What all parts of this series have in common, the central theme around which, on the surface, disparate subject matter constellates, is in seemingly irrational perceptions of risk (and gaps in perception arising from them) in the immediate sense and that extended over time. These are both individual and collective issues.
It is one thing to observe the dangers which result when we are more afraid, or not afraid enough, than evidence available warrants. It is another entirely to mitigate against those dangers by closing the gaps in perception exploited by them. To do that would clearly take more than lamenting how our fears don’t match the facts.
It would require understanding the roots of risk perception. Of course, as any analysis of current politicisation encroaching into almost every area of our lives shows (and is underscored by where focus is, has and has not been, throughout ongoing UK Covid public enquiries, including in how this has been reported in UK media), it may be right to heap blame on ‘the media’ and poor risk communication by government and/or the scientific community.
As accurate and appropriate as that may be, the body of evidence explaining the psychology of risk perception (and all attendant cognitive bias) is far richer and offers much more detailed explanation for why our fears so often appear irrational and not supported by evidence.
Most importantly, risk perception is not (and can never be) purely rational. No matter what the facts or evidence say, our perception of them is intrinsically subjective.
Humans unconsciously apply psychological and often apparently instinctive filters, which help us to arrive at a perceived determination of any received data or information suggesting danger or potential for it. Against these critical first judgement or primary risk evaluations, concerned with how we keep ourselves safe, we interpret everything which follows.
It is extremely difficult to reverse, or ‘unwire’, the neural connections made and synaptical pathways formed, mapped during our first assessments of how to protect ourselves. They are rooted in the architecture of our brain’s ’fear systems’. Humans are hard wired to respond to risk with a mix of facts and feelings.
There are at least four decades of clinical and academic psychological research, which reveals a common set of affective and emotional characteristics, which can in turn be recognised as emergent properties of how that ‘hard wiring’ in human neurology manifests in our minds. These explain, facts not withstanding, why some risks feel scarier, induce more fear, than others.
Most (but not all) of how our cognitive processes arrive at this induction can be explained by the following categories of impactful stimuli:
- uncertainty; when we are a uncertain, we grab onto anything which appears to answer any questions rooted in that uncertainty. The ‘sense of knowing’ we derive from this, however ill or well founded, affords us the reassurance of perceived control. Control, or perception of it, is vital to anyone who is afraid, worried, concerned or uncertain.
- trust; when any type of authority dismisses our fears, our trust in that specific authority and authority in general goes down and our resistance to it goes up.
- choice; a risk imposed upon us feels, or is perceived as feeling, scarier than when we choose to take a risk ourselves.
- risks vs benefits; the same risk can lead to differing perceptions, not based just in fact, but how we feel about trade-offs against other perceived benefits presented.
These four categories summarise the primal emotional and apparently instinctive psychology in risk analysis and management which helps us survive. The power of survival instinct as imperatives is why our perception of risk, informed by them, can be so fiercely held and deeply resistant to reason or persuasion.
As powerful and deeply a part of being human as this psychology is, describing it as right or wrong, rational or irrational, ignores or arrogantly denies an inescapable reality of human perception and behaviours extending from it. There is no reductive reasoning of the complex, imperfect and affective way humans perceive and respond to danger.
It appears to be a truism of human experience that we will always be susceptible to perception gaps. Rather than lament this or try to fight it in pursuit of an illusory and naïve conception of perfect rationality, or allow it to compound and fragment further into subjective divisions and tensions, between humans and groups of us formed around shared perceptions and gaps in them, we can choose to respond differently, both individually and collectively.
It is wholly possible to use what can be learned, what has been learned, about risk perception to manage the risk of misperception. We can do this, individually, by leading a truly examined life, not one based in reinforcing cognitive bias but in questioning it.
And it can be underpinned by collective effort, to bring about policies, regulations, incentives, communication and education campaigns to help us deal with these fundamental dangers. Just as we already do for so many other perceived physical threats but not so much for the psychological processes which underlie how we respond to them.
We can go beyond observing that we so often get risk wrong and use our knowledge of why. Applying it, we can do a better, more effective job of getting how we respond to perceived risk right. Essentially, its all a matter of attitude.
