Gladwell’s thesis is that social media campaigning doesn’t change anything. Retweeting a hashtag, clicking the ‘like’ button and slapping a twibbon (ick) on your avatar are all heart-warming acts of self-congratulation – a little pat on your own back in recognition of your very fine moral nature – but they don’t have any influence on the real world.

The Shirky response is, more or less, ‘Duh.‘ Some people overstated the case for Twitter activism during the Green Uprising in Iran, but just because social media couldn’t overthrow a government doesn’t mean it isn’t good at other stuff.

It’s a communications tool: it’s good at conveying information and emotions. Gladwell is just arguing with the Quixotic extreme when he says, “”Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that [Martin Luther] King’s task in Birmingham, Alabama, would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail.”

But campaigners aren’t now using social media instead of direct action; they’re using it to inform and motivate direct action, and to change attitudes. One good example is the It Gets Better Project, launched by Dan Savage in response to the suicides of bullied gay teenagers.

It’s a very simple civil rights campaign, in which gay adults upload videos to YouTube describing how their lives have improved since the grim days high school.

Pre-social media, it’s the kind of guidance that could perhaps only come about through personal ads and penpal friendships: YouTube makes it possible to broadcast support. You could criticise it for not being the Stonewall riots, but a first-person account of a happy adult life probably beats smashing up a nightclub when it comes to helping these kids.

The truth is that all causes everywhere come with a lot of badge-wearing hangers-on, and even street level activism is enormously inefficient. I don’t think I’m doing myself a disservice when I say that my contribution to the anti-war movement (shuffling around Sheffield city centre, wearing a pillowcase skirt with “NOT IN MY NAME” screen printed on the arse) could have been left undone without harming the overall cause of the Stop The War Coalition.

Bluntly, if you’re involved in a protest it’s probably because you’re basically powerless, and you’re not going to get everything what you want anyway. 60 years on from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, there are mainstream media organisations pimping the deceit that ‘black’ is synonymous with ‘unamerican’, and 50 years post Stonewall, gay teens are still being bullied to death. Even the most powerful campaigns are only skirmishes in long, slow and sometimes sorrowful struggles.

Yes, social media gives a lot more people the opportunity to be telescopic philanthropists, sitting at our desks plugging our email addresses into petition forms. But that’s purely a function of campaigns being able to reach a lot of people – and useless as these pixel-level gestures may be at bringing about the object they’re supposedly aimed at, they do at least demonstrate and encourage a movement of attitudes leading to long-term change.

In terms of campaigning, you’d be a goddamn fool to keep organising flyer drops and forget to update your Facebook group, just because Facebook gives you the dispiriting ability to see who’s lost interest, whereas your flyers never report back when they end up in the bin. And in terms of places to wear a political slogan, I’m going contra Gladwell and saying that ‘in my Twitter feed’ is probably an improvement over ‘on my arse’. Neither does much. But fast paper does it where a few more people will see.

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Photo by arimoore, used under Creative Commons

His Centre For Social Justice believes that “married two-parent families produce the best outcomes for both adults and children”, and in government, he’s contributed to the policy of removing the dubious “couples penalty” from the benefits system.

Why dubious?

“They calculate this penalty,” says Lisa Ansell, “by looking at net state support, but with no consideration for the cost of childcare or rent, or the earnings potential of a single person with responsibility for a child.”

In other words, the intention is to strip out the benefits that help the most vulnerable parents and children to survive, because the government believes it would be altogether better if those single mums would just settle down with a nice man – and the state is not going to pay anyone to stay single, dammit.

Incidentally, the CSJ doesn’t seem to have looked into the idea that those “missing couples” on its little graph as the wages of the highest earner dip below £20k could reflect the possibility that poverty is both a cause and an effect of lone parenthood – in which case, making people more poor isn’t very likely to make them less lone.

But still, at least Iain Duncan Smith has a plan to get the unemployed into work. The plan: move people to where the work is.

“We have to look at how we get that portability, so that people can be more flexible, can look for work, can take the risk to do it,” says IDS. What risks?

Well, for one thing, moving away from an extended social network is a risk factor for divorce – couples are more likely to survive if they belong to a shared group of friends and family with an investment in their futures.

There’s now a government that’s broadly sympathetic to ResPublica’s aims (Red Toryism occupies the same sort of self-help space as Compassionate Conservatism). And it’s received a hefty injection of support – enough to be recruiting for six new positionsoffering “competitive + bonus” salaries.

One of the roles it’s looking to fill is “head of the security and civil cohesion unit“. Wait, what? Why does “security” go with “civil cohesion”?

