in extreme circumstances.

But it takes a special kind of evil, a special kind of hatred for society, a special kind of arrogance - to deliberately target doctors and teachers.

The programme then follows Geoff (a retired schoolteacher) as he visits a local school, which he finds is still not fully built. Geoff comments that "I was absolutely speechless when I looked at the environment... the classrooms looked liked a derelict school you would find in Britain" and yet the potential of the young boys and girls at the school is clear, they are full of energy and yet well behaved during the classes. Across Basra, a quarter of schools in Basra have yet to be re-built.

Chris's diary provides a sense of what it was like for the UK troops, and it can be seen how the intensity of the insurgency increased during Chris's time in Basra. And comments from Chris's sister and parents give some insight into the size of hole that the loss of Chris has left in their lives.

Geoff talks to many people who tell of how brutality and trigger happy behaviour of some coalition troops cost the Iraqi civilians dear and it can be seen that, while Geoff has lost a son, many Iraqis lost whole families.

He also visits a water distribution project started by the UK troops - which was then sold to a private company who started charging for the water but did not maintain the plant until eventually there were too many faults to deal with and the company folded. The local population now have to use bottled water and suffer many diseases from their inability to access safe clean water. Geoff comments that "the British had started something off that was immense here for he Iraqis and then we have left them high and dry, literally."

The narrator comments that much of the oil revenue of Iraq is lost to the rampant corruption in the country.

Towards the end of the programme, Geoff meets a group of young Basrans who are cleaning up their neighbourhood and trying to hold their local government to account for the corruption and poor services that they are receiving.

The programme was just heartbreaking.

BFTF recalls that it was a Labour Government that took the UK into that war and asked the local MP whether, if it had been the current leadership in place back in 2003, whether they would also have taken the UK into Iraq and precipitated the disaster that Basra then suffered. After chasing up on 6th May, received a response on 28th May which said:

"...Much has been said about Britain's involvement in the war and important lessons have been learnt. It is important that everyone takes those lessons on-board"


Not exactly a "No, they wouldn't have taken the UK into that war" that BFTF would have liked to have heard, and BFTF wonders what exactly are the lessons that were learnt. But this is now perhaps an argument to park for another time.

But, dear reader, please feel free to challenge your MP on this issue as it is only when MP's receive comments from multiple people that they perceive an issue to be important.

Tuesday 5 March 2013

Talk : Conspiracy Theories

A recent talk in the Café Sci series was given by Dr Jovan Byford, senior lecturer in psychology at the Open University and entitled “Differentiating *conspiracy theories* from analyses of real conspiracies”.

It is often suggested that critics of conspiracy theories do not adequately acknowledge that plots, secretive collusion and cover-ups are a regular feature of contemporary politics, and therefore that a conspiracy-based explanation might in fact be a perfectly reasonable view to hold.

Dr Byford began by mentioning that there are real conspiracies (collusions between states, companies and individuals) that are happening right now. Some of these conspiracies will be revealed by whistleblowers, some will be revealed by the release of information years or decades later, and some may never be revealed. But these conspiracies are all limited in time and in scope and are individual conspiracies.

In contrast, the narrative of conspiracy theorists is that there is a continuum between conspiracies that are proven with a great deal of information in the public domain (e.g Watergate, Iran Contra) and those that are obviously ridiculous (e.g Protocols of Zion, David Icke’s lizards). The theoriststs will seek to place themselves somewhere on that continuum, effectively saying “unlike the David Icke nonsense, THIS is a real conspiracy, just like Watergate”. In this way, real conspiracies are used as a springboard for conspiracy arguments. For example, the fact that the US Public Health Service experimented on blacks in the 1960s is used as evidence that they, or other government organisations, could be guilty of any other specific crime, such as being the source of the AIDS virus

Dr Byford commented that conspiracy theories are a relatively new phenomena, with the first being Augustine Barruel, who had escaped the French Revolution to England and there published a book entitled “Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism” which alleged that the French Revolution was the result of a deliberate conspiracy or plot to overthrow the throne, altar and aristocratic society in Europe. The plot was allegedly hatched by a coalition of philosophers, Freemasons, and the Order of the Illuminati.


The first organised conspiracy theory : Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism


It is worth noting that many leading figures of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in France were also anti-religion, so any reaction against the excesses or ant-religious aspects of the French Revolution was also likely to rail against the Enlightenment.

Barruel’s ideas were taken up by, amongst other, John Robison, who published a book entitled “Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies”, which is perhaps the most comprehensively entitled work of the last 300years.


Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe


These ideas of a long term conspiracy controlled by secret societies was also picked up in the US and gained ground there in the early 20th century. In the case of the US, the “enemy” was the government and that is why many of the conspiracy theories around the world focus on the US government, or US institutions, as being the controlling forces behind conspiracies.

As the term “conspiracy theorist” is a term of abuse, writers of conspiracy theories will seek to frame their arguments so that they appear legitimate, often using academic language to imply that their research is accepted by the academic community.

Critically, conspiracy theorists assume that there is a link between a series of conspiracies and that this link implies there is a sinister controlling force behind them all.

It is also worth noting that the things which the very aspects of conspiracy theories that sceptics scoff at (e.g controlled demolition of the twin towers) are the aspects that appeal to conspiracy theorists, because they imply the presence of a hugely powerful controlling force.

In essence, it is the very absence of hard evidence that conspiracy theorists use as evidence that there must be a powerful controlling force.

In addition, conspiracy theorists draw on other conspiracy theories for their “evidence”. An example of this is the book “The New Pearl Harbour” that uses conspiracy theories of the 1940s to bolster 9/11 arguments.

And it also worth noting that conspiracy theorists are not interested in “real world” conspiracies. When conspiracies are incovered, it is never by conspiracy theorists.


The Sandy Hook School killings. A Conspiracy?


Q&A
The first question came someone from a newcomer to Café Sci, and she asked whether the speaker was saying that the 1000 engineers )who said that the Twin Towers could not have fallen due to the effects of the crashed aircraft ) were wrong?

Dr Byford suggested that many of the 1,000 “engineers” might have had doctorates and other qualifications, but not often in structural engineering and added that a contrast could be made with the investigations undertaken by the official enquiry and by the likes of Popular Mechanics which were undertaken by engineers.

The questioner insisted that it was wrong to dismiss the views of the 1000 engineers, said that it the speaker and audience wanted to live in their “unicorn world” then they “were welcome to it” and then she walked out.

Dr Byford commented that it was part of the psychology of conspiracy theorists that they felt good about being part of the select few who really understand how the world works and it was noteworthy that the questioner had left absolutely certain that she was right and that the speaker and audience was wrong.

Another questioner asked how Dr Byford had become involved in this area of investigation. He responded that he had grown up in Serbia during the times of conflict there and had seen man strange stories in the media that suggested outside forces were against Serbia, for example that NATO was using secret weapons that sent messages into your mind. This had made Dr Byford curious about what made societies that were under stress so susceptible to conspiracy theories

The next question asked whether Dr Byford had ever known of any conspiracy theorists who had changed their minds. Dr Byford replied that he had not - but he did know of sceptics who had become convinced by conspiracy theories.

Related links:
Third party evidence for conspiracy theories
Mythbusters debunks moon landing conspiracy theories
Sandy Hook School Killings Conspiracies
The MMR "conspiracy"

Images
Memoirs, Proofs