2013-05-28

Exploring the relevance of Townsend’s ideas in the 21st century. Key points Abbreviated/picked over by Mark Aldiss


Exploring the relevance of Townsend’s ideas in the 21st century. Key points

Abbreviated/picked over by Mark Aldiss

About the study
The research is mainly based on analysis of the first wave of the ESRC Understanding Society
household panel survey. The data relate to almost 100,000 individuals in nearly 40,000 households that are representative of the UK population. The interviews were conducted in 2009 and 2010.
The analysis of children’s participation utilises the separate Millennium Cohort Study; interviews were conducted with children and their parents or carers when the 19,000 sampled children were aged 8 in 2008. The findings are based on analysis using modern statistical tools.

Poverty, participation and choice



  • • Participation in society can be measured in terms of social relationships, membership of organisations, trust in other people, ownership of possessions and purchase of services. All are lower among people with low incomes.

  • • However, while participation generally drops as income declines, participation stops falling among the 30 per cent or so of people with the lowest incomes creating a participation ‘floor’; among this group, those with higher incomes do not have measurably increased living standards, greater social participation or higher levels of trust.

  • • The 30 per cent of people with the lowest incomes are also forced to choose between the basic necessities of modern life; they must decide which needs to neglect.

  • • For people affected by the floor, additional income may well be spent on upgrading the quality of necessary goods and services rather than adding to them.

  • • Averages mask important variation. The participation floor for benefit recipients is lower than for other groups on the same income.

  • • Most minority ethnic groups experience greater material deprivation than the white majority but social participation is, on average, higher.

  • • Children’s engagement in school life and friends is not directly affected by household income.

  • • However, parents on low incomes, on average, play less often with their children and spend less on activities. This is associated with poorer educational outcomes as judged by teachers.

  • • Low income parents frequently spend more time than affluent ones assisting children with their school work because they have fallen behind their classmates.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
This summary is part of JRF’s research and development programme. The views are those of the authors and not necessarily those 
of the JRF.

This is a summary of a larger report Poverty, Participation and Choice: The Legacy of Peter Townsend by Emanuele Ferragina, 
Mark Tomlinson and Robert Walker published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Read more summaries at www.jrf.org.uk
Other formats available
ISSN 0958–3084

Joseph Rowntree Foundation
The Homestead
40 Water End
York YO30 6WP
Tel: 01904 615905

email: publications@jrf.org.uk

2013-05-01

Pirates take a chunk of Iceland

REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Iceland, a nation of seafarers, has been stormed by pirates.

They won't be forming the government, but online freedom advocates the Pirate Party were still big winners in the country's election.

The party, just a few months old, took 5.1 percent of the vote in Saturday's poll, gaining three of the 63 seats in Iceland's parliament, the Althingi.

It is the biggest electoral trophy yet for a movement founded seven years ago in Sweden by a group of rebellious file-sharing geeks and hackers who scoffed at copyright laws.

Now, its Icelandic leader says, the party is "the political arm of the information revolution," dedicated to freedom of expression and political transparency, online and off.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, the most senior of Iceland's three victorious Pirate lawmakers, argues that political and legal structures around the world have not kept pace with the technological change that has transformed the way we live. She compares it to new software that can't run on an old computer.

"We feel that most people, not only in Iceland but all over the world, feel that the institutions that are set up no longer function for us," she said.

"We need to create a new mainframe, a new hardware for this stuff."

The Pirate Party was founded in Sweden in 2006, its name a taunt to the anti-piracy activities of copyright-holders, its logo a buccaneering black flag.

It has spread to countries including the United States, but has had its greatest electoral success in northern Europe.

Sweden has elected two Pirate members to the European Parliament, and last year a Pirate candidate was elected to the Czech Republic's upper house, the Senate. There are several dozen Pirate deputies at state level in Germany, and the party could gain national seats there in September's election.

The Icelandic party was founded late last year, but the volcanic North Atlantic nation - population 320,000 - has a long history as a bastion of technological and political experimentation. Physically isolated near the Arctic Circle, it is one of the world's most wired countries and has been a hub for the online secret-spilling group WikiLeaks. Jonsdottir has worked with WikiLeaks in the past.