I know I’m approaching this from my standard fuzzy left position, but doesn’t “security” mean “people with guns and things that go bang”? And isn’t that a bit of an awkward fit with “community cohesion”, which seems to mean… Well, I don’t really know what it means. People rubbing along together, I guess. Municipal halls. That sort of thing.

Actually, I can have a pretty good guess at what it means in Blond-world.

There’s his insidious insistence that the “indigenous white working class” have been “marginalised and ignored” (by whom?); he has a “sense” that “racism is returning”, but he treats racism as a rational response to barely-defined social conditions, rather than a repellent attitude that ought to be publically thrashed.

Blond is not keen on difference. He writes about the “ruinous consequences of state sanctioned multi-culturalism and the lazy moral and social relativism of the liberal middle class” as though those ruinous consequences are absolute and their cause confirmed.

Whatever the ruinous consequences are, they were caused by multiculturalism, whatever that is. Clear? Good.

It’s that sort of floppy logic that makes sense of ResPublica’s decision to class civil cohesion with security issues.

Things were nicer, in Blond’s view, before the 1940s – and maybe it’s not a perfect coincidence that his British Eden pre-dates Windrush.

In Blond-world, security comes from sameness and pockets of otherness mean danger. And that, presumably, is why ResPublica puts “civil cohesion” under the same remit as spies, terror and invasions: because if you’re  not like Blond, then you’re against his nebulous, homogenous little idea of Britain.

[Note: article originally said "civil" not "civic" cohesion. Now changed.]

His late metamorphosis into the Tory party’s social conscience was one of the more endearing curiousities of the Conservatives’ wilderness years.

Sure, the assumptions from which IDS’s Centre For Social Justice worked were often numbingly traditionalist.

The think tank’s obsession with marrying the nation off, turning out endless papers on the presumed value of legally enshrined heterosexual coupledom, made it a bit of a meddling grandmother to the nation, constantly trying to nudge us all down the aisle.

But still, Compassionate Conservatism meant well. And who wants to be anti the anti-poverty think tank? Anyone who wanted to criticise the Centre’s work had to pass through a pretty invidious double negative to make their point.

Actually, that was part of its function. The mission statement says it was established “to seek effective solutions to the poverty that blight parts of Britain”. But it was also part of the reorientation of the Conservative party away from being the big bad benefit-slashing wolf of British politics, and into a more lovable Red Riding Hood guise (basket of goodies, keen on the extended family).

In a 2005 interview, IDS was disarmingly frank about the fact that his policy contributions were inspired by salesmanship as well as sympathy.

Asked about how the Tories could make themselves electable again, he explained that the party needed to “present a set of values which represent compassion”: “You need people to say, rather like they say about Labour, actually these are OK, they are decent people, their heart is in the right place.”

But while he was persuasive on the heart part of the argument, it was the head that caused IDS problems earlier this year – specifically, his flawed interpretation of one neuroscientist’s work on the developing brain. As the Guardian reported, IDS was caught extrapolating wildly from Dr Bruce Perry’s research on the brains of children who experienced extreme neglect.

Perry’s work found that infants who experienced profound sensory and emotional deprivation tended to have restricted brain development. Duncan Smith spoke about that finding as though it applied to a whole range of more minor deprivations, from witnessing abuse to growing up in the care of a mother who has several partners. And IDS posited brain size as an explanatory factor in poverty and crime.

Perry described Duncan Smith’s comments as an oversimplification and distortion of his research. It’s a depressingly lax attitude to evidence, but that can hardly seem surprising in a politician. What’s perhaps worse is that Duncan Smith is making a deterministic case for putting the poor and supposedly disruptive beyond help.

After all, the government can’t be expected to make people’s brains bigger. And people with small brains can’t be expected to make anything of their lives.

It’s a nonsensical perversion of the research, but very seductive to a party that had already committed to the Broken Britain lie – a pseudo-biological explanation for inequality that exonerates the well-off from responsibility.

In fact, it’s practically Victorian. As the cuts start to take effect – starting, it turns out, with some of the smallest and poorest – that workhouse comparison might not turn out to be as facetious as it sounded.

And so, when Ofsted releases a report criticising the provision of religious education in UK schools, traditionalist voices like the Telegraph are ready to jump all over it and blame “misplaced enthusiasm for multiculturalism” and the “ignorance” of teachers for the limited treatment of Christianity.

Ofsted’s report highlights several areas of genuine concern in the way Christianity is taught, and most educators would accept that a stunted understanding of religion will affect children’s ability to learn about (say) history and literature – studying the Renaissance or the Reformation without a rough grasp on Christian beliefs is pretty much going to be a bust.

