Fortnightly Mailing

John Lanchester in LRB on the banking crisis

"The RBS corporate report  is like that. (So are their slogans: ‘Make it happen.’ Make what happen? A £100 billion tab for the taxpayer?) The section on corporate citizenship at the beginning is particularly good value. The firm is involved in plans to increase general levels of financial education. ‘When people have been educated about money and how to work with financial services firms they are more likely to make the right decisions and to avoid difficulties.’ That’s true, but you can also just rob post offices. ‘RBS is a responsible company. We carry out rigorous research so that we can be confident we know the issues that are most important to our stakeholders and we take practical steps to respond to what they tell us. Then occasionally, we blow all that shit off, fire up some crystal meth, and throw money around with such crazed abandon that it helps destroy the public finances of the world’s fifth biggest economy.’ See if you can guess which of those sentences is not in the report."

The 28 May London Review of Books has a long, entertaining and informative piece about RBS and the banking crisis by John Lanchester, from which the extract above is taken.

Social solidarity, high levels of taxation and economic competitiveness are not mutually exclusive

This letter appeared in the 23 May 2009 Economist, and I am posting it with Bo Rothstein's permission.

SIR – You pointed to a shift in our understanding of which socioeconomic template is “the best” in Europe (“A new pecking order”, May 9th). The neoliberal Anglo-Saxon blueprint is in shreds, you say, and the French model, with its heavier regulation and higher taxes, is being given a second glance. However, looking at the data it is not the French but the Nordic countries that have the upper hand.

The World Economic Forum ranks the Nordics at the top for economic competitiveness; Transparency International ranks them towards the bottom on corruption; and the World Bank places them ahead of other countries when measuring the “knowledge factor”. On almost all measures of social trust and social capital, the Nordic countries come out ahead. Moreover, they have outperformed most of their neoliberal Anglo-Saxon counterparts as well as France and Germany in economic growth during the past 15 years.

Simply put, and contrary to what most economists take for granted, the Nordic countries have shown that social solidarity, high levels of taxation and economic competitiveness are not mutually exclusive. Public investment in human capital creates a sense of equality in opportunity among large segments of the population, which in turn has a positive effect on social capital. Together these factors increase economic prosperity.

Bo Rothstein
Professor of political science
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden

Finding and treating lorry drivers with sleep apnoea - 13/5/2009 adjournment debate in Westminster

My 26 year-old nephew Toby was killed outside Liverpool in August 2006 by a truck driven by someone suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnoea who had fallen asleep at the wheel.  After last year's the inquest into Toby’s death, the coroner reported in August 2008 that the truck driver had visited his general practitioner during April 2006 complaining of tiredness. Blood and urine samples were taken to test for diabetes, and when the results were returned negative he was advised that he was most probably suffering from stress. Critically, sleep apnoea was not diagnosed.

Regular readers of Fortnightly Mailing will know that over the last 18 months, with the support of a wide range of people with medical, legal, and technical knowledge, in the UK and further afield, I and Toby's immediate family have been campaigning in a low key way for a coherent and evidence based framework that:

• makes clear the connection between obesity and obstructive sleep apnoea;
• indicates the likely prevalence of the condition among vocational drivers, given the prevalence of obesity among them;
• encourages general practitioners to identify and treat potential cases of sleep apnoea;
• requires vocational drivers or certainly the obese amongst them to be regularly screened for sleep apnoea, rather than only once they reach age 45.

Key players in such a framework will need to be the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the Health and Safety Executive. Both have been signally and depressingly reluctant to act, ignoring the Coroner's 2008 Rule 43 Report from Toby's inquest [137 kB PDF], and generally defending the status quo in a morale-sapping manner.

In the early hours of this morning my MP Meg Munn, Labour and Cooperative Party Member of Parliament for Sheffield Heeley, spoke lucidly in a 30 minute adjournment debate in the House of Commons, achieving a really clear synthesis of the issues, and gaining agreement that the relevant Minister (Jim Fitzpatrick) will now meet Meg Munn and others to consider them. The official transcript of Meg Munn's speech gives a clear insight into what the real work of backbench MPs can and should consist of.

Hut-to-hut skiing in Jotunheimen

Looking West from top of Fortundalsbreen, 4 April 2009

This Easter I skied "hut-to-hut" in Norway from Lake Tyin via Tomashelleren and Lake Bygdin to Gjendesheim, followed by three days with a friend in and above the birch woods East of Gjendesheim (Finnbølesætra to Storholiseter to Skriurusten to Oskampen to Finnbølesætra). I then joined a group skiing from Sota Sæter to Fondsbu over the Fortundalsbreen and Smørstabbrean glaciers via Nørstedalsæter, Krossbu, and Skogaldalsbøen.  The weather ranged from still, clear and cold, with perfect snow to match, via downright hot, to too windy for safety, this last resulting in the welcome attention of the Red Cross. The pictures below will give you the flavour.

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by David MacKay

If Tony Juniper, former Executive Director of Friends of the Earth says "For anyone with influence on energy policy, whether in government, business or a campaign group, this book should be compulsory reading", and Robert Sansom of EDF Energy  says "At last a book that comprehensively reveals the true facts about sustainable energy in a form that is both highly readable and entertaining", then the book is probably hitting the nail on the head. David JC MacKay's is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and his book is available for purchase or for free download. There is also a podcast from a one-hour talk MacKay gave at the Cambridge Science Festival, on 12 March 2008, for which you can also access a reasonably matching set of slides, in HTML format.

