Category: Contemporary Sociology

Does Therapy Work?

Increasing numbers of people in the United Kingdom are turning to therapy to help improve their mental health, but does therapy actually work?

This topic was explored in a recent podcast with Journalist Horatio Clare and Psychiatrist Femi Oyebode.

The focus was mainly on the use of psychotherapy to combat more serious mental health issues such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and post traumatic stress disorders, and the overwhelming consensus was that therapy can help and the podcast explores why, as well as what makes for effective therapy.

What is psychotherapy?

Psychotherapy is the use of words as a means of treating another human being

Both psychiatrists and psychotherapists use talking therapy as part of their work, but a psychiatrist is someone who has had medical training, so is qualified to prescribe drug treatments to patients, whereas a psychotherapist doesn’t have prior medical training and so is limited to only do talking therapy with clients.

On misconception about the difference between the two is that psychotherapy focus on dealing with the causes of mental illness whereas psychoanalysis only deals with the symptoms, there is in fact more blurring between the two disciplines.

Types of psychotherapy

The British Council of Counselling and Psychotherapy lists over 30 types of therapy. Three of the main types of psychotherapy are:

  • Psychoanalysis, developed by Freud, is built on the theory that experiences in early childhood have a deep impact on the formation of adult personalities. Dynamic psychotherapy is a modern version of this.
  • Behavioural Therapy believes that patterns of behaviour such as OCD or anxiety arise because of conditioned behaviour, abnormalities of learning which developed either in childhood or adulthood.
  • Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, invented by Aaron Beck was a further development of behavioural therapy theorises that our emotions are dependent on our thinking, so the intent is to alter our thinking so our emotional state changes.

Psychotherapy to treat Schizophrenia

The podcast introduces as a case study one individual who used a combination of medication and talking therapy to ease his symptoms of schizophrenia.

His symptoms were serious, including hearing voices, delusions (having the wrong perception of reality), depression and paranoia which in turn created a number of severe negative emotions such as frustration, hopelessness, disappointment and an overwhelming lack of self-worth, or very low self-esteem.

Talking therapy helped him because his schizophrenia meant he only listened to himself, only heard from himself, having other people’s opinions helped him see from another perspective.

An example of how this can help is if you imagine walking into a room of people who are talking but stop when you enter, you might think ‘they must have been talking about me’ but a different perspective is that maybe they were just talking about something private and confidential.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can help calm the symptoms of schizophrenia in two ways.

  • Firstly it can help reduce hallucinations and delusions that may not have responded to drug treatment
  • Secondly it can help a patient deal with the low self-esteem and worthlessness that it causes.

It was suggested to him that family therapy may help, since in psychoanalytic theory childhood experiences may have contributed to his schizophrenia, but his parents refused to take part.

The concept of over-resilience was used to to describe his family’s reluctance to take up family therapy: his parents thought the family was fine as an emotional unit and had no need of therapeutic input.

Over-resilience is very common in ethnic minority families and it builds up over generations. Fathers especially want to be the family rock and so don’t want their partners or children to see them crying or stressed, and so children grow up thinking they also need to hide and not talk about negative emotional states, vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

However for some people this builds up and leads to a mental health crisis, or a breakdown as it did with the case study here.

Psychotherapy and bipolar

One guest, Katie Mason, argued that therapy can also help treat bipolar disorder.

In such cases it can help prevent relapse, addresses symptoms that occur in depression and reduce guilt and shame after someone has had a manic episode. It can also help people accept their condition, which can prevent relapse as they recognise when they are getting unwell again and get early intervention.

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing

Another guest, Dr Logi, outlined how a relatively new type of therapy called eye movement desensitisation reprocessing can help patients process previous traumatic events and thus help with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The process is roughly as follows:

  1. The patient thinks about a key even that is causing them to have negative feeling and events, for example a road traffic accident.
  2. They identify what emotions these memories trigger and where in the body they are located.
  3. Then they do something which encourages rapid eye movement while the patient thinks about those memories and feelings.

The theory is that rapid eye movements distract the clients, keeping them in the here and now while they are revisiting the past, thus enabling them to process negative emotional states caused by past events more easily.

EMDR also works with people with depression, phobias and OCD.

Effective Psychotherapy

The most effective thing about therapy is the relationship with the therapist, they work as well as each other!

A good psychotherapist needs to have cultural competence: they need to recognise that their own cultural context and narrative is not superior to that of the patient.

There are some people who believe that a psychotherapist needs to come from the same cultural background to be effective, arguing that positive results are more likely if a therapist is from the same ethnic group as the patient, but Oyebode doesn’t subscribe to this theory.

The most important qualities of a good series of psychotherapy sessions are that they are well structured and allow time for the patient to focus on themselves.

The system also needs broader structures in place to ensure that patients who need medication can find that kind of support which psychiatry doesn’t offer.

Psychiatrists need more time to spend with their patients so they can can tailor therapy more effectively. They are pushed to medicated while therapy is more of a longer game – there are times when it’s more appropriate than others.

