England's NHS is in crisis; a top government advisor has been proven corrupt; there is mass unemployment and many disabled people are losing their only means of support - so why are we talking about pasties and pies? It's easy to ally oneself with those who are crying foul, describing this as a distraction. Indeed, it was very likely intended as such. But for a fair number of people, the affordability of food is the most fundamental issue there is.
It's a testament to the successes we have enjoyed as a nation that most people here rarely have to think about going without food. When they talk about cutting back on their food budget, most mean doing without treats. But there remains a substantial minority for whom finding enough to eat is an ongoing challenge. And whilst there may seem better ways to go about doing that than eating a lump of hot fat and sugar from the nearest Greggs, the fact is that some people depend on doing precisely that.
Foe me, the crisis came way back in 1992. It was my first summer as a student and the rules had been changed just a few years before so that people in my position were not eligible for government support. There were complex (and very personal) reasons why living with my parents was not an option for me. John Major was in Number 10 and unemployment was close to three million; though I would happily have supported myself through work, I simply couldn't find anything. So I sub-let a room and subsisted on a food budget of ten pounds a week; five when the soles of my shoes wore through and I had to save up to buy more.
In that situation, getting enough calories was difficult. I didn't have the skills I would acquire later from an Australian friend whose weekly budget was £2.50, who subsisted on chocolate for calories and cabbage for nutrition. I did discover that I could get free vegetables by visiting a local greengrocer who had to get rid of items that would go off by the following day. But getting enough calories was harder. After six months I would find myself in hospital, weighing less than seven stone, with multiple infections (starvation is hell on the immune system). Without the occasional bit of hot bakery food, I doubt I would have survived that long.
I always assumed that cases like mine were rare, but since I raised my voice over the 'pastygate' debate I have been contacted by a whole heap of people with similar issues. For some it's about poverty. Of course it is usually cheaper to buy ingredients and cook at home, but not everybody has a home to go to. For others it's about disability. Severe anxiety disorders can make cooking terrifying and mean comfort food is important because otherwise one might not eat at all (for a significant number of people, anxiety is accompanied by serious weight loss). Then there are those on the autistic spectrum who struggle to cope with the sequential tasks of shopping, cooking and eating - things that might sound ridiculously easy to others but which they also find it hard to get help with. As people in these groups are more likely to be living on very low incomes, affordable hot food becomes all the more important.
In addition to these, there are the people on low incomes who need to get something to eat during breaks at work. If you're working long hours (as many on the lowest wages do) or if you're living in poor conditions, making a packed lunch can be difficult, and many workplaces have no facilities for heating food. This isn't just an issue for those struggling to survive, it's an issue for those with few sources of pleasure for whom an extra couple of pounds a week in VAT will mean having to give up the hot lunch that makes a grim job bearable on a cold day. Little things like that matter a lot when life is hard.
This isn't a plea on behalf of Greggs, who were bending rules that many other bakeries felt obliged to hold to. It's simply a plea that these issues be treated with the seriousness they deserve. It's all very well to protest that food like this is unhealthy - I'd far rather people could get calorie-dense food without the fat and salt - but if the solution is simply to price that food out of people's reach, with no alternative put in place in the interim, very vulnerable people will have their lives made even harder. We really do need to find ways of reducing the price of fruit and vegetables but we also need to ensure people can get enough calories. Because when you're in that situation, you can't wait for the next piece of legislation. I was lucky. I found somebody to help me. I wouldn't have lasted much longer without.
When Margaret Thatcher was in power, doctors petitioned for the right to prescribe food to patients who kept ending up back in hospital basically because they couldn't afford enough to eat. Last year a young mother starved to death in Dublin. We don't like to talk about hunger in the First World but it does exist. Ultimately we need to tackle it by creating more employment, providing assistance to those with specific difficulties and improving our welfare system. In the meantime, we must think carefully about anything that increases the price of cheap, hot food at a time when inflation is already outpacing wages.
That old story about Marie Antoinette - false, of course, like many of the best historical anecdotes - stems from an old French law which required bakers who had run out of bread to supply customers with cake at the same price. It represents, then, common beliefs about the failure of the privileged to grasp what being out of bread means. Sadly, those beliefs are all too easily substantiated. Of course it doesn't matter where David Cameron bought his pasty (though it might matter that he thinks all Northern cities are essentially the same) but it matters that, to him, that expenditure was utterly insignificant, and he is making decisions on that basis, whilst others make choices between eating, heating and paying the rent.
