What more is there to be said on the subject of Rachel North and her erstwhile internet stalker, Felicity Jane Lowde.

Well, for one thing, Rachel is not Lowde’s only victim.

Take Daniel Hart, for example. Daniel is a graphic designer who made - in retrospect - the mistake of doing a bit of graphic work for her blog and has been accused repeatedly - and falsely - of being a ‘vindictive stalker’ with a history of violence against women.

It’s worth noting that Lowde’s blog, which up until a year or so ago used the standard pink blogger template, currently ascribes copyright on the design, layout and ‘look’ of the blog to Lowde herself, although whether any of Daniel’s work is still included on it is anyone’s guess.

Then there are a number of members of Casebook, a forum for Jack the Ripper enthusiasts who’ve been subjected to much the same kind of treatment as you’ll see from the extracts below:

In January 2005 I was contacted, via Casebook, by a woman called Felicity Jane Lowde, now 41, unemployed, of North Oxford.

She claimed she was a teacher at a private school and wished to buy one of my rare books for £250. I declined but said I would loan her the book on receipt of a surity. This never came but I began to receive strange e-mails from her which started to get personal and I asked her to stop contacting me.

Shortly after this I discovered she was defrauding many sellers of JTR material on eBay and I alerted eBay to this abuse. In early March, 2005, I received a phone call from Thames Valley Police informing me she had contacted them with a claim of harrassment against me, though I had nothing to do with the woman.

On sending them her e-mails, I was informed there was no case to answer and they spoke to her to insist she stopped making false claims.

Shortly after this I started receiving e-mails, silent and non-silent phone calls and a vast amount of libel on various blog sites. She followed me around the internet, claimed I had been arrested and was in psychiatric care, contacted my employers in attempts to get me fired and posted links to her libel blogs to individuals on other websites I contribute to. Some of you may remember her mass SPAMMING of Casebook and other Ripper sites in the summer of 2005 with false claims against me and demands that anyone contacted by me was to phone the police or her solicitors.

I was placed on Victim Support as a result.

Two years on and, periodically, the stalking continued. The police were involved at an earlier stage but no action was initially taken as it was a Civil rather than Criminal case…

…Felicity Jane Lowde has been arrested several times and was remanded in custody before appearing in court last year on several occassions . She claims she is a Jack The Ripper researcher with contacts in Special Branch and unlimited access to The National Archives. None of this is true. She also claims that Prince Eddy had a child with MJK and Sickert witnessed the Ripper killings (this is her ‘thesis’).

It appears that Felicity Jane Lowde is a woman who lives on benefits and has few friends or contacts outside of her libellous blog site.

In the summer of 2006 Lowde set up a vast array of libel sites about many of the leading people on this site - those of you who were victims of her harrassment, feel free to add your voice; I am not going to name any of you without your permission. Some of these sites still exist.

Early this year Thames Valley Police raided Lowde’s council flat and seized a huge array of apparatus she had used to stalk and harrass complete strangers. She has been held on remand in both Holloway Prison and Stoke Newington Police Station. At her last remand hearing, numerous bail conditions were set, which she instantly broke.

After the hearing, Felicity Lowde went ‘on the run’. She has not returned to her Oxford accomodation since and, as far as I can gather from her writing, has been living rough in London, surviving on benefits and begging on the streets. She is still, however, posting on her libel blog.

As most of you should be aware, Lowde is still on the run, having been convicted of harassment in her absence, but she continues to post harassing and libelous comments about Rachel on her blog, all of which has prompted a blog campaign to raise awareness of this case in the hope that it might lead to her arrest - check the post for the list of blogs/bloggers lending their support. Oh, and extra special props to DK for creating the blog buttons.

That’s the story so far, the ‘what’ if you like, but being a curious sort, ‘what’ is never quite enough for me - I have to try and understand why as well.

Lowde is not the first online obsessive I’ve been able to observe in action, although her particular brand of stalking ranks amongst the worst I’ve ever seen, and there is much is her modus operandi that is, unfortunately, all too familiar from prior incidents I’ve seen, first hand. All of which suggests what I think is an all too plausible explanation for her behaviour; plausible in the sense that on three previous occasions that I’ve encountered individuals who display the same kind of behaviour, the cause in each case has been the same - an untreated personality disorder, or to be more specific a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

NPD and the internet don’t mix. Or rather they shouldn’t be allowed to mix for the good of the individual with the disorder, for reasons which necessitate an explanation what a narcissistic personality disorder is and how it affects those who have one.

NPD has been, rather aptly in my opinion, described as a state of ‘denial of the true self’. The root of this particular disorder, so far its understood, lies in the individual harbouring a subconscious belief that they are personally flawed in such a fundamental manner as to ensure that they will be be rejected and ostracised by others should they become aware of whatever the flaw is. Think in terms of someone having brutally low self esteem and a near pathological fear of rejection and isolation and you’ve got a far idea of what’s actually running under the hood in such individuals, although these anxieties operate at a below conscious level.

To understand how NPD manifests itself its perhaps to consider the diagnostic criteria for the disorder, as set out in DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth Edition) - the annotations are my own, by the way:

Narcissistic Personality Disorder - A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

(3) believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

These are the classic indicators of NPD.

Individuals with the condition exhibit a massively overinflated sense of their own self importance, which they typically sustain by means of creating a false persona that serves to elevate their personal status within the social circles in which they move. More often than not this entails the creation and active promotion of a false life history which presents them to others as being markedly more successful or able than they really are, e.g. the junior clerk who claims to be a senior executive at their place of employment. One of the more common types of false personae adopted by NPDs is that which establishes their (undeserved) status by means of laying claim to be some kind of authority figure or expert in a particular field and a basis of establishing their superior status over others.

(4) requires excessive admiration

(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

These two, similarly, go together. An NPD expects, if not demands, to be recognised as a superior individual on the strength of their false personae alone, without providing any evidence to validate their claim to such status. NPDs not only go to great lengths to elevate their social status by means of creating and outward promoting a false persona but the also make strenuous efforts to control how they are perceived by others. Anyone who challenges or questions their claim to superiority will, at best, be treated in an entirely dismissive manner. At worst a failure to buy in to their fictional character will be treated as a mortal insult and the NPD will respond abusively and aggressively in an attempt to browbeat their antagonist back into line.

Remember, NPDs are driven by a subconscious belief that they are fundamentally flawed in character in a manner that others would not accept were the truth to be revealed - anyone or anything that challenges the veracity of their false persona is perceived to be a serious threat to this subconscious act of concealment, hence the extreme reaction that questioning or challenging their self-generated status provokes.

(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

As might be obvious, NPDs are highly manipulative and exhibit little concern for the feelings, abilities or personal reputation of other. All that matters is the validation of their own, claimed, high status and they tend to have few scruples when it comes to climbing on the backs of others to sustain their artificially elevated social position.

(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

It follows, logically, that there is nothing an NPD finds quite so threatening as an encounter with an individual, or individuals whose status matches or exceed that of their assumed persona. Not only do NPDs tend to be deeply envious of such individuals, whose position has been gained on the basis of merit and genuine achievement, but such individuals also present the NPD with an omnipresent threat of exposure as a fraud.

The false belief that other are envious of them provides the NPD with both a means of shoring up their contrived personal status when threatened - i.e. the belief that others envy them and their status provides additional validation for the belief in their own superiority - and with a means of rationalising any challenge to, or questioning of, their false status by such individuals - i.e. anyone making such a challenge is obviously motivated by envy, therefore such a challenge can be dismissed on that basis alone.

Envy, in both forms described above, is a common response amongst NPDs to situation in which they feel threatened or at risk of exposure, which is why it appears in the diagnostic criteria. It it not, however, the only potential response. In more extreme cases, the fear of exposure may resolve itself into full blown paranoia, in which any questioning of, or challenge to, the NPD’s status is likely to be interpreted as deliberate persecution.

Such challenges may also prompt an NPD to elaborate and exaggerate the false persona even further in order to re-establish their ascendancy over their challenger, often by meaning of weaving into their false life history some sort of special, unique or otherwise inaccessible privileges of a kind not open to the individual who is perceived to be a threat; for example the NPD may claim to be the inventor or originator of something of value to their claimed status (but to have had their invention or idea stolen). Being the first to a discovery provides a means of elevating their status above others who cannot (obviously) share in such a distinction. Claiming membership of a closed, and preferably, secret social structure or to have privileged access to secret knowledge of some kind is another device commonly used by NPDs to reclaim the ascendancy when threatened.

This may also be accompanied by concerted efforts to reduce and/or minimise the status of the individual who is perceived to present a threat by means of false claims of wrongdoing - especially against the NPD - and wide-ranging ad hominem attacks on the individual’s personal character and integrity.

(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

Given everything cited previously, this last diagnostic criterion seems rather to be stating the bleeding obvious.

Before getting down to specifics in terms of Felicity Jane Lowde there are a couple of other things worth noting about NPDs.

First, NPDs rarely voluntarily seek treatment for their condition, because such treatment threatens both the integrity of their false persona and is likely to expose the unacceptable character flaw(s) that drive their condition.

Second (and if you’ve understood even part of what I’ve written thus far this should be obvious) the internet, and specifically blogs and online discussion forums are a near perfect environment for NPDs to operate, because it affords the NPD near complete control over the persona they present to others. In the online world you can claim to be pretty much anything you want to be with only a very limited chance of being exposed as a fake or a fraud, so long as you’re careful to conceal your real identity, steer clear of situations and environments where there may be people who know you in the real world and who might be able to connect you to your online persona, and are reasonable consistent in the character to put on display to others.

The internet is an almost uniquely attractive environment for NPD because it affords them a degree of control over both how they present themselves and how others perceive them that is almost impossible to achieve in the real world. Form my own experience I think it would be fair to say that most of the worst and most difficult trolls I’ve encountered online have shown clear signs of mental illness or an untreated personality disorder and, of those, by far the most difficult to deal with have those who have been verified as having or shown clear signs of a narcissistic personality disorder.

That’s the social science bit over and done with, now what of Rachel’s stalker?

Well, as I’ve said, a number of aspects of Lowde’s behaviour and modus operandi seem rather too familiar for comfort and are broadly consistant with other problem characters I’ve dealt with in the past who have, at some point, been verified as having a narcissistic personality disorder.

So while I am categorically NOT making a diagnosis - that kind of thing must right be left to a practicing clinical psychologist or psychiatrist, and my personal specialism, in any case, was organisational psychology, human factors and information systems, what I am prepared to state in terms of fair comment is that there are a number of elements in Lowde’s behaviour that are broadly consistent with the diagnostic criteria for NPD and that these would be sufficient for a clinical practitioner to consider it a possibility worth considering should Lowde be professionally assessed (and my personal opinion is that she should have such an assessment).

That’s not a statement that I’m prepared to make without some evidence to back it up, and in Lowde’s case one of the most compelling pieces of evidence lies in her claim to be a graduate researcher who has/had privileged access to secret files held by Special Branch and the National Archive, a claim which features heavily in both her interactions with members of the Casebook community and with Rachel and other members of the Kings Cross United group.

Notwithstanding obvious questions as to the veracity of such a claim - Lowde claims to have been given this access at least in part to facilitate her (claimed) research into the Jack the Ripper case - this is precisely the kind of claim to expert status based on otherwise unattainable privilege that often features in severe cases of NPD.

The Jack the Ripper case is one that still provokes considerable public interest from time to time and has its own dedicated and highly knowledgeable following - a search on Amazon UK for ‘Jack the Ripper’ returns more than 250 books currently in print on the subject, and even if we take out works of pure fiction, there must be at least 150 books currently available that deal with the factual elements of the case and advance various theories as to the identity of ‘Jack’ and his possible motives. And that’s just the currently available stock, never mind the many and varied past works on the subject that are no longer in print.

