The erosion of trust and the Scottish Independence referendum

Looking back on the first 14 years of the new millennium (or 13, depending how you measure the starts of millennia) it seems clear that one of the predominant trends of this time has been the extraordinary erosion of public trust in institutions and prominent individuals, from the Press to the Church and everything in between. The list is seemingly endless: Government intelligence agencies, the banks, politicians in general and the Liberal Democrats in particular, Radio 1 DJs, children's entertainers (Rolf Harris, for God's sake!), the police, the staff of old people's homes, multinational corporations from Amazon to Starbucks... I could go on. Indeed the erosion of trust seems to have become government policy. There have been concerted (and unfortunately often successful) efforts to undermine our trust in the NHS, the State education system and the British impulse towards supporting the underdog (from penniless immigrant to destitute benefits claimant).

Of course most of this erosion of trust has been brought about by the exposure of iniquitous and self-serving behaviour on the part of individuals and organisations that it is vitally important has been brought to light. The Public Interest Disclosure Act of 1998 introduced powerful protections for whistle-blowers and it is in part this that has led to the exposure of wrongdoing that had remained hidden often for decades. The time was that power and privilege bought secrecy and the opportunity to exploit others with impunity and it is of course wonderful that those days are gone. We are cannier now, empowered by social media technology and the availability of information. To quote the Who, we won't get fooled again.

Yet this erosion of trust has not been without its downsides, and perhaps the clearest illustration of this is what has been happening in UK politics of recent years. The whole MPs' expenses debacle, combined with the revelation of the poisonously cosy relationship between political leaders and the Murdoch press and the Liberal Democrats' abandonment of their manifesto pledges have led to a catastrophic destruction of public trust. In a poll in 2013 93% of those surveyed said they would not trust politicians to tell the truth when in a tight corner. What this has led to in England has been a quite extraordinary rise in support for UKIP- a party without MPs or indeed discernible policies. Why? Principally it seems because they are not in any meaningful sense politicians. It is not that anyone trusts Nigel Farage, it is simply that he, like the rest of the UK population, doesn't trust politicians either.

This way of course madness lies. You do not trust politicians, so you choose people about whom you know virtually nothing (beyond their uninformed, narrow-minded and xenophobic attitudes to foreigners) to become... politicians. The same applies to that other public-school educated "anti-establishment" (I hate ironic quotation marks, but what option do I have?) figure, Boris Johnson. Londoners continue to elect him because he shares their cynical, world-weary distrust in anyone and anything. Plus he's good for a laugh.

On a wider level the habit of distrust has a corrosive effect on any notion of State-provide services, so playing into the hands of the neo-cons who want to tear such institutions down. We no longer automatically assume that hospitals, schools or social services departments will be acting in our interests. And should you think that this attitude affects only the neo-Thatcherites amongst us, consider even those who work in such institutions. Most, it seems, no longer trust their own higher tiers of management, or assume that the whole institution is broadly working together in their common pursuit of a worthwhile goal.

Bizarrely the bankers, whose betrayal of trust was the most flagrant and expensive of anyone's, seem to have been the least affected by the erosion of that trust. Maybe self-serving cynicism has for so long been engrained in them that they barely noticed that no one trusted them any more. Presumably they always knew that no one should, and were just astonished that up until the great financial crisis of 2007-8 people seemed to. Nowadays they function just as they always did, paid just as much as they ever were and gambling just as recklessly, only this time with money given directly to them by the taxpayer under quantitative easing.

So does any of this matter? Surely it is better that at least now we know when we have been shafted, unlike the forelock-tugging proles who preceded us. Well, yes and no. The problem is that to a certain extent any social organisation is based on trust: an act of faith in the fundamental decency of other human beings on whom we can rely to act broadly in the public interest. Without such trust there really is (to echo Thatcher) no such thing as society. A complete erosion of trust can have only one destination: the assault-rifle-wielding sociopaths of the American right wing. Which surely most sentient and rational humans would regard as a bad thing.

So how do we square the circle? When recent revelations have taught us that people in public life up and down the country (and the world) have been venal, corrupt, self-serving and deceitful how do we retain trust in institutions, even where we believe them to be essential to the civilised functioning of our world?

Partly I think the answer goes back (for me) to a lesson I learned in many years as a headteacher: adults and children are fundamentally exactly the same, it is just that children are generally more transparent in their childishness. Thus what we know about children's behaviour can be applied wholesale to adults too. And one thing that I have learned about children is that if you distrust them they will behave in such a way as not to be worthy of trust. The converse may not always be the case (children are capable of lying even to people who offer them complete trust) but distrust inevitably gives rise to lack of trustworthiness. If a child knows they will not be believed whatever they say then they will always lie. If you give them a genuine chance of telling the truth and being believed then they may possibly live up to that belief. If you subject children to a behaviour-management regime based on distrust then they will find sneaky ways to misbehave and not get caught. Give them trust and a positive sense of responsibility and they just might live up to it.