There is very little availability of therapy in in-patient services. The average in patient stay in the U.K. is 21 to 28 days and it is not possible to do effective psychotherapy with the patient in an extremely disturbed state and in such a short period of time.

Signposting and Sources

While this material isn’t directly relevant to any of the standard A-level sociology modules I thought it was of sufficient interest given the amount of young people with poor mental health and the fact that therapy is becoming increasingly normal!

Radio 4 (February 2023) Is Psychiatry Working?: Episode 5: Therapy.

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Why are Teachers Striking?

Over 90% of National Education Union Members who were balloted voted for a series of six days of strikes which start today (1st February 2023) and go on approximately every two weeks until the 15th of March.

The main reason teachers are striking is over poor pay and long working hours, which are the main reasons why teachers are leaving the profession.

Teachers have had a real terms pay cut of 20% since 2010 because their annual pay increases haven’t kept pace with inflation and this year the government has only offered a 5% pay increase when inflation is running at 12%, meaning a 7% real terms pay cut.

And the government is currently residing over a recruitment crisis in teaching. There simply aren’t enough people who want to train to be teachers under the current pay and working conditions.

Understaffed schools mean that the teachers who are working have to soak up the difference, mainly by taking on larger class sizes which contributes to their intense work loads.

Overworked teachers and higher teacher to pupil staff ratios ultimately mean children suffer a poorer quality of education. Teachers are not superhuman after all and they can only do so much, hence the strikes.

It must be remembered, despite the rhetoric of the ultra-wealthy, tax-dodging, massive national-debt creating (Liz Truss) and morally bankrupt Tory party that teachers do not want to strike, they are doing so as a last resort because of Tory failure to manage the economy competently so that there is sufficient money to pay public sector workers a wage which reflects the work they do serving the public.

Relevance to A-level Sociology

The fact that it’s not just teachers striking, but also many other public sector workers demonstrates the harms that 40 years of neoliberal policy have done to the UK economy. There isn’t enough money being raised by taxes to pay decent wages for those working in the health and education sectors.

Striking is a good example of collective mass action, the final resort that the working classes have to demand fairer pay and conditions, and if you want to you can show solidarity with ordinary hard working public sector workers by attending one of the local rallies on one of the strike days.

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Take Action: Support the Strikes

If you want to support striking teachers you can find a list of rallies on strike days on the NEU website.

Remember, solidarity can help with positive social change!

Zahawi’s Tax ‘Carelessness’

Nadhim Zahawi is the Conservative Party Chairman and previous Chancellor of the Exchequer who this month paid around £5 million in tax, which included a 30% penalty from the HMRC for underpayment of previous taxes.

Nadhim Zahawi: The Ex Chancellor who doesn’t know how to fill in his tax return form.

To understand why Zahawi received this tax penalty we need to go back to the year 2000 when Zahawi co-founded the well known polling site YouGov.UK.

At that time Zahawi’s partner received 40% of the YouGov shares, while Zahawi received none but another 40% of the shares went to company called Balshore Investments which is located in Gibralter and has a history as a tax haven.

Later on it emerged that Balshore Investments was owned by Zahawi’s parents who don’t live in the U.K. and he claims he he gave them those shares to in exchange for advise on how to set up YouGov.

Balshore, or Zahawi’s parents, eventually went on to sell said shares for a capital gain of around £27 million, which, had this been based in the U.K. would have been taxed at around £3. 7 million.

There are YouGov documents showing that one dividend cheque for £99 000 was redirected to Zahawi,

YouGov financial documents reveal that a share dividend of £99 000 was redirected from Balshore to Zahawi, suggesting that he was benefiting financially from these shares.

Analysis by Dan Neidle, a tax lawyer, suggests that Zahawi has basically just been made to pay ALL of the tax due on the sale of those shares (£3.7 million) plus a 30% fine by the HMRC because he was ‘careless’ in reporting his capital gains from the sale of these shares.

Carelessness or Tax Evasion?

The fact that HMRC charged Zahawi a 30% penalty means they classified his omission of information from his tax return as ‘moderately serious’, it was a result of ‘carelessness’ rather than it being a deliberate omission.

‘Careless mistakes’ on a tax return are penalised by 30% penalties whereas deliberate withholding of information for financial gain is regarded as tax evasion which carries a prison sentence of up to 7 years.

Now technically this investigation into Zahawi is over and legally his failure to report his tax affairs accurately in the past have been constructed as ‘carelessness’.

And I am sure that technically he has done nothing wrong in the eyes of international law or British Laws: using your parents’ company in a tax haven stash shares which then grow in value and then sell as a profit technically isn’t tax evasion.

But hang on…. HMRC have made him pay tax on the profit he made from those shares…? So surely this was an example of tax evasion?

Maybe his carelessness was that he tried to use loopholes to evade tax deliberately but then one document created a paper trail and that messed up his despicable scheme?

So maybe the serious fraud office and the national crime agency should be investigating this too?