In 2011 the country announced it would crowd-source a new constitution, allowing Icelanders through Facebook and other online platforms to submit ideas directly to, and debate with, an elected committee set up to draft the new document.

For some Icelanders, the Pirates made an appealing party of protest. Five years after its debt-swollen banks collapsed during the global credit crisis, the country still faces high inflation, capital controls and a deflated currency, while many Icelanders are still struggling to pay off mortgage debts made bigger by the crisis.

The main contenders in Saturday's election were the center-right parties that led Iceland into the crash and the left-wing coalition that has been implementing painful austerity measures ever since.

"The Pirates have a cool factor," said travel agent Hilmar Einarsson. "They are not typical politicians, but represent ordinary Icelanders. We want our country back, and they understand that more than any other party here in Iceland."

Others found the party's success mystifying.

"It was primarily a shock because their extreme view is considered by most (as) only appealing to punks still stuck in the '80s," said entertainment consultant Daddi Gudbergsson.

Welcome Page | DIRHA

Welcome to the DIRHA EU project!  The DIRHA project addresses the development of voice-enabled automated home environments based on distant-speech interaction in different languages. A distributed microphone network is installed in the rooms of a house in order to monitor selectively acoustic and speech activities observable inside any space, and to eventually run a spoken dialogue session with a given user in order to implement a service or to have access to appliances and other devices. The multi-microphone front-end is based on the use of arrays consisting of analog microphones or Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) digital microphones. The targeted system analyses the given multi-space acoustic scene in a coherent way, by processing in a parallelized fashion simultaneous activities which occur in different rooms, and in case by supporting at the same time the interaction with users who may speak in different areas of the house. These very challenging objectives require advances in different scientific and technical fields. In fact, based on the given network of microphone arrays, multi-microphone front-end processing includes, among the others, tasks as speaker localizati

John Pilger on Margaret Thatcher – “he reminds us there has been a coup in Britain” by The Stringer April 28th, 2013

John Pilger is one of the world’s most prominent journalists, an author, a filmmaker with a litany of documentaries and someone whose fortitude has made a difference to the public record and the public interest.

“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it,” said John Pilger.

In 1979, John Pilger, filmmaker David Munro and photographer Eric Piper entered Cambodia in the wake of the push of the Pol Pot regime out of the capital and into the western border jungles. They brought out a number of world exclusives. The first exclusive took up most of the UK’s Daily Mirror, which sold out. Pilger, Munro and Piper produced an ITV documentary, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, which took the genocide in Cambodia to the living rooms of Britain, then Western Europe and then the rest of the world. 

The witness of the suffering of the Cambodian (Khmer) people led many within the British public to donate some $45 million. This was unsolicited - Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia had touched the hearts and souls and the consciousness of the people. 

These financial donations funded the first substantial relief to Cambodia, including life saving antibiotics such as penicillin. 

Pilger and Munro would make a further four films about Cambodia. During the filming of Cambodia Year One the Khmer Rouge had put John Pilger on a ‘death list.’

John Pilger himself described the British reaction to Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia (New Statesman, September 11, 2006):

“Year Zero not only revealed the horror of the Pol Pot years, it showed how Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s secret bombing of that country had provided a critical catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. It also exposed how the West, led by the United States and Britain, was imposing an embargo, like a medieval siege, on the most stricken country on earth. This was a reaction to the fact that Cambodia’s liberator was Vietnam – a country that had come from the side of the Cold War and that had recently defeated the US. Cambodia’s suffering was a wilful revenge. Britain and the US even backed Pol Pot’s demand that his man continue to occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN, while Margaret Thatcher stopped children’s milk going to the survivors of his nightmare regime. Little of this was reported. Had Year Zero simply described the monster that Pol Pot was, it would have been quickly forgotten. By reporting the collusion of ‘our’ governments, it told a wider truth about how the world was run… Within two days of Year Zero going to air, 40 sacks of post arrived at ATV… in Birmingham – 26,000 first-class letters in the first post alone. The station quickly amassed one million (British) pounds, almost all of it in small amounts. ‘This is for Cambodia,’ wrote a Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week’s wage. Entire pensions were sent, along with entire savings. Petitions arrived at Downing Street, one after the other, for weeks MPs received hundreds of thousands of letters, demanding that British policy change (which did, eventually). And none of it was asked for… I learned that a documentary could reclaim shared historical and political memories, and present their hidden truths. The reward then was a compassionate and informed public, and it still is.”