That doesn’t mean the same as this claim from the Telegraph, though:

Our youngsters have no chance of understanding the history of Britain, or its fundamental values of equality, toleration, and freedom of conscience, unless they also understand where those values came from.

If it even makes sense to talk about instilling “freedom of conscience” through compulsory religious instruction, it’s patently excessive to ascribe all those liberal values to Christianity. Many Christians have done great work for social causes – but then, so have people of every other faith and no faith at all.

The problem for the Telegraph is that, if it wants Christianity to be taught like very other religion, then it has to accept that Christianity is like every other religion. Not an unchallenged part of the national life, and not an inevitable object of worship, but a system of belief that can be studied as an outside phenomenon.

While the right is presenting Ofsted’s report as another warning from the death of Western civilisation (snore), the report itself is arguing that agnostic and atheist arguments need to be better presented in schools.

And that’s not all: while the Telegraph is getting all hot for the “self-starting schools [that will] spring up as the state contracts”, Ofsted is clear that the problems with religious education could be down to too little centralised control.

“There is still very significant variability in the quantity and quality of support for RE provided to schools by local authorities and Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education,” states the report.

“A review is needed to determine whether the statutory arrangements for the local determination of the RE curriculum which underpin the subject should be revised or whether ways can be found to improve their effectiveness.”

The ill-fitted union of classical liberals and social conservatives that makes up the Tory party (and, by extension, the coalition) is going to founder on issues like this.

At the moment, both tendencies have reason to believe they can get what they want from education reforms (as well as the policy on academies and free schools, Gove has already said that he wants neocon historian Niall Fergusson to advise on the history curriculum). But the ideological tension between the desires for a small state and a homogenous culture suggests that they’ll soon find themselves in opposition to each other.

The Telegraph likes to promote the idea that Christians are under cultural siege. But the coalition’s contradictory impulses are going to ensure it’s the pupils who get thrown to the lions.

[photo by Paul Johnston, used under Creative Commons.. A longer version of this article is here. ]

She saw a social problem where she lived in LA, and she – with the time, money and inclination to do it – implemented her own solution. She even uses the language of entrepreneurship to describe the poor and desperate people she works with: they’re her “paid clients”.

And now, she’s bringing that solution to the UK, campaigning from the This Morning Sofa and the BBC’s Hard Talk.

The problem she identified is the birth of babies to drug-addicted parents. And the solution? Paying addicts to be sterilised.

Before her current UK tour, Harris claimed to have received 400 requests for her services and a $20,000 donation. That’s enough to pay about 65 women to get sterilised at the standard rate of $300 a time.

While Project Prevention doesn’t exclusively offer sterilisation – long-term, reversible contraceptive methods such as the coil, implants and injections are also supported – more than a third of her “clients” do take the tubal ligation option, according to Project Prevention’s own statistics.

In interviews Harris fequently describes herself as offering sterilisation. It’s fair to say that sterilisation is presented as the first choice for drug-addicted women. (And the “clients” mostly are women – fewer than 50 of Project Prevention’s “paid clients” had a vasectomy, which means that fewer that 2% of them are men.)

There are some pretty obvious ethical issues in offering drug addicts money for medical procedures. Harris has said (in an interview for Radio 4′s Taking A Stand) that that “in most cases” the money Project Prevention hands out goes to pay for more drugs.

Ultimately, Project Prevention’s money could be used to subsidise the drugs trade, supporting dealers and helping to create new addicts.

But Harris’ interest isn’t in the long-term outcomes for the women she works with or the areas they live in. There’s no subsequent monitoring programme and no requirement that addicts sign up for treatment – Project Prevention’s involvement with these women begins and ends with their fertility.

If they should later regret their sterilisation, Harris says “that’s no worse than if they got AIDS prostituting”, putting Project Prevention on the same level of responsibility as a virus.

At the bottom of this, Harris is responding to a genuine problem, even if she does exaggerate its severity. Babies born to drug-addicted mothers have a bad start of it.

If the pregnancy comes to term (drug or alcohol abuse both increase the risk of miscarriage), it’s more likely to result in a premature or early birth, low birth weight, infant mortality and other health problems. And then there are the social costs: children of the addicted are more likely to grow up in impoverished or disrupted conditions, and more likely to end up in care. It’s fair to say that drug addiction isn’t a great foundation for family.

Dr Petra Boynton, agony aunt and sex educator, acknowledges this, but says that Project Prevention’s approach isn’t the answer either: ”

Aside from their work being based on ideology rather than evidence (they’ve not published any research on the effectiveness of their approach for example), there is the issue of existing UK services.