At the very least we have to question the morality of a former Chancellor over this, and this certainly doesn’t fit into the demands by Rishi Sunak that the Tory Party should display ‘Integrity, Professionalism and Accountability’ going forwards!

Relevance to A-Level Sociology

This material is most relevant to Crime and Deviance.

It is a useful reminder of how crime is socially constructed in that the financial crime of misreporting taxes has layers of seriousness to it which can be interpreted flexibly by the HMRC.

It seems that this flexibility gives people the opportunity to push the boundaries and risk withholding information without financial gain with a reduced threat of going to prison, the maximum penalty being a 30% fine on what profit you’ve made, which for the very rich, that might just be worth the gamble!

Sources

(1) BBC – Ross Atkins on Nadhim Zahawi’s Tax Affairs.

The Guardian – HMRC boss tells MPs ‘innocent errors’ aren’t penalised after Zahawi tax row.

Kinsella Tax – Tax Evasion Penalties – HMRC UK.

The Death of Awaab Ishak

Awaab Ishak was a toddler who died in December 2020 as a direct result of exposure to black mould in his flat in Rochdale.

Awaab’s untimely death is a consequence of poverty in the U.K. and government policy which allows landlords to get away with putting profit (or money saving) before people’s health.

The death of Awaab Ishak

Awaab Ishak developed a respiratory condition due to exposure to black mould in his house which caused his death, just eight days after his second birthday, according to the Coroner’s report.

Awab’s family lived in social housing, renting from Rochdale Bouroughwide Council (RBH) and Awaab’s father, Abdullah, had repeatedly raised concerns with RBH about mould, first reporting the problem in 2017 shortly after he moved into the flat. At that time he was told to paint over it.

According to the inquest into Awaab’s death the toddler had frequently been plagued by respiratory problems and a health visitor had written twice to RBH in 2020, expressing concern about the mould and the negative health effects it could have.

Also, in 2020, Abdullah had instructed solicitors via a claims company to try and get RBH to conduct repairs, as it was the social landlord’s policy to not do repairs until a formal claims procedure had been initiated.

At the inquest into Awaab’s death RBH accepted they could have been more proactive in dealing with the mould issue (which to my mind sounds like something of an understatement!)

The Social-Structural Causes of Awaab’s death

The initial cause of Awaab’s death was the staggering inactivity of the social housing provider in Rochdale, but a wider enabling causal factor was the fact that government regulations over standards for social housing provision allowed them to get away with such inaction for so long.

The national level policy which allows a housing association to not deal with sub-standard housing conditions which are life threatening, such as the existence of mould, until tenants file a formal process via a solicitor means delays in addressing such conditions.

The very fact that a formal process, via a solicitor, is required means that some tenants simply won’t initiate such a process because of maybe language barriers, or negative experiences with such institutional authorities in the past, or just plain lack of time or organisational skills.

Tenants also require sufficient knowledge of the system to be able lodge such complaints, knowledge they may not have, especially when English is their first language, as was the case with Abdullah who first came to the U.K. in 2016 from Sudan, and this was probably a causal factor in his reporting the mould first in 2017 but then not going through a solicitor until much later in 2020 – it took him a while to learn the formal processes.

Some people have even accused RBH of blatant Racism, claiming an English speaking family would not have had so much of a problem getting the mould issue addressed promptly.

Awaab’s Law

At least there has been a policy reaction to this horrific event….

Following an online petition at change.org the government recently announced (3) that it will be amending Social Housing Policy to specify time limits for social housing landlords to address problems which are potentially threatening to human health.

Sociological Perspectives on the death of Awaab Ishak

This unfortunate case study is a reminder of the extent of poverty and relative deprivation in the United Kingdom today, the death of this toddler just being a very tragic and extreme indicator of this.

About 450,000 homes in England have problems with condensation and mould (2) so this is far from one isolated case, that’s about 2% of the housing stock, and most of that is going to be in the social and private rented sectors, those houses owned by landlords that are taking advantage of the lax laws to keep more profit rather than re-investing their passive income back into providing better quality housing.

Probably another underlying factor to the mould not being sorted promptly is underfunding for social housing from the State, which is caused by more than a decade of austerity policies by the Tory government.

If we move away from the social rented sector and consider those houses with mould in the wider private rented sector, this demonstrates the downside of the profit-motive within the capitalist system. This would literally be a case of those with capital keeping their profits for themselves rather than re-investing in improving society. It is literally a case of profit before people, and the fact that law currently still allows this to happen demonstrates that the state is aligned with Capitalism rather than the people.

Most people don’t die from poor housing conditions such as mould, but poor quality housing is still resulting in poor physical and mental health for millions of the poorest adults and children, and such conditions more generally will lower life expectancy and mean children are less able to do their homework effectively (in damp bedrooms) which explains differential educational achievement by social class.

In short, this is a very stark example of how poverty negatively affects life chances – in the sense that Awaab now has no life and his parents’ lives are probably now ruined as well given the emotional toll on them.

