Category Archives: mark easton

Mark Easton’s report for the Today programme (reproduced on his blog) about a study into civility by “social science think-tank” The Young Foundation is a classic of the Easton genre. He opens the piece with some Tory bashing, in this case reproducing a 2007 David Cameron quote which he then dismisses as “dangerously counter-productive bunkum”. He explains:

“Generalisations about declining standards of civility are inaccurate and problematic”, say the researchers….

I can almost hear a nation harrumphing at this idea. Where on earth did these “researchers” do their “research”?
The answer is partly in one of the poorest and most diverse neighbourhoods in London’s East End; Queen’s market in Newham to be precise.
“We observed how shoppers of a range of ethnicities queued patiently and stepped out of the way of prams and elderly shoppers”, they noted.
They also travelled to relatively prosperous communities in Wiltshire – Salisbury, Trowbridge and Frome – and recorded how “high levels of superficial civility… often hid deeper, covert incivilities” such as domestic violence, racism and prejudice against younger residents.

Poor ethnically diverse Newham is a paragon of civility because the people queue and step out of the way of prams. However, more prosperous (and – clearly implied – more white) communities display only “superficial civility” (queuing and avoiding prams is not superficial, evidently). These prosperous white areas are rife with racist wife-beaters, unlike the joyous melting pot of ethnic communities who all treat their women so well. (One wonders why the government is being forced to contemplate a law against forced marriage, then.)

The Young Foundation’s ideologically-driven conclusion would have been the same whatever the results of their study. If the noble people of Newham had not been good at queuing it would have been a sign that they’re all relaxed in each other’s company and happy to let others go ahead of them, unlike the stuck-up whities in Frome where queuing is just another blood-pressure raising inconvenience that contributes to domestic violence. And Mark Easton would have lapped it up just the same.

Incidentally, I heard the guy from the Young Foundation interviewed on R5L. What is it with the increasing number of spokespeople starting nearly every sentence with “So”? Is it a media training device to prevent “ums” and “ers” or something? It’s very irritating and unnatural.

(Be as civil as you like in the comments. UPDATE. Check out the opening comment by Umbongo for some background on The Young Foundation.)

UPDATE 2. Craig points out that one of the co-authors of the report is Rushanara Ali, Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow. Mark Easton fails to mention this, of course.

Beeb Bias Craig.

David Preiser and John Horne Tooke in the comments. (Update – sorry, direct links to comments still don’t seem to work. Click on page 4.)

Continuing my occasional series on Mark Easton, I happened to catch him being interviewed on Eddie Mair’s PM programme on the topic of knife crime. In essence, Easton was taking the line that new statistics are far from compelling and that “knife crime” itself could include attacks with a broken bottle by drunk young men, bottom line being that it will take generations for any real trend to become discernible. On his blog, he is much more scathing of the stats than he was on-air but again he parrots the notion that change is long-term, indeed transgenerational. In fact, if you read his last sentence on his blog, he endorses this view that our police cannot hope to deal with knife crime in months or years but rather decades. That’s where the line is crossed. There are plenty of us who believe that knife crime COULD be dealt with much more vigorously if there was the will but Easton holds the contrary view. Why is there no one to voice an alternative to him?