So what possible lessons can be learned from this? Am I suggesting that so long as we trust David Cameron and [shudder] Michael Gove they will, in the end, do the right thing? Ummmm, No.

Where this is relevant though is in the question of the Scottish Independence vote. Although still barely rippling the political waters south of the border the upcoming referendum is clearly building towards a political reawakening in what was North Britain of which a vote for independence may not be the most profound outcome. Poorly informed as I am it does seem to me that what seems to be gathering momentum is a sense that just maybe Scotland can make a leap of faith away from the narrow-minded, UKIP-centric, anti-cosmopolitan politics of England towards a more egalitarian, demilitarised, pro-European vision of an independent nation state.

The thing is, if the Scottish people are to vote for independence then that will require a great deal of the quality which this millenium seems so profoundly to have eroded: trust. They need to trust that Alec Salmond is not just a politically astute media-junkie. They need to trust that all the bluster about not letting Scotland keep the pound was just bluster. And most of all they need to trust in each other, that independence will take them not towards jingoistic introspection but away from it, and towards a fairer and more enlightened society.

And I say all power to their elbows, though I will be profoundly sorry to see them go. In fact if it wasn't for the weather I'd be contemplating a move right now.

And the lack of availability of ethnically diverse food shops.

And the sheer bloody DISTANCE from anywhere.

And did I mention the weather?

The grammar of social intercourse on the web

Facebook notification: Fred Bloggs likes your comment.

What does that mean exactly? It occurs to me that, whilst human societies have had countless centuries to develop and disseminate subtle modes of social interaction in the face-to-face world we are having to put together similar codes for interaction ludicrously quickly when it comes to the internet. Take the general area of the notification that starts this post- namely the expression of agreement and affirmation.

In the face-to-face world there exists a whole range of means, verbal and non-verbal, to let the other person know that you agree with them- that you are on their side. At a base level there are the simple nods and mumbled "yeah"s and "mhmm"s that really signify little more than "I am not actually asleep yet." Then there are the slightly more enthusiastic smiles or "Yeah, yeah"s and "quite"s or the never-completely-sincere-sounding "Ooh I know." For the young there are the the more emphatic "innit doe"s and "you know it"s or even "that's what I'm saying blud," accompanied perhaps by a high-five or other congratulatory physical contact. For the older participants there is a similar lexicon of supportive (though often essentially meaningless) comments, such as "absolutely," or "I couldn't agree more." In some communities even the middle-aged can accompany these with physical contact, usually centred around handshakes, though we repressed Britons usually have to make do with vigorous nodding and enthusiastic smiles.

If the social context is veering more towards intimacy than debate there is a similar range of supportive actions and comments, often so highly charged that a tentative touch of the hand across a table carries a wealth of meaning and potential. In these contexts in particular the signifiers are so subtly differentiated that they can become a minefield for the unwary or socially inept. So it is not just a question of whether one smiles at a particular point in the conversation, but what sort of smile that is. Get it right and the relationship can move forward incrementally; get it wrong and you risk looking insincere, pushy, creepy or downright manic (or is that just me?)

And on the internet what do we have? A "like" button, often illustrated with a thumbs-up icon.

The thumbs-up icon is actually interesting in itself. In face-to-face contexts the thumbs-up is very rarely used, and then in very specific circumstances. It implies an invocation to stick at it in the face of difficult challenges. It is the non-verbal equivalent of the French "bon courage." Think- when was the last time you gave anyone a thumbs-up in the context of an actual conversation? Because it is also typically a sign given at a distance, when someone is leaving for instance and the time for words is over.

The word "like" itself is pretty inoffensive and all-purpose, but the problem is that it has to carry such a vast range of meanings. To take a variant of the post above for instance: when a woman reads "Fred Bloggs likes your photo" there is an enormous amount of guesswork involved as to the implications of that statement. It could mean:

1. Fred appreciates the humour/beauty/photographic skill on display in the photo.
2. Fred has been reminded of your existence by the photo and wants to say hi.
3. Fred thinks you look very good in the photo, and wants to give you some supportive positive feedback.
4. Fred fancies you and is using an inoffensive "like" of your photo as a way in to deepening your relationship.
5. Fred is in fact a deeply creepy stalker who you would be well-advised to block from your facebook posts.

And how are you supposed to know which is which?

Or to take a similarly potentially awkward situation. Imagine the following: you have posted a sarcastically tongue-in-cheek comment about some issue which divides public opinion, in which you purport to put forward a point of view in order to satirise those who hold such views: "I really think the coalition government should be doing more to clamp down on the benefits that go to scroungers pretending to be disabled." Fred Bloggs (whom you barely know) 'likes' your post. Does this mean that he shares your political viewpoints and satirical humour, or that he is a closet Tory who thinks that he has found a political soulmate?

