Sanity and Sanitisers

A friend of mine has asked if I'll send him some hand sanitiser as all the shops where he lives have run out, and there is still some on the shelves in my local ASDA. At first, I didn't think he was serious as he's way too intelligent to get caught up in the Coronavirus panic, but apparently not: he genuinely wants me to post him as many bottles as I can get.

It may be that his family are pressuring him, but mine are far more grounded, as are all my friends living locally. Maybe it's a Yorkshire thing? Maybe we'd rather risk death than pay inflated prices for scented squirty soap? Or maybe as my daughter put it, Yorkshiremen would rather die than suffer the embarrassment of being thought panic shoppers?

I accept that Coronavirus (Covid-19) is a pretty virulent virus, but not in the contagious-imminent-danger-to-everybody's-health way.

As I type this there are 125,743 confirmed cases worldwide, almost 81,00 of which were or are in China, and 3,169 deaths in China plus another 1441 elsewhere in the world. So 4,610 deaths in total and half the planet is in lockdown.

Why? What has driven this hysteria? Two years ago, all the way back in 2017-18 the Office for National Statistics recorded 50,100 ‘excess winter deaths’ but it was business as usual. The explanation (for the deaths, not the lack of hysterical reaction), according to the ONS, was probably ‘the predominant strain of flu, the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine, and below average winter temperatures’. Across the pond where Donald Trump has just announced a flight ban from mainland Europe and the golf I'm watching on TV is discussing the ban on spectators from tomorrow onwards, according to the US-based Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, over 80,000 died.

In both countries most of the victims were geriatric, many with compromised immune systems, as is the case with the UK Coronavirus deaths - or as I prefer to refer to them as a statistician, deaths of people with Coronavirus (not necessarily from, due to their age, health and underlying conditions)

And seasonal flu? According to an estimate by the CDCP, it causes somewhere between 291,000 and 646,000 deaths globally a year. To put it another way, if the number of deaths from coronavirus rises a hundredfold in the next few weeks or months, it will only have reached the lower bound of the estimate for existing strains of flu. How many of us wear face masks because of winter flu? How many planes and trains are cancelled? Does the stock market slump?

There is some justification for being more wary of Covid-19 than the flu as the former is an unknown quantity which we've not evolved with and don’t yet have a vaccine. But we know more about it by the day, its death rate is under 3 per cent and it is mostly killing people with pre-existing health conditions.

And probably more importantly, if it can, or does, spread quickly and easily, why don't we all have it already? In the past week, I've been on 8 trains (all crowded) and four buses (two full), attended a conference, a rock concert and a football match (1000, 2000 and 30000 people respectively) and been to the gym where nobody has cleaned down anything, sanitised between exercises, or avoided personal contact four times. And I'm ok. As is everybody I know and know of, but if the virus is virulent then surely this wouldn't be the case?

So where is the evidence that closing large gatherings of people makes anyone safer or slows the spread of disease? Is it logical to assume that Covid-19 can be passed on easier at a football match or the now-cancelled Australian Grand Prix than in a gym?

Maybe I'm missing something about Coronavirus and the attitude of people like me will only compound the problem, but it feels like this is just the latest "end of the world" phenomenon to trouble the populations of developed countries along with other apocalyptic portents such as climate alarmism, nuclear Armageddon and financial collapse.

At the end of January, Brexit had just been completed (sort of anyway) without incident, the standoff between the US and Iran had fizzled into nothing, the Australian bush fires had largely gone out, so did the media need something else to worry us about?

Reactionary hysteria has taken hold all over the world. Saudi Arabia has suspended religious pilgrimage trips to Mecca (oh the irony that the praying won't make the most devout any safer!), the Italian Prime Minister has ordered the lockdown of the country’s northern region, Ireland has closed schools and colleges, and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said today it was 'inappropriate that we continue as normal' and will recommend the cancellation of gatherings of more than 500 people to protect front-line services from Monday. She didn't supply any information as to why Monday and not tomorrow if the measure is so necessary, or why allowing gatherings at the weekend was appropriate, but common sense does seem to be in short supply.