In short, an online community based on a shared interest in ‘Jack the Ripper’ is a very difficult environment for anyone to enter and rise to the top of the pile. It’s a subject on which there’s is not much to be said that’s likely to be entirely original and hasn’t been said or alluded to before and a wide range of active theories each of which have their own dedicated following, which make for plenty of lively discussion and considerable scope for intellectual dispute.

To establish one’s personal status as a genuine ‘expert’ in such an environment one much either bring to the table a verifiable track record of genuine expertise or have (or claim to have) access to information that’s otherwise unavailable to the rest of the community, of which there is very little in existence that hasn’t already been extensively picked over by past researchers…

…unless, of course, on claims to have access to privileged information held by Special Branch and the National Archives, information that requires a form of security clearance not permitted to others, which is precisely what Lowde did claim.

This claim, which members of the community in question assert is completely untrue, fits very nicely with several elements of the diagnostic criteria for NPD. It’s certainly grandiose and based (seemingly) on a complete fantasy and, of course, if it were true it would mark Lowde out as being ’special’ and uniquely privileged and elevate her status - based on a claim to expertise - in such a community to a level unattainable by others in a manner that would be expected to provide Lowde with a significant degree of recognition and admiration were she able to substantiate such a claim with hard evidence - which, of course, she cannot provide because her claim to expertise is predicated on an association with a closed social environment (the security services) which conveniently precludes her from being in a position to reveal her source material to others; this being the only effective means of validating her claims.

This whole strand of outwardly project persona and claimed life history fits the diagnostic pattern for NPD very nicely, even without consideration of her behaviour towards members of the community when this claim to expertise failed to deliver the attention and unquestioning recognition she would have expected.

These claims about privileged access to information held by the security services feature in a number of Lowde’s earliest posts about Rachel and the Kings Cross United group, starting at around the point at which she began to turn on the group over its calls for a public inquiry into the London Bombings.

In a post on May 4, 2006, entitled ‘My stance on the 7/7 Kings Cross United project‘, Lowde pitches her claimed ‘privileged’ relationship with the security services three times in this one post, which appears to be the first in which started to turn against Rachel and KCU group:

I wanted to be clear about the way I feel over the 7/7 survivors current KCU issues, partly for the benefit of those in security whom I work with, but also for KCU themselves, for the other 7/7 survivors who detract from the public enquiry campaign approach, and for our readers.

In 2005 I was working at security buildings based in London, looking at documents with special permission. ( Special Branch, New Scotland Yard.) I’m a researcher, based in Oxford and London, I look at secret history. It’s not a thing I go into much on my blog. I was taking the London transport myself when the bombs went off, travelling between Whitechapel and ( -security building) and like many London people I was profoundly affected by the news.

…

I have advised Rachel that liaising with the press and chiming in with their agenda so that they regularly print your stories and making genuine advances with the security services doesn’t mix. It’s I thing I’d never do. I’ve told Rachel this several times. I have told her that her only real way forward should she be genuine in her desire to get to the truth is to make an application to be granted special permission to view documents relating to her matter. I told her that the security matter is live, and that even if there were signs of her being organised about a public enquiry it would almost certainly not be granted because documents relating to live security matters can’t be thrown about in the public domain.

…

As an experienced researcher I feel strongly enough about the crafty way the press have been handling ( maneuvering) ‘Rachel From North London’ to write a whole book, but anyone could guess the content. Mainstream press have been pushing Rachel to accommodate their political standpoint and she has been a willing puppet. I can’t go along with throwing mud at the security services when one doesn’t get one’s own way, which is the media approach.

Pretty much the entire purpose of this post is to establish Lowde’s ascendancy over Rachel based on her claim to a privileged relationship with the security services - which she doesn’t appear to actually have - which she then reinforces by claiming that Rachel sole available route to substantive information about the events of 7/7 is to obtain the same privileged status that Lowde claims to possess. At this stage Lowde is at least publicly on cordial terms with Rachel and the rest of the group, but only because at this point she is still actively seeking to establish her superiority over them by advising them that they should aspire to be like her - she’s clearly seeking to obtain recognition and validation by way of trying elicit imitation from members of the group.

About a month later, Lowde is back on the subject of the 7/7 bombing and fulsome to the point of obsequiousness in her praise for the contents of the London Assembly report on the bombing, which she again uses to try and assert her claim to a privileged status:

One of the reasons the research report is so important is that it highlights the prevalent problem as per communication between the public and the modern Security Services which results in the public being badly let down in moments of crisis in the wake of terrorist attacks.

Inside the Security Services there is a strong reluctance to disclose relevant protection information on the premise that the public cannot be trusted with security matters at all. This way of thinking is partly ‘culture’. In its origin, it’s motivated by a genuine desire not to compromise security operations. It’s not an attitude that’s impossible to understand , either, when the many foolish, dangerous and aggressive attitudes directed towards the Security Services are so very apparent.

There seems to be a vicious cycle of closed communication between the Security Services and the public which it seems imperative to carefully break. This surely cant be done in an atmosphere of hostility, such as the press continually create. There is a need for stepped up awareness and good communications between the Security Services, the Emergency Services and the public.

Although seemingly critical of the nature of the ‘vicious cycle of closed communication between the Security Services and the public’, Lowde makes her remarks only after going to some lengths to present herself as an ‘insider’ - again she’s laying claim to expertise based on the fiction of a privileged relationship with the security services. However she saves her most interesting remarks in this post for its final paragraph:

N.B. This doesn’t mean I have changed my mind about the ill advised public enquiry. I have advised the survivors that that particular campaign will only lead to misery and exhasution [sic]. I am not going to change my mind about that, however angry and aggressive a small few people feel/are towards me for having given that information.

This appears to be the first clear indicator that things are about to turn nasty and, as importantly, why. Ignore the reference to ‘angry and aggressive’, that’s just a means of dismissing dissenting opinion without addressing its substance, what matters here is that she claims to have ‘advised the survivors that that particular campaign will only lead to misery and exhasution [sic]’, having stated a month earlier that she had ‘advised Rachel that liaising with the press and chiming in with their agenda so that they regularly print your stories and making genuine advances with the security services doesn’t mix’ and that she’d ‘told Rachel this several times’.

If Lowde does, indeed, have a narcissistic personality disorder, then Rachel’s failure to accept Lowde’s ‘advice’ (and, therefore, her ’superior’ status) is like a red rag to a bull. Rachel’s not buying into Lowde’s claim to privileged status, which to most people is simply a difference of opinion, but to an NPD its both a denial of the status they believe they should be afford and a potential threat to their public facade. It’s also unlikely to be a coincidence that this turn in Lowde’s attitude to Rachel begins to emerge within a couple of weeks of Rachel and the KCU group having met with the Home Secretary (by this point, John Reid) - remember status is a major issue in this case and Lowde’s claim to possess a higher status than Rachel is based on her claim to privileged access to the security services, a claim that’s rather extensively trumped by the KCU group in obtaining direct access to the Home Secretary.

The full extent to which Lowde had, by this time, turned on Rachel only became apparent a couple of days later when she commented for the first time on the abusive e-mails she’d been receiving from Lowde:

I’ve been getting abusive emails from one of the blog readers, who I have repeatedly asked to leave me alone. She is convinced that she is helping me; but she is sending dozens of emails, lecturing and ranting, and saying as many hurtful things as she can think of. The conspiracy theorists who tell me I am a liar and deserve to die I can deal with, but this person is troubling. Has anyone any ideas of the best course of action? I think I might need to go to the police.

It’s worth reading this post both for the choice selection of Lowde’s ‘work’ both at this initial stage of the harassment and from an update added the following November and because nowhere in this post does Rachel actually name Lowde as the person responsible for this harassment, its actually Lowde who ‘outs’ herself as being responsible for the abusive e-mails sent to Rachel with this ‘response’ on her own blog the following day.

A cursory comparison between the two posts makes for interesting reading.

Lowde, for example, states on her own blog:

Rachel North was on the train carriage where everyone died, blown apart, waiting for rescue, while their lives ebbed away. Many survivors fled the scene. Rachel fled the scene and she was unscathed. I have had a nagging question about this and I asked her ” Why didn’t you stay and help the dying?”

Rachel, however, shows that Lowde framed this question in altogether more aggressive terms:

‘Why didn’t you stay and help the dying?
So you could have a go at journalism?

Nice, eh?

Having noted the possibility that Lowde may have a narcissistic personality disorder, I started to look into this to try an understand how and why Rachel became the focus for this harassment, which necessitating going back to the beginning and trying to identify how and why it all started.

From what’s available in the public domain, it appears that Lowde latched on the KCU group and then, following the diktats of her condition, attempted to assert her superiority over the group by using he claim to have privileged access to the security services to take control of the groups’ campaign and direct it into an approach that would afford her the high status she is seeking to claim. What she wanted the group to do was drop their efforts to secure a public inquiry into the bombing and buy wholesale into the idea that they would only get further information by cosying up to the security services and obtaining the kind of privileged access to information that Lowde claims (seemingly falsely) to have had - access that they would certainly have been refused.

Had Rachel, and others in the group, been gullible enough to buy into this then their failure to obtain such access would have meant either giving up on their efforts or going cap in hand to Lowde to ask her to use her (non-existent) privileges to secure further information. The latter scenario, which is what it seems likely that Lowde was trying to bring about, would have put her firmly in control of the group by giving her control over their access to information - even though she was no more able to get access to privileged information than any other member of the group. Had that happened, Lowde would have got her payoff by becoming, at least for as long as she could sustain the fiction that she had privileged access to information, the most important and valuable ‘member’ of the group.

The initial trigger for the harassment was, therefore, the group’s refusal to buy unthinking into this scenario, denying Lowde her ‘payoff’. Rachel then became the focus of Lowde’s anger and abuse simply because her public profile makes her, by default, the ‘Alpha’ member of the KCU group so far as its perceived by Lowde - whether or not that’s a role that Rachel occupies in reality is immaterial; Lowde has never met the group as has no idea of its internal dynamics. In Lowde’s ‘world’ she can only assert her superiority over the group by ‘topping’ Rachel, and having failed to do so by means of her false persona; the researcher with privileged access to the security services, her only means of doing this is to try and destroy Rachel’s public profile and personal reputation.

To make matters even worse, from Lowde’s perspective, Rachel and the group then obtained a measure of privileged access of their own - the meeting with John Reid - which made them (and Rachel in particular) a direct threat to Lowde’s false persona - what if they’d have asked Reid about Lowde’s claims and got the reply ‘who?’. Suddenly we’re being merely denying Lowde the status she believes she deserves and into the possibility that Rachel and others in the KCU group may obtain information that would expose Lowde’s false persona. The irony, of course, is that it was actually Lowde’s reaction - the harassment - that prompted Rachel to contact the police and led her to obtain exactly the kind of background information on Lowde that she didn’t want to become public knowledge.

And so on and so forth…

That’s the kicker with NPD - the more that the false persona falls apart the more the individual with the condition tries to cling on to it, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence that the whole thing is a facade and a tissue of lies, falsehood and gross exaggerations.

One of the previous NPDs I encountered claim to be the inventor of the ion drive (and to have their designs stolen by NASA), a fiction they tried to maintain even after they were not only shown documentary evidence of NASA working on ion drives more than ten years before the were born but actually ran into (in the online sense) an actual NASA engineer, who promptly (and very publicly) handed them their arse on a platter.

So, it comes as no great surprise to find that in September 2006, with Lowde’s campaign of harassment get fully into it stride, she was still making posts in which she advances the fiction that she have privileged access to the security services in an effort to advance her own status over that of Rachel and the KCU group:

I am being portrayed as fascinating and bizarre and intriguing.