Finally, something else you might want to explore more is the possibility that Racism was a causal factor in Awaab’s death.

Sources

(1) BBC News (November 2022) Awaab Ishak: Mould in Rochdale Flat Caused Boy’s Death, Coroner Rules.

(2) The Guardian (November 2022) Death of Two Year Old from Mould in Flat a Defining Moment, Coroner Says.

(3) Manchester Evening News (January 2023) Government Announces Plans for Awaab’s Law.

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The Arrest of Andrew Tate

Andrew Tate is the poster boy for toxic masculinity – why did he get so popular in 2022 and why was he arrested?

Andrew Tate, the self-styled King of Toxic Masculinity was arrested in Romania on 29th December 2022 and is currently in being held in jail pending possible charges for human trafficking, rape and forcing women into pornography against their will.

Tate subscribes to an incredibly toxic brand of masculinity which holds that men are superior to women, and the main markers of successful masculinity are how much wealth a man has and how successful men are with women. He also believes that ‘strength rules’ – the only valid arguments are those that can be won with violence, and he has no time for weaker or poorer men – he doesn’t believe that depression is real and regards anyone who is poorer than him as not worth knowing.

He has a stated preference for sleeping with teenagers because ‘he can leave more of a mark on them’, despite the fact that he his very critical of women who are sexually promiscuous.

He has a penchant for radical freedom and conspicuous consumption and it was the later that triggered his recent arrest.

He took it upon himself to troll Greta Thunberg on Twitter…. goading her about how many gas-guzzling cars he owned.

Great’s response was one of the most popular tweets in 2022 and promoted a video response from the egoist Tate in which he had Pizza delivered and asked that ‘they not be recycled’.

The only problem with that was the Romanian authorities managed to figure out where Tate was staying because of the brands on those Pizza boxes and within just a few hours his house was raided and he is now under arrest, along with his brother and two Romanian nationals for allegedly sex-trafficking women to Romania.

A hideous individual, finally brought down by his own arrogant ego, hopefully!

Who is Andrew Tate?

Andrew Tate was a relatively little known figure until August 2022 when he managed to gain huge visibility on social media thanks to an army of followers who edited and re-posted his content using his name as a hashtag, successfully gaming especially TikTok’s content-ranking algorithm.

He was born on an estate in Luton, so he is British, and is an ex kickboxer who won international titles, he is also a chess-master. He gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was booted out of Big Brother after video footage emerged of him beating a woman with the buckle of a belt – he claims it was consensual but we don’t know this for certain.

He earns his money mainly through online pornography. He ’employs’ mainly Eastern European women to do cam shows and he takes a cut, claiming that at its hight his ’empire’ consisted of 75 women in five locations brining in $500 000 a month.

He moved to Romania a few years ago claiming that 40% of the reason for this was that it was easier for him to evade rape charges in that country.

Andrew Tate’s Toxic Masculinity

Andrew Tate is an anti-feminist who consciously defines himself as a misogynist. He has previously stated in online content that women are men’s property, that women should be controlled by men and that women’s best defence against rape is to not put themselves in risky situations. He believes that women who go out and get drunk are themselves responsible for being raped.

He regards women as inferior to men in every respect, having stated that all they want to do is post pictures of themselves on instagram to gain attention, and has questioned why women are allowed to drive.

He thinks contemporary masculinity is threatened by women’s equality and the feminist movement and runs a web site called ‘Hustlers University’ which claims to help men be more successful in life, ‘helping’ them to earn more money and be more successful with beautiful women.

A lot of this so-called help involves encouraging men to themselves adopt his own brand of toxic-masculinity which means not accepting women’s equality with men and has men firmly in control of women, and he has even suggested than male violence against women is acceptable to keep them under male control.

Andrew Tate – Why is he so popular?

Tate has been peddling his toxic messages for several years and has been banned from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

However, despite being cancelled he has become one of the most well-known social media influencers, with his popularity peaking in August 2022 when his name was searched more times than Kim Kardashian or Donald Trump.

There have been more than 12 billion views under his hashtag, TikTok being the platform guilty of giving him the most airtime.

Andrew Tate is popular because of at least three factors:

  1. He has encouraged his followers to edit and repost his videos using his name as a hashtag – effectively he created a trend storm which successfully gamified social media algorithms, especially on TikTok
  2. His content is presented in an entertaining way and it is shocking – so people tend to watch to the end, something which social media sites reward with higher rankings.
  3. Unlike with Pick up artist culture he has a broader appeal – he is talking al ALL men, whether they have jobs or are in relationships, not just the single unemployed ‘losers.
  4. He has become a kind of poster-boy for cancel-culture – despite being cancelled he has been invited onto chat shows and been the subject of newspaper articles, which has all helped to raise his profile, perversely.

The problem with Andrew Tate’s Toxic Masculinity

Tate talks about violence against women in such a flippant way that there’s a danger he’s helping to normalise violence against women.