Margaret Thatcher - Photo, telegraph.co.uk

Margaret Thatcher – Photo, telegraph.co.uk

 By John Pilger     -  In the wake of Thatcher’s departure, I remember her victims. Patrick Warby’s daughter, Marie, was one of them. Marie, aged five, suffered from a bowel deformity and needed a special diet. Without it, the pain was excruciating. Her father was a Durham miner and had used all his savings. It was winter 1985, the Great Strike was almost a year old and the family was destitute. Although her eligibility was not disputed, Marie was denied help by the Department of Social Security. Later, I obtained records of the case that showed Marie had been turned down because her father was “affected by a Trade dispute”.  

The corruption and inhumanity under Thatcher knew no borders. When she came to power in 1979, Thatcher demanded a total ban on exports of milk to Vietnam. The American invasion had left a third of Vietnamese children malnourished. I witnessed many distressing sights, including infants going blind from a lack of vitamins. “I cannot tolerate this,” said an anguished doctor in a Saigon paediatric hospital, as we looked at a dying boy. Oxfam and Save the Children had made clear to the British government the gravity of the emergency. An embargo led by the US had forced up the local price of a kilo of milk up to ten times that of a kilo of meat. Many children could have been restored with milk. Thatcher’s ban held. 

In neighbouring Cambodia, Thatcher left a trail of blood, secretly. In 1980, she demanded that the defunct Pol Pot regime – the killers of 1.7 million people – retain its “right” to represent their victims at the UN. Her policy was vengeance on Cambodia’s liberator, Vietnam. The British representative was instructed to vote with Pol Pot at the World Health Organisation, thereby preventing it from providing help to where it was needed more than anywhere on earth. 

To conceal this outrage, the US, Britain and China, Pol Pot’s main backer, invented a “resistance coalition” dominated by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces and supplied by the CIA at bases along the Thai border. There was a hitch. In the wake of the Irangate arms-for-hostages debacle, the US Congress had banned clandestine foreign adventures. “In one of those deals the two of them liked to make,” a senior Whitehall official told the Sunday Telegraph, “President Reagan put it to Thatcher that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show. She readily agreed.” 

In 1983, Thatcher sent the SAS to train the “coalition” in its own distinctive brand of terrorism. Seven-man SAS teams arrived from Hong Kong, and British soldiers set about training “resistance fighters” in laying minefields in a country devastated by genocide and the world’s highest rate of death and injury as a result of landmines. 

I reported this at the time, and more than 16,000 people wrote to Thatcher in protest. “I confirm,” she replied to opposition leader Neil Kinnock, “that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge or those allied to them.” The lie was breathtaking. In 1991, the government of John Major admitted to parliament that the SAS had indeed trained the “coalition”.  “We liked the British,” a Khmer Rouge fighter later told me. “They were very good at teaching us to set booby traps. Unsuspecting people, like children in paddy fields, were the main victims.”

When the journalists and producers of ITV’s landmark documentary, Death on the Rock, exposed how the SAS had run Thatcher’s other death squads in Ireland and Gibraltar, they were hounded by Rupert Murdoch’s “journalists”, then cowering behind the razor wire at Wapping. Although exonerated, Thames TV lost its ITV franchise.

In 1982, the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, was steaming outside the Falklands exclusion zone. The ship offered no threat, yet Thatcher gave orders for it to be sunk. Her victims were 323 sailors, including conscripted teenagers. The crime had a certain logic. Among Thatcher’s closest allies were mass murderers – Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, responsible for “many more than one million deaths” (Amnesty International). Although the British state had long armed the world’s leading tyrannies, it was Thatcher who brought a crusading zeal to the deals, talking up the finer points of fighter aircraft engines, hard-bargaining with bribe-demanding Saudi princes. I filmed her at an arms fair, stroking a gleaming missile. “I’ll have one of those!” she said.