As the great Homer Simpson once said "you can prove anything with facts" so why haven't the governments of the world provided some which justifies their extreme actions?

Or is that there aren't any and this hysteria is the result of a media frenzy which has caused the "leaders" of some countries to be scared of not being seen to "do something" whether or not it makes sense?

Political Mathematics

Many years of interacting with MPs, advisors and policy makers has made me very sceptical when any of them start to use numbers to illustrate a point: the latest of which is the London Mayoral hopeful Rory Stewart who claims in this week's Sunday Times to have slept in 50 different homes around London as part of his ‘Come Kip With Me’ scheme.

However, as he apparently only launched his campaign in the second week of February, a whole 27 days before Sunday, this means that Mr Stewart would have to have slept in almost two homes a night every night, never spending an evening at home, for his claim to be true.

He also says that “you learn an amazing amount because you’re spending 14 hours with somebody”, which means he wants us to believe that he's spent 700 hours in other people’s homes over the last 27 days.

Which is an admirable amount of effort when there are only 648 hours in 27 days ….

Don't Even Think About Asking

All a FEC wanted from me was a little advice on whether or not an “Annual Assurance Statement” had to be provided to the Office for Students every year (and as far as I know they all submitted one when registering in 2018).

On the face of it, this doesn’t exactly sound like something out of Alice in Wonderland, but it’s not mentioned in either of this month’s new OfS regulatory advice notes – #15 covering monitoring and intervention, and #16 explaining reportable events. So does that mean that it wasn’t “annual” at all, and should have just been called an “Assurance Statement” or is one still required because it hasn’t explicitly been superseded or withdrawn and is in the framework?

Note #15 tells us how the OfS will monitor compliance of registered providers with the ongoing conditions of registration and the activities which allows it to respond proportionately to regulatory risks and identify changes to risk levels which are basically:

• Data and information flows that will assist the OfS in the identification of trends and theoretically help them to predict the future,
• notifications of material decisions/issues/changes,
• and other intelligence such as whistleblowing or student complaints.

None of which really fits with my understanding of “quality assurance” as it’s not doing all that much to actively assure quality, it’s more like trying to get somebody (Who? Students? Government? The public?) to believe that quality is actually present until there is something to show that it isn’t. Which as I see it is rather like the religious types who knock on my door every few months and leave still convinced that God must exist because I couldn’t prove that He doesn’t.

Anyway, despite this flaw and the fact that looking at outcomes rather than inputs leaves colleges (and HEIs/others) operating under a constant threat of failing to meet Condition B3 (“the provider must deliver successful outcomes for all of its students”) thresholds which are always in the future and so can’t actually see.

But the real fun, the “Alice Through the Looking Glass” moment if you like, is in Regulatory Advice 16 which explicitly warns HE providers not to ask the OfS any sort of question:

"Where a provider seeks to abdicate responsibility for decision making, and seeks steers from the OfS, this behaviour may indicate non-compliance with condition E2."

So, in addition to what we’ve known for 18 months or so in that under/over reporting can have serious consequences – basically sending the OfS something they don’t want might be a sign of incompetence, as could not sending them something they need to “assure quality” - we now know that just asking for guidance from the regulator if in doubt is just as bad.

All of which is why I was asked to ring the OfS on behalf of someone who daren’t speak to a regulator that assures baseline quality not by looking at what goes on, but the outcomes from it, and threatens those it regulates with serious penalties just for asking questions which may help them to deliver outcomes they probably can’t really control because they don’t know what they are.

Economics with the Truth

I rarely go anywhere first class - way too expensive - but I had a voucher for the station lounge which I used this morning prior to my journey down to London.

Anyway, there are free copies of the Financial Times along with the coffee and the croissants so for what is probably only the second or third time in my life, I picked one up (the FT, not a beverage or pastry!) and leafed through it.

In it is an article which even my decades-old Economics A level education can understand as utterly ludicrous.

The Economics Editor Chris Giles complains that the British economy has actually been doing too well since the referendum. Yep, the UK has been over-performing.