Mostly of course we have other clues as to what the 'like' means in any particular context, but we can never be completely sure. Did Fred click 'like' as a thoughtlessly automatic reaction whilst scrolling through hundreds of status updates, or is this a considered, thoughtful, even coded message of a deeper reaction to your post? Who knows?

The point is that I think we need somehow to develop a greater range of communication fillers and signifiers of social responses for use on the internet. Quite what I am not sure, and I think it would be hard to replicate the vast range of such signifiers we have in face-to-face contexts (particularly given the inherently multicultural nature of the internet), but we need something.

Click the button below to like this post if you agree.

Shame and poverty

I watched a depressing Panorama last night about the plight of Brent residents hit by the benefits cap, then read this morning this comment piece about the lovely Ian Duncan Smith's "reformed" replacement for the Disability Living Allowance. All of this is part of a pattern of course, and I have no intention of adding another pathetic complaint to the mountain that has built against the current government's benefit "reforms."

What I did want to pick up on is a strange but all-pervading reaction that I observed from most of those whose cases were followed in the Panorama programme. As they faced eviction and penury some were confrontational, some resigned, some vocal and truculent, others submissive. However most of all what they felt seemed to be shame. They were ashamed of being poor, ashamed of having to rely on the state, ashamed of the shitholes they lived in. Many of them were also as willing as the general population currently is to turn on and vilify "benefit claimants," as though that was not what they were. Many also seemed to have in their minds a definition of a "benefit claimant" who actually deserved to feel the shame they were themselves experiencing. One truculent man whose benefit was being cut trotted out the old myth about young single mothers having it easy; a young single mother, unsuccessful in her search for work to fit around her childcare responsibilities, blamed those without jobs.

Despite all being trapped in the steadily tightening web of the casually cruel benefits cap I would be very surprised if any of the subjects of this documentary would have voted for a political party whose policies included raising taxes and increasing benefits (should such a party even exist). We were reminded in various soundbites from leading politicians just how universal the political consensus is that benefits have to be cut.

So why is it that almost everyone in the UK (including the poor) believes that in times of austerity the amount of money going to the poor should be cut? How is it that we have developed to a point where poverty is of itself is deemed to be shameful? This used to be a country where "a working-class hero [was] something to be." No more, it seems.

Not so long ago it was the very rich who were typically portrayed as feckless, self-absorbed and decadent. Think of Bertie Wooster, or the Roman Emperors in the 70s productions of I Claudius or Caligula. At the same time there was a prevailing image of the fierce independence of the British working classes. Some of this was a legacy of the "spirit of the Blitz", when the poor of London's East End were portrayed as sticking two fingers up to Hitler's Luftwaffe. Some had an even longer germination, from the images of industrial workers powering the industrial revolution and the glories of the British Empire. The question of how closely these myths related to reality is neither here nor there: we had our archetypes of the miner, the shipworker or the railwayman, their faces blackened and their eyes steely with determination.

The 70s industrial troubles dented these images slightly, and began to introduce the conflicting trope of the "all out lads!" unionist warming his hands round a brazier. However the miners' strike, much as it might have divided Britain, had at its heart a powerful image of the indomitable poor fighting against the oppressive power of the state. From the Clash to Billy Elliot we were presented with images of the poor beaten down and dominated but retaining some dignity nonetheless.

However slowly our iconography has begun to change, and with it, apparently, our attitudes. Despite the prominence of made-to-measure figures of contempt from amongst the hyper-rich, like Fred (the Shred) Goodwin and Paul (meth and crack) Flowers we still seem to be moving towards a US-style veneration of the rich. Depending on our political affiliations (and level of personal wealth) we may feel anger towards them or envy, but we rarely seem to laugh at them any more. They may be figures of hatred, even of contempt, but rarely of fun. We seem to have accepted that, to get where they are, the hyper-rich may be grasping and of questionable morality but they must also be powerful, virile and brilliant. The fact that most of them are probably none of these things seems to have passed us by.

More sadly though, any last vestige of the concept of dignity in poverty seems to have disappeared. We have come to the point where poverty porn seems principally designed to generate not sympathy but contempt for the poor. The word "benefit," in itself an intrinsically positive word (from bene facere: to do good) now seems inextricably linked to the word "cheat."

Shame is a powerful force, but it really needs to find its appropriate target. It is the rich who should feel ashamed, every time they spend more on a meal out than the average family has to live on for a week. And we should feel ashamed at every story we hear of families evicted and the sick and disabled living in penury. The concept is bandied about a fair bit, but often directed by the current government at those in the public sector who, for all their failings are at least making some effort to address the needs of those less fortunate than themselves. Yes, mistakes by social workers, or poor hospital care by nurses are terrible things, but nowhere near as shameful as the simple fact that the 85 richest people in the world own as much as the poorest 3.5 billion or that in Britain today families in poverty can be forced to move 100 miles with no redress because their benefits have been capped.