We have got overstretched reproductive health services, but generally they are good and are currently seeking to improve their work. It seems odd that an organisation from outside the UK wants to parachute in and start their own approach which may run counter to what’s being attempted here.

After all, all the options offered by Project Prevention are available for free in the UK through the NHS. A better way for Harris to help addicts access contraception would be to help drug services and sex educators to work together – but then, that would take a much more sympathetic approach than Harris seems able to offer.

Harris says that she’s happy to accept donations from far right organisations, so long as the money can help her cause. Distasteful as that all might be, it isn’t the reason we should reject what she’s offering: Project Prevention should be turned back at the border because what it’s offering is short-sighted, liable to exacerbate the problem it’s supposed to solve, and most of all, it just isn’t needed.

But there probably aren’t very many people left with much affection for the Indy at all, because the brand seems to have specialised in weird and reputation-squandering reversals. Its Sunday version campaigns for the legalisation of cannabis, but then decides that skunk is actually a deadly menace.

It doesn’t support the Iraq war, but then recruits the Observer editor who put the made-up case for war on his front page.

Appropriately, Liddle was indirectly behind one of the other great journalistic screw-ups of the Iraq war – as editor of Today, he recruited Andrew Gilligan, who both found an internal source to blow the whistle on the exaggerations and bad intelligence in the “45 minutes” dossier, and then ruined the story’s credibility by mishandling his quotes and revealing his source.

But Liddle had left the Today programme the year before “sexed up” became a slogan, in 2002 – after a column he wrote for the Guardian was deemed to have shown unacceptable bias. (Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of news from 2001-4, hinted at the challenges of employing Liddle in a tweet, below)

Since leaving Today, Liddle has concentrated on obnoxious opinionising for the Times and the Spectator. And, in the same way his Guardian fox-hunting column relentlessly tracked the grossest prejudices of his presumed readers (toffs are loathsome because, well, they’re toffs), his later ones have offered racial determinism and climate-change denial to right-wing readers.

He has a talent for presenting exactly what he thinks his readers want to hear as though it’s a consensus-shaking blast of radicalism, and no facility for (or interest in) figures or facts.

If Alexander Lebedev gets the Independent, and if Liddle gets the job, it might be that Liddle’s crowd-pleasing reflexes will give Indy readers something to grab onto and stop them drifting away.

Or he may retain that reactionary edge, and the Indy could become a new middle-market tab – an aspirational answer to the Express. Both of which feel like things that journalism could do without.

————
Cross-posted to Paperhouse.

Around the end of 2008, Eady was the most unpopular judge on the circuit as far as newspapers were concerned. His rulings on privacy –  including extending indefinite protection from publicity to Maxine Carr, preventing the exposure of an adulterous sports star, and most famously awarding hefty damages to Max Mosley when he sued the News of the World for publishing details of a private S&M session – seemed to get lambasted every time a tabloid editor made a speech.

Judge Eady and Max Mosley

In a speech to the Society of Editors in November last year, Paul Dacre called Eady undemocratic, arrogant and amoral: according to the Mail editor, Eady was making no moral delineation […] between right and wrong “ and “allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds”.

Possibly more importantly, he was also “undermining the ability of mass-circulation newspapers to sell”. Rebekah Wade used her January Cudlipp lecture to accuse him of “[constraining] freedoms hard won over centuries”.

Some people (including me) were not awfully sorry to see the press getting a little curtailment on its powers of hounding. While Dacre and Wade presented themselves as valiant defenders of justice and propriety, the opposing points are pretty compelling. Private, consensual sexual activity can reasonably be expected to remain private: newspapers have got no business policing what goes in where.

And, despite the appeals to a sense of justice, press coverage routinely threatens to derail legal processes by prejudicing jurors before a trial can even begin.

In particular, the Guardian was low on sympathy for News International’s Eady-woes: the interview they ran with Max Mosley post-trial was criticised by Wade as “the epitome of self-flagellation” (no self-respecting journo would pass up an oo-er joke in the circumstances).

Then came the Simon Singh case.

Writing for the Graun’s CiF section, Singh stated that the British Chiropractic Association “happily promotes bogus treatments”. The BCA sued for libel, and Eady ruled against Singh. The phrase in question, noted the judge, constituted “the plainest allegation of dishonesty and indeed it accuses [the BCA] of thoroughly disreputable conduct.”

Regardless of the peer-reviewed evidence about efficacy, Eady found Singh’s comment libellous in what blogger Jack of Kent called an  “astonishingly illiberal ruling”.