By North’s hangers on, tetchy and pointless ‘Blair dissenters’, I am being portrayed as illiterate and incapable of expressing a political view.

I am none of these. I am a researcher with a happy life, answers, and privileged access, who disagrees with you all, and thinks you are alot of timewasters . Get over it.

I also thought that taking statements I made about my experiences inside the canteen when researching with Special Branch, which are of no great security significance, incidentally, and promoting them as an alleged example of my purported ‘delicious indiscretion’ was opportunistic and untrustworthy.
Shockah: the agents confiding interesting subjects in me over coffee in the canteens didn’t reveal anything they wouldn’t be happy to see discussed elsewhere. Another shockah: I have never breached the O S act and I have never betrayed my research. Numeral’s insipid innuendos are utterly silly. They are also damaging to people I worked with, who are good people.

I’m getting tough at present about people who simply can’t behave on the Internet. Numeral’s, Kier’s, Bridget’s, Rachel’s, Quarsan’s, the Antagoniser’s and others’ behaviour is a prize example of how to get yourselves in someone’s bad books. Sneaking, selfish and underhand. Get a life.

And, indeed, this fiction persists right to this day, all be it in a rather different form:

Nonetheless, a false prosecution against me is convenient to Nicolas Pierce (and associates), Special Branch P R, who is facilitating it via the police she’s been courting at the Met, on account of the work that is on my hard drives that relates to Special Branch files that ought to have been released to the public. But she began this current matter, along with the obvious sleezo greebo local Oxford stalker Daniel Hart; I am quite sure that Special Branch didn’t. I spoke with Nicolas Pierce and told him that my hard drives had been taken on account of her and his false allegations (on the telephone) for one, as I have stated, and I know genuine surprise when I hear it ( he instantly began asking opportunistic and artful questions) ; and two, she is obviously (from their point of view) a twit and a loose canon who would never get close to S B. Since she began her vendetta, he has helped facilitate it, (hence my email to him when I was very distressed in the beginning, title ‘you bastard’- not in the public domain obviously, and not produced in Court by anyone) because her vendetta involves the (false) retention of my hard drives and property by local and Metropolitan police.

That’s from yesterday…

To be clear, none of this changes the fact that Felicity Jane Lowde has been tried and convicted of harassment and will, when the police finally catch up with her, be sentenced by a court of law - that is only right and proper.

To that, I would also strongly suggest that she undergoes a full psychiatric assessment - as I’ve said I’m not trying to make a diagnosis here (and there are other disorders that can give rise to markedly similar behaviours) but what I am confident of is that a narcissistic personality disorder - and quite a serious one at that - is a distinct possibility. What needs to be determined is both whether such a disorder is at work here (and I would venture that Lowde has some sort of personality disorder, the only question that needs to be answered is precisely what kind) and whether its actually treatable (some personality disorders aren’t, unfortunately).

I would also hope that not only will Rachel be granted a full injunction to prevent any further communications but that the court considers taking steps to keep Lowde off the internet altogether until she’s been assessed (and treated, if that’s possible) - if she does have an NPD then, unfortunately, the only thing that that allowing her to use the internet does is facilitate and sustain her condition, if not make it worse.

Finally, I would also suggest strongly that if anyone knows of her whereabouts and especially if you happen to be putting up at the moment, then you’d best best advised to contact the police and disclose her location to them. If anyone is harbouring her at the moment or giving her a place to stay then you should be aware that you’re really not doing her any favours at all - she may well wind up in prison but at least there she has a chance of receiving the treatment she certainly appears to need, which she isn’t going to get while she still on the run.

I thought I’d start this article with another ‘treasure’ from my storehouse of personal anecdotes dating back to my days as a youth worker.

One of the semi-regular chores during my time as a youth worker was the mandatory attendance at a bi-annual get-together of youth workers from the statutory sector, where I worked, and voluntary youth workers, mainly the kind of people who ran church youth clubs and uniformed groups (Scouts, Guides, etc.). These get-together were arranged for all the usual reasons; networking, sharing practice, etc., and, as one might expect, followed the traditional formula for such events. A mind-numbingly dull speech from a ‘keynote’ speaker - the keynote being flat - followed by a short pep talk from a local councillor who’d tell us we were all doing a valuable and important job while studiously avoid any reference to why we could have a decent budget to do that job, after which we’d all drift off into seminar groups, all of which had been awarded high-minded titles by the organiser, for a cup of coffee and general catch-up on events since the last time we’d all been forced into the same environment.

By and large, the most difficult task afforded by the whole event was that of finding someone stupid enough to volunteer to act as the ’scribe’ in your particular group and undertake the deeply embarrassing ritual of giving ‘feedback’ to the plenary session at the day.

On this occasion, our group was joined by a nondescript middle-aged man, a first-timer. who it transpired has taken over the running of church-based youth club a few months earlier and had desperately wanted to come to the event to ’share’ with us a ‘problem’ he was having with a young man who’d only recent began to patronise his particular youth club.

Having nothing better to do, the ‘question’ assigned to the group being one that belonged to the general category of ’stating the bleeding obvious’, we politely allowed the man to take centre stage and tell us his troubles.

The ‘problem’ such as it was, came in the former of a young Asian man who’d recently started attending the youth club with his friends, most of whom were Black. On noticing a new face in the club and, unusually for that area, one of South Asian descent, the youth leader decided that he really should take a well-intentioned interest in the young man, get to know him a little and make a conscious effort to engage with him within the context of his own, presumed, cultural identity.

By now, the more perceptive of you might have already figured out exactly what the ‘problem’ was. The youth leader undoubtedly meant well, but on encountering a South Asian youth for the first time, he unfortunately made the assumption that this young man’s sense of his own personal identity would be entirely defined by his ethnic background, and that, therefore, the correct means of engaging with him, and showing a willingness to respect his culture would lie in exhibiting and encouraging and interest in all thing South Asian. THe fact that the majority of young man’s friends were black and that he seemed perfectly happy sharing in what might be considered their cultural worldview, went sadly unnoticed.

Or to put it more simply, if the kid’s Asian, so the youth leader thought, then he must like things like Bhangra, etc.

Big mistake.

What followed was a rather embarrassing tale of cultural misapprehension resulting in one deeply irritated young man and one well-intentioned but deeply perplexed voluntary youth leader.

And the youth leader’s question to the group? ‘What have I done wrong?’, of course.

Follwoing a brief pause and an exchange of ‘are you going to tell him, or should I’ looks with colleagues I took the bull by the horns and decided to put him out of his all too obvious misery, and gently explained that there’s rather more the concepts of identity and culture than simple where you born, your ethnic background, etc. and that by far the best approach to engaging with this young man would to be put away any preconceptions you might have and treat him as an individual. Don’t assume that his appearance and apparent ethnic background defines either his sense of identity or his personal view of what constitutes his culture, just take the time to ask him what his real interests are and listen to him.

Culture and identity are not fixed commodities, nor are they the product of a Pavlovian response to the ethnic, cultural and social background into which one is born and brought up. Not only do such change and evolve over time in response to external forces, the shifting sands of cultural values and social mores, but they are also things that one can take control of, shape and direct by means of free will.

You have a choice. You identity is your own and you can shape it, change it and developing as you see fit. Or to borrow a line from The Levellers (the musicians, not the 17th Century political movement), ‘there’s only one way of life, and that’s your own’.

Peter Tatchell, who, like a good malt whisky, seems to improve with age as his obviously passionate beliefs come to be tempered by experience, understands:

Given that homophobia still exists, we need to challenge prejudice and defend our right to be gay. But in the long term, lesbian and gay identity is doomed. And a good thing, too.

Like every other expression of human culture, homosexual and heterosexual identities are historically transient. They haven’t always existed, and they won’t last forever. Indeed, the weakening, blurring and eventual dissolution of the labels queer and straight will be final proof of the demise of homophobia.

One has to suspect that Tatchell is being a touch over-optimistic in his unashamedly utopian vision of a future society in which cultural notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality are entirely meaningless:

In a future, more enlightened epoch, homophobia will be vanquished. Anti-gay attitudes will be deemed as ridiculous as flat-earth theories and opposition to votes for women. In this non-homophobic society, the present separate, exclusive sexualities of straight and queer are likely to be eventually supplanted by a more inclusive, polymorphous sexuality. This dissolution of rigid hetero and homo orientations and identities is thus both the precondition for, and the proof of, queer emancipation - for without differentiation and polarity, there can be no conflict and prejudice.

But as Utopian visions go, this is undoubtedly a good one, and one worth aspiring to.

It is also a view that is underpinned by an all too important and contemporary message about both the importance of respecting individuals and their personal sense of identity while, equally, recognising the divisive effects of efforts to constrain individuals and individuality into large-scale homogeneous (and amorphous) blocks of ‘humanity’ defined solely by crude general characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, culture, etc.

Meanwhile, CiF also throws up (literally, as in ‘vomits’) an absolutely abysmal article by the editor of the New Nation, Michael Eboda, on the subject of Tony Blair’s non-apology for the slave trade, one that is badly hampered by possibly the worst analogy I’ve seen in a long time:

Imagine if, today, Africans came to Europe and started kidnapping the fittest young men and women they could find. Let’s say they took them from Norfolk, for example, dragged them down to Bristol in chains, put them on a ship and transported them to Africa, a place they didn’t even know existed.

And I’m expected to respond to that how? Fuck ‘em, they’re a bunch of morons? Kidnapping the fittest young men and women is not trading in slaves, its trading in idiots… and speaking of idiots, why the fuck would you capture slaves in Norfolk and then drag them 250-300 miles overland to Bristol in order to ship them out to Africa, when you could just ship them out of Lowestoft or Harwich? Norfolk is on the coast, you do realise?
Okay, so I’m being facetious in the face of a Daily Mail-style personalised exposition of the slave trade contrived to deliberately engage ones personal sympathies for a scenario than hasn’t been seen in Britain for almost 200 years, one that complete with the obligatory shock revelation at the end.

And these unimaginable horrors would continue for not 10, or 20 or even 30 years, but 450. Yes, four and a half centuries.

And your point is..?

Now where do you think Europe, in terms of development, would be, at the end of that period, compared with Africa? You don’t need to be a great historian to work it out. Neither do you need to be a great psychiatrist to deduce that there are likely to be long-lasting psychological consequences of any such suffering.

Two statements there, both of them equally stupid and banal.

Let’s take history as our starter for ten.

Eboda’s clear contention here is that its was the economic proceeds and benefits of slavery that drove Europe’s rapid cultural, technological and economic development during the period from around 1500 right through to the early to mid 19th Century, the period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, resulting in the impoverishment of Africa at the same time.

There are a couple of serious problems with a such a view.

First, Europe’s great period of cultural, scientific and technological expansion didn’t coincide neatly with the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but began some 200 or so years earlier - this first great phase of European expansion, the Renaissance, was pretty much done and dusted by the time we’d discovered the America’s, let alone started to exploit that region and make extensive use of slave labour from Africa.

European economic, and subsequently, colonial power was built first and foremost on trade - slavery only entered the picture at later stage and coincided with Europe’s first great period of Imperial expansion.

Second, Europe was not the only culture to make extensive use of African slave labour during this same period. Slaves were widely used in the Arab world, and indeed, the majority of slave trading in Africa prior to the 16th Century was carried out by Arab slavers operating out of Zanzibar - one estimate, included in the Encyclopedia Britannica, gives the number of African slaves delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between 650 and 1905 as totally some 18 million.
If the economic benefits of slavery were the sole or primary determinant of progress, then one might reasonably expect to see the advancement of the Arab World parallel, if not outstrip, that of Europe - prior to the Renaissance, the Arab World was culturally and scientifically considerably more advance than Europe. This didn’t happen, there was no Arabic Reformation, nor was there an Arabic Enlightenment. The Arab world moved instead into first stasis and then a slow decline.