And he’s not just anti-women – he is well networked with alt right – Alex Jones, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson, so his views align with their’s to an extent, and he’s a massive anti-environmentalist.

He basically has no social conscience at all.

Pretty much anyone under the age of 30 has heard of Andre-Tate, and he is very popular with young men, with teachers reporting increasing numbers of young boys mimicking him.

How to deal with Andrew Tate?

It’s impossible to ignore this guy as he is so visible on social media, but it’s also difficult to know how to deal with him.

A starting point would be to have more discussions around masculinity with young men, especially offline, because otherwise we are just leaving it to this guy and others like him to fill that void.

It’s also a wake up call about how little social media companies care about the content they display – yes he was cancelled, at least formally, but this didn’t stop him being able to game the search algorithms to remain one of the most visible and toxic personalities of 2022.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material is most relevant to Feminism as part of A-level sociology – it reminds us that Feminism still has a lot to guard against.

It is also relevant to the sociology of the media, in terms of the power of spamming to keep even cancelled content visible.

If you want to find out more I recommend this Guardian Podcast.

The increasing cost of Christmas

25% of people say they can’t afford the Christmas they want in 2022, double the number from 2021.

The cost of Christmas is up by around 20% in 2022, and almost 40% say the cost of Christmas makes the event too stressful, but despite these woes, 70% say that ‘cancelling Christmas is not an option’.

These are some findings from a recent YouGov survey and in this post I consider how all of this might be relevant to sociology!

How much does the average person spend on Christmas…?

The average person in Britain plans to spend £642 on Christmas in 2022, which is down only slightly on 2021 when the average person spent £670. (These are Mean, not median averages).

However given inflation, people will be getting a lot less for their money this year even though the reduction in raw expenditure isn’t that significant!. According to The Guardian the cost of our various Christmas expenditures – mainly presents, food and, for some, travel have risen by more than 20% this year compared to 2021….

This basically means everyone’s going to be having one less slice of turkey, maybe a couple of less potatoes, and, worst of all, fewer pigs in blankets (yes, things really are THAT bad!)

25% of people can’t afford the Christmas they want

Given that the cost of Christmas has risen sharply it’s not surprising that the number of people saying they cannot afford the Christmas they want has doubled to 25%.

This proportion sounds about right based on the poverty stats: about 20% of the UK population are in relative poverty and I imagine most of the people responding positively to that question are going to come from this 20%.

Of course not all of them will, several people on low incomes budget for Christmas by saving all year round, and some of those responses will be more middle-income families having to cut down on their usual more affluent Christmas.

I do find it interesting that 75% are happy enough with their finances to be able to afford the Christmas they want, suggesting that people aren’t that sucked into the consumerist hype – the average figure of £650 seems to be adequate.

Maybe that’s a fail for the Christmas hype-machine, further suggesting that people aren’t as passive as you might think?!?

40% say Christmas is too Stressful

This is depressing – a significant minority of the population find the event too stressful because of the money…

This means that maybe that the veneer of Christmas is something of a lie, while underneath at the micro-level there’s a lot of suffering going on.

Value Consensus around Christmas?

Besides the increasing cost of Christmas and the increasing numbers of people feeling stressed about it and going into debt to fund it, nearly 70% of Britons say that ‘cancelling Christmas is not an option’

And it’s very rare these days that you get that many people to agree on anything, and so celebrating Christmas is maybe one of the few points of value consensus that we have.

Or is this value consensus at the level of society? Christmas is one of the few periods of the year where we all get to retreat from the world of work and society and spend some time with our families, so maybe here Britain is saying ‘we value being able to retreat to our private households’, so one could interpret this as being anti-social.

Signposting

This is really just a bit of annual Christmas fun with statistics!

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Sociological Perspectives on the December Strikes…

1.3 million workers are making just demands for better pay and conditions, but the neoliberal government is against them

Over one million workers across numerous sectors are going on Strike from December 2022 and into 2023.

Their main demands of the strikers are for better working conditions to make public services better and safer for everyone who uses them, and also for fairer pay to enable them to afford their basic human needs.

Who is going on strike?

There are workers going on strike from several unions in December 2022- January 2023

  • The Teacher’s union
  • The nurses union
  • ambulance workers
  • The RMT
  • buses
  • highway workers
  • Postal Workers
  • Boarder Force/ Driving InstructorS
  • University staff.

Is this a general strike?

No. A general strike is when industrial action is co-ordinated across several unions in solidarity. At the moment, while many individual unions are striking they are no co-ordinating these strikes.

Why are workers going on strike…?

The main reason for striking is that ordinary hard working public sector workers want to receive fair pay for the services they provide, and by ‘fair’ we mean a wage that is at least sufficient to pay for housing, food, utilities, transport and other basic needs rather than nurses having to go into debt and/ or rely on food banks to survive.

Real term pay has decreased by 20% since 2010 because of a decade of below inflation public sector pay rises as part of the Tory’s ongoing austerity policies.

