'Fairness' As A Policy Basis.

Reading through some policy development discourse and statements it seems that ‘fairness’ has become a basis for all kinds of decisions, from what used to be equality of outcome to political party sloganeering.

“This may be true of professional public discourse, which has a way of sucking the life out of potent words, but I don’t think it’s true of the way that ordinary voters understand the concept. 

Fundamentally, fairness is about the desire for a moral order.”

Whose morality? Yours? Mine?

We know that until very recently a majority of people in the UK said they wanted a return to the death penalty: the most recent poll in 2015 suggested that 48% of British people were still in favour and a year on I’d put 50p on that figure being significantly above 50% today. Morality is incredibly fluid, across time and geography.

Why did ‘Equal Opportunity’ become ‘Equality of Opportunity’ which in turn became ‘Equality of Outcome’? Why has ‘fairness’  - so much less measurable, less defined, less meaningful - become the mot juste?

Cui Bono?

Here’s a good article on the subject, which recognises three definitions of ‘fairness’.

Fairness as Equality

Fairness as Equity

Fairness as Need

In summation it draws our attention to the essential condition of this discussion, the same condition in every human situation: power.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘”The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

When you cry down the phone I feel like crying too

A DWP member of staff writes about how stressful it is to speak with vulnerable people in crisis.

 "I have a script I read from, over and over again, the same for every customer. Some of the questions are opaque at best: “has your doctor told you that special rules apply to your condition?” is one which flummoxed the woman this morning who has cancer; the script specifies that I should not offer an explanation of the term unless I’m asked. She did ask, so I read the follow-up line “special rules means your doctor has told you that your condition has a life expectancy of less than six months.” No, she said, not yet, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief that I wouldn’t need to ask another series of questions about this, pushing the call-handling time up further."

Tackling poverty and mental health – what we know and what we can do

 The UK is the world’s sixth largest economy, yet today 13 million (that’s 1 in 5 people) are living here in poverty. Given the daily struggle that people living in poverty experience life to be, it is perhaps not surprising that this review found that poverty increases the risk of mental health problems and is both a cause and consequence of mental ill health.

The 2015 Monitoring poverty and social exclusion report found that within the lowest socio-economic class, 26% of women and 23% of men were at a high risk of mental health problems. It is clear that there is much that we can do to prevent both mental health problems and poverty by tackling the root causes of both and by mitigating their impacts on individuals, families and communities. 

Iris Elliot 

Head of Policy and Research at the Mental Health Foundation. 

How many therapists working with the DWP will read this report?

How many counselling training establishments, whose students will practice on clients who are too poor to be able to choose private therapy, will read this report?

How many agencies who use counselling students to service the needs of their client base will read the report?

The Meaning of Money

Stephen Hawking writes about our attitude to wealth. 

I don’t know what I would do with a racehorse, or indeed a Ferrari, even if I could afford one. So I have come to see money as a facilitator, as a means to an end – whether it is for ideas, or health, or security – but never as an end in itself. 

We hear about Sir Philip Green whose Knighthood is supposed to be under some or other scrutiny because of his involvement in destroying BHS, though he's done nothing illegal.  He owns how many yachts? 5? 27? 3? At £100million a pop it's all a bit academic.

One. Hundred. Million. Pounds. Spent on one yacht. Just let that settle into your mind for a moment.

---

On one occasion while in Switzerland early on in my career, I developed pneumonia, and my college at Cambridge, Gonville and Caius, arranged to have me flown back to the UK for treatment. Without their money I might not have survived to do all the thinking that I’ve managed since then. Cash can set individuals free, just as poverty can certainly trap them and limit their potential, to their own detriment and that of the human race.

Money is like fire, intrinsically neither good nor bad, just a tool. It can save one persons life. It can manifest yet another yacht for someone who wants more than one yacht.

Money has always signified a persons worth; people who don't have much are considered individually, personally much less valuable than individual people who do, and the more money one has the more valuable one is. We know that happiness is linked to money but there remains a myth of "We Woz Pore But We Woz Happy" Cui bono? What does this myth serve?

There's some research to show that having above £56.5k only makes you happier if you're investing in other people's happiness. And an Office of National Statistics study suggests that the richer we become the happier we are, but this article proposes more nuance.


What the people here who became rich overnight are saying is that they feel isolated and their lives have lost meaning.

which is perhaps why so many lottery winners return to work.

The Meaning of Money

Stephen Hawking writes about our attitude to wealth. 

I don’t know what I would do with a racehorse, or indeed a Ferrari, even if I could afford one. So I have come to see money as a facilitator, as a means to an end – whether it is for ideas, or health, or security – but never as an end in itself. 

We hear about Sir Philip Green whose Knighthood is supposed to be under some or other scrutiny because of his involvement in destroying BHS, though he's done nothing illegal.  He owns how many yachts? 5? 27? 3? At £100million a pop it's all a bit academic.