This alone suggest that the key factor in European advancement during the period was something other than economics, in fact the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment are all developments on from Europe’s prevailing Judeo-Christian worldview and all dependent on that worldview, to varying degrees, for their motive force.

It is impossible to say quite how Africa might have developed in the absence of the slave trade, but what one can say is that such development, had they happened, would not have mirrored those in Europe, as Africa lacked the cultural pre-conditions necessary to spawn a European-style period of rapid development, and might easily not have happened at all.

The very reason why the once-common racist trope that suggested that were it not for European colonisation, then African’s might still be living in mud huts and scratching out a subsistence living is a hurtful one for Black people, not because it presents a completely false picture of Africa but because it contains a grain of truth at its centre. Left entirely to its own devices, much of Africa might well exist in precisely such a state. However, its also true that progress is not necessarily all its cracked up to be and that the inhabitants on such a mythical ‘unspoiled’ Africa might very well be entirely content with living in conditions, much as is the case with other remote tribal cultures in the Amazon basin or the rainforests of Papua New Guinea.

Even given the hypothetical scenario in which roles are reversed and African slavers were exploiting Europe, there is no guarantee either that Africa would have attained either a European-style state of cultural, social and technological development or have undergone a European-style period of Imperial expansion.

Moving on to psychiatry, Eboda’s suggestion of that slavery has produced long-lasting psychological consequences is similarly an absurd notion, for all that he cites the work of Dr Joy DeGruy-Leary and her formulation of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome as authority for his suggestion.

Psychology, like all social sciences, is prone to throw up more that its fair share of pseudo-intellectual clap-trap, but even by the general standards of the discipline, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome stands out a particularly tendentious piece of old tosh.

Look, let me explain by due reference to a description of the foundations of her ‘theory’.

Leary’s concept is based on the theory of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is firmly accepted by the psychiatric establishment. It’s now taken as a given that there are people who will need treatment for the ongoing damage they suffered psychologically from the trauma of experiencing or witnessing life-threatening events such as military combat, a terrorist attack, natural disaster, serious accident or a violent personal assault, including rape. People afflicted with PTSD, Leary explained, often relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks. They may have difficulty sleeping, be irritable, have outbursts of anger, exaggerated startle responses and feel estranged from others. Their ability to function in social, work or family life is also impaired. This includes having trouble holding down a job, marital problems and difficulties in parenting.

And, okay, PTSD is firmly accepted and fairly well understood psychological condition in which direct experience of a traumatic event can trigger a range of psychological problems. No problem there, but then…

The Theory of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome suggest that centuries of slavery followed by systemic racism and oppression have resulted in multigenerational adaptive behaviors, some of which have been positive and reflective of resilience, and others that are detrimental and destructive. In brief, Dr. Leary presents facts; statistics and documents that illustrate how varying levels of both clinically induced and socially learned residual stress related issues were passed along through generations as a result of slavery.

True to form, if one searches for the key term ‘multigenerational adaptive behaviors‘ in an effort to find independent evaluations of Leary’s theory, one find that the only name that comes up alongside this term is that of Dr Leary, herself.

That, in itself, does not invalidate Dr Leary’s theory, it just means that no one else has yet found it sufficiently interesting to bother putting it to the test. The real problem with her theory is rather that its not really personal psychology at all, in talking about multigenerational adaptive behaviors she’s not describing a psychological disorder she’s talking about cultural values and received wisdom, her theory is no more than sociology dressed up in the borrowed clothing of psychology.

No one, today, is personally traumatised by slavery in the manner of PTSD, unless they either experience it directly or witness it first hand, which entirely rules out amost the entire Black population of the US and Europe - sub-Saharan Africa is, sadly, still a different matter in some places. One can, of course, still be legitimately traumatised is this fashion by one’s personal experience of racism, but that’s NOT slavery, for all that modern notions of racism were contrived to justify the practice of slavery.

So all she’s really saying is that Black culture has internalised certain values, ideas and behaviours, some positive, some negative, as a consequence of slavery (and latterly racism) which are passed down from generation to generation as Black culture is transmitted between those generations. This, as sociological concepts go, is perfectly reasonable, but its still not psychology, its sociology. So why dress this idea up as psychology.

The answer is nicely illustrated by perhaps the most stupid remark I’ve seen in a long time:

Racism is a direct result of slavery. The idea that black people were inferior was concocted in a bid to justify its brutality. It was OK to treat them like animals because they were sub-human, went the argument.

As a result, many African and Caribbean people to this day have a lack of self-love or self-belief that is directly related to what their ancestors endured during those centuries of enforced terror. It’s why, for example, black boys find it so easy to shoot one another (but very rarely boys of other ethnicities). They see in front of them someone who reminds them of what they hate and regard as worthless - themselves!

>That’s Michael Eboda, again, talking utter rubbish - Black-on-Black gang violence is the product of slavery, okay?

No, Michael, it isn’t. But it does explain why Leary, and yourself, seeming, are so keen to pretend that a sociological theory about culture is actually a psychological ‘disorder’. It’s a blame, responsibility and self-exculpation.

If, using Eboda’s example, Black-on-Black gang violence is the product of aberrant social values within Black culture, or that portion of such a culture accepted by gangs, then for all that it may, historically speaking, be rooted in values that arose out of slavery and, then, racism, it is still a Black ‘problem’ for which the appropriate response, and only prescription, is ‘physician, heal thyself’.

That is not an unacceptable view of the problem, by any means, and in fact its one widely accepted by the vast majority of Black youth and community workers who work in gang-ridden urban districts. Our Community. Our culture. Our problem. Our Solutions.

If, however, the cause is not sociological but psychological, such violence is the product of ’stress-induced disorder’ then culpability is more or removed from the perpetrator - it’s not my fault, I have a mental health problem caused by my ancestors having been slaves.

Yeah right - just try and get off death row with that excuse.

A cultural explanation for such violence leaves the concept of moral agency firmly in place - the individual has a choice whether to pull the trigger or not and a choice as to whether to accept of reject those aspects of their culture they deem negative or destructive. By reconfiguring a cultural problem as a psychological disorder, Leary is attempting to minimise, if not remove entirely, any considerations of moral agency, destructive behaviour is not longer a matter of choice but a pre-conditioned response arising from a stress-induced condition.

What this illustrates is perhaps the most unsavoury and unsettling undercurrent within the whole debate surrounding next year’s anniversary of the end of the slave trade in Britain, the fact that for at least some of those most vociferously demands apologies and reparations for slavery, the primary reason why the events of 200 and more years ago remain such an issue for them is no more than the fact that continue to define their own existence, cultural and identity in relation to slavery and the slave trade, even though the majority of people in this country have long since ceased to do view them through that particular distorting lens.

And worse still, they actually do this by choice and, therefore, at a psychological level, create their own slavery.

No one in Britain, today, has to define themselves by reference to historical events in which they and their recent ancestors had no direct part. No one has to think of themselves as a slave or a descendent of slaves, nor define their own sense of idenity on such a basis. You have a choice to be something, and someone, other than the sum of your received cultural background and history, if only you choose to exercise that choice and think for yourself.

If there’s cure for so-called Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, then its not counselling and it certainly doesn’t lie in the realms of psychology.

A good dose of Malcolm X - that’s a different matter. That makes sense.

Or you could just take a bit of advice from the late, great, Bob Marley:

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.

Abortion is back in the news, courtesy of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor - excellent commentary here by Owen Barder, by the way -  so it should come as no particular surprise to note that while researching the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship’s campaign on the draft Sexual Equality Regulations, I discovered that one of the other group’s supported by its Public Policy Officer, Andrea Minichiello Williams, Christian Concern for Our Nation has a few things to say on this subject as well.

In fact, only this week is published a press release on behalf of what looks to be another spin-off group ‘Choose Life’ with the following headline:

VAST MAJORITY OF WOMEN BELIEVE ABORTION IS CRUEL AND LAW SHOULD BE CHANGED

The press release, which I’ll analyse in a moment, trumpets the results of an opinion poll carried out by CommunicateResearch on their behalf into attitures towards abortion, the results of which, so this group claim, support their calls for changes in the present abortion law - but does it really do that and does the spin put on these results by this group genuine match up with the results of the poll?

The problems with Choose Life’s interpretation of the results of this opinion poll begin right from the very headling of the press release which makes two clear statements, that the ‘vast majority’ of women believe that abortion is cruel (full stop) and also beleive that the law should be changed.

In actual fact, the poll does not ask whether women believe abortion is cruel, in general, what is asks, instead, is whether respondents (not all of whom were women) agree or disagree with the statement that ‘aborting a baby at six month is cruel’ - to which 76% of all respondents agreed.

Not only does this group misrepresent the actual question asked in the poll but the question, itself, if both unreliable and biased, if the objective of the poll is to assess the level of support for current abortion laws. The question of whether one perceives abortion at six months is cruel is entirely subjective and limited in scope; the poll does not ask whether respondents consider an abortion to be ‘cruel’ to the foetus; to the pregnant mother or both, nor are respondents asked to consider whether, even if they perceive abortion at this stage to be cruel, whether it could also be justified or even considered necessary in certain circumstances.

As such, it is not possible to make any assertions as to the degree of public support for current abortion laws or changes in the current law based on this one question, not least as nowhere in the poll are respondents asked explicit whether they would wish to see or support changes in existing law - the headline states that women believe the law should be changed, but nowhere in the poll is that actual question asked.

The full text of the press release is given below with my own annotations, based on the actual results of the poll as published by CommunicateResearch, including a number of questions/responses that the Choose Life group have chosen to omit from their press release for what you will see are very obvious reasons.

The vast majority of women believe that abortion is “cruel” and that the existing law should be changed, according to the biggest ever professional survey of female opinion.

The assertions made int he press releases headlines, and restated here, I’ve already dealt with and shown to be unreliable. As for the ‘biggest ever professional survey of female opinion’, the research results show a total sample size of 1503, of whom 1046 were women, which means it is certainly not the biggest ever professional survey of female opinion on this subject, a 2002 survey into women’s’ perceptions of abortion law and practice (pdf) conducted by Marie Stopes International, used a sample size of 1,222 women aged 16-49 and included attitudinal data.

I’m pretty sure if one looks around, you’ll find even larger studies have been carried out in the past - a sample size of 1046 women is not that big and nothing in particular to crow about.

The survey also shows that most people – men and women – believe that too many abortions are being carried out each year and want to see the 200,000 a year toll reduced.

The survey does indeed show that ‘most people’ agreed with the proposition that 200,000 abortions a year is too many in total and should be reduced, although the actual figure for those who agreed with this statement was only 53% - 29% disagreed with the proposition (the survey did not ask why) and 18% chose ‘don’t know’ or refused to comment.

The survey does not, however, ask respondents to indicate by what methods they would prefer to see the number of abortions reduced and the simple fact is that any reasonable individual, even the most ardent pro-choice supporters, would prefer to see fewer abortions being carried out, albeit that their preferred means of achieving such a goal - better sex education and access to contraception - differs fundamentally from Pro-Lifers who favour a complete ot near complete ban on abortion.

The mere fact that a majority of people would like to see fewer abortions carried out each year, again, tells us nothing about attitudes toward current abortion law or any denabd for change.

Another key finding is that women overwhelmingly want Government money spent on charities offering alternatives to abortion, such as adoption. Eighty five per cent want to see more help given to women who want to keep their baby rather than further moves to make abortion easier.

This is, again, wholly misleading.

The actual questions asked in the survey were:

If you were forced to choose between the following outcomes, which ONE would you select?

Easier Access to Abortion – 10%

More support for women who wish to keep their baby – 84%

And

It has been argued that since the government funds abortions in private clinics, it should also make funds available to organisations offering women alternatives to abortion such as adoption. Would you support or oppose this proposal?

Support - 85%

Oppose - 11%

In neither case do these questions demonstrate a lack of support for the current abortion laws or servie provision - one can easily reach the conclusion that the government should prioritise greater support for alternatives to abortion simply on the basis of believeing that existing provision is already adequate and that women should have every available option open to them when choosing what’s best for them.

Pro-choice means exactly that, enabling women to choose according to their needs and their personal circumstances, whether than means abortion, adoption or motherhood.

The poll, carried out by CommunicateResearch for the campaigning group Choose Life, will add to the mounting pressure for a change in the abortion law and a reduction in the current upper limit.

But the poll suggests that women will not be satisfied with a simple reduction in the upper time limit of 24 weeks if that simply results in an increase in early abortions. Most want to see fewer terminations overall and wider availability of alternatives to abortion.

The poll, in actual fact, does nothing of the sort as none of conclusions cited so far in anyway conclusively supports this group’s claims - what they giving here are the results they wanted to see, not the results they actually obtained.

It comes shortly before a major public debate in London between doctors and lawyers on opposing sides of the abortion argument. Barrister Charles Foster and Professor Patricia Casey will declare that the the number of UK abortions is too high and that the Abortion Act, last revised in 1990, should be reviewed. They will be opposed by barrister Nick Toms and Dr Wendy Savage.

As noted previously, it does not follow that the perception that there are currently too many abortions being carried out should necessarily lead to either a review of the Abortion Act or greater restrictions on access to abortion, nor that such such restrictions would even reduce the total number of abortions carried out each year on UK citizens. As the experience of the Irish Republic clearly demonstrates, prohibitive restrictions on access to abortion, these days, only lead to those seeking abortion going elsewhere - mainly the UK.

The net effect of restricting access to abortion in the UK would be simply to encourage women seeking an abortion to go abroad, most likely to Eastern Europe to get the procedure done.

Tory leader David Cameron and his predecessor Michael Howard have both backed calls for a lower limit and the leader of Britain’s Roman Catholics Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is to meet Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt next week to press for a tightening of the law.

Professor Casey said: “For years abortion has been cast as a central tenet of feminism and as essential to women’s empowerment. But recent developments in pro-life feminism give the lie to this thesis and abortion has devastating effects on the psychological well-being of many women.

"There have been several influential studies published recently that show an increased risk for psychiatric disorder and psychiatric hospitalisation among women who have abortions.

“So, contrary to the early feminist rhetoric promoting abortion as a positive choice for women with crisis pregnancies, women deserve better and we cannot and should not act as oppressors of our unborn children as we were once oppressed by the structures within society.“

Professor Casey, quoted here, is Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin and Consultant Psychiatrist in the Mater Hospital, Dublin, and from what little biographical information I can find appears to something akin to the Irish equivalent of Raj Persaud.

Abortion is undoubtedly a traumatic experience for any woman and in some case may result in psychiatric problems, but the same can be said for both adoption and motherhood. In talking about ‘pro-life feminism’, Prof. Casey is talking about abortion in a political and a professional context, one which I would certain hope would not carry through in her work as a consultant psychiatrist as such a biased view of this issue, if applied in therapy, would create severe ethical problems and compromise her objectivity within the doctor/client relationship.

Andrea Williams, public policy officer for the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship, which is organising Monday’s debate, said: “This poll confirms that women in this country are deeply unhappy with the existing abortion laws and want them tightened up. It also suggests many women fear that too often abortions are carried out because of social pressures and not because the women concerned want a termination. Above all women want to see fewer abortions in this country. It would be disastrous if the move towards a lower time limit for abortion were to lead to more early abortions. That would achieve very little”

Again, it is worth restating that the questions asked in the survey and the response received do not support the view put forward here - in fact the single most telling question in the survey is one that the press release omits from consideration, thus far:

Q5 Do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements about abortion?

A woman’s right to choose always outweighs the rights of the unborn

Agree – 65%, Disagree – 26%

In fact the survey also include this question, for which the response is equally revealing:

Q.4 If a candidate in a general election in your constituency publicly said they believed that abortion should be made less easily available would yoube more likely or less likely to vote for them, or would it make no difference?

More Likely – 19%

No Difference – 56%

Less Likely – 22%

65% of those surveyed consider a woman’s right to choice in the matter of abortion to be paramount, which is altogether a kick in the teeth for the pro-life lobby as is the abject their failure to find any evidence support for greater restrictions on abortion has a significant impact on voting intentions.

The latest survey reveals mounting disquiet among women at the scale of abortions in Britain and the laxity of the existing law. It is based on interviews with 1046 women and 457 men.

Having read the survey results that’s not, as you might have already gathered, the impression I’ve gained, but then as a trained psychologist what do I know about attitude surveys… still, lets take a closer look at the evidence.

The key findings are:

More than eight in ten women believe that aborting a baby at the current upper age limit is cruel.

That’s the third occasion that this statistic is quoted - see my earlier comments and contrast with the 65% support for the pre-eminence of a women’s right to choice.

A massive 95 per cent of Britons agree that the abortion law should be kept under regular review and fewer than one in twenty disagrees.

It’s only reasonable for any law to be kept under periodic review, so support for this proposition tells us nothing at all about any level of support for actual change, it just means that people think it prudent to keep an eye on how the law is working in practice.

Two-thirds of Britons believe that abortion law hasn’t kept pace with our knowledge of early development in the womb. Only one-quarter disagree.

Does this indicate actual support for a reduction in the time limit for elective abortion on grounds other than disability or not? The one question that the survey avoids asking is whether the current time limit should actually be reduced - quite why is unclear as it’s a simple enough question.

The most one can legitimately infer from this statement is a belief that abortion law should take into account current medical practice and clinical evidence on the viability of the foetus at certain stages of development and nothing more - it indicates support for evidence-based law-making not necessarily for further restrictions in access to abortion.

The survey also finds widespread dissatisfaction with the way the current law operates.

78 per cent of women want a compulsory cooling-off period between diagnosis of pregnancy and any abortion.

So what? Women want time to think things through properly before making a major decision about their life - nothing unreasonable in that.

That the law does not explicitly provide for a ‘cooling-off period’ between diagnosis of pregnancy and abortion is not a deficiency in law - most pregnancies, today, are self-diagnosed using home tests, follwing which, even if a women’s immediate view is that she wants abortion, she still has to obtain an appointment with a medical practitioner, which takes a couple of days at least, then undergo a counselling session and then be given an appointment for the actual procedure. Unless someone is badly ‘on the clock’, having discovered their pregnancy or decided on a termination at a very late stage in relation to the current 24 week limit, even going private with result in a delay of about a week between the initial decision to have a termination and the actual procedure, allowing time to think things over.

Why is there no statutory cooling off period - most likely because giving a patient time to think things through adn come to an informed decision is simple matter of medical ethics and, therefore, one that does not require legislation. If anyone feels that a doctor has rushed or pushed them into a decision on abortion without giving them time to reach an informed decision then their recourse is a complaint of professional misconduct to the GMC.

A massive 96 per cent of women want a right to be fully informed of the medical risks associated with abortion.

Well who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be fully informed of the medical risks before any medical procedure, If a doctor prescribes medication you’re not familar with then the second question you ask is generally going to be whether there are any side-effect - the first is always, "is this going to help?", obviously.

Again, the right to be fully informed of medical risks is a matter of medical ethics and not one that requires legislation.

The most common reason for abortion is perceived to be on grounds of disability (66 per cent), and this proportion is even higher among women than among men. But this is far from correct. In 2004 only one per cent of abortions in England & Wales took place for this reason.

Public understanding of the grounds on which abortion is sought is certainly out of kilter with reality in the matter of disability, however this was not the only thing that this particular question looked at - the actual question was:

Q6 As far as you can tell, what would you say are the most common reasons for abortion?

And the full results were:

The baby’s father is unsupportive - 45%

A girl’s parents don’t agree with her having a baby - 55%

It would be difficult to combine a baby with a full time job - 48%

Having a baby would interfere with education - 52%

The unborn baby has a disability - 66%

Note the obvious bias here, in so far as the answers given seem to relate primarily to abortions in teenagers, particularly those who are still living with parents and in full-time education.

In actual fact, one the most recent complete statistics (2004) only 2% of abortions were carried out on under 16s and teenagers, in total, account for only 20% of all abortions. The largest number of abortions by single age group - 27% - occurs in the 20-24 age group, while women over 30 account, in total, for nearly 29% of all abortions.

The vast majority of women seeking abortions in the UK are mature adults - more that half of all abortions occur in women over the age of 24 - so its not just in the matter of disability that there is a degree if general ignorance about abortion, but equally a significant degree of ignorance as to just who might be having all these abortions and, in fact, the majority of women who do seek an abortion or more than capable of making and informed adult decision as to what they believe to be in their best interests.

Two-thirds of Britons support, and one-quarter oppose, a right for healthcare workers not to have to sign abortion forms or assist abortions where this would conflict with their ethical views.

As far as I’m aware, medical practioners are under no legal requirement to sign abortion forms or assist in abortion procedures if they have a personal moral objection to abortion - should this arise the would simply be under a duty to refer the individual to medical practioner who will deal with them.

Okay, I could be wrong, in which case I would expect a fellow blogger such as the excellent Dr Crippen to correct any misconceptions I might have on this matter…

84 per cent of Britons, including the same proportion of women, believe parents of girls under 16 have the right to know if their daughter has been referred for abortion. This rises to 90 per cent among women in social groups DE, often regarded as the most prolific client group for abortion.

Again, this is a matter of natural parental concern - of course parents of girls under 16 want to know if their child is considering having an abortion. Whether some parents should know is a very different matter and I suspect that a majority of people, if asked, would take the view that it is only right to withhold such information from parents where, at the very least, it may put the teenager in question at risk of harm.

Once parent’s get over the initial shock of finding out that their teenage daughter is pregnant, many and probably most are supportive and concerned only with the best interests and well-being of their child - sadly there are some who aren’t and who may either pressure their child into having (or not having) the baby againsther wishes, or in the worst case scenarios, may abuse, assault and even kill their daughter.

The question is misleading simply because it fair to ask respondents to give an informed response on consideration of the full issues.

More than seven in ten Britons, including two-thirds of women, agree that fathers should be given a say over whether their child is aborted. Among women aged 18-24 this rises to 79 per cent.

Again, the question itself is ambiguous and therefore misleading - all this demonstrates is the view that a majority of people think that a woman who is considering having an abortion should make some effort to discuss the matter with the father of the child and seek their opinion. What this question does not address is whether peopel believe that fathers should somehow be given a veto over the decision to abort a foetus and, therefore, override the woman’s wishes. Ask that question and I suspect that the outcome would look much more like that given in relation to the question of a woman’s right to choose, at least amongst women, which is what actually matters most in this case.

More people agree than disagree with the statement ‘most abortions are carried out for purely social reasons’ (49 per cent:41 per cent). This rises to 56 per cent agreement among Labour voters.

The question is simply ambiguous once again - what does the survey mean by social reasons?

Does this include decisions based on personal economic and financial circumstances or not, for example, and if so was this clearly communicated to respondents or not. One can infer nothing from this question due to its poor framing.

The phrase “a woman’s right to choose” clearly carries enormous emotional weight, as 65 per cent of Britons (both genders) agree that it ‘always outweighs the rights of the unborn’. This however conflicts with the earlier statements about, for instance, abortion for disability.

The supposed ‘conflict’ actually comes later in this press release, not earlier, but never mind - it’s up next so I’ll deal with it there.

Disability

Only around one-third of people are aware that abortion is legal up to birth if the baby is disabled, and men are more ignorant than women of this. The youngest age group, 18-24 yrs, are the least likely to be aware of this fact.

Most Britons regard it as unacceptable that under existing law abortion is legal up to birth on grounds of disability. Opinion runs strongest among the 18-24 yr age group, 73 per cent of whom regard it as unacceptable – perhaps because disability rights legislation is a more recent development. Interestingly, among both men and women those who voted Labour in the 2005 General Election are more likely to regard this law as unacceptable than those who voted for any other party.

The reference to a woman’s right to choose carrying emotional weight seem clearly intended to devalue the results of that question - 65% support - as does the allusion to a conflict with the response to the question of abortion on grounds of disability being available right up to birth.

In fact the two are only in conflict to a limited extent based, primarily, on perceptions as to the viability of the foetus - in fact , if one takes the two set of responses together, the issue of viability is absolutely central to this whole issue.

What one can quite reasonably infer here is that mainstream public opinion is broadly of the view that a woman’s right to choice in abortion should be supported, but only to the point at which foetal development is such that the child has a reasonable chance of survival outside the womb - this is perceived by many as a pragmatic view of pregnancy which holds that the notional right to life begins for foetus at that point where it is capable of surviving independently of the mother.

That’s not the absolute right to choice that some favour but its also certainly not the absolute prohibition of all abortions that pro-lifers are after either - it’s a compromise position and one which relies largely of medical practice and technology.

The apparent conflict with views on abortion and disability is, therefore, not quite so straightforward as this group are trying to suggest and certainly does not negate or mitigate entirely against a woman’s right to choice - in simple terms how one views the rights and wrongs of abortion up to birth in cases of foetal disability is entirely contingent on the nature of disability at issue and its affect of on the viability of the foetus.

Public opinion, it would seem, would not support such late abortions for disabilities where the foetus in question has a good chance of survival and is likely to experience a decent quality of life, even allowing for their disability, but this would almost certain not carry over to severe disabilities that are likely to result in very early mortality or in the child, once born, having little or not quality of life whatsoever.

All this really tells us that abortion raises a series of complex ethical debates in which, by and large, the public view is that its interests are best served by a reliance on medical evidence - the viability argument carries considerable weight in the public eye and, for those without strong moral/ethical views on the subject is perceived to be a valid position, albeit as both Owen (linked earlier) and Brian Barder note, its adoption by the pro-life lobby is entirely hypocritical - the best response to this new particular tactic, by the way, is to turn the moral/ethical argument on its head by questioning the pro-life as to the extent to which it would be prepared to accept medical intervention in pregnancy at ever earlier stages. How would, for example, this largely, if not entirely, religiously motivated lobby respond to Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ scenario in which conception and incubation to ‘birth’ takes place entirely outside the womb? One suspect, not very well, which is precisely why the question should be asked.

Support for alternatives to abortion

87 per cent of women (and 83 per cent of men) agree that government funds should also be available to organisations offering alternatives to abortion such as adoption, in light of the funding given to private abortion clinics.

Well quite - so what? It’s entirely reasonable and laudable to provide women with alternatives to abortion, should they choose to take up such options - of course by far the best alternative is always high quality sex education and access to effective contraception, which, curiously enough, this survey neglects to mention at all.

89 per cent of women support a legal duty on doctors to provide access to advice both from abortion providers and from organisations offering alternatives such as adoption.

Again, a balanced spread of information on the options available to women in order to support them in making an informed decision as to what’s best for them is, quite obviously, a good thing - provided that there is adequate quality control as to the nature and content of the information provided.

If any organisation wishes to promote adoption as an alternative to abortion, then that’s fine by mean, as long as its done properly and with the intent to inform - however, its also perfectly clear that any group whose approach is try and moralise or scare women into taking such an option, as some pro-life groups seem to think is acceptable, have no business receiving public money or being given access to women who may be considering abortion as an option - which is probably not what the pro-lifers would really want.

And finally…

85 per cent of women would rather see more support for women who wish to keep their baby than easier access to abortion – and support for this is particularly strong among the 18-24 age group and Labour voters.

Well yes, but the actual question, as noted earlier, is:

If you were forced to choose between the following outcomes, which ONE would you select?

Easier Access to Abortion – 10%

More support for women who wish to keep their baby – 84%

And the fact that a large number of women would like to see more support for women who wish to keep their baby in no way indicates support for any increased limitations in access to abortions nor, indeed, should it come as any great surprise to find that Labour voters strongly support this idea - the survey does not ask the question that needs to be asked here, which is what kinds of additional support should be provided, but as a Labour Party member I think I can safely predict that the kind of additional support that most Labour voters would have in mind would come in terms of economic/financial support, access to high quality affordable child care, strong employment rights and an equitable labour market that does not unduly penalise women for taking time out to have a baby - all things which serve to minimise the impact of financial/career considerations in the decision-making process undertaken by women which find themselves, usually unexpected, pregnant.

If Labour voters, and particularly socialists, have a clear and long-standing moral and ethical position on abortion it is is that no woman should - in an ideal world - be deprived or unduly limited and constrianed in her right to choice on the basis of purely, or largely, economic/financial considerations.

That, I suspect, is something that this particular group simply do not understand - and probably never will.

 

I should preface this post with a rare - and brief - autobiographical note.

Although I work in community development, and have done now for more than ten years, I actually trained as a psychologist (organisational/human factors, not the ’sit down on the couch and tell me your problems’ variety). And like many people who trained in one profession only to move on and take up another, I still keep my hand in, from time to time, by skimming the professional/academic journals for items of interest, a couple of which form the basis for this article.

Ask most people to list the things that routinely driven them into a state of screaming frustration and somewhere near the top of the list you’re sure to find the word ‘incompetence’, more often than not this will be cited in the context of ‘bureaucratic incompetence’ and encounters with the kafkaesque world of officialdom where anything and everything seem purposely designed to prevent the individual obtaining a reasonable solution, answer of response to even the most basic of problems.

Over the years, much has been written, said, filmed and blogged on the subject of bureacratic incompetence..

It has influenced our common language - the term ‘jobsworth’ entered the English language sometime during the late 1960s/early 1970s, rapidly becoming the standard methods of describing one of least endearing denizons of the bureauicratic environment,  the minor functionary for whom ‘the rules’ are everything such that any deviation from them is ‘more than their job’s worth’.

It has spawned a language all of its own, one rich in euphemisms, disingenuity and dissembling: bureaucrats don’t have skills, they have core competencies, they never lie, although they may be economical with the truth, and, of course, no one is ever fired, sacked or made redundant, they are merely downsized or redeployed outside the company. And this, in turn, has spawned a game, which is called either buzzword bingo or bullshit bingo depending on your personal prefence, and given rise to the cultural phenomenon that is Dilbert, which manages to both take the piss unmercifully and yet still prompt people to put forward their own stories of real-world bureacratic incompetence and stupidity that are every bit as bizarre as anything that Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, can concoct for his cartoon strips or books.

Yet, for the most part, what captures the attention of most people are the bureaucratic systems that support and sustain the kind of incompetence on regularly encounters in bureaucratic organisations. It seems almost to be taken as read that in dealing with bureaucracies you will encounter people who are incompetent, stupid, venal and occasionally bordering on corrupt, and yet when we complain about such things we invariably blame the system for housing these people and for failing to hold them to account rather than the individuals themselves.

One can readily see how ‘the system’ works to avoid accountability and personal responsibility from this BBC report of Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell’s response to questions from Parliament’s Public Administration Select Committee about the recent foreign prisioners fiasco:

The UK’s top civil servant [O’Donnell] was questioned about the controversy by the Commons public administration committee.

He said it was sometimes difficult to divide policy, which was the responsibility of ministers, from "delivery".

"If you ask Charles Clarke, he was clear he takes responsibility for the department and all it does. Certainly from the civil servants’ side mistakes were made and we need to learn from that," he said.

Asked if civil servants should have resigned over the controversy, Sir Gus replied: "I’m not clear that there was sufficient direct accountability for that to be appropriate.

"This would have been assessed by line managers along the way and people will be looking at what lessons to learn and what staff changes are necessary."

A "wide range of officials" were responsible for "a number of jobs", he added.

Look carefully enough and you can sense the mental subtext behind O’Donnell’s comments:

Good god, man. If we had to get rid of everyone who screwed up we’d end up sacking half the damn department!

While it is certainly true that bureaucracies have, over time, evolved any number of subtle and sophisticated methods of avoiding responsibility for getting this wrong - amongst my personal favourites are collective decision-making, which ensures that no one is ever blamed for getting things wrong as no one person can be identified as having taken the decision that caused the problem, and process management* under which projects are judged successful if they follow the right kind of process, even if they fail entirely to deliver anything of consequence - this does not remove the personal dimension from consideration. Bureaucracies are staffed by people, and its the people that make the actual mistakes - the system only serves to cover-up these mistakes, allowing the incompetent to avoid any responsibility for fouling things up.

*Process management is, of course, the basis of the majority of ‘quality systems’, many of which aren’t actually worth the paper they’re written on. To give a perfect example, the Community Legal Service Quality Mark, which was set up by the government as a quality standard for providers of information, advice and legal services, assesses applicants on their processes and how well these are documented/implemented - the one thing it doesn’t assess, however, is whether the information/advice given is actually any good.

All of which brings me to what I really wanted to discuss here, the personal dimensions of incompetence and to two research studies: -

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf) by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University, first published in 1999 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and

‘Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence’ (pdf) by Dunning, Kerri Johnson & Joyce Ehrlinger (Cornell University) and Kruger (now University of Illinois),which was published in 2003 in Current Directions in Pshycological Science.

Of the two, the second ‘Why People Fail…" is a little more accessible being more of a review paper than ‘Unskilled and Unaware…", which is more strictly reseach orientated, and yet both make for fascinating reading.

Both deal with what might colloquially be referred to as ‘David Brent Syndrome’, where one encounters an individual with seeminging unshakable belief in their own ability despite it being patently obvious to the outside observser that they are manifestly incompetent and what both show is incompetence packs a double whammy in these people: not only do they consistantly over-estimate their own ability, skills and job performance, but they also consistant under-estimate the ability, skills and performance of competent people around them. They are, quite literally, blind to their own failings being neither capable of recognising their own incompetence or recognising competence in others, from which they could otherwise identify benchmarks against which to the assess their own ability, as the Kruger and Dunning study notes:

In essence, we argue that the skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain—one’s own or anyone else’s. Because of this, incompetent individuals lack what cognitive psychologists variously term metacognition (Everson & Tobias,1998), metamemory (Klin, Guizman, & Levine, 1997), metacomprehension (Maki, Jonas, & Kallod, 1994), or self-monitoring skills (Chi, Glaser, & Rees, 1982). These terms refer to the ability to know how well one is performing, when one is likely to be accurate in judgment, and when one is likely to be in error. For example, consider the ability to write grammatical English. The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine if a grammatical mistake has been made. In short, the same knowledge that underlies the ability to produce correct judgment is also the knowledge that underlies the ability to recognize correct judgment. To lack the former is to be deficient in the latter.

Factor in a ‘business culture’ that insulates such individuals from criticism and personal accountability for mistakes and you have a perfect recipe not only for failure, but for repeated failures.

Consider, for a moment, the abysmal record of the public sector and particularly central government when it comes to large-scale information technology projects - a field in which, over the last few years, words like ‘on-time’ and ‘on-budget’ are almost unknown. In report after report by external auditors, the Audit Commission and the Public Accounts Committee, government departments have been castigated again and again for making the same basic mistakes in commissioning IT project to the point where government and the civil service are near legendary for their inability to adequately commission and project-manage technology-based projects.

I’m not going to go down the road of quoting large chunks of some of these reports in failed and failing projects but you can trust me that if you do track down and read a few of them you’ll find the same failings and same criticisms repeated over and over again, and yet nothing seems to change.

Why?

In part the system is to blame insofar as it protects individuals from the full consequences of failure - in the public sector, in particular, screw-ups that would result in an absolute blood-bath of sackings in a private company will often get written-off as ‘learning experiences’ while those responsible are either left in place, redeployed to other departments, taking their failings with them, or sometime even promoted on the basis of little more than having achieved the requisite ’seniority’ to merit a move up the ladder.

But equally it would not be true to suggest that such reports are simply ignored and not acted upon - they are. Departments are reorganised, recommendations are considered and implemented, systems are put in place, policies are written, action plans are drawn up and staff are redeployed and given training - and all to little or no appreciable effect.

Why? Because all the system, procedures, training and action plans in the world will not overcome the basic problem of incompetence, because non of these things actually teach people the one key skill they lack, the ability to distinguish between good and bad judgement, between accuracy and error.

One could ask, I suppose, why these people aren’t weeded out earlier their careers; why their incompetence is not  noticed sooner. Well that’s where the ‘Peter Principle’ comes into play, which holds that:

successful members of a hierarchical organization are eventually promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to a level at which they are not competent.

Or more simply that:

In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.

However, this is not simply a function of promotion placing individuals into a more difficult or complex job, which they then fail to cope with, rather promotions may take an individual into a role which requires different skills to their previous job(s); skills that they don’t possess - the classic example of the Peter Principle is the worker whose excellence in their jobs gets them promoted from the factory floor into management, only for it become apparent that they are completely unsuited to such a role.

In short, incompetence only becomes apparent once an individual is placed in a situation where their failings are exposed and not before - they may even have been in a particular job for several years when that happens having either had their deficiencies masked by the work of colleagues/subordinates or simply never having faced a particular situation in which the skills they lack are some obviously essential.

There is much of interest to be gleaned from these two studies - just consider these passages for a moment:

However, we have found that people’s estimates of their performance arise, at least in part, from a top-down approach. People start with their preconceived beliefs about their skill (e.g., “I am good at logical reasoning”) and use those beliefs to estimate how well they are doing on any specific test. This strategy at first seems to be a good one—people who believe they have logical reasoning skill should have some basis for that claim—except for one fly in the ointment. People’s impressions of their intellectual and social skills often correlate only modestly, and sometimes not at all, with measures of their actual performance (Falchikov & Boud, 1989). Indeed, and perhaps more important, people just tend to hold overinflated views of theirskills that cannot be justified by their objective performance (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Weinstein, 1980). Therefore, preconceived notions of skill can lead people to err in their performance estimates.

And…

The top-down nature of performance estimates can have important behavioral consequences. Women, for example, tend to disproportionately leave science careers along every step of the educational and professional ladder (Seymour, 1992). We began to wonder if topdown influences on performance estimates might contribute to this pattern. Starting in adolescence, women tend to rate themselves as less scientifically talented than men rate themselves (Eccles, 1987). Because of this, women might start to think they are doing less well on specific scientific tasks than men tend to think, even when there is no gender difference in performance. Thinking they are doing less well, women might become less enthusiastic about participating in scientific activities.

We put these notions to a test by giving male and female college students a pop quiz on scientific reasoning. Before the quiz, the students were asked to rate themselves on their scientific skills, and the women rated themselves more negatively than the men did. The students’ estimates of their performance on the quiz showed the same pattern, with the women thinking that they had done less well than the men thought, even though there was no gender difference in actual performance. Later, when asked if they would like to participate in a science competition for fun and prizes, the women were more likely than the men to decline the invitation. This reluctance correlated significantly with their perceptions of performance on the quiz, but not at all with actual performance (Ehrlinger & Dunning, 2003, Study 4). Perception of performance, not reality, influenced decisions about future activities.

This line of argument is one that has clear implications for the ongoing debate about the ‘gender pay-gap’ on which both Tim Worstall and Chris Dillow have made a number of interesting and rather sceptical observations about what often passes as the ‘accepted wisdom’ in this area - a selection of Tim’s commentaries can be accessed via this link while Chris’s take on matters can be accessed here - both links take you to Google search results, which is the quickest way of tracking down these articles - not least as it suggests that the observed differential, in women, between perceived and actual performance may well act as form of internalised ‘glass ceiling’ that influences women’s educational/career choices to the detriment of their real economic potential.

Intruiging as such lines of inquiry are, they are one’s that I much prefer to leave to those, like Tim and Chris, whose knowledge and understanding of economics far outstrips my own - if nothing else I can recognise the boundaries of my own competence in such matters. What I find more interesting is how these studies and question of individual and systematic incompetence may relate to certain facets of our currrent political and governmental culture and how they shape that culture in terms of what seems increasingly to be a prime objective of all those working in government - the avoidance of responsibility and accountability.

By tradition, when screw-ups happen in government, the buck stops at the relevant Minister, as Gus O’Donnell stresses here:

If you ask Charles Clarke, he was clear he takes responsibility for the department and all it does. Certainly from the civil servants’ side mistakes were made and we need to learn from that

This is an all-too typical response in such situations - civil servants must ‘learn from their mistakes’ but the Minister is the one who bears the actual responsibility for the foul-up.

Sometimes this is undoubtedly true - Politicians make policy and when it all goes pear-shaped, its found that policy if the cause of the problems. However it is still more often the case that when government screws thing up badly, the real fault lies in the incompetence of civil servants than in the failing of Ministers. By and large, the British political system remains relatively free of wholesale pre-meditated corruption/deception - few of the more notorious/egregious examples of governmental cover-ups over the last 30-40 years began with political decisions and/or politically driven conspiracies before the fact - the one fully documented case of such a conspiracy we have is that of the Chagos Islanders. Most such cover-ups develop after the fact and are devised to conceal cock-ups and errors of judgement committed by public servants - one thinks of the business of ‘arms to Iraq’ and the Scott Inquiry, Chinook ZD576 and ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ or even the furore over the sinking of the Belgrano*, where a simple failure to appraise Parliament of the true circumstances of its sinking at the first reasonable opportunity led to an entirely unnecessary cover-up and subsequent scandal out of all proportion to the actual event itself.

*The Belgrano has to be one tof he most unnecessary scandals in British Parliamentary history.

The short version of what happened was that a battlefield decision to sink the Belgrano was taken by a commander in the field who judged that its simply being at sea constituted a serious enough threat to British Forces to warrant its sinking. In the aftermath of the sinking an innaccurate narrative of events was given to Parliament - misleading the House being entirely permissable when British forces are engaged in combat on the grounds that one simply does not provide information in a public arena that may be of use to ‘the enemy’.

Where things went wrong was after the Falklands War was over. The Conservative government, faced with questions about the sinking of the Belgrano, chose to stick to the earlier, misleading, narrative of events rather than provide an accurate account of the real circumstances leading to its sinking, dug itself a hole in process and then kept digging in the face of further questions and speculation as facts emerged which contradicted aspects of the official line, not least the position and direction of the Belgrano at the time it was sunk.

Everything that followed, including the unsuccessful prosecution of civil service whistleblower, Clive Ponting, could have been avoided had the government simply told Parliament what had actually happened and explained that they could not give them the full story earlier as this would have compromised the safety of the British Task-Force.

The problem here is that the doctrine of Ministerial accountability often mitigates against holding civil servants to account for their own acts of incompetence.

Why?

Because Ministers rely on their civil servants for information and answers to questions about departmental performance and service delivery - in answering a probing question tabled a backbench MP, the answer given by a Minister has almost always been supplied to them by a civil servant whose interests, when it comes to matters of incompetence, are likely to be anything but that of giving a full, open and transparent response to the original question.

To be a government Minister is, to some extent, to become a hostage to fortune - civil servants never knowingly lie to ministers but they do omit information which might prove ‘inconvenient’ or open up lines of questioning that they would prefer to avoid. Ordinarily, one might suppose that such practices are fine so far as they go, until it become apparent to the Minister that a particular account they’ve been given is somewhat less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, at which point the Minister in question would start asking a few awkward questions of their own.

But that’s not generally how thing turn out, usually because by the time it becomes apparent to a Minister that the official line they were given by civil servants is some distance from being the full truth, the official line has long since been conveyed to Parliament and entered into the official record to the extent that backtracking becomes near impossible without damaging the credibility of either the Minister, the department or both.

The most spectacular example of this in recent years has to be the case of Chinook ZD576, the history of which is covered here. What makes this case particularly interesting is that it spans a change of government such that the absurdities it demonstrates cannot be attributed to a single political party.

To understand the situation as it still stands today, allow me to quote from a letter written by Sir Malcolm Rifkind and published in the Sunday Herald in February 2002:

Last week a high-powered House of Lords select committee published its report into the 1994 Chinook air disaster that caused the deaths of the cream of British military intelligence. . .The select committee was chaired by the formidable Lord Jauncey, a former Lord of Appeal and a judge whom I know from my own experience to be a person of the highest ability and integrity. He was assisted by four colleagues, two of whom are distinguished QCs. They had no axe to grind and they approached their task with great professionalism.

They concluded, unanimously, that it would be wrong for the Ministry of Defence to maintain the finding of gross negligence against the deceased pilots of the Chinook made eight years ago by two senior RAF air-marshals. . .The immediate reaction of the government was made by armed forces minister Adam Ingram within hours of the publication of the report. He could hardly have had time to read it, but he appeared to dismiss it as containing nothing new. The implication was that the government would not budge.

That in itself would not run counter to any of the previous behaviour of the Ministry of Defence. There has already been a fatal accident inquiry, under a Scottish sheriff, which concluded that the finding of gross negligence was unsafe and should not be maintained. The government ignored that.

The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, its most important select committee, has accused the Ministry of Defence of arrogance and called for the verdict to be put aside. They have been ignored for their pains. There have been various studies of the accident by aeronautics and com puter experts, all of whom have concluded that technical problems may have caused the accident. Their views have been dismissed.

To make matters worse, the RAF has changed its procedures so that never again will air-marshals be asked to allocate blame for air accidents. They will try to identify the technical causes of air accidents but leave questions of blame to the civilian courts. The Chinook case, therefore, remains a hangover from a discredited procedure, but the Ministry of Defence clings to the air-marshals’ decision with all the tenacity of a rottweiler.

I confess I have a personal interest in this case. I was the secretary of state for defence at the time the air- marshals reached their decision. I endorsed it and reported its conclusion to parliament. . .I recall being sad that the pilots were being blamed, but at that time I had no reason to question the conclusion of the RAF that gross negligence was the cause of the accident. These are highly complex and technical matters. A defence secretary has no more specialist knowledge of why an aircraft might have crashed than a health secretary would have on why a heart transplant had gone wrong. One must, to a considerable extent, trust the judgement of one’s senior advisers.

That’s the nub of this case - two air-marshals overruled the findings of the RAF’s own inquiry into the crash and inserted an unsustainable verdict of gross negligence (which amounts to manslaughter) against the flight crew who were killed in this crash and yet, despite a series of independent inquiries, including a House of Lords Select Committee, all which found against this verdict, the MOD has steadfastly refused to reconsider the verdict of the air marshals - a line which Ministers have consistantly followed in the House to the extent that one MP, James Arbuthnot, is still pursuing the matter to this day.

How does one get from this sorry situation to the two reseatch papers on the psychology of incompetence, well perhaps these extracts from the report of the House of Lords Select Committee may clarify matters:

135.  During the course of his evidence Sir John [Day] on more than one occasion emphasised that his conclusions were based on fact and not on hypotheses. It is therefore appropriate to look at some of the matters which he treated as fact. (Page references are to HL Paper 25(i).)

      (a)  "We know that about 20 seconds before impact with the ground the crew made a way point change" (Q 280, p 118 col 1). This figure which derives from the Racal report on the SuperTANS is based on a power down speed of 150 knots and a straight course from the WP change to impact at that speed. It is therefore at best an estimate and not a fact since the only factual evidence of speed at or after the change is the indication from the ground speed and drift indicator of 147 knots at initial impact (AAIB report, paragraph 7).

      (b)  "We know for a fact … that some four seconds before impact the crew started to flare the aircraft" (Q 280, p 117 col 1; Q 1088). Not so. The Boeing simulation, using assumptions now shown to be incompatible, produced this result. On no view could it be described as fact and there is no evidence either way as to what caused the aircraft to impact the ground in the position described in the AAIB report.

      (c)  "They had chosen to fly straight over the Mull of Kintyre, and we know that because they had set up this 1000 feet a minute ROC" (Q 301). There is no evidence that they had chosen to overfly the Mull, and indeed the making of the way point change suggests the contrary. Furthermore the 1000 feet a minute ROC derives entirely from the Boeing simulation with all its deficiencies referred to above.

      (d)  "What is for sure is that they were in a 1000 a minute cruise climb in that last 20 seconds before the final four seconds of flare" (Q 304). This is far from being sure given the deficiencies in the simulation already referred to.

      (e)  "We know they did not pull emergency power" (Q 311). Sir John later agreed that the impact could have destroyed any evidence of emergency power being pulled (Q 1097).

136.  An example of Sir John’s reliance on facts appears in the evidence given on his first appearance before us: "The judgment I have made about gross negligence is not based on what I think may have happened, it is based on what I know happened from the facts I have described to you" (Q 321). The majority of these "facts" were the matters referred to in the preceding paragraph.

However, the select committee had this to say about these facts in its conclusions:

148.  We consider that Sir John’s conclusions on this matter must be weakened by his reliance on matters which he treated as facts but which have been demonstrated to our satisfaction to be not facts but merely hypotheses or assumptions.

The actions of Air Marshals in this case fit the pattern of incompetence identified Dunning et al - he has grossly overestimated his own understanding of the evidence in this case and reached a judgment predicted primarily on his belief that his own experience vastly outweighed the judgment of the RAF’s own investigators - indeed when challenged as to why the Air-Marshals overruled the findings of RAF crash investigators and inserted their own judgement in its place, their reponse was to dismiss the finding of the investigators on the grounds that they lacked experience in such matters.

Chinook ZD576 may be an extreme example of government and the civil service go about the task of protecting the incompetent, but it is far from being unique - indeed one has to wonder just how routine an occurance it actual is?

The other aspect of incompetence I want to raise is directed more specifically at politicians and wider political culture in general, or to be more specific one aspect of that culture which has come to dominate the political scene over the last 30 years or so, and that’s the ‘cult of strong leadership’.

Since the late 1970s politics, and particularly success in elections, has increasingly come to rest on public perceptions of leadership, both here and in the US - all the beginning of this in the US can more properly be traced back to at least Kennedy’s victory over Nixon in 1960. This leads to a rather intriguing observation about winning elections, or more precisely about winning successive elections, which is simply that over the last 30 years, in both Britain and the US, the politicians who have succeeded in winning successive elections have, almost uniformly, been those who most conveyed an image of having almost absolute self-belief in their ability - Reagan, Clinton and George W Bush in the US and, of course, Thatcher and Blair in the UK. Conversely on the two occasions where an incumbent failed to secure reelection , George H W Bush and John Major, both were markedly more self-effacing in character than their opponents, Clinton and Blair.

But, as the research into incompetence seems to demonstrate, this quality of absolute self-belief in one’s own ability is often a sign of incompetence and, in particular of its ‘double curse’ in which one not only fails to see one’s own failing but also cannot recognise the competence of others.

When one thinks about how such a character trait might manifest itself in someone who attains high office, such as becoming President or Prime Minister, one has to think that one of its more striking effects would be to condition the individual to take an extremely hands-on approach to their role, Being far more inclined to trust their own judgement than that of others whose competence cannot be assured, such an individual would inevitably tend to centralise the authority of government on themselves. In fact the more their administration ran in to problems the more they would respond by taking on even more responsibilty for and control of decision-making processes in government - after all, if, for example, the Home Office cannot manage to deport foreign prisioners on release, thereby proving itself incompetent, does that not also prove that the judgement of the Home Secretary responsible for that department cannot also be trusted - and if one cannot trust the Home Secretary’s judgement, well who else’s can you trust but your own.

The US system to some extent mitigates against such scenarios by limiting Presidents to two four year terms of office - even if the American peiople do succeed in electing an incompetent President, they’re rarely around long enough for the full extent of their incompetence to become fully apparent. That coupled with mid-term congressional elections which often leave the opposition in control of the Senate and/or House of Representatives for the last two years of the Presidential term, effectively preventing the President for doing anything that might really stuff things up, tend to the limit the potential damage that an incompetent President might do were they to go the full eight years with their full powers and support intact.

Britain has no such check and balances - a successful Prime Minister can go until either the electorate - or their own party - get sick of them and decide its time for a change…

…which when you look at the circumstances of Thatcher’s fall from grace and Blair’s increasingly difficult situation prompts an interesting question.

To what extent can Thatcher’s downfall and Blair’s current problems be attributed to each of them reaching the point of their own incompetence?

Of course, the clincher in Thatcher’s case was the Poll Tax, but in terms of finding something which both reflects the overall character of the Thatcher government during its final years and which could be construed to support an ‘incompetence’ hypothesis, perhaps this closing section of Geoffrey’s Howe’s resignation speech from November 1990 might prove illuminating:

There is talk, of course, of a single currency for Europe. I agree that there are many difficulties about the concept–both economic and political. Of course, as I said in my letter of resignation, none of us wants the imposition of a single currency. But that is not the real risk. The 11 others cannot impose their solution on the 12th country against its will, but they can go ahead without us. The risk is not imposition but isolation. The real threat is that of leaving ourselves with no say in the monetary arrangements that the rest of Europe chooses for itself, with Britain once again scrambling to join the club later, after the rules have been set and after the power has been distributed by others to our disadvantage. That would be the worst possible outcome.

It is to avoid just that outcome and to find a compromise both acceptable in the Government and sellable in Europe that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has put forward his hard ecu proposal. This lays careful emphasis on the possibility that the hard ecu as a common currency could, given time, evolve into a single currency. I have of course supported the hard ecu plan. But after Rome, and after the comments of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister two weeks ago, there is grave danger that the hard ecu proposal is becoming untenable, because two things have happened.

The first is that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has appeared to rule out from the start any compromise at any stage on any of the basic components that all the 11 other countries believe to be a part of EMU–a single currency or a permanently fixed exchange rate, a central bank or common monetary policy. Asked whether we would veto any arrangement that jeopardised the pound sterling, my right hon. Friend replied simply, "Yes." That statement means not that we can block EMU but that they can go ahead without us. Is that a position that is likely to ensure, as I put it in my resignation letter, that

"we hold, and retain, a position of influence in this vital debate"?

I fear not. Rather, to do so, we must, as I said, take care not to rule in or rule out any one solution absolutely. We must be seen to be part of the same negotiation.

The second thing that happened was, I fear, even more disturbing. Reporting to this House, my right hon. Friend almost casually remarked that she did not think that many people would want to use the hard ecu anyway–even as a common currency, let alone as a single one. It was remarkable–indeed, it was tragic–to hear my right hon. Friend dismissing, with such personalised incredulity, the very idea that the hard ecu proposal might find growing favour amoung the peoples of Europe, just as it was extraordinary to hear her assert that the whole idea of EMU might be open for consideration only by future generations. Those future generations are with us today. How on earth are the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England, commending the hard ecu as they strive to, to be taken as serious participants in the debate against that kind of background noise? I believe that both the Chancellor and the Governor are cricketing enthusiasts, so I hope that there is no monopoly of cricketing metaphors. It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.

The point was perhaps more sharply put by a British business man, trading in Brussels and elsewhere, who wrote to me last week, stating :

"People throughout Europe see our Prime Minister’s finger-wagging and hear her passionate, No, No, No’, much more clearly than the content of the carefully worded formal texts."

He went on :

"It is too easy for them to believe that we all share her attitudes ; for why else has she been our Prime Minister for so long?"

My correspondent concluded :

"This is a desperately serious situation for our country." And sadly, I have to agree.

The tragedy is–and it is for me personally, for my party, for our whole people and for my right hon. Friend herself, a very real tragedy–that the Prime Minister’s perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation. It risks minimising our influence and maximising our chances of being once again shut out. We have paid heavily in the past for late starts and squandered opportunities in Europe. We dare not let that happen again. If we detach ourselves completely, as a party or a nation, from the middle ground of Europe, the effects will be incalculable and very hard ever to correct.

In my letter of resignation, which I tendered with the utmost sadness and dismay, I said :

"Cabinet Government is all about trying to persuade one another from within".

That was my commitment to Government by persuasion–persuading colleagues and the nation. I have tried to do that as Foreign Secretary and since, but I realise now that the task has become futile : trying to stretch the meaning of words beyond what was credible, and trying to pretend that there was a common policy when every step forward risked being subverted by some casual comment or impulsive answer.

The conflict of loyalty, of loyalty to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister–and, after all, in two decades together that instinct of loyalty is still very real–and of loyalty to what I perceive to be the true interests of the nation, has become all too great. I no longer believe it possible to resolve that conflict from within this Government. That is why I have resigned. In doing so, I have done what I believe to be right for my party and my country. The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.

What makes this interesting is not the policy issues - one can easily dispute Howe’s assertions about monetary union and the ERM being right for Britain - but the overall picture it paints of conditions within the Thatcher government of the time, particularly here:

The first is that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has appeared to rule out from the start any compromise at any stage on any of the basic components that all the 11 other countries believe to be a part of EMU–a single currency or a permanently fixed exchange rate, a central bank or common monetary policy. Asked whether we would veto any arrangement that jeopardised the pound sterling, my right hon. Friend replied simply, "Yes."

Where she appears to have unilaterally taken a policy stance on the matter that not only do senior members of her cabinet disagree with, but about which they appear to have had no knowledge whatsoever until she made the statement to which Howe refers.

Over the last year, since winning the general election, one can see much the same characteristic emerging from the Blair government. Although no one has, as yet, done a ‘Geoffrey Howe’ on Blair it seems clear that more and more policy is being driven entirely from the Prime Minister’s office with the expectation that even senior ministers will fall meekly into line and simply do as they are told by the PM, whether they agree with him or not - there have certainly been persistant rumours that both Charles Clarke and Ruth Kelly, while Home Secretary and Education Secretary respectively, were extremely unhappy with elements of the policy hand being dealt to them by Blair but had their objections more or less summarily dismissed, meanwhile, as the recent reshuffle made apparent, Blair has chosen to surround himself with as many loyal supporters as humanly possible in a government where there is a heir-apparent waiting in the wings - it may be a little harsh to characterise some of these people simply as ‘yes men’ but it does seem to be the case that Blair has substantially stripped away from the core of government those whose judgment fails to coincide precisely with his own or who are likely to put forward alternatives to his preferred policy position on key issues.

The question has to be asked, therefore - has Blair exceeded his own competence as Prime Minister?

While he obviously retains all his presentational skills of old and remains a formidable performer on the floor of the House, in terms of policy his agenda for his final term in office is much less conservative and much more demanding than anything put forward in the bulk of his two previous terms and this may well be the tipping point beyond which he falls prey to the double curse of incompetence being neither able to correctly assess the validity of his own judgements nor recognise competence in the judgments of others.