Portraiture and the #nomakeupselfie

I was alerted to the phenomenon of the no makeup selfie by my daughter, who has written an excellent blog post on the inappropriateness of aligning it with the fight against cancer. I have nothing to add to her post on that subject but wanted to look a little at the place of the phenomenon in the history of portraiture.

Disclaimer: I am emphatically not an art historian, so some of what follows may well be inaccurate. Ah well...

Although it seems a commonplace to state that portraiture has been around "since the dawn of time," or "for as long as people have made art," I am not entirely sure that that is the case in the sense that we understand portraiture today. Most of the Paleolithic art that we have today, if it depicts humans at all, depicts them in generic and non-individualised ways (like these), or records their presence rather than depicting their facial features (like the hand-prints for instance). There is a famous "portrait" in the grotto of Vilhonneur, thought to be 26,000 years old, but it seems to me at least questionable that this is a depiction of any real individual.

Ancient artists seem to me to have been more concerned with depicting archetypes and creating symbols than with recording the physical appearance of individuals. Perhaps art was for them too powerful a medium to direct it to depicting what some particular person looked like. It may also be that the power of art rendered portraiture problematic- that the act of capturing a likeness endangered the person whose likeness was captured. That would seem a plausible thought in a time when the spirit world, with which art was strongly associated, was always close at hand.

When portraiture first really boomed as an art form it was in forms with very different purposes to those we associate with it today. In ancient Egypt and elsewhere portraits started appearing in tombs. Whether or not these were painted or carved post-mortem it seems clear that the primary audience was not the living. These portraits seem almost an attempt to give the deceased an identity in the hereafter. It appears not to have been particularly important that the portrait resembled the sitter physically, since the name inscribed thereon would identify it. Instead the portrait depicted the person symbolically, sometimes with attributes of Gods or sacred animals. Art still seems to be seen as having a magical effect, though one that people now feel can be harnessed to their benefit.

The other forms of portrait in the ancient world have survived to this day, but we scarcely see them as portraits any more. These are depictions of rulers and other powerful people on coins and in public statuary. Here the magical power of art is clearly being used to enhance the temporal power of the sitters. Coins are immensely potent symbols of the power of an emperor or other ruler. The point about coinage is that it is the symbols impressed on the coins that in a sense invest them with monetary value, and it is perhaps unsurprising that rulers chose to associate that symbolic power with their own faces. However there is a clear coding of the use of portraiture on coins: always in profile, apparently decapitated and without any physical context. Realistic and individualised as many of them appear to be these portrayals are clearly different in intention to what we regard as portraits today.

Public statuary (and other public portraits) equally use the magic of art to enhance status and reputation. The focus seems much more on the sitter's role than on their character or personality, with fighting rulers portrayed on horseback, striking heroic poses. Roman statues of emperors, whilst apparently much more realistic than the Greek statues whose style they emulated, were manufactured with generic bodies and replaceable heads. This was handy in the case of a sudden overthrow of an emperor and replacement with another (no need to start a new statue, just chuck away the old head and make a new one) but also tells us something about the statues' purposes and how they were to be read: these were not an attempt to capture the unique character of a sitter at a particular moment in time but a public statement of their power. Such public portraiture is not as popular as it once was, being uncomfortably associated nowadays with repressive dictatorships, but the tradition has lived on in Hollywood posters.

Domestic portraiture in the sense that we would understand it does seem to have existed in Ancient Rome, as evidenced by some of the wonderful frescoes discovered in Pompeii. However what actually struck me when I visited there was how few there are. Many of the apparent portraits are actually depictions of gods or other mythological beings, and given the enormous profusion of art on every wall, ceiling and floor in the city there seem to be precious few straightforward portraits of the owners or their ancestors. Perhaps in a world where the Lares and Penates were physically present in every household it was seen as something like hubris to use the magic of art to associate one's own image with that of the heroes, gods and emperors.

However domestic portraiture survived, though for centuries being associated almost exclusively with the rich and powerful. And even domestic portraits seem often to have been concerned at least as much with a symbolic as a realistic portrayal of the sitter. Renaissance portraits for instance, whilst often beautiful and highly individualised are also frequently packed with symbolic images that lift the portrayal beyond a mere snapshot. Sitters are clearly aware of the power of having their portrait "taken" (the word is an interesting one) and this awareness survives into the beginning of the era of photography.

However the transformation of our concept of domestic portraiture began with the availability of cheap portable cameras. Suddenly portraiture not only became available to everyone but was stripped overnight of its intimidating power. We all took hundreds of pictures of each other, hardly regarding them as portraits, and kept them as mementos of holidays and weddings, early childhood and significant events. These portraits were domestic and personal in an entirely new way, not being intended for viewing beyond the immediate circle of close family (except perhaps in those ghastly slideshow evenings following foreign holidays).

So while public portraiture was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it had once been (outside countries such as Turkmenistan at least) domestic portraiture was booming. And domestic portraiture meant something much more private and informal than it had ever meant before. And so it seemed that the nature of portraiture itself had changed forever and perhaps the process of disassociating it from the  magical power of art was complete.