In his arms-to-Iraq enquiry, Lord Richard Scott heard evidence that an entire tier of the Thatcher government, from senior civil servants to ministers, had lied and broken the law in selling weapons to Saddam Hussein. These were her “boys”. Thumb through old copies of the Baghdad Observer, and there are pictures of her boys, mostly cabinet ministers, on the front page sitting with Saddam on his famous white couch. There is Douglas Hurd and there is a grinning David Mellor, also of the Foreign Office, around the time his host was ordering the gassing of 5,000 Kurds. Following this atrocity, the Thatcher government doubled trade credits to Saddam.

Perhaps it is too easy to dance on her grave. Her funeral was a propaganda stunt, fit for a dictator: an absurd show of militarism, as if a coup had taken place. And it has. “Her real triumph”, said another of her boys, Geoffrey Howe, a Thatcher minister, “was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.”  

In 1997, Thatcher was the first former prime minister to visit Tony Blair after he entered Downing Street. There is a photo of them, joined in rictus: the budding war criminal with his mentor. When Ed Milliband, in his unctuous “tribute”, caricatured Thatcher as a “brave” feminist hero whose achievements he personally “honoured”, you knew the old killer had not died at all.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in the New Statesman

India’s population is now 1.21 billion New Delhi, Apr 30: 1-May-2013 / 01:38 AM

India’s population is now 1.21 billion

New Delhi, Apr 30: India’s total population stands at 1.21 billion, which is 17.7 per cent more than the last decade, and growth of females was higher than that of males.

According to the final census released by Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde today, India’s total population as on March 1, 2011 is 1,210,726,932 or 1.21 billion — an increase of 181.96 million persons in absolute number of population during 2001-11.

There was an increase of 90.97 million males and increase of 90.99 million females.

The growth rate of females was 18.3 per cent which is higher than males — 17.1 per cent.

India’s population grew by 17.7 per cent during 2001-11, against 21.5 per cent in the previous decade. Among the major states, highest decadal growth in population has been recorded in Bihar (25.4 per cent) while 14 states and Union Territories have recorded population growth above 20 per cent.

Altogether, 833.5 million persons live in rural areas as per Census 2011, which was more than two-third of the total population, while 377.1 million persons live in urban areas.

1-May-2013 / 01:38 AM / Agencies / 0 Comments

2 months time set for biometrics enrolment Source: The Sangai Express

2 months time set for biometrics enrolment
Source: The Sangai Express

Imphal, April 30 2013: A high level official meeting presided by Chief Minister O Ibobi today decided to complete the work of biometrics enrolment within two months which would be taken up under the National Population Register.

The meeting was convened following strong instructions from the Centre regarding the biometrics enrolment programme.

The meeting was attended by Deputy Chief Minister, Ministers, Chief Secretary, Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Census Director, Deputy Commissioners and officials of MANITRON and In-Media, an agency.

Speaking to media persons after the meeting, Government spokesman M Okendro stated that the meeting decided to complete the biometrics enrolment work by June 30 .

To ensure that biometrics enrolment work is completed within the said deadline, Ministers, MLAs and public representatives would cooperate fully with the officials concerned.

After collecting biometrics data such as iris image, fingerprints and photographs, each and every citizen would be given an unique identification (Aadhar) number.

This Aadhar number would be made a compulsory requirement while opening accounts in banks or post offices.

The same number would be put into use while selecting beneficiaries of schemes sponsored by the Centre or State Government, Okendro stated.

After collecting all the data by June 30, the data compilation portion would be completed by July 31.From August 1, only those who have been allotted Aadhar numbers would be made eligible for such schemes like MGNREGS, IAY, old age pension etc.

In-Media would do the biometrics enrolment work in Ukhrul, Bishnupur, Senpati and Thoubal while MANITRON would be assigned to Imphal West, Imphal East, Chandel, Tamenglong and Churachandpur.

Okendro appealed to all the people to come out and participate in the biometrics enrolment work in accordance to the schedule which would be worked out by Deputy Commissioners.

To a query, the Minister claimed that biometrics data collection has been completed up to 35 per cent so far.

He also admitted that the project is going slow in Ukhrul and Senapati.


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