Fortunately I am no longer in such desperate straits, but others are, and this isn't all pie in the sky to them.
Showing posts with label disability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disability. Show all posts
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Entitlement
After the shredding of Andrew Lansley by the Royal College of Nursing and David Willetts by the Congregation of Oxford, the next major government policy plank looking likely to run into trouble is Social Security. Meanwhile, the first volleys are being heard in a battle to determine whether or not Scotland will take control of its own Social Security matters after independence or a further devolution settlement. The demonisation of working class people and those with disabilities which commentators like Polly Toynbee and Owen Jones have recently remarked on ought to have made these issues politically straightforward, but this is a context in which the political ground can shift very quickly. What does this mean for the Westminster coalition, for Holyrood, and for those who depend on the welfare state?
Let's start with a simple question. Why change the Welfare State at all? The answer the Westminster government will give you (and one which was earlier espoused, to an extent, by its Labour predecessors) is that it is all a matter of money. The system costs too much (at £152 billion a year) and loses too much in fraud (approximately £1 billion). The danger of buying into this theory is that it's too easy to see those figures in isolation. As with every other public service, we should be asking what we get in return for this investment, what we would stand to lose if we cut the money, and how it fits into the context of comparable services.
First of all, let's set aside the issue of fraud. Fraud is, of course, a serious problem and needs to be tackled, but it should not be a major consideration in policy making for two very good reasons: firstly, that £1 billion is a small amount when compared, proportionally, with losses made by major financial organisations operating in the private sector; and secondly, it is a small amount in comparison with the amount of benefit that goes unclaimed by British citizens who are entitled to it. The value of unclaimed benefits amounted to around £15 billion last year. Some people choose not to claim, of course, but others are not aware of their full entitlement because the system is so complicated.
How did it get this way? This is a natural consequence of Social Security having been a political football for several decades now, kicked around by politicians of all stripes. Many have tried to reform it, for varying reasons, and the end result is that it has become a collection of poorly connected systems assembled around half-complete strategies that are at odds with one another. This is a problem for governments, staff and claimants alike. It's one of the reasons why the system is riddled with poverty traps whereby claimants can end up being poorer if they work. It contributes to claims taking months to process whilst claimants struggle to feed themselves and stay in their homes. It has also resulted in a bloated bureaucracy that costs the taxpayer a fortune. If we want to make Social Security cheaper we should be looking not simply at how much claimants receive, but at how much it costs to deliver it to them.
Simplifying this is a noble aim and there is a lot to be said for Iain Duncan Smith's early ambitions. Unfortunately, like many ministers before him, he has found that this isn't so easy to do in reality – especially within the lifetime of a Parliament. The measures now travelling through Parliament are consequently just another half-baked plan that doesn't really tackle the underlying problems with the system and will end up adding to the existing mess. That the government knows this too is evident in its cautious climbdown over hasty suggestions like the cap on benefits at £26,000 per year. Now that we are told this “was never intended to apply” to households which include disabled people and that it is unlikely to be applied to households with children, it is difficult to see who it will apply to. Despite the shocking figures which the Department of Social Security has now admitted it took, without verification, from the Daily Mail, there is no real evidence that people on benefits are bringing in over £100,000 a year. Most live on very little.
So let's take a look at some of the central problems in the system, how they manifest, and what could realistically be done about them.
First up is the issues of long term recipients of Incapacity Benefit. When Iain Duncan Smith and Ed Miliband express their shock at how some people have been 'left' on these benefits for over a decade it may sound shocking, but what does that really mean? In some cases there is reason to be sceptical about long term claimants. In the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher's government was worried about the consequences of spiralling unemployment figures, many claimants with relatively minor health problems were moved onto Incapacity Benefit as a convenient way of massaging the statistics. This was a particular issue in depressed areas of the country where little employment was available (it's one of the reasons, for instance, why the number of claimants in Glasgow is so high, when you consider that unemployment reached 85% on some Glasgow housing estates during that period). Some (not all) of these people could now go back to work, though they would of course need extra support to update their skills and to find jobs when they are unlikely to be considered very employable. But this does not apply to all Incapacity Benefit claimants.