It was social media that began to change things round again, and to reinvest domestic portraiture with some of that magic and erode some of the distinctions between public and domestic portraiture. At first social media seemed to provide nothing more than an electronic version of those slideshow evenings. Facebook was just a way to share (endless) images of people in social situations of various sorts primarily with others who had been there at the time. However the selfie was an interesting development, and the #nomakeupselfie even more so.

Whilst "traditional" Facebook or Instagram uploads are all about images of the user in social contexts, selfies are the precise opposite. A true selfie (unlike the notorious one taken at Mandela's funeral) has only the sitter/photographer, often in a highly domestic setting, such as a bedroom. Its purpose, which has its logical extension in the no makeup selfie, seems to be to present to the world an image of one's essential individuality and uniqueness (which makes the whole notion of the #nomakeupselfie craze even more paradoxical). The only explanation I can find for people doing this goes back to the earliest days of portraiture: it is as if people are aware of the magical power that can be harnessed by creating an image of the human face. In taking and publishing a selfie they want to make a public record: this is me. I exist.

The no makeup selfie is the same but even more so, and seems to me even more an existential act, which again makes it even weirder that many seem to have been moved to create and publish one by an internet craze and the social pressure to conform. If that isn't mauvaise foi then I don't know what is...

Oddly, written analogues for self-portraiture seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Twitter, which for a time seemed doomed to be no more than an interminable sequence of self-indulgent verbal selfies ("Got up early today and brushed my teeth. May go out for a walk later.") has mutated into a medium for social debate and the sharing of memes of various degrees of sophistication and/or humour. No tweet now is complete without at least one hashtag, and these take the attention away from the individual essence of the tweeter in a way that is diagrammatically opposed to the impulse that creates the no makeup selfie. Although the concept of the self-portrait diary got a bit of a boost recently with the broadcasting of Tony Benn's diaries after his sad death that form of diary has begun to sound rather old-fashioned. In writing, it seems, we are to be defined by the size of our audience of followers, or by our humour and our skill and persistence in unearthing gems from the vastness of the internet.

So is the no makeup selfie just a temporary aberration- a craze that will soon die a death? Who knows. However I do suspect that its sudden ubiquitousness as a phenomenon has revealed a yearning to harness the magic power of portraiture that humans have been aware of for so long.

This is not what disclosure of abuse is like

I am an admirer of Barnardos, and have watched with interest their attempts to put over what they (and others, such as social workers) do to support vulnerable children. Their first TV campaign, "breaking the cycle" was compelling and disturbing, using TV editing (the repetition of the same sequence in shorter and shorter segments) in a similar way to their juxtaposition of visual images in the controversial "heroin baby" poster. They then appear to have decided to put the emphasis more on their supportive work than on the traumas faced by the children they work with, and their first effort at this, "Life story" I think took an excellent approach, even if its intention wasn't quite matched by its execution.

However their recent TV advert is I think dreadful, and carries a real danger of doing more harm than good. My attention was drawn to the advert by the absurd juxtaposition of a small boy worried about playing the recorder at a school concert and a teenage girl disclosing abuse. Having read Barnardos' blurb I learn that this juxtaposition is intended as a contrast between the supportive environment within which the boy confronts his fears and the lack of support faced by the girl. Which of course implies some similarity between the challenges they face. Really? What world precisely do the ad makers live in?

The second reason for taking against the advert was the melodramatically "actorish" playing of the part of the teenage girl. Whilst this seems to conform nicely to most people's image of what the disclosure of abuse is (must be) like, I am afraid that to me it was far more reminiscent of a Year 10 drama class than any actual disclosure. The actress has clearly been told to get into character and then give it all she's got, and I certainly don't blame her for the result. Also, of course, they have to shoehorn the disclosure into a 60 second ad, so cannot possibly give any sense of the halting, reluctant and time-consuming nature of most conversations of this type. Children generally take time, not just to trust the person to whom they are talking but to get round to what the real issues that trouble them are, and of course time is what the ad-makers did not have. Nevertheless "Ellie's" progression from angry self-hatred to reassurance in about 25 seconds of screen time comes across as ludicrously and simplistically compressed.

There is a deeper point at issue here. People at large, if they have to to think about child abuse at all, want to think of it as something "other"- as the action of demonic and inhuman monsters from whom children can, and must, be rescued by social workers or charities. In fact of course the situation is probably always more complex than that. There may be cases where one or more parents is genuinely monstrous, but they are vanishingly rare, and generally in such cases no one is ever allowed to discover what is going on until too late. In every case of disclosure of abuse I have ever encountered the inter-relationships within the family are complex and so are the children's attitudes towards their parents. It is this that makes disclosure so difficult for the child, because they sense at some level that their disclosure is going to change those relationships for ever and may break them completely.