So not only is the paper apparently mystified by the country not voting as we were told to by the government back in 2016, it also cannot understand why the markets haven’t done what George Osbornes and other "financial experts" predicted either.

Giles - presumably someone with an Economics education above my A level? - states that “relatively benign economics has emboldened politicians to harden their Brexit demands and refuse to compromise” and follows that with “it is now too late for markets or the UK economy to exercise much discipline on Britain’s politics before the scheduled exit date of March 29”.  He then goes on to state that since the referendum “economic performance has been tolerable while the employment rate has reached record levels.”

Or in other words: it’s too late now for a Project Fear's Deal-free Brexit financial and economic Armageddon to happen, and far from our performance being "tolerable" one only has to flick through four pages of the very same paper to find some GDP Growth figures which list the UK as currently the fastest-growing European country in the G7 while Italy and Germany slide towards recession....

Pants on Fire?

Congratulations to the BBC's sharp-eyed Sean Coughlan for pointing out that the DfE's Nick Gibb was trying to mislead the public about education funding last week when he claimed that his department was “spending record amounts on our school funding ... the third highest spender on education of the 36 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)."

However, it turns out that on a per-pupil basis, this equates to a cut in real terms of about 8%, and that the OECD figure includes private school fees, university tuition and all sorts of other non-state school funding and it's for the whole UK, not just England.

Tut, tut.

Nice to know that the UK Statistics Authority and the Office for Statistics Regulation are investigating and will publish findings “shortly", but there's nothing about whether Mr Gibb's pants are currently, or will be, on fire ….

Double Standards? Or Just Very Standard Hypocrisy?

Watching the news in my London hotel where the lead story has been around England’s participation (or not as a result of the chemical attack in Salisbury) at the World Cup, a thought hit me like a football below the waist. As the Conservative Party has apparently received around £3million in donations from Russian associates in just over five years:

• Are they proposing to give it all back if the Football Association try and bring Vladimir Putin to book?
• Or is it just some headline-grabbing grandstanding from politicians out of touch with more than just higher education?

Adonis, A Donkey and A Donut

For reasons I can't even being to grasp, this summer has seen UK Higher Education under attack from all directions, and particularly from the Narcissus-like “Architect of Fees”, Labour Peer Andrew Adonis.

He's criticised fees without seemingly knowing very much about them other than headline costs, vice chancellor and senior staff pay (he does have a point - some of them receive ridiculous levels of remuneration), and most irksome of all, academics and their so-called “three-month summer holidays”

Marking? Feedback? Boards? Research? Admin? Preparing? Obviously, these things are all done on a beach over cocktails, or in some Iberian café while the kids argue over which straw donkey grandma would prefer as a present, but at least we in the sector do tend to spend at least a little time trying not to look like, well, donkeys.....

He's followed up his ridiculous accusations of our idleness and privilege for 25% of the year (or more? who knows?) with an attempt to report the Committee of University Chairs to the Metropolitan Police for alleged crimes of conspiracy and cover-up in dealing with Freedom of Information requests after it advised members on how they should respond to Adonis’s enquiries.

It wouldn't have taken much research - maybe he could have asked one of us academics to do it in between rubbing tanning lotion on one another - to find out that most English universities are regulated as exempt charities and that even a cursory look at the law will show that the charge of criminality is utterly baseless.

Joining him now in an ill-judged campaign to undermine the finest higher education system on the planet (not just my opinion - I go all over the world, and academics in foreign institutions are consistent in their praise of it, and puzzlement at what a succession of recent governments have been doing) is something called UK 2020.

This is apparently a "think-tank" run/administered/convened by the Conservative MP Owen Paterson based on “concerns expressed by numerous friends who are parents of university students” which has announced that UK HE operates a “cartel” conspiring to rig fees and ensure that students get poor value for money.

Now if only this set of ignorant buffoons had waited until all we idle academics had come back from our incredibly long holidays, then their report might have got an interested and concerned audience?

We might then have put some effort into preparing for the coming year to assuage our guilt at doing so little, for so much, to the benefit of so few...