Standard of Living

The standard of living in the UK is something that has risen almost imperceptibly over the decades. It takes somebody who has spent a great many years on the planet, with a good recall of the past, to illustrate how what we regard as every day essentials used to be regarded as impossibly luxuriant dream goods.

Historian and writer William Woodruff wrote of his upbringing in the Blackburn of 1916 in his book The Road to Nab End. In what sounds today like a Pythonesque parody of northern poverty, Woodruff relates about people being woken at 5am, to walk to the mill in their clogs six days a week. Home consisted of a two-up-two-down house with a slate floor dusted with sand downstairs, and a boarded floor upstairs you could see through the gaps of and hear a conversation downstairs as if you were in the room. Woodruff and his brother shared a bed with their parents, and his two sisters shared a bed in the other room. During the depression of the 1920s they went without coal over winter for weeks, and without even stale bread to eat for days at a time.

You tell that to kids nowadays and they don't believe you, etc. etc.....

If you think that's extreme or far fetched, here's some government statistics that back up that what we used to consider an every day necessity sounds today like something out of the ark. And likewise, what we consider necessity today seems like a ridiculously flimsy nice-to-have by comparison.

The government has been measuring inflation using something called the Retail Price Index (RPI) since the 1950s. To do this they defined a shopping basket of 700 common consumer items of the day that they could measure the cost of over time to see whether the cost of living was going up or down. Conveniently, this also shows how our attitudes to what is a 'common consumer item' change over time.

In the 1950s, we regarded a mangle, some candles and some frozen cod as standard consumer items. By the 1970s that basket included Smash mashed potato, cassette recorders and duvets. By the 2000s we regarded MP3 players, mobile phones and fruit smoothies as being equivalent consumer items!

Source: BBC News in 2009

By the RPI basket of 2015 we have added on-line games console subscriptions, e-cigarettes and a streaming music subscription to our basket of essential items.

You tell that to kids in Blackburn in 1916 and they don't believe you, etc. etc.....

Source: The ONS 2015

Health & Safety NOT Going Mad

Contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, health and safety is not going mad. It's one of the most ridiculous areas of self perpetuating mythology in the modern tabloid press, alongside its supposedly ever maddening little brother political correctness.

The mythology is so strong that the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) was motivated to keep a log of health and safety myths that had been reported as fact on numerous occasions by newspapers that really should know better if they weren't busy pedalling an agenda and unwilling to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

We've all heard the myths, everything from children being banned from playing conkers, office workers banned from putting up Christmas decorations, pin the tail on the donkey being banned, candy floss on a stick being outlawed, pantomime dames being banned from throwing sweets, pancake races being banned, adults being banned from putting plasters on kids etc. All of which totally untrue, but if the Daily Express and Daily Mail hadn't printed an of them they'd be reduced to a single sheet of A5 on most days.

Aberfan coal tip collapses onto a primary school in 1966 (Source: here)

Let's rewind a bit to understand why the concept of health and safety even came about. Following the industrial revolution, the rural poor got sucked into urban industrial jobs to escape the ever repeating cycle of famines and bad harvests for the promise of a captive source of income. The urban poor wasn't educated or particularly mobile, and so had to settle for whatever work was available to feed their families. At the time there was practically no legislation on workplace safety or public safety, meaning that unimaginably dangerous situations were allowed to exist at work and in public places causing deaths, often in hundreds at a time in a way that would be unthinkable today. In some cases, incredible lapses in basic safety were causing deaths in their hundreds well into recent years.

There were pit disasters with hundreds of deaths at a time, outbreaks of cholera due to appalling public sanitation, ships sinking without enough lifeboats for the number of people on board, gas explosions killing hundreds, mining waste piled high collapsing onto a school, there were fires in wooden stands and crushes in unsuitable stands at football matches, ferries that sank having set sail with their car doors open, tube station fires under rubbish filled escalators, fires in badly designed buildings made from flammable plastic, and so-on, all of which were preventable, and which caused from under a hundred to over a thousand deaths each.

Kids in mines with no safety gear (Source: socialstudieshelp.com)

Many famous buildings were built with an alarmingly high cost of human life to those workers building them. It is estimated that 30,000 people died building the Panama Canal and 500 died building Egypt's Aswan Dam, around a hundred workers died building the Hoover Dam and five workers died constructing the Empire State Building. Without some basic health and safety legislation in place, workers would still be dying in droves today, just like the estimated 900 construction deaths involved in building Quatar's World Cup venues. In the UK in 2013/2014 there were just two deaths per 100,000 workers, by contrast.

In many cases there was little or no legislation compelling companies to make sure their business wasn't profiting at the expense of hazard of death to the general public, The Health & Safety legislation that does now exist to deal with some of these glaring issues was brought in to deal with things like chemical hazards, the sale of dangerous goods, the use of things like lead and asbestos in construction, issuing of safety equipment to workers in dangerous conditions, and so on. You'll notice that there's precious little in there about conkers, Christmas decorations and pin the tail on the donkey.