At this juncture, allow me a little latitude, if you will dear reader, to explore a personal gap in risk perception and relate it to a wider societal and cultural gap. It’s where this series set out from and to, a necessary return journey.
Whilst it may hazard appearing to stutter, mirroring wider changes to how things as fundamental as marking time, years, begin, I’d now like to start again. What follows is my original opening to an intended blog post on a particular perception gap.
Hopefully you’ll see the correlations between its subject matter, focussed on gaps in specific perception, and what is presented in Pts 1 & 2. Maybe you won’t. If it helps, even if for me the subject matter in all parts of this series are inextricably connected, maybe think of this as a cut off point, a finger marking the place, and take what precedes alongside what follows as distinct things.
To get all of the intended nuance though, to paraphrase Bruce Lee, it
is worth not concentrating on the finger. You know, so you don’t miss
all that heavenly glory. Continuing, moving on, connecting, beginning
again.
Ok, so, you might feel a wee sting.
Maybe more than that, depending on your perspective. Full disclosure, this blog will contain induced, dysregulated emotional responses, which may be difficult for some readers to process.
You may even consider them triggering. There is no helpline to call, no recourse other than just having to deal with it.
If it’s a struggle for you, you don’t have my sympathy or empathy. Unless you’ve been on the receiving end of the behaviours it will describe. Then you have my full and unconditional positive regard.
Otherwise, if your affected in any way by the contents of this post, I’m not sorry to hear that.
Sure, the subject matter here has what few people realise is political and, for that reason, for me, it’s personal too. So, with the general concept of how little people realise, generally and specifically, about this and oh so many other things not within their realm of direct experience (and often even when it affects them or someone close to them) foremost in my mind, as a residual response whilst I write this, I am going to try and engender as much understanding for anyone reading this, from those perspectives, as I can.
I may be low on empathy for how people’s behaviours, arising from that lack impact me and others like me, compounding the very thing not understood, but I don’t hold you, or anyone else personally responsible. So, there is an almost counter intuitive impulse in me, whilst needing to express rage and frustration, to hold your hand, guide you through the reasons why.
Sure, I’ll do it to soften the blow a little. But it has to be part of acknowledging that while I don’t blame you, I do think you are, more likely than not, when the numbers are crunched and the results are in, part of the problem.
As a person with refractory (resistant to medication), high daily seizure frequency epilepsy, none of this has been easy to face or write but, nevertheless, it needed written. It’s taken me nearly four months, from deciding to prioritise this over other pre-written blogs, due largely to how the subject matter not only impacts me psychologically but neurologically too, by way of lowering seizure thresholds and increasing seizure frequency.
Not least because of that and what prompted my re-prioritisation, all
things considered etc etc, this shouldn’t be an easy read. No matter
how much I feel a familiar need to play to a neurotypical audience, or
at least one which doesn’t, can’t fully understand what living with the
type of difference epilepsy actually means, and their particular needs.
Bless them.
Right, let’s get intae it…
Remember the storms? The floods? And not just from pt2?
Just a few months ago, when the battered citizens of Brechin became avatars for Scotland’s poor infrastructure and adaptive risk planning in the face of climate crises?
For a brief period, images of the town and its citizens became a worldwide feature. This extended a little when the lens zoomed in on what that meant for working as if we are in the early days of a better nation. Press pause there, with news images of floods and residents battered by poor climate risk planning, loves upended, hanging there, widescreen, while a related, foundational tangent, wanders through your perceptions of them…
…when we, citizens of the polity we call Scotland, carved Alasdair Gray’s poignant paraphrasing of Dennis Leigh’s ‘Civil Elegies’ into the then shiny and new Scottish parliament building (or, perhaps more accurately, when our elected political representatives had it carved there on our behalf) it was a reminder, an incitement, to do better. In so many ways and for a whole myriad of reasons, lurching forward then staggering back, we haven’t.
In just as many ways, why and how the building came to be constructed is both directly symbolic and a more indirect metaphor for the plight of Scotland and its people, as a nation, even and perhaps particularly in how it has become delimited, a symbol of power devolved and retained, both to itself and by Westminster. And of agency deferred.