It is estimated that approximately a third of current Incapacity Benefit claimants could work, a third will never be able to work, and another third can do some types of work with a lot of support. Though I have never claimed this benefit, I might consider myself in the latter camp – my serious illness means that I am limited to working from home, which in turn effectively limits my earnings. It's not so very bad for me because I have skills that enable me to do this, but many people with long term illnesses and disabilities don't. Any government serious about having them work – and keep working – must provide the necessary training, create suitable job opportunities (by more effectively tackling employers' unwillingness to take on disabled staff, by encouraging the development of more telecommuting opportunities, etc.), and acknowledge that many of these people will be unable to cope with full time hours. The upshot of this is that it may well cost more to help such people into employment than it does to keep them in receipt of Social Security. This is one of the reasons why we have a welfare state – sometimes it's the most practical option.
This brings us to another intrinsic problem with the system – it is built around a model that assumes people will be in full time work or not working at all. Again, Iain Duncan Smith has the right idea with his pledge to support those in 'micro jobs', but at a policy level he has failed to follow through on this. Part time working is heavily penalised at many levels. People working more than one part time job because that's the only way they can earn enough to support themselves are penalised by the tax system, hardly an encouragement to work. Benefit claimants working over sixteen hours a week can have their benefits docked even if they are not earning enough to compensate for their losses – not a problem if they are above the minimum wage but a serious impediment to people who are self employed, for instance. As an individual earns more, they become ineligible for specific benefits such as free dental care, so that they may easily end up being poorer as a consequence of working. They should do it anyway, you may well say (and, indeed, I have long done it anyway), but when one is on the breadline and has a family to support, that's not such an easy call.
Part time working is the best model for many people with long term illnesses and disabilities, for single parents and others with care responsibilities; and it's also very often the only choice people have when full time jobs are scarce. We might prefer that people not claim benefits at all, but it's better people contribute what they can than not contribute at all. Working also tends to result in better health outcomes for individuals and reduced pressure on families, both of which reduce later costs for the state. So these barriers to work need to be removed. How do we find them all? By using the only research tactic that has been consistently ignored throughout these decades of poorly thought-out changes: sitting down the long-term claimants and asking them what has made it difficult for them to work.
One point raised again and again in these situations is the particular difficulty experienced by families. Because partners (whether married, in civil partnership, or not) are expected to support each other financially there is a disincentive for one partner to work when the other is not working (because if their earnings are relatively low they will receive very little financial reward for it) and there is an incentive for families to split up, which then costs the state more because it is more expensive to provide Housing Benefit for two properties and there may be additional bureaucratic costs in relation to child support. It would be one thing to penalise partners like this if their responsibility for one another as dependants were acknowledged in the tax system, but it is not, so they lose out at both ends. The system also loses out because this means that people can be paying taxes at the same time as they are receiving benefits, so the state is taking with one hand and giving with the other and inevitably losing money in administration during each process. Iain Duncan Smith's early proposals included the suggestion that this obligation of support be broken, so that people were responsible simply for themselves and their children; he also proposed ensuring that people would not pay tax until they were above the threshold at which they received benefits; but again, these potentially effective measures were lost in subsequent redrafting as political concerns interfered with his attempt to bring a straightforward management approach to the system.
The danger of allowing political rhetoric to contaminate approaches to Social Security is twofold. First of all, it can create lead to real suffering and a lack of help for the most vulnerable people in our society, something all politicians decry but few seem willing to take action on. Secondly, it encourages short term solutions that fob off the worried taxpayer whilst doing nothing to reduce costs in the long term. Taking away people's benefits if they're fit to work but don't accept jobs might sound like a good idea, but the reality of it is much more complicated. What if they have children – do we leave the children to starve, or take them into care (costing the state a lot more)? What if they start stealing in order to provide for themselves? What if they have been wrongly assessed as fit and their health declines rapidly in the working environment (at least one man has already died of a heart attack after finding himself in this situation)? As so often, this cost saving measure could easily become more expensive than simply leaving things as they were.
There is a real problem with a small minority of benefit claimants who simple can't be bothered to work, but to focus policy around them is economically naïve and risks seriously harming those in genuine need. It makes for good soundbites but it doesn't make for good government. Simply put, we need to take the same approach to the benefits system as the banks – fraudsters must feel the full force of the law and we must aim to clarify the rules to make things more difficult for those who simply avoid doing their duty. Meanwhile, we must make take care that the problem minority are not allowed to tarnish the whole system.