The adult in the TV ad looks reassuringly trustworthy, and gains "Ellie's" trust by telling her that she doesn't think she is worthless. In reality however, it will generally take a lot more than that before a child will effectively hand over the future of their entire family to such a person.

Which leads me on to the real issue I have with the advert, and the aspect that I think makes it dangerous. "Ellie's" nod of trusting agreement comes after the adult tells her that, "Together, we're going to find a way to make this stop." Her voice is calm and reassuring and there is a note almost of complicity when "Ellie" nods her agreement. The implication is that "we" means "Ellie" and the adult, and the viewer is left with a sense that, having thrown her lot in with this lady, "Ellie's" problems are now over because the two of them are going to find a way to sort things out.

This is almost the opposite to the message an adult has to give a child when they disclose abuse. One of the first things the adult MUST say to the child is that they cannot keep this information to themselves and they are going to have to pass it on. Far from drawing the child into the entirely illusory comfort that they and child together will find a way to navigate this abuse it is the adult's duty to tell the child that this situation is NOT their responsibility any more. The child will have been trying for some considerable time to "make this stop" and will have disclosed to an adult precisely because they have recognised that they simply can't do it.

The juxtaposition with the recorder-playing boy makes this even worse. All that the boy needs to conquer his babyish fears about standing in front of an audience is a few comforting words from a supportive teacher. The inevitable implication is that the teenage girl similarly just needs to buck up her ideas a bit and then, with the support of the bespectacled Barnardos lady she too will be able to confront her fears and "make [the abuse] stop."

This is a truly dreadful message to put across, and whilst it may not have been intentional, one would have thought that Barnardos, with all their experience in working with vulnerable children, would have seen that this is how some children might read the ad.

At one level of course I cannot blame Barnardos for all this. The population at large has a simplistic, black-and-white and often contradictory understanding of issues relating to child protection. Social workers are simultaneously condemned for meddling and for allowing abuse to go on under their noses and being taken into care is seen as an obvious solution to any case of familial abuse despite the worrying statistics about the future for children in care.

The public at large want to imagine that the situation is as pictured in this advert: that when a child is being abused, all that needs to happen is for them to pluck up the courage to tell a suitably soft-spoken but determined-looking Barnardos lady and that will make the abuse stop. They don't want to think about the mess and complication and family disruption of a police Sapphire investigation or a Social Services child abuse case conference. They don't want to think about the complications around finding a place of safety for the child (which is worse, an adult brother with a conviction for burglary or police cells until someone can get emergency foster care set up?) and they don't want to think about the burden the abused child is so often carrying in trying against the odds to hold their family together.

Clearly a 60 second advert can't make the public at large understand all these things, and nor (probably) should it. What really worries me though, aside from the appalling messages this advert gives to any child or adult directly involved in a disclosure of abuse, is the illusory comfort it gives the public that by donating to Barnardos they can make the world as reassuringly simple as this ad makes it seem.

the British and immigration

Warning: the following post may contain sweeping generalisations about the characteristics of entire populations based on very little evidence. If such national stereotyping offends you please look away now. If what you prefer is racial stereotyping, please click here.

So, it seems that 78% of the British public surveyed think that immigration to the UK should be reduced, even though 30% believe that immigration has a good or very good effect on the UK economy. In fact 34% of those who rated the economic impact of immigration as very good still want it to reduce, according to the survey.

The easy way to interpret these findings is that the British are inherently racist and are allowing this instinctive racial prejudice to be whipped up by the right-wing tabloid press. So, like Nigel Farage (who in a recent interview named Enoch Powell as his political hero) they would prefer to suffer economically so long as it meant keeping the foreigners out.

This is certainly a tempting argument, if you look at some of the front pages British tabloids have run in recent years. Look here for instance. And no, they aren't made up.

Yet there is a part of this argument that actually doesn't ring true to me. In everyday life, here in London where issues of race are all around us, I cannot remember the last time I witnessed any sort of behaviour that I would regard as racist. I am convinced that people are much less racist in their attitudes now than they were in the past and that British people are less prone to be racist than are say the French or the Italians.

As head teacher of a large London comprehensive I had to deal with many hundreds of argumentative teenagers of various racial, religious and ethnic origins yet never found racism in interpersonal relations to be a particularly significant issue (nowhere near as significant as homophobia for instance). Yes there was the occasional racist insult but the kids, almost without exception, saw these as unacceptable. Indeed, race seems to have virtually disappeared as an issue for these kids: a prominent member of the unpleasantly violent Dem Africans gang was white British and another Turkish. This is a very different situation to that which pertained even 20 years ago, when racist insults were much commoner in schools and gangs tended to be mono-ethnic and indeed defined by race. Interracial marriages are now so commonplace as to attract no attention whatever where not so long ago they were treated with deep suspicion and even anger.