From the outset, the building and its construction proved controversial. The choices of location, architect, design and construction company were all criticised by politicians and the (overwhelmingly, almost exclusively then, edited and based in other areas of the UK) media.
Due to open its doors in 2001, they remained closed until 2004, more than three years late with an estimated final cost of £414 million, many times higher than initial estimates of between £10m and £40m. A public enquiry into handling of the construction was established in 2003.
The inquiry concluded in September 2004, and criticised the management of the whole project from the realisation of cost increases, down to the way in which major design changes were implemented. Despite these criticisms and a mixed public reaction, the building was welcomed by architectural academics and critics.
The building aimed to achieve a poetic union between the landscape of Scotland, its people, its culture and the city of Edinburgh. The Parliament Building won numerous awards and was described by the late landscape architect, cultural theorist and historian, Charles Jencks, as "a tour de force of arts and crafts and quality without parallel in the last 100 years of British architecture".
It was the realisation of its architect’s vision, which won him the competition to build it. In many ways, as a Catalonian post-modern architect, Enric Miralles was the perfect candidate. Internationalist and outward looking, working in an architectural style antithetical to the parochialism of which Scottish political vision had often been accused, the building, completed four years after his sudden death, due to a brain tumour, in 2000, became synonymous with his legacy.
The independent architectural language of Miralles can be difficult to classify in terms of contemporary architecture. It is influenced by Spanish architects, such as Alejandro de la Sota, José Antonio Coderch and Josep Maria Jujol, and also by international greats such as Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Alvar Aalto, as well as the Russian Constructivist movement of the early 20th century.
Freely formed buildings utilising massive bulk construction materials and steel, develop from their relationship with the environment and connect themselves to it. The form is constructed using often unusual materials, generally left with exposed natural surfaces. Form and material interpret the place, traditions and history in a personal and poetic art, as his critics attest.
From the starting point of the townscape or landscape, he would design a building in its totality, down to the details of the furnishings and exterior installations. Therefore, the execution of detail was just as important to the communication of meaning as the main form. Both were developed over a large number of designs and with numerous models as the main tool of the design process.
Of the building, Miralles said in 1999, ‘We don't want to forget that the Scottish Parliament will be in Edinburgh, but will belong to Scotland, to the Scottish land. The Parliament should be able to reflect the land it represents. The building should arise from the sloping base of Arthur's Seat and arrive into the city almost surging out of the rock’.
Miralles sought to design a parliament building that could represent and present a layered, complex national identity. This intractably difficult question was tackled by displacing the question of identity onto the landscape of Scotland.
In a characteristically poetic approach, he talked about slotting the building into the land "in the form of a gathering situation: an amphitheatre coming out from Arthur's Seat", where the building would reflect a dialogue between the landscape and the act of people sitting. An early goal of the design was to open up the building and its public spaces, not just to Edinburgh but to a more general concept of the Scottish landscape. Miralles intended to use the parliament to help build the end of Canongate - ‘not just another building on the street...it should reinforce the existing qualities of the site and its surroundings. In a subtle game of cross views and political implications’.
In terms of vision, poetry and the role of architecture’s form and function as a reflection of people and place, the building has been a success which continues to both be realised and to spark meaningful debate. In so many ways, what has been achieved inside it has been much more tentative, less bold, despite ambition, and ultimately has failed to spread or devolve power further to the people it invites into its public spaces. Like citing Alasdair Gray’s para-phrase, it realises the poetry of national aspiration but has, in so many other ways, failed to manage genuinely local democratisation of political decision making.
Even as a long term ‘fanboy’ of Grey, I still think a sheela na gig would have been a more fitting (and possibly a greater unconscious influence over all who entered through the doors of the new parliament, including on the decisions of lawmakers and devolving them further still) ‘inscription’ at the building’s entrance. Maybe the visceral reminder of where we all come from, as a reminder of the right to life and agency over it, would have proved a greater incitement to do better. Ultimately though, fa kens?
So, unpausing the picture, tangent meandered and returned to the setting off point..