But these strikes aren’t just about wages for the workers, they are also about working conditions and the wages being sufficient to attract enough workers to fill vacancies so that current workers aren’t overstretched. For example there are currently 47 000 unfilled nursing roles in the NHS – the pay isn’t enough to attract people into those roles, but current workers have to do overtime to cover those roles or just ‘work harder’.

The RCN says thousands of “burned out, underpaid nursing staff” have left the profession in the past 12 months.

And the fact that organisations like the NHS are understaffed means working conditions aren’t safe, THAT’s a pretty decent to strike for better conditions – these people actually care about the quality of work they provide and they can’t provide quality if they are stretched beyond capacity due to the wages being so low one in six vacancies are empty!

The longer term context of these strikes is twelve years of austerity politics from the Tories – most public sector workers have suffered a real terms pay cut (when factoring in inflation) of 20% since 2010, meaning they are a lot poorer now than they were twelve years ago. So basically, blame the Tories.

Public sector pay hans’t kept pace with private sector pay, so fairness is also about helping public sector workers catch up

Think about the kind of of people who are striking here too – nurses and teachers – these people go into a vocation, many of them dedicate their lives to it and they genuinely want to make YOUR LIFE and your children’s lives better – just pay them!

Then of course there is the Pandemic – it wasn’t so long ago that especially nurses, but also teachers were in the front-line of keeping the country going during Lockdowns, with nurses exposing themselves to Covid-19, some literally dying or seeing colleagues die as a result and now we can’t even give them a pay-rise in line with inflation.

How many people support the strikes?

It depends on who is striking.

60% of the public would support nurses striking, and a majority supports fire fighters, supermarket workers and doctors, with 50% supporting teachers.

However, people are very much against barristers, civil servants, university staff and train drivers going on strike!

People also support the nurses strike…

Arguments against striking

The government says it can’t afford to pay workers because it’s broke but it found enough money recently to pay pensioners 10% more – and that’s ALL pensioners, even the rich ones.

But NB – the Tories may say they now don’t have enough money, but consider the fact that Liz Trus’ mini-budget wiped £30 billion off the economy – there’s your pay-deal for all public sector workers right there!

So there may not be enough money but that’s because a combination of sheer incompetence and choosing to fund pensions over workers.

Media bias against strike action

If you can be bothered to wait for the advertising-slowed sluggish right-wing biased fest that is the Daily Mail online to load up you will immediately see the usual anti-social justice vitriol against the strikes.

Besides referring to Mick Lynch as ‘Grinch Lynch’ the other dead giveaway is immediately focussing on how the strikes will inconvenience you – clearly to the Daily Mail it’s more important that wealthy people get their Christmas cards delivered on time rather than the ordinary hardworking mail workers who deliver them receive decent pay and conditions for their service.

Applying Sociology to the strikes

This strike action is a fantastic example of how four decades of neoliberal economic policy have failed ordinary hard working people. If policy had been more about reinvesting back into public services, part of which would have meant pay rises in line with inflation, these socially just strikes would not be necessary.

The government’s reaction in not agreeing to the 1.3 million strikers’ totally reasonable requests also reminds us of the continued relevance of Marxism – with a political elite who recently tanked the economy with their fickle min-budget now refusing to enact a social policy which benefits ordinary hard working people.

Sources

The Daily Mirror (November 2022): Why are Nurses Striking?

BBC: Rishi Sunak working on ‘tough new strike laws‘.

The Guardian – Strike Statistics

Just Stop Oil – A Sociological Analysis

Just stop oil are challenging people to rethink what their values are in global context, but are coming up against governmental and corporate power structures which are pro fossil fuel.

Just Stop Oil is a UK based coalition of groups with the aim of getting the government to stop all new licences for exploring and developing fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

Just Stop Oil draws on evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which suggests if the global community doesn’t take action to radically and rapidly reducing its fossil fuel use within the next few years then climate change could be irreversible, meaning today’s children will face a calamitous future of global warming, sea level rise and extreme weather events.

The group has an overtly political focus, and a very specific focus – to get the government to disallow companies to exploit new fossil fuel reserves, and their tactics are very radical involving non violent direct action.

Just Stop Oil’s Tactics

Just Sop Oil uses Non Violent Direction Action to disrupt social activity in England and other countries, in order to draw attention to the urgent need to address the climate crisis.

The group made headlines in the UK in early November by climbing motorway gantries and stopping traffic for hours on end around the M25 and other places – if people enter gantries the police are legally obliged to remove them for their own safety, which requires traffic to be stopped.

The video below gives you an insight into the rational behind these tactics from the words of one of the activists

Just Stop Oil also made headline news back in October 2022 when activists threw soup over Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

The reason for choosing to attack art is to make people question what they value – if people are getting angry over vandalising a work of art, why aren’t they getting angry over governments allowing corporations and lazy individuals to vandalise the ecosystem which art depends on too?