One. Hundred. Million. Pounds. Spent on one yacht. Just let that settle into your mind for a moment.

---

On one occasion while in Switzerland early on in my career, I developed pneumonia, and my college at Cambridge, Gonville and Caius, arranged to have me flown back to the UK for treatment. Without their money I might not have survived to do all the thinking that I’ve managed since then. Cash can set individuals free, just as poverty can certainly trap them and limit their potential, to their own detriment and that of the human race.

Money is like fire, intrinsically neither good nor bad, just a tool. It can save one persons life. It can manifest yet another yacht for someone who wants more than one yacht.

Money has always signified a persons worth; people who don't have much are considered individually, personally much less valuable than individual people who do, and the more money one has the more valuable one is. We know that happiness is linked to money but there remains a myth of "We Woz Pore But We Woz Happy" Cui bono? What does this myth serve?

There's some research to show that having above £56.5k only makes you happier if you're investing in other people's happiness. And an Office of National Statistics study suggests that the richer we become the happier we are, but this article proposes more nuance.


What the people here who became rich overnight are saying is that they feel isolated and their lives have lost meaning.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/notch-net-worth-isolation-twitter-outburst

which is perhaps why so many lottery winners return to work.

Why Counsellors Need To Understand Economics.

Again and again I find myself having to start at the very beginning when it comes to explaining why we are where we are. Counselling is part of the everyday world, not something apart from it. We are subject to exactly the same forces, fashions and mindsets as everyone else.

It used to be that only rich ladies had the time, money and enough people telling them they were neurotic (poor women were just plain mad) to seek analysis. Over time therapy became more widespread but the rich were treated entirely differently from the poor. Officers in the First World War had "neurasthenia" while ordinary soldiers were often diagnosed with the "women's disease" of hysterics. Mentally ill poor people were punished and many (though by no means all) mentally ill rich people went on holiday for their 'nerves.' Still today, we see poor people under entirely ideological stress being punished for being stressed while when rich people who produce nothing and pay fewer taxes than poor people behave strangely are 'eccentric'.

Counselling buys into this. 

We treat the client as an individual. The concept of an individual is by no means universal and it is central to therapy:

"The right of the individual to freedom and self-realization"  

 is a socialist concept. (Developed because workers were treated in the same way as tools or machine parts and as a troublesome mass that should be starved to death for their own good.)

"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values." 

is a quote from Ayn Rand, and indeed many of her most famous quotes might come from a counselling theorist. Read through a selection here. Really DO THIS before you stick an Ayn Rand motivational poster on your site, as any number of counsellors have done because they don't know who Ayn Rand was!

We blindly accept that 'The Market' rules our lives and the lives of our clients. If you accept that ethics are not applicable when you or your counselling agency are seeking funding then of course the market is in charge. Because you are allowing it to be. It's like standing in front of a lorry and blaming the lorry for running you over, because you can't possibly be expected to move.

Anyway, rather than write a thesis here, please take 10 minutes to watch this video from Ha-Joon Chang from the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge. 

Economics is not a natural law like the sun coming up or winter. We have choices. Who is benefiting from you believing  you have no choice?

Brexit Exposes Profound Political Naivety

As you can imagine, many of our clients have been disturbed by the political chaos we're all immersed in. As ever, counsellors have been more or less silent on the matter and where there has been very limited discussion the ability to address politics has quickly degenerated into name calling and brutal judgements. To respect professional identities I won't link to those discussion but if you search for something like 'Brexit counselling', and plough your way through counsellors telling clients how to manage their feelings, you might come across one or two short threads.

Like the rest of the nation counsellors as a population tend to be naive at best about politics, at worst absolutely uncomplicated in their opinions. This is a bad failing. Politics is woven into our day to day experience from the way we speak to our life expectancy, we are so immersed in it that we do not even recognise it. When it comes to politics most of us live in an echo chamber: we talk with people who agree with us, dismiss those who don't and don't seek to hear and try out values and opinions that differ from ours, which further distorts our belief that we are right and everyone else is stupid.

Jeremy Corbyn and the Press from Chris Lincé on Vimeo.

This vimeo demonstrates research to show that

Corbyn was thoroughly delegitimised as a political actor from the moment he became a prominent candidate and even more so after he was elected as party leader, with a strong mandate. This process of delegitimisation occurred in several ways: 1) through lack of or distortion of voice; 2) through ridicule, scorn and personal attacks; and 3) through association, mainly with terrorism.
All this raises, in our view, a number of pressing ethical questions regarding the role of the media in a democracy.

You can read the whole report here.

The research is done by the LSE.

Has part of you thought, "The LSE has a left wing bias"?

If it has, then you are likely to have experienced cognitive distortion.

If it hasn't and you are based in the UK then you have just become aware of political naivety.