…as the residents of Brechin, entitled to put a little trust in the all too recently completed, expensive (2016 at a cost of £16.3m, if your interested) and much lauded flood prevention scheme found to their cost, when Storm Babet set about ripping up any preconceptions or sense of safety engendered by (and the political marketing campaign which inevitably sounded a fanfare around) it. The inadequacy of political vision and practicalities of implementation in the face of escalating climate related crises is covered, as much as this series can whilst remaining true to this blog’s scope, in pt2, but, as with almost everything posted here, what is political is context for what becomes, is, personal…
…so, around two weeks prior to starting writing this series, back in late October last year, as Anthropocene consequences got real local and invasive, two other seemingly
unrelated, or at least unwittingly on the part of their instigators,
events thrust their way into my unprepared awareness. I’d had a few
rough days seizure wise and was working my way back to what constitutes
recovery when you have a daily base frequency of around 20-40 seizures,
so my threshold was pretty low. I was having to work hard at not
allowing the fear of further increases to become a familiar contributory
causal loop.
At times like that, my autistic differences become my friends. Familiar patterns and regulation are just what’s required. So, I had been doing a bit of repetitive work. Getting a fair bit done, a positive neurological feedback loop had worked its way into my cognition and I, like many other people with epilepsy, found myself wilfully ignoring the inculcated hyper-vigilance emerging from clusters of seizures leaves hanging around my neuropsychology.
I decided to chance a bit of qualitative work, having dispensed with some of the quantitive stuff. Tentatively, I logged into a work email address.
Right at the top of a neglected inbox pile, a subject header sounded alarm bells. But I couldn’t un-see it, so I opened it.
The nature of my academic, professional and personal interests means I am on mailing lists for a lot of neurological and neuropsychological research centres. A month or two before I’d taken part in an epilepsy survey conducted by Epilepsy Action. The email I’d clicked into was an advance forward of the results before they went onto general press release.
I tried, I really did, to look through them with my academic and professional hats on, to regulate, to respond rather than react personally. Fat chance.
Just a few lines in, relaying results my day-to-day work and research could easily confirm and prepare me for, and all the ‘wrong’ feels coursed right through me. Rage, indignance, righteous anger, sadness, visceral pain. I tried to hold on, to regulate but the psychological had quickly made its way into the neuropsychogical and then made the jump straight into the neurological.
Without realising or being conscious of any steps in between, I found
myself no longer at my desk looking at the screen, but on the floor
beside it, chair tipped over, clustering in focal seizures, tears
streaming down my cheeks, racked with uncontrollable sobbing in
interictal phases, barely able to distinguish between them and the
ictal. At some point I’d raised a hand to a bump on my head, where I’d
hit it on the way down. It was the last thing I remembered before losing
time.
When absences are part of your seizure profile, you have to learn not to panic, to accept things someone first experiencing them would be wholly disoriented by and fearful in. But the panic those type of responses induce just will not help. If you’re alone in them, you have to reach for the type of calm reassurance anyone caring for a person with epilepsy has to learn. It’s a matter of caring for yourself.
A few deep breaths. Ok, controllable, no dystonic breathing. A body check over. Ok, a little shaky but no myoclonic jerks, clustering seemingly dissipated. A few minor lumps and bumps but nothing major. The inevitable rawness inside my lip, where I’d bitten in seizure. All fairly standard.
One sudden focal leg jerk, as I try to get up, just to remind me not to get complacent. So, I lean on the table, see the screen still open, allow my eyes to dart, instinctively, fearfully, away from the email, down to the clock in the corner.
Ok, so about 25 minutes since I opened the mail. I’d checked the time then as the first minor jerks became accompaniment to all that emotional response.
As is so often the case for me, weary and wary though I was, cold, precise clarity came alongside them. It let me know this was most definitely post-ictal now, cluster done. I reached for a water bottle on the shelf, probing my inside lip with my tongue as I took a few sips.
All my other, hard learned, coping mechanisms kicked in. If there had been anyone with me, they’d probably have told me to rest, take at least a beat or two. But another part of my frontal lobe, enervated by the electrical activity and regulated by pattern seeking instinct and academic curiosity, was already looking at the irony of my meta-response, from a distanced perspective, at it not in it. So, I sat back down, read through the nine-page report, every word just as resonant, just as impactful but in context.