In Italy by contrast my daughter recently witnessed racist abuse of African street sellers by uniformed police of a sort that would be unthinkable in the UK and in France the comedy l'Italien exposed a degree of anti-Arab racism that is seen there more or less as normal. Yet France and Italy are both signatories to the Schengen accord and in neither is there the same sense as in Britain of paranoia about immigrants swamping the country.

Indeed on closer examination it really does seem to me that British anxieties are much more to do with national populations than with race. The image most people seem to hold is of our island nation desperate to resist invasion and keep the alien hordes the other side of the channel like armies outwith the castle's moat. Indeed the use of this metaphor in the phrase "pulling up the drawbridge" points up precisely the difference between attitudes to race and attitudes to immigration: those pulling up the drawbridge are previous immigrants into Britain and their descendants (which covers all of us I suppose) who are keener than "native" Brits to resist further immigration. In fact in the study cited here a higher proportion of British Asians than White British believe that immigration should be stopped permanently.

So why is this? Why is a population which is, by comparison with previous eras and other countries, fairly tolerant and accepting of other races so intolerant and fearful of immigrants and immigration?

Partly of course this is the fault of the lies peddled by the tabloids and implicitly endorsed by government ministers. The UK population now seem to take it for granted that immigrants milk Britain for benefits and take all the council houses, despite this study for instance showing that immigrants are 59 per cent less likely than natives to receive state benefits or tax credits and 57 per cent less likely to live in social housing. Now, I wonder where they could have got such an idea from...

But that isn't all of it, I don't think. There has to be a kernel of distrust of the outsider somewhere for the tabloids, UKIP and the Tories to play on. So where does that distrust originate?

Well, I will posit two explanations:

1) It's because Brits are so terrified of ABROAD that anything that originates from there is to be distrusted.
Brits do seem to be almost uniquely frightened once outside the boundaries of their own country- more so than any other population with the possible exception of the Chinese. As a people, we have the linguistic ineptitude of all English-speaking peoples without the gung-ho adventurousness of the Aussies or the arrogant sense of entitlement of the Yanks. Wherever we go we huddle together in safe English speaking enclaves or scuttle about in abject terror that we may be called upon to communicate with someone who DOESN'T SPEAK ENGLISH! Some of us, it is true, appear totally at home in Provence or the Algarve, but on closer examination it is clear that we are so only because these places are now as Anglicised as the Costa del Sol.

It seems that the Brits are unique in creating such tropes as the pool-bed-hogging German early-riser and we clearly see foreign holidays as brave sojourns into enemy territory. Other Europeans seem much less phased: they are used to having to operate in a number of languages and can drive from one country to another without ceremony (they don't even have to pack their suitcases full of PG tips and packets of hobnobs). The Americans by contrast seem to see other countries as so utterly alien that they are merely quaint and hence no threat, and Aussies wonder what all the fuss is about, since wherever they go there never seem to be as many highly venomous animals as there are at home.

And I am convinced that this fear of abroad carries over to attitudes to immigration. Apart from anything else, the numbers generally quoted on the subject are for NET migration (numbers of immigrants minus numbers leaving the country) and there is a strictly limited number of places that the British (or the English at least- the Scots and Irish are more adventurous) are prepared to go.

2) It's because Brits distrust the motives of those with the power to control migration
The perception of who immigrants are and why they want to come here seems to have changed radically over recent years, in a very interesting way. It used to be that "immigrant" was equated with "asylum seeker" and conjured up images EITHER of terrified refugees from appalling conflicts overseas OR of hook-handed hate-preachers pretending to be terrified refugees... (depending on your political viewpoint and/or readership of the Daily Mail). Now, it seems, that is not what people think of first when immigration is discussed. Instead, people now see impoverished Eastern Europeans coming over here EITHER to do a fantastically professional but incredibly cheap cash-in-hand job of refitting your kitchen OR to lounge about in council houses claiming benefits (again, depending on political orientation/Daily Mail readership/experience of having cheap cash-in-hand job done on the kitchen).

And in a sense this is not surprising. It turns out that, with the freeing up of employment restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians entering the UK major companies and institutions here have been falling over each other to recruit Romanian and Bulgarian workers. Suddenly they have discovered a new and even cheaper way to outsource work, without even leaving the UK- just get foreign workers in to do the work for next to nothing right here! You don't even need to pay the minimum wage if you go through an agency. Win, win!

And this is hardly the first time this has happened. It seems pretty clear that New Labour's attitudes to Polish immigration were prompted more by the desire to boost the economy than some sort of impulse towards internationalism. Which of course it did, much to the advantage of the captains of industry and the money men who duly profited enormously, while average wages failed to keep up with inflation.

So whilst it is shameful for Britain to turn its back on the refugees from Syria for instance some of the British attitudes to immigration are neither as racist nor as illiberal as they might appear. Immigration has served the rich of the UK very, very well indeed. Immigrants provide a net boost to economic output and increased economic output, more than ever before, benefits the rich. It is perhaps hardly surprising that the less well-off resent the way the movement of people has been used by the rich to keep their wages down.

