Advocacy and action
The final section in this volume is the largest and concerns what can be argued for and what can be done, but also why it is often so hard to achieve very much at all. The section begins with a paper published in the New Internationalist magazine which suggests that, in very unequal affluent countries, people’s individual and collective abilities to argue cogently for change have been greatly curtailed. We are made a little more stupid and selfish the longer we live in a stupid and selfish society.
Next, an example is given from a short piece reproduced from the journal Criminal Justice Matters concerning how, in criminology, people stop thinking straight when they start thinking of ‘us’ and ‘them’. This is followed by an extract from the newsletter of the Regional Studies Association, Regions, giving an example of when government ministers commissioned research and then ignored the results because they did not fit their way of thinking. The result, as the fourth article of this section, written initially for Public Servant Magazine, argues, is that inequalities rose in many areas under a New Labour administration supposedly committed to reduce them.
The worst, and growing, inequalities are inequalities in health, and so the fifth short article for this section gives an example of advocacy in that area through the simple listing of what kills most people at each age in Britain. The result was used in evidence by the House of Commons Select Committee on Transport in their 2010 report on the scandal of road deaths in Britain (see page 366). This is followed by a piece from The Yorkshire Post newspaper which illustrates that, in general, as social inequalities rise, we tend to confuse becoming more unequal with becoming more free. Chapter 49, an article from Poverty (the journal of the Child Poverty Action Group) then lists how children did not necessarily benefit from a government committed to the eradication of child poverty. Commitment is necessary but not sufficient.
Next a very different chapter is included from an article on new ways of mapping the world written with three colleagues for ArcUser, a magazine that is almost exclusively read by people who use expensive mapping software. Almost no one who reads Poverty will read ArcUser and vice versa, but the new ways of visualisation are about mapping using projections that are more equitable.
To my mind, advocacy is about very different little bits of action in very many very different places. What works in one place does not often work in other places, but if you have a rough idea of where you are trying to get to, and you try most of the time to make steps towards that, you won’t go too far wrong. The section ends with a chapter taken from a very short article first printed in The Big Issue (a magazine mostly sold by homeless people, often to students) on imagining if you could be king, just for one day, what roles, as a king, queen or emperor, you would play, should you get the chance.