Sure, I could feel the lactic acid in my fingers and arms as they raised and worked through filing the information into the right parts of my brain. It was an echo of neurological response passing as other responses, from entirely different neurological aspects of difference, regulating it and themselves too. My fingers, especially when it comes to processing information in the right formats, are their own fidget spinners, I’ve never needed anything external to serve that purpose.
They did their job. I reached the end of the report, picked up a pen and went back to the start again.
Fifteen minutes later, I had a two-page summary and half a page of remembered links to other relevant research and surveys and another page of a to-do list, for professional and academic response. There was work to be done. At the foot of that page, a note to write this.
I’ll get to the skinny on some of that in a mo, honest guv. First, to the other synchronous event.
That same evening, our house phone rang, the number on the display instantly recognisable to me. It was a well-meaning family member, who, belatedly and in their own idiosyncratic way has garnered a basic understanding and empathy for my neurodivergence. I say empathy because much of their restricted understanding has emerged over time and has increased with late life diagnosis of their own divergence.
The diagnosis and their re-contextualisation of lived experience, of their condition and the reactions of others to them because of it are not the same as mine. Neurodivergence is not homogenous. It is, by its nature, incredibly person specific. Nevertheless, it has helped them re-evaluate how they have responded to me, my diagnoses and corresponding life changes. It has been a route into a deepening understanding and empathic response.
Whereas, for a long time, from soon after my first late life epilepsy diagnosis, which also acknowledged it had been present since birth, after some particularly discriminatory comments and reactions, albeit largely from their partner but who was excused and supported by them faced with my reaction, I found being in their company difficult and often chose not to be as the path of least impact, I would now acknowledge them as perhaps the most supportive and understanding friend or family member, with the significant and incomparable exception of my partner. In the fullness of context though, it's still not enough, still a case of settling, of not as bad as the worst.
The phone call was a case in point.
A familiar lack of salutation, straight into what the call was ‘for’:
‘Guess where I am?’
‘Erm, sounds busy, at the clubhouse?’ (The family member had recently bought a static caravan/lodge in a park with its own leisure facilities and clubhouse/bar/restaurant, spending significant periods of time there, familiarising themselves with and availing themselves of the facilities. It was a fair and accurate shout…)
‘Well, that wasn’t difficult to guess but guess what for?’
‘Erm…’. (Part of the family members diagnosis was adult ADHD, their attention span and impatience familiar to us long prior to it!)
‘Its a night for epilepsy!’
‘What do you mean, for epilepsy?’
‘Well, its for epilepsy, the tickets, raffles and that, all of the money goes to epilepsy. It’s a good thing.’
‘Is it? How is the money going to epilepsy? Do you mean it’s a fund raiser for an epilepsy charity? Because that’s a different thing.’
‘I just wanted to share a good thing. Me and my partner…(names changed/not used to protect the not so innocent)…aren’t so bad, we’re here helping epilepsy! I thought you’d be pleased!’
Now, I understand fully how it may be too high an expectation to hope anyone concerned in giving to, fundraising or providing services for a charity, or in the sector generally, would understand the history of third sector service delivery in the UK and what it means to service users. Or, in simpler terms, the people a charity or service is set up or claims to help.
There are whole theses and endless blog posts which could be written around that history and how it informs glaring deficiencies of provision. Some have been, others will be.
What could, would and should be considered a reasonable expectation in this regard is for a family member to consider why my partner and I are both involved in providing third sector services and support we founded (and fund) ourselves due to a lack of them (and funding for them) locally, as well as academic research in which they are grounded, for particular demographics impacted by those deficiencies. We make no bones about viewing this as direct, responsive action and activism.
Is it unreasonable to hope family members and friends, who claim to know us well, may be able to consider why we would find aggrandisement of such layered deferral of agency at the least poorly considered and ill-founded, at most offensively discriminatory, to the extent of creating compound disabling circumstance? Just asking, rhetorically, like.
Actors in and contributors to the third sector generally, individually and collectively, whether through donations of money or time, grants/funding or employment, more often than not, are guilty of deferring that agency too, as acts of ‘charity- washing’. Right?
Unpicking the layers of third sector reciprocal relationship and involvement with ‘the public’ is admittedly complex. Understanding any of it requires an engagement with its long history of delivering public services most such deferral of agency actively seeks to avoid.
Much of third sector provision and agency in or derived from it can be traced back to patrician and philanthropic involvement in the establishment of organisations providing key welfare services at a time, mainly in the 1800s, when public provision was limited.
Despite development of the welfare state later, in the 20th century, third sector provision continued, accreting layers of social perceptions and gaps in them. Reforms of the 1980s and 1990s led to more such accretion and further change in associated social relationships.
Conservative governments sought to replace public welfare with private and voluntary providers. Marketisation and contracting out continued with successive Labour governments of the early 21st century (including in newly devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), as part of a more general commitment to revisions to the ‘mix’ of welfare providers, captured in their notion of a ‘third way’.
As an aspect of this, ‘new’ Labour were proactive in promoting a perception of choice and innovation in public service delivery. This was largely managed through encouraging the involvement of third sector providers, including in supporting them to develop capacity to bid for and be seen to deliver public services.
This also drew significantly on conceptions of public trust in public service delivery, significant reserves of which had been built up by much of the welfare state, largely instituted as a response to changing perceptions in the aftermath of two world wars. It was drawn deeply upon in late 20th and early 21st century government welfare policy formation, as political prestidigitation.
Ultimately, this changed the dynamics of public/third sector relationships, subjecting them to all-pervasive, free market-based dogmas. This meant increased exposure to competition and ‘command & control’ structures or mechanisms, as well as a correlative decrease in community turn or engagement in shaping cultures of relationships.
Power and control became increasingly exerted through ever more dominant organisational cultures and arrangements. These also undermined independent approaches, innovation and organisational learning across sectors.
State bodies took trust in their actions as given whilst shifting responsibilities for service delivery and risks of failure onto other organisations, who became pliant due to largely depending on funding from them. Increasing market cultures and regulation damaged (and continues to damage) cross-sector trust, promoting divisive interests and risk averse behaviours.
These also restricted localised autonomies, innovation and promotion of genuine community (in both a wider and a more specific, demographic sense) action. Evolving over a few decades, changing UK government policies, also restricting provision in devolved administrations, have effectively and increasingly eroded trust in third sector provision. This appears to be most true of service users, whose enforced dependency on that provision has become both ambivalent and problematic.
Much of this stems from involvement of free market economics in areas where its only genuine function appears to be a deferral of personal agency and abdication of social responsibility. This is extended and continued by the ubiquitous and nefarious involvement of invasive tech-capitalism in almost every area of our lives.
For tech and legacy capitalists alike, corporate social responsibility has become a ‘buzzword’ for brands across the globe. Companies have giving strategies, or are expected to, whether as an SME donating gifts to local events or fundraisers or with some of the biggest corporations creating entire teams to deliver their corporate giving strategy.
Undeniably charitable giving has upsides and by no means should brands, or indeed people, be donating less to charity. However, obvious issues arise when taking a closer look at bigger corporations’ charitable donations and their motivations.
Lots of companies with huge profits throw around their charitable donations in ways that make them look more committed to change than they really are. In effect, donations can act as a doing-good mask for companies operating with bad or harmful practice. The same is true of deferred agency in individual giving and the two are almost inextricably linked.
‘Charity washing’ like this is similar to greenwashing, across the corporate (pardon the pun) board. Companies attempt to hide their less-than-favourable investments behind donations to charity. The offset of their donations very rarely outweighs the harm their business practices do.
In theory, it may, to some, appear to make some sense that charitable giving, if necessary, should come from those with millions in turnover, not individuals. Likewise, for someone who perceives themselves, or is perceived, as a consumer, there may be barriers to spending time analysing a company’s turnover vs. their charitable giving. What consumers can do is spend money with companies that have transparency surrounding their giving, and external certification if possible.
For many though, that too is a ‘barrier’ to the convenience of consumerism. If we’ve deferred agency so we can engage with it, why assert it at the point of consumption? For others, there is a distinct gap in this perception too. It is one which can be closer examined by looking at (oxymoronic?) ethical markets.