Just as we all depend on having access to banks, we all depend on Social Security. It's a safety net for society and it's insurance for us as individuals – that portion of our taxes that goes toward supporting it is not just there to provide for other people, it's there to ensure that we, too, will receive support if we should ever fall on hard times. In a recession, this is something people should be acutely aware of. Politicians and tabloid journalists frequently complain about benefit claimants having a sense of entitlement, but they should feel entitled to draw upon a system that their taxes have contributed to. Why do bankers have a sense of entitlement to large bonuses when their companies are making losses? Why do some of Mr Cameron's front bench colleagues have a sense of entitlement to inherited wealth and, well, titles? If we are to question the entitlement of the poor it should cut both ways.
There are real problems with the Welfare State and there are fictitious ones. It's time our leaders stopped play-fighting with the latter and took responsible measures to introduce genuine reform and make Social Security a better system for everyone.
Let's start with a simple question. Why change the Welfare State at all? The answer the Westminster government will give you (and one which was earlier espoused, to an extent, by its Labour predecessors) is that it is all a matter of money. The system costs too much (at £152 billion a year) and loses too much in fraud (approximately £1 billion). The danger of buying into this theory is that it's too easy to see those figures in isolation. As with every other public service, we should be asking what we get in return for this investment, what we would stand to lose if we cut the money, and how it fits into the context of comparable services.
First of all, let's set aside the issue of fraud. Fraud is, of course, a serious problem and needs to be tackled, but it should not be a major consideration in policy making for two very good reasons: firstly, that £1 billion is a small amount when compared, proportionally, with losses made by major financial organisations operating in the private sector; and secondly, it is a small amount in comparison with the amount of benefit that goes unclaimed by British citizens who are entitled to it. The value of unclaimed benefits amounted to around £15 billion last year. Some people choose not to claim, of course, but others are not aware of their full entitlement because the system is so complicated.
How did it get this way? This is a natural consequence of Social Security having been a political football for several decades now, kicked around by politicians of all stripes. Many have tried to reform it, for varying reasons, and the end result is that it has become a collection of poorly connected systems assembled around half-complete strategies that are at odds with one another. This is a problem for governments, staff and claimants alike. It's one of the reasons why the system is riddled with poverty traps whereby claimants can end up being poorer if they work. It contributes to claims taking months to process whilst claimants struggle to feed themselves and stay in their homes. It has also resulted in a bloated bureaucracy that costs the taxpayer a fortune. If we want to make Social Security cheaper we should be looking not simply at how much claimants receive, but at how much it costs to deliver it to them.
Simplifying this is a noble aim and there is a lot to be said for Iain Duncan Smith's early ambitions. Unfortunately, like many ministers before him, he has found that this isn't so easy to do in reality – especially within the lifetime of a Parliament. The measures now travelling through Parliament are consequently just another half-baked plan that doesn't really tackle the underlying problems with the system and will end up adding to the existing mess. That the government knows this too is evident in its cautious climbdown over hasty suggestions like the cap on benefits at £26,000 per year. Now that we are told this “was never intended to apply” to households which include disabled people and that it is unlikely to be applied to households with children, it is difficult to see who it will apply to. Despite the shocking figures which the Department of Social Security has now admitted it took, without verification, from the Daily Mail, there is no real evidence that people on benefits are bringing in over £100,000 a year. Most live on very little.
So let's take a look at some of the central problems in the system, how they manifest, and what could realistically be done about them.
First up is the issues of long term recipients of Incapacity Benefit. When Iain Duncan Smith and Ed Miliband express their shock at how some people have been 'left' on these benefits for over a decade it may sound shocking, but what does that really mean? In some cases there is reason to be sceptical about long term claimants. In the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher's government was worried about the consequences of spiralling unemployment figures, many claimants with relatively minor health problems were moved onto Incapacity Benefit as a convenient way of massaging the statistics. This was a particular issue in depressed areas of the country where little employment was available (it's one of the reasons, for instance, why the number of claimants in Glasgow is so high, when you consider that unemployment reached 85% on some Glasgow housing estates during that period). Some (not all) of these people could now go back to work, though they would of course need extra support to update their skills and to find jobs when they are unlikely to be considered very employable. But this does not apply to all Incapacity Benefit claimants.