With thanks for the link to Nic Tweddell

IT People Supporting Real World Development - something to join?

Updated 25/5/2009

Dick Moore has set up IT People Supporting Real World Development on the Kiva web site, through which you can make a small or large repayable loan to a small entrepreneur in the developing world. I'd already made a loan in December and I've now joined the group. So far there are nine eight seven six five two of us. Currently, with over USD 50m raised and lent (astonishing, eh?), Kiva again has a large range of projects looking for support.

The bombing of Gaza: Gideon Levy in Haaretz

This piece by Gideon Levy in the 31/12/2008 web version of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and the response it stimulated, caught my eye, and is in contrast to the anodyne discussion of Israel's actions in the mainstream UK media. It ends:

"Maybe if they [the pilots] were to confront the results of their "wonderful work" even once they would regret their decisions, they would reconsider the effects of their actions. If they were to go just once to Jerusalem's Alyn Hospital Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Center, where for nearly three years Marya Aman, 7, has been hospitalized - she is a quadriplegic who runs her wheelchair, and her life, with her chin - they would be shocked. This adorable little girl was hit by a missile in Gaza that killed almost her entire family, the handiwork of our pilots.

But all of this is well hidden from the pilots' eyes. They are only doing their job, as the saying goes, only following orders like bombing machines. In the past few days they have excelled at this, and the results are there for the entire world to see. Gaza is licking its wounds, just like Lebanon before it, and almost no one pauses for a moment to ask whether all this is necessary, or unavoidable, or whether it contributes to Israel's security and moral image. Is it really the case that our pilots return safely to base, or are they in fact returning to them as callous, cruel and blind people? "

Sleep apnoea and road accidents - our memorandum of evidence to the Transport Select Committee

[This post is tagged "nothing to do with e-learning...]

Earlier this year the Transport Select Committee began an Inquiry on Road Safety. The then Chair of the Committee, Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, who sadly died in April of this year, helpfully agreed to allow my family to submit a memorandum of evidence, well beyond the closing date, concerning the problem of undiagnosed sleep apnoea and the large numbers of vocational drivers suffering from it. 

Our evidence is now available on the Parliament UK web site. One of the things we called for was for the  Health and Safety Executive, with its responsibilities for minimising work-related death and injury, and with its powers to insist on action by employers to prevent risks to non-employees (that is, road users at risk from drivers suffering from sleep apnoea), to play a much more prominent role in relation to work-related fatal road-traffic accidents and their prevention. The Transport Select Committee's  report, published on 15/10/2008, makes scant reference to sleep-related road accidents, and none to sleep apnoea, but it is nevertheless good to see that the report highlights, in paragraph 110 the anomaly that "the vast majority of work-related deaths are not examined by the Health and Safety Executive, purely because they occur on the roads", and calls for the Government to "review the role of the Health and Safety Executive with regard to road safety to ensure that it fulfils its unique role in the strategy beyond 2010".

BBC Radio 4 "PM" to cover sleep apnoea and road haulage at 17.30 on Saturday 13 September

Source: BBC

Sometime between 17.30 and 18.00 on 13 September, BBC Radio 4's Saturday edition of "PM" will consider the problem of sleep apnoea amongst HGV drivers. The coverage stems in part from my family's 22 August 2008 media release, posted here on Fortnightly Mailing, following Coroner Sumner's issuing of a Rule 43 Report to the Lord Chancellor calling for a toughening of the rule and procedures governing sleep apnoea and road haulage. Interviewees are likely to include my nephew's father, sleep apnoea expert Dr Dev Banerjee, as well as Colin Wrighton, the driver of the lorry that killed my nephew, who is now himself campaigning for action on the problem.

Coroner calls for Government action on sleep apnoea

Today my sister and brother in law issued a media release stemming from last month's Inquest into the death of their son Toby. Regular readers of Fortnightly Mailing may remember from a long post I wrote in October 2007 that my 25 year old nephew was killed 2 years ago on his way to work in Liverpool. His car was waiting in a morning rush hour queue on the M62 motorway approaching the Rocket Interchange. The queue was hit from behind by a heavy goods vehicle and Toby’s car was crushed. The driver of the HGV had fallen asleep at the wheel, and was later diagnosed to be suffering from Obstructive Sleep Apnoea (OSA).  When we investigated OSA we found serious weaknesses in the way that the condition is controlled by Government, by the road haulage industry, and by General Practitioners.

Following the Inquest, the Coroner issued a Rule 43 Report to the Lord Chancellor, calling for major changes in the way that sleep apnoea amongst lorry drivers is dealt with. The media release [137 kB PDF] provides full details, and includes the Rule 43 Report itself, as well as the bulk of a fascinating and comprehensive report to the Inquest by Dr Dev Banerjee, who is Consultant Respiratory and Sleep Physician at Birmingham Heartlands Hospital.

The Coroner's Rule 43 Report calls for the following:

• regular medical screening for all lorry drivers;
• amendment of the DVLA Medical Examination Report form to improve identification of undiagnosed sufferers from OSA;
• fast track medical assessment of commercial drivers involved in road traffic collisions;
• better education of all drivers on the dangers of tiredness when driving, in the same manner as drink-driving campaigns;
• better education of commercial drivers to make them aware that a diagnosis of OSA is almost certainly not the end of their livelihood as a driver.

Under new rules that came into force on 17 July, the Lord Chancellor is required to respond to a Coroner’s Rule 43 Report within 56 days.