Tracking sales data across a wide range of consumer sectors, the UK based ‘Ethical Markets Report’ has acted as a barometer of changing habits since 1999. It is trusted and used by academics, businesses and municipal/government authorities.
Until 2023, the report has shown year on year growth for ethical products and services since it began collecting data. The figures for 2023 show this faltering significantly across most sectors. There were two big growth areas which bucked that trend, where spending increased significantly:
- spending on electric cars increased by 80%
- spending on green energy tariffs increased by 40%
In a year where inflation averaged 9.2%, most other sectors saw little growth or real term declines, with growth less than inflation. Other exceptions to this were:
- spending on solar panels increased by 282%
- sales of second-hand clothes increased by 49%
This latest report is a reminder that, although there appears to be a longer term trend toward ‘ethical market growth’ in the UK, the bulk of growth is not necessarily founded in ethical but rather in consumer or market driven considerations. This exposes ‘ethical’ businesses to the same or compound market turbulence as other businesses, in the context of a year which saw retail sales volumes decline by 3%.
‘Ethical consumer banking and investment’ also saw the lowest levels since 2017. Spending decreased everywhere as people faced difficult economic circumstance. The year’s final quarter saw the UK slip into recession, with these unlikely to change for the better accordingly.
Placing the report and its statistics in that context, its clear that, in general, people are poorer and are spending more money on energy to stay warm. Those who can, are taking steps to adjust to a world where climate change affects them, directly and financially, by buying electric cars and installing solar panels. Those who can’t, are buying more things second-hand.
Against this backdrop, in terms of individual giving as a perceived ethical consideration, according to recent research by NPC and think tank Centre for Cities, there are fewer and smaller donations to local charities in the ‘most deprived’ regions across the UK. Both also found a higher density of charities in the more affluent south of England compared to regions with greater need.
Meanwhile, people in the southeast of England are up to 15% less likely to give to charity compared to places of similar incomes in the rest of the UK, according to the research. Charities in higher need areas receive fewer and smaller donations than those in richer regions.
Similarly, ‘deprived’ areas have stronger preferences for local giving but are limited by lower overall donation rates. In all higher need regions, the types of local causes donated to do not reflect local need.
Both research reports argue that higher rates of charitable giving could be unlocked in the places most able to give to help address needs across the country. Centre for Cities recommends a more active role for local authorities in targeting local charitable donations towards local needs.
It suggests large national charities are best placed in the voluntary sector to ensure donations flow to areas with the greatest need, supporting local charities limited by local economic constraints.
“Their role should be to increase transparency and share data on where their donations are spent in order to fill in the gaps on the role of national giving in tackling regional inequality,” it states. It also recommends “levelling up charity partnerships” between national and local charities, applying their combined knowledge and resources to reach ‘deprived people’ in areas where local people are less able to donate to charity.
Andrew Carter, chief executive of Centre for Cities, said: “The mismatch between local ability to give and local economic needs from place to place is well known. The charities sector recognises that it can’t always reach the most deprived parts of the UK, particularly as resources have been squeezed over the last decade.
“The ability to donate and get involved is ultimately related to income so, to address it, we need economic growth and income growth everywhere. This would give everyone the increased chance to give to local causes.
More can also be made of the donations that are given – from a levelling up perspective – by channelling a greater share of them to local issues related to economic deprivation. Local authorities, by raising awareness and helping to direct giving, can help people living in an area target their generosity towards issues where their help is needed most.
In places where opportunities to volunteer time or give money are limited, this can make a big difference.”
Note, the Centre for Cities self defines as ‘the leading think tank dedicated to improving the economies of the UK’s largest cities and towns’. It’s ‘mission’ is to help them ‘realise their economic potential’ by producing ‘data-driven research and policy ideas’ which ‘address the challenges and opportunities they face – from boosting productivity and wages to preparing for the changing world of work’.