Eady’s credit dipped low with bloggers, and lower still when he presided over the case which allowed the Times to out Night Jack.

There’s some obvious merit in the principle that blogging is a public activity with no reasonable expectation of privacy (even if it is strangely conflicted with a contemporaneous decision about privacy for judges guilty of misconduct). There are some important stories to tell behind internet anonymity. Just not in the case of Night Jack, who was apparently concealing nothing of substance apart from his name, and deleted his blog as a result of the publicity.

As far as several newspapers were concerned, this amounted to a victory for their freedom of speech, even as Night Jack’s was shattered: the Mail celebrated with a piece titled “Bloggers beware”. “The ruling is likely to have a knock-on effect for the thousands of other ‘bloggers’, who are now likely to be refused an injunction to stop newspapers from making their name public”, it added, ominously.

The Night Jack ruling looks like a departure from a series of decisions often characterised by a preference for privacy. But one way in which Eady’s judgements might be seen as consistent is in their restriction of scrutiny. Whether it’s scrutiny of private lives, scrutiny of scientific evidence, or scrutiny of frontline services by bloggers, all have become more difficult because of Eady’s decisions.

In an ideal world, privacy law and libel would never have come into these decisions. A robust Press Complaint Commission, for example, might be able to force all newspapers to look on the right to a private life as a default and demand that any breach of that right should fulfil the highest standards of public interest.

But while the PCC is what it is, Eady’s decisions have formed the best line of defence against intrusion, and newspapers are incentivised to go after only those who don’t have the means to sue.

Right now, that seems to include bloggers, and especially bloggers whose coverage challenges that offered by papers. If the kiss-and-tell is out, maybe the blog-and-tell is being lined up as a replacement.

The BNP is detestable, and it knows as much – which is why the party has been making exerted attempts to rebrand itself, dressing up racism as a culture war and claiming to stand up for the white man on the street against political correctness, immigration, and all those other half-lit monsters that loom from the national press.

There’s a commonly-made argument that the BNP thrive on being ostracised, that presenting them as bigots is playing into their hands. This is rubbish, of course.

What they want is for people to join them, vote for them and extend their power – and for that to happen, they need to be seen as an active political proposition comprised of people that voters can bear to be associated with. That’s why their current campaign for the European and council elections uses the slogan “People like you voting BNP” (even if the people do turn out to be stock images of white people rather than actual voters).

And that’s why every mention of the BNP in the media should be given the most severe editorial scrutiny. The normal rules of bodging through on “balance” rather than factual accuracy are hopelessly exposed when it comes to coverage of extremist politics. Operate an editorial policy that allows BNP supporters to expound their beliefs on the radio, and broadcasting a few opposing points of view won’t be enough to protect you from the charge of inciting racial hatred.

Or, in the case of my local paper (the Bath Chronicle) publishing a soft ‘family’ story about a mother, father and son all standing for the BNP which uses BNP language as part of the editorial (uncritically referring to “white ethnic indigenous British people”) doesn’t become journalism because the last paragraph states that the BNP “has long been criticised” without outlining any of the things they’ve been criticised for.

No other candidate in the region has been given the same extensive and flattering coverage as the BNP got in the family story, because no other candidate combines the shock-quality of the BNP with the cosy angle of the three united generations. And while it’s all very well to say that the BNP should be allowed to damn itself out of its own mouth, in this case the words were presented as the newspaper’s own: by omitting the quote marks, the Chron inadvertently put its own voice behind the BNP’s racial interpretation of Britishness.

Not a great example of the local press as a democratic force, really. (Much better was the Bath Chronicle’s attendance at and reporting on a local hustings meeting featuring a BNP candidate.)

In fact, none of the faults with the story originated with the Chron. The copy and the picture originally appeared as a feature in a sister paper, the Western Daily Press (complete with that hateful little unattributed phrase, “white ethnic indigenous British people”) and was picked up as shared copy. The BNP candidate profiled was so satisfied with the piece, he blogged about looking forward to it appearing on the wire services – the Western Daily Press had supplied a piece so soft, the BNP were viewing it in the light of a press release.

This is churnalism at work. The BNP’s claims about ethnicity slipped into the editorial unchecked and unopposed, and were then dispersed among the other Daily Mail And General Trust journals in the area.

This isn’t evidence of racist sympathies within the newspapers, but it is evidence of reporting so damaged that it allows the impression of racist sympathies to appear on the page, which allows latent racists to feel justified in their unjustifiable views. Reporting on extremists is necessary – but reporting means making judgements as well as accurately repeating what other people say.

Churnalism about the BNP is about the most depressingly dangerous error a reporter can get into.