National Statistics (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

[Grant]

But is the problem that we stage these interventions but never push them 100%
If we had chucked a few nukes at Afghanistan they might have realised we were being serious and given up the fight.
By now the Afghans might be on the way to a Japan-style economic recovery

[Mick Harper]

If we'd have allowed the Iranians to have nukes they'd have done it for us. They hate the Taliban and all its works. Instead we allowed the Pakistanis to have nukes but they turned out to be a bunch of Taliban groupies.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

The news (from Newsnight, last night) that the West Midlands has significantly higher infant mortality than the rest of the country and that this was down to cousin-marriage in South Asian communities did not quite deliver the correct message. It's all very well recognising the problem and going on about the need for education and so forth (i.e. the usual) but it should also have mentioned that it's sort of a non-problem, and it's sort of an insoluble problem, and it's sort of a soluble problem with a problematic solution. All rolled into one.

First off, it's tiny. We're talking about an extra one/two/three babies per thousand and, the programme assured us, cousin-marriage is in decline anyway. Not so tiny as to be well worth concerning ourselves with but it was the what-to-do-about-it bit that had me worried. If you want to marry your cousin that's fine by me and by everyone else. Don't, for heaven's sake, not do it, because for you personally the risk is 'tiny'. If you want to do extra screening and whatnot, that's fine by me and everyone else too. We hope you do. But you're going to have to abort if the tests come out wrong -- otherwise the whole thing will have been a complete waste of time. Again that's fine by me, but is it fine by you and everyone else in your community?

It just may be one of those problems that really is best left with a shrug. As AE teaches us: to do nothing is to do something.

[Alfred Wegener]

Most recent report is here

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/515800/InfantMortalityInTheWestMidlandsFinal.pdf

[Alfred Wegener]

Makes for interesting reading. As for a solution, I don't think that this is amenable to reason or logic, as you imply, Mick.

[Chad]

Mortality is a non-problem. By its very nature mortality provides its own solution... Morbidity is the bigger issue.

My wife works with ‘special needs’ kids, in a mainstream school and the number of ‘ethnic minority’ pupils with some form of disability, is extremely disproportionate. (She puts this down to cousin-marriage.)

This is an expensive problem to deal with, at an individual level... but in the grand scheme of things, careful ignoral is probably the best course of action.

(The disproportionality shouldn’t last more than a couple of generations.)

[Mick Harper]

What I'm really talking about is what might be called 'internal colonialism'. The talking heads were all European middle class professionals (including the hyper-modern Asian woman academic who was doing the grunt work) and the solutions they were proffering were, as I said 'the usual'. But people who routinely marry their cousins are in arranged marriages and are most definitely not European (even though many of them would be middle class professionals).

I don't actually know the attitude to abortion (even scanning for birth defects) in such a traditional society but I'm pretty sure when people talk about 'education' they are really saying, "For goodness sake, you're not in the Punjab now." And, for better or worse, they are gradually not being so. Chad says 'a generation or two' but I wonder. It's already been longer than that.

[Mick Harper]

[Chad]

[Mick Harper]

[Chad]

[Mick Harper]

I accuse you of recovered memory syndrome. But if not, congratulations. Too recent though to account for the present situation.

[Chad]