Applying sociology to Just Stop Oil

There are lots of concepts you can apply to the Just Stop Oil campaigns, especially value consensus (or lack of it), indivdualisation, the Marxist perspective on global power structures, and Durkheim’s ideas about deviance and social change.

Value Consensus (or lack of it)

Just stop oil explicitly call on people to rethink what they value, as you can see from the FAQ on their site about ‘why soup over art’ – the whole point of that is to get people to think about why they care more about art than the climate, if they are getting angry about just the art rather than the climate.

You can also see it in this twitter exchange – the person replying to the individualised mother is challenging her to change her values and act on them, like she has done and like the U.N. is calling on people to do.

However the fact that so few people seem to care about the climate crisis and just go on doing their own thing and polluting suggests we are a long way off value consensus over the need to reduce our fossil fuel usage.

In short, Functionalist theory just doesn’t seem to apply here!

Individualisation

The tweet above reminds me of Bauman’s concept of individualisation – we live in a society where individuals are increasingly tasked with finding solutions to their own problems, rather than relying on society to do it for them.

In the above case we see a woman ‘managing’ her ordinary life in a very individualised way – she has a car to transport her kids around and is trying to plan to avoid disruption – which in itself is very efficient and organised.

However any sense of her using the train to care about the environment clearly isn’t on her agenda – and it isn’t on most people’s agendas either as they are too busy trying to just survive on a day to day basis.

There’s a strong possibility that governmental action may well be needed to reduce global emissions – if people aren’t forced to use less fossil fuels most of them will choose to carry on using them for the sake of convenience as any sense of ‘care for society’ has largely disappeared in our individualised age.

Marxist theories of global power structures

The fact that insufficient government action has been taken over climate change to prevent catastrophe by 2050 (according to climate scientists) suggests that they are on the side of the oil and gas companies.

In the case of the UK this is very much obvious – two of our largest companies are Shell and BP and the government isn’t even prepared to tax the current enormous profits they are making on high energy prices.

It seems to be that it’s very much the climate coalition versus the governments plus the oil corporations, and the later two are still putting short term profits before long term sustainability, which suggests that Marxism may well still be relevant today!

The Social Construction of Crime

Just a quick one – the High Court put out an injunction against anyone blockading motorways and other roads in certain parts of the UK.

This means that instead of just being charged with public nuisance offences which only really carry minor punishments anyone blockading a motorway as part of Just Stop Oil’s campaign can now be charged with contempt of court which carries longer jail sentences and unlimited fines!

It’s a great example of how an act can be made ‘more criminal’ by the simple act of a court.

Durkheims’ theory of social change

If you read through Just Stop Oil’s website and listen to the voices in these videos it’s clear that Just Stop Oil activists position themselves as being at the moral forefront of positive social change, in the same vein as civil rights activists in the 1960s.

Durkheim said that deviance in society is necessary in order for social change to take place and that ‘today’s deviance may well be tomorrow’s norm’.

Perhaps these committed activists have the value-system of the future – perhaps in 40 years time we will look back and think these were pioneers of a greener future when it is the norm to live more sustainably?

Another way Durkheim’s theory may be relevant in the future depends on how these activists are punished – if they are given very harsh punishments this could be an attempt by the courts to enforce social regulation through sending out a message.

Just Stop Oil – Relevance to A-level Sociology conclusions

This case study is most relevant to the Power and Politics option, but few students study that module, but this material is still a good example of deviance and so for most people will be relevant to the crime and deviance module.

also relevant to the global development module as this is clearly a global movement!

Liz Truss’ Energy Price Cap Will Benefit the Rich more than the Poor

State hand-outs for TNCs and more support for the rich – this is neoliberalism on steroids!

The New British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, recently announced her plans to help families and households through the current cost of living crisis.

The main policy to be introduced is an energy price cap which limits the average amount each household will pay capped at £2500.

NB this policy doesn’t mean that every household will pay a maximum of £2500 , that figure is the ‘easy to understand’ figure based on what the new price-per-unit of energy that OFGEM has to work with will be, which will mean an average house going forwards will be paying £2500 on energy until October 2023 (those calculations based on how much energy an average household has been using historically).

Of course if one ‘average household’ keeps the heating up at a toasty 25 degrees all winter they will still be paying more for energy than a similar household which keeps its thermostat at a more reasonable 18 degrees.

And so larger houses will be paying more than £2500, smaller houses and flats probably less than £2500.

HOWEVER, the cap on the unit-of-energy price still benefits the rich more than the poor, and. one simple chart from The Guardian shows how…

According to the figures above the following types of household save the following amounts per year with Truss’ new energy policy…

  • Detached houses save £1400
  • Semi-detached save £1150
  • Mid terraced save £950
  • Purpose built flats save £650

And as a general rule it is the wealthier and higher income earners who live in detached houses, while it’s the working and lower classes who live in mid terraced and flats.

So what we see here is that this Tory Policy saves the average wealthy household £750 a year more than the average poorer household.

This becomes clear when we see just HOW MUCH the richest households spend on energy, which was revealed in a recent 2022 report: A ‘Variable Energy Price Cap’ to Help Solve the Cost-of-Living Crisis by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research…

As you can see from the above the richest households spend almost twice as much on energy as the poorest households, which means any uniform energy price cap will benefit them proportionately more.

This is one of the reasons why the above report proposes a more nuanced policy approach of a variable cap and energy prices increasing the more households use, which would help the poor more compared to the rich and make the wealthier households contribute more to dealing with rising energy prices.

According to Bloomberg the current Tory policy could cost tax payers as much as £130 billion over two years, which is a CHOICE by a TORY to make the people pay rather than energy companies who are likely to make sufficient profit to be able to pay for the ENTIRE increase themselves and STILL make a decent profit on top!

The Tories allow the Corporations to Keep their Profits

According to UK Treasury figures Energy firms are expected to make an additional ‘unexpected’ £170 billion in profits over the next two years due to the increase in energy prices.

One policy the government could have pursued to tackle rising energy prices is thus to use a windfall tax on the two major UK energy corporations – Even just a 10% tax on £170 billion would raise £17 billion to help weather the storm.

However Liz Truss is part of the same Transnational Elite as the international energy companies. She used to work for Shell and she accepted a £100 000 donation from BP towards her leadership campaign.

And now she is repaying them by guaranteeing to allow them to keep ALL of their profits from this crisis, be effectively using tax payers money to pay them everything above the price cap for at least another year.

The most likely situation is that MOST of our

New Fracking and Oil Exploration Licenses

A more longer term policy (or lack of it) is to issue several new licences to allow firms to drill and frack for oil and natural gas in the North Sea and (probably) poorer parts of the United Kingdom.

Given Liz Truss’ pro-corporate and light regulation stance it’s unlikely these licenses will come with terms which see the profits from such resources go back to the people – far more likely is light regulation, low tax and profit extraction to distant lands.

Liz Truss’ Energy Policy – Relevance to A-level sociology

Probably the best fit for this material is within the Global Development module or the Theories part of Theory and Methods.

This policy is very much neoliberal – she is not taxing large corporations and giving out new licences for corporations to suck out our natural resources (NB we don’t have details, but I’m anticipating very lax regulation here).

We might even call this hyper neoliberalism – Truss is proposing a straight transfer of tax payer funds to Corporations – naked and visible and no effort to hide it, usually with pro-privatisation policies this is obscured, but not here.

Meanwhile her energy cap does little to help the poorest and more, proportionally to help the richest.

It’s also worth going back and reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine – that seems to apply here – we have a crisis and the right wing use it to pass even more wealth to the rich…

So this evidence also suggests support for the Marxist view that the government, ultimately (or at least in its current form) works in the interests of the elites and Transnational Corporations.

How has Covid-19 Changed our Work and Home Lives?

During the Pandemic our ordinary lives and norms were suspended because of government mandated rules enforcing Lockdowns and other protective measures agains the spread of the virus.

And it is precisely when our ordinary daily lives are disrupted or suspended that social norms are illuminated, and the Pandemic highlighted some of these, such as our reliance on technology (digital platforms) and gender relations within the household.

Furthermore, the social polices developed in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic reproduced already existing inequalities and power relations.

All of this is according to Will Davis, Professor of Political Economy at GoldSmith’s University, who featured in a recent Thinking Allowed Podcast…

Davis argues that the Pandemic shows us the power of the Nation State – what it can achieve when there is political will to spend money (and neoliberalism as usual is suspended!) – as evidenced in the ‘Covid Secure Housing’ scheme – all of a sudden, homelessness was almost eradicated, because it was deemed necessary to get people off the streets.

However for the most part the government’s policy approach during the Pandemic was one of ‘rentier nationalism’ – further blurring the boundaries between the public and private sector by giving generous contracts to companies in managing the Pandemic.

One such example was awarding SERCO the track and trace contract, and there are many more.

This policy, according to Davis was a continuation of several decades of post-neoliberal policies in which the role of the State is to ensure that those with assets can make a profit out of them – this is true for people with houses and for companies too.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t neoliberalism which is more global and free-market, it is the State having more of a role – and in fact this was the case with the political response to the Pandemic which was less global and more national according to Davis – as evidenced in ‘Vaccine nationalism’.

Inequality in the experience of Covid-19

Davis suggests we went through a ‘crisis of space’ during Lockdown with the home the chief weapon in combatting the spread of the virus.

He notes that for those with larger homes and spare rooms, Lockdown was relatively easy, and the wealthy were more able to spend money on technology to transition to home working, for example.

Property prices even increase during the Pandemic, further benefitting the rich!

Meanwhile the poor had a much worse time, and in extreme circumstances where there was overcrowding in multifamily households with share bathrooms, it was even impossible to isolate in family bubbles, meaning higher rates of infections.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is a useful update of some very contemporary sociology illustrating how inequalities are relevant to understanding our responses to Covid-19.

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