In other words, the Centre produces market driven solutions to issues created by markets. Unsurprisingly, their chief executive advocates, without any apparent sense of irony, for major charities and local government (with resources ‘squeezed’ by market involvement in their structures and ‘purpose’) to mainly be concerned with raising awareness and directing giving. The panacea, the cure for all societal and economic ills, of course, is to be administered by the markets they ‘should’ serve only a secondary or facilitating function to.
Inevitably this takes the form of advocating for ‘economic growth and income growth everywhere’. There is an apparent wilful, deliberate and politicised lack of self awareness to this.
There is also an implicit irony in the proportion of environmental charities, addressing a pressing and all too current need, with disproportionate environmental impacts in the very areas in most of it meaning third sector provision and involvement is splintered across seemingly disparate sectors, whose founding principles begin from a base level acknowledgement that exponential economic growth is simply not possible in a world with finite and dwindling resources.
How should they (or local councils on their behalf) direct their energies? What awareness needs raised? How effective (or ultimately counter-productive) is awareness raising as a spending priority for environmental charities specifically and for charities generally?
Market based think tanks and policy research units have so often come to serve as data producers for political economies. Charities also so often provide both the same function and political cover for them, dependent as they are on corporate and consumer led giving. Market led political economics attempts (and always has attempted) to assert an inevitability to its own ubiquitous logic.
As much as anything else, given that markets are anything but inevitable and have only become so seemingly ubiquitous relatively recently, these are political choices. There are others.
In this regard, it is necessary to acknowledge, as ever, that these apparent tangents, en route to exploring particularities of what it means to fall through the gaps created by market involvement in necessary(?) third sector service provision, underlines this blog’s maxim that context is everything. Before moving onto, in some sense back to, what these particular contexts have been provided for, it is also worth quoting a recent article, by the one-person pressure group and political economist, the inestimable Prof. Richard Murphy:
‘ONE of the many things that annoy me about political debate in the UK is that far too many people are obsessed with economics and far too few people are even interested in political economy. As a former professor of political economy, let me explain.
Economics likes to think of itself as a technical discipline that creates theories on how economies work and which then produces piles of data that supposedly explain the outcomes that those theories predict.
Most economists would like to think of themselves as scientists and most of them spend much of their time obsessing with mathematics. In reality, most of what they do is quite absurd. That is because their theories are based on ridiculous assumptions about how human beings behave.
For example, they presume that we are all rational human beings who seek to maximise our wellbeing. But nobody can really measure wellbeing. In that case, most economists presume that people, and most especially businesses, maximise their incomes or profits instead. All that reveals is the complete ignorance that the average economist has on how people and businesses actually think because, as a person who has directed quite a lot of companies and advised many hundreds more, I can say with certainty that not a single one of them has ever known how to maximise its profit, let alone do it.
One reason for that is it would be quite absurd to do so when income is measured in pounds and almost everything that is of real value in life, from our families to our friendships, to our communities, to our environment, to the arts, and so much more, cannot have a price tag attached to it. Economists assume, as a result, that these things must be worthless and, therefore, not worth bothering about. We know otherwise. Wisely, we largely ignore economists (and even accountants) as a result.
It’s just a shame politicians do not, because the result of economists’ myopia is that vast quantities of data is produced on everything from inflation to national income, growth, trade, and almost anything else you can imagine, and it is not just likely to be wrong, but may well seriously misrepresent our true wellbeing.
In contrast to economists, political economists are very much less interested in data or mathematics. What they are interested in is something of much greater concern to most people. This is how it is that some people are very much more influential than others within society, meaning that they are able to influence policy so that their best interests are served by governments and others, with the concerns of the rest of the population being very largely ignored.’
As with all things political, the same basic facts, as observed here, can be acknowledged, interpreted and applied from entirely different politicised points of view. The trick of market led economics has been to change citizens’ perceptions of themselves and their political agency by reducing them not only to ‘rational’, economic units but also to defer that agency through the manufactured consent of representative democracy. Residual agency is left only to make the choice between consumer products supplied, whether these are political parties, charities to give to, or any other goods and services.
So, what does that mean for people with epilepsy?
Almost inevitably, providing as much context as is this blog’s want, for ease of reading (or, neurodivergent command avoidance as procrastination, whatever your perception tells you is most appropriate), that deserves its own focus. Catch up in pt3a…