The following HSE graph shows the decline in workplace deaths since 1974 from over 600 to fewer than 200 by 2014, as a direct result of better workplace safety. One can only imagine what the equivalent fatality figures were for Victorian times, where kids and adults alike worked dangerously long hours in dark, cramped conditions with heavy machinery and no safety gear:

Source: HSE stats on Workplace Deaths 1974 - 2014

If you want to point the finger at why some individual schools and business have chosen to put up a notice forbidding something relatively trivial on their premises, then look no further at the rise in litigious culture whereby parents will sue a business and seek compensation for an accident that befell their little Johnny. And that's the fault of societal greed and no-win-no-fee legal firms, not some left wing Health & Safety Gone Mad epidemic.

Improving Representativeness in Westminster - 2015 Election Update

Only a month ago, I covered the 'Improving Representativeness in Westminster'; a story of a continuing shift from a parliament once dominated exclusively by white, male, land-owning aristocracy to something which matches the demographics of the country a bit more closely. Since then, we've had a general election, and the situation has improved again.

For example, as the BBC reported, the number of female MPs has risen by a third, from 147 to 191 (out of a total 650 MPs). That's now at about 30% of MPs, as opposed to about 23% before the election. A handy graph shows how that number has increased slowly over time:

Source: BBC News

Similarly, The Guardian reported the rise of female MPs alongside the rising number of ethnic minority MPs. In the 2010 election there were 27 non-white MPs (4.2% of the total 650 MPs), rising to 42 in 2015 (6.6% of the total 650 MPs) where the current non-white demographic of the the UK is about 13%. Again, a handy graph shows how this trend is improving over time, now at over ten times the number of non-white MPs there were in 1987:

Source: The Guardian

Also, new Conservative MP Alan Mak, who is of Chinese-Malaysian background, is now the first MP of Chinese descent.

Also covered in the Guardian article, the number of privately educated MPs is dropping slowly too. In 2010 the percentage of privately educated Tory MPs was 54%, dropping to 40% in 2015. Likewise, in 2010 the percentage of privately educated Labour MPs was 14%, dropping to 11% in 2015.

The average age of MPs has hovered at around the 50 mark since 1979, but in this election the youngest MP since 1667 was elected in the shape of the SNP's 20-year-old Mhairi Black.

In terms of extremist parties getting seats, much was made of the fact that the predicted UKIP surge didn't materialise, where they actually lost one of the two seats they'd won in by-elections since 2010. But this doesn't mean that other right wing parties have prospered either, as the BNP won just 1,667 votes, which is 0.3% of the 563,743 votes they won in 2010. As the BBC points out, this election even the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol Party won 8,419 votes, while the Monster Raving Loony Party reached 3,898 votes!

In terms of general public voting, this election was the highest voter turnout this century. where 66.1% of eligible voters registered their vote (up from 65.1% in 2010, 61.4% in 2005 and 59.4% in 2001). Also, the number of 18-to-25-year-olds who voted was 58%, up from 52% in 2010 and 38% in 2005. In Scotland, the turnout was 71.1%, which is up from 63.8% in 2010.

Again, there's a lot of positive trends there, but true representativeness is by no means a done deal quite yet.

Discovery of Extra-Solar Planets Has Rocketed

Extra-solar plantes, or "exoplanets", are planets that orbit stars other than our own. Finding exoplanets is important if the human race is ever to succeed in finding life elsewhere in the universe, or indeed settle on another planet.

The discipline of exoplanatology is the attempt to observe such planets in their orbits around distant stars, which is no mean feat given that even the nearest star is 4.24 light years away!

Three Exoplanets imaged by the Hale telescope (Source: Wikipedia)

Whilst exoplanets have been rumoured to exist since the 16th century, it was not until 1988 that the first one was discovered. The problem being that at that distance planets are so tiny as to be invisible even to the Hubble Space telescope directly, and their existence has to be inferred by measuring things like the tiny gravitational wobble they impart on their star or a  minuscule dimming of their star as they pass in front of it.

Even then, scientists were cautious in concluding that a planet had been detected. It wasn't until 1992 that two more were observed orbiting a pulsar, and observed with such a degree of certainty that their discovery was regarded as definitive.

Since then a variety of techniques have been used, including direct imaging, radial velocity, transit and gravitational lensing. And the number of exoplanets spotted has rocketed, if you'll excuse the pun, and in 2014 there were 800 exoplanet discoveries:

Source: The Smithsonian

And this is a field that can only continue to grow, particularly since the James Webb Space Telescope, which is 100 times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, is due to be launched in 2018:

James Webb Space Telescope versus Hubble (Source: Wikipedia)