A response to Victoria Coren

Last week the Washington Post published the results of a phone survey of 1900 adults, on a range of issues, with individuals identified by gender and race. This weekend’s Observer published a follow-up article by Victoria Coren giving her interpretation of these findings. The general thrust was:

1. According to this poll’s results, American black women tend to have higher self-esteem are more career-focussed, romantically independent, less stressed and more religious than white women.
2. It must be because there are so few black models featured in magazines that black women “have managed to not get screwed up”.
3. Black women should continue to be disconnected from and under-represented in the evil media, for their own good.

While I have a lot of respect and time for Victoria Coren, and I’m sure this was written with the best intentions and possibly with a tongue firmly in cheek, I feel she has deeply misunderstood, reduced and misrepresented a multitude of black women’s voices. Aside from the problem of a white woman telling black women how lucky they are to be excluded from mainstream society, the leap of logic exhibited in the piece is frankly a bit dodgy.

Student loans repayments: a minor distraction

News emerged this week that the government is scrapping the early repayment penalties they intended on implementing upon graduates who tried to repay their student loan earlier. The whole ‘Lib Dems wanted it but we the Tories saved you from it’ is a bit of good cop/bad cop politicking to distract from the main point.

The mini-policy itself was a mixed bag with no measurable benefit or disbenefit. It had a touch of progressiveness about it in that it stopped the wealthiest just paying off their loans immediately. This means they wouldn’t have been able to pay less for their degrees than those from lower income backgrounds who would instead accumulate interest over a longer loan period. (This of course assumes that the wealthiest don’t just pay their fees upfront).

Why You Should Worry About the NHS Part III

In earlier posts (1, 2) I outlined some issues with the government’s NHS proposals. Here I finish the job…

Ending ‘target-driven’ culture

Currently:

The last government brought in a raft of NHS targets, such as GPs having to see patients within 48 hours, and maximum of four hours waiting time for A&E treatment.

Plans:

The Government is abolishing ‘targets’ and replacing them with ‘goals’. Suspiciously synonymous jargon aside,

The focus in targets/goals/aims (delete as appropriate) is shifting rather than talking about lengths of waiting lists themselves, the focus will be on reducing the number of people developing serious cancer – through reducing waiting lists among other methods.

Clearly this is better, because instead of doctors working to get people in and out as quickly as possible to meet targets, it takes a more holistic view on how we can actually achieve what we’re after in the first place, which is better healthier lives.

At the same time, it may mean that waiting lists get longer – the abolishing of the 18-week wait for secondary care last year has predictably led to many patients being left untreated for longer periods.

Whether this will improve health overall remains to be seen.