It is even almost understandable that they direct that resentment towards the least culpable parties to this process: the immigrants themselves.

Christmas nostalgia

With the Christmas season in full swing we are being bombarded with nostalgic images of log fires, steam trains and flickering candles. This is nothing new of course, in fact nostalgia definitely isn't what it used to be, but there is one particularly egregious example that caught my eye this year. It is an advert for some breakfast cereal and involves three blonde haired Midwych cuckoos who conspire to leave a bowl of breakfast cereal for a particularly creepy looking Father Christmas. The whole advert has a distinctly dated feel to it, to the extent that my daughter asked me if this was some advert from my childhood that they were rerunning.

Which got me to pondering why exactly Christmas is seen so much as a time for looking back into the past. Not that it can be that exclusively of course, since most of what the advertisers are trying to flog us in terms of presents to buy is distinguished by its newness: nostalgia would not seem appropriate when advertising a 50 inch 3D HD television for instance. But nostalgia, warm muted colours and an evocation of lost childhood still remain the predominant themes of advertising in this season.

Much of this is of course down to the dominance of US culture, with its emphasis on sentimentality and small-town family values. It's a Wonderful Life (which I love, by the way) exemplifies this perfectly, but so does the annual Coca Cola campaign. It all goes back to A visit from St Nicholas ("'twas the night before Christmas") written in 1823, even more than our own A Christmas Carol from 1843. The essence of the poem is an evocation of the magic of childhood and this has survived as probably the central element of the modern era Christmas, and is no doubt responsible for much of the sense of nostalgia.

However that is clearly not the only source of our association of Christmas with the past. Father Christmas (the English equivalent of the originally Dutch Sinterklaas, or Santa Claus) has long been depicted as an old man, and much of the symbolism of modern Christmas harks back to ancient times. The holly and ivy (as the carol reminds us) are plants whose symbolic power is rooted in the past. Indeed they hugely predate their appropriation for the Christmas story and evoke a long-lost pagan past.

In fact, on the subject of carols, Christmas is interesting as one of the few occasions that we still universally associate with seasonal songs. And whilst many of these songs are Victorian in origin (still quite a long time ago) many are far older, and almost all use very antiquated language. When else but at Christmas would most people use words like "hark" and "lo" and "ye" or syntax like "let nothing you dismay"?

And in fact the specifically English association of Christmas with times past goes a long way back- to the puritan era. The personification of Christmas became Father Christmas (and an old man) during the puritan clampdown on such festivities, and evoked the good old rip-roaring, drunken Christmases people remembered when they were young. As I said at the start, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

There's more to it than that too. Christianity has always been adept at highjacking pagan symbolism and Christmas is of course a reworking of winter solstice celebrations such as the Scandinavian Yule, and even of the Roman Saturnalia. The feasting, the emphasis on firelight and the bringing of the greenwood into the house all remain as central to our conception of Christmas and all hark back to long gone former times.

However, interesting as all this is, for me it doesn't get to the essence of why we associate Christmas with the past. The winter solstice (particularly in Northern regions where the day-length effect is most marked) has always been associate with looking both backwards into the old year and forward into the new. The Roman God Janus (from whom January is named) was famously double-faced to symbolise this. He was the God of (amongst other things) gateways and thresholds and the winter solstice has always been seen as a threshold between the past and the future, marking the final death of the old year's sun and the promised rebirth of the new.

However this is a massive concept and most societies appear to have separated out or extended the celebrations of death and rebirth symbolised by the season. Saturnalia, for instance, occupied the "left-over" days following the 12 30-day months of the Roman calendar and Yule was apparently traditionally three nights long.

In modern times we have the week from Christmas to New Year, and it does seem to me that, for all its central image of a birth, Christmas has taken on much of the looking back and New Year the looking forward elements of the winter solstice rituals. Perhaps the clearest way to see this is in a comparison of the symbolism of the two celebrations: where Christmas Day has log fires and candles, New Year has fireworks; where Christmas Day has hand-knitted jumpers and cosy slippers New Year has party dresses and impractically high-heeled shoes; where Christmas Day has slumping in front of the Queen's Speech New Year has partying into the small hours and first-footing; whilst New Year is universally "Happy", Christmas is often "Merry", a much more antiquated sounding word. Even the songs are different. Yes, we do sing Auld Lang Syne at New Year, but we bellow along to Prince's 1999 as well. No "Hark the herald angels" at New Year. And fundamentally New Year's Eve is an adult occasion, contrasting with the child-centred nature of Christmas.

So there you go. Like Janus we look both forwards and backwards over the Christmas/New Year season, and in my opinion that is just as it should be. A society develops the rituals and celebrations it needs to deal with the fundamental themes of life, like death and rebirth, like the inevitable progression from the past into the future. And if the price is having to endure a few saccharine-heavy nostalgia-laden adverts at this time, then does that really matter?

Merry Christmas, I say, and a happy New Year.