It is estimated that approximately a third of current Incapacity Benefit claimants could work, a third will never be able to work, and another third can do some types of work with a lot of support. Though I have never claimed this benefit, I might consider myself in the latter camp – my serious illness means that I am limited to working from home, which in turn effectively limits my earnings. It's not so very bad for me because I have skills that enable me to do this, but many people with long term illnesses and disabilities don't. Any government serious about having them work – and keep working – must provide the necessary training, create suitable job opportunities (by more effectively tackling employers' unwillingness to take on disabled staff, by encouraging the development of more telecommuting opportunities, etc.), and acknowledge that many of these people will be unable to cope with full time hours. The upshot of this is that it may well cost more to help such people into employment than it does to keep them in receipt of Social Security. This is one of the reasons why we have a welfare state – sometimes it's the most practical option.
This brings us to another intrinsic problem with the system – it is built around a model that assumes people will be in full time work or not working at all. Again, Iain Duncan Smith has the right idea with his pledge to support those in 'micro jobs', but at a policy level he has failed to follow through on this. Part time working is heavily penalised at many levels. People working more than one part time job because that's the only way they can earn enough to support themselves are penalised by the tax system, hardly an encouragement to work. Benefit claimants working over sixteen hours a week can have their benefits docked even if they are not earning enough to compensate for their losses – not a problem if they are above the minimum wage but a serious impediment to people who are self employed, for instance. As an individual earns more, they become ineligible for specific benefits such as free dental care, so that they may easily end up being poorer as a consequence of working. They should do it anyway, you may well say (and, indeed, I have long done it anyway), but when one is on the breadline and has a family to support, that's not such an easy call.
Part time working is the best model for many people with long term illnesses and disabilities, for single parents and others with care responsibilities; and it's also very often the only choice people have when full time jobs are scarce. We might prefer that people not claim benefits at all, but it's better people contribute what they can than not contribute at all. Working also tends to result in better health outcomes for individuals and reduced pressure on families, both of which reduce later costs for the state. So these barriers to work need to be removed. How do we find them all? By using the only research tactic that has been consistently ignored throughout these decades of poorly thought-out changes: sitting down the long-term claimants and asking them what has made it difficult for them to work.
One point raised again and again in these situations is the particular difficulty experienced by families. Because partners (whether married, in civil partnership, or not) are expected to support each other financially there is a disincentive for one partner to work when the other is not working (because if their earnings are relatively low they will receive very little financial reward for it) and there is an incentive for families to split up, which then costs the state more because it is more expensive to provide Housing Benefit for two properties and there may be additional bureaucratic costs in relation to child support. It would be one thing to penalise partners like this if their responsibility for one another as dependants were acknowledged in the tax system, but it is not, so they lose out at both ends. The system also loses out because this means that people can be paying taxes at the same time as they are receiving benefits, so the state is taking with one hand and giving with the other and inevitably losing money in administration during each process. Iain Duncan Smith's early proposals included the suggestion that this obligation of support be broken, so that people were responsible simply for themselves and their children; he also proposed ensuring that people would not pay tax until they were above the threshold at which they received benefits; but again, these potentially effective measures were lost in subsequent redrafting as political concerns interfered with his attempt to bring a straightforward management approach to the system.
The danger of allowing political rhetoric to contaminate approaches to Social Security is twofold. First of all, it can create lead to real suffering and a lack of help for the most vulnerable people in our society, something all politicians decry but few seem willing to take action on. Secondly, it encourages short term solutions that fob off the worried taxpayer whilst doing nothing to reduce costs in the long term. Taking away people's benefits if they're fit to work but don't accept jobs might sound like a good idea, but the reality of it is much more complicated. What if they have children – do we leave the children to starve, or take them into care (costing the state a lot more)? What if they start stealing in order to provide for themselves? What if they have been wrongly assessed as fit and their health declines rapidly in the working environment (at least one man has already died of a heart attack after finding himself in this situation)? As so often, this cost saving measure could easily become more expensive than simply leaving things as they were.
There is a real problem with a small minority of benefit claimants who simple can't be bothered to work, but to focus policy around them is economically naïve and risks seriously harming those in genuine need. It makes for good soundbites but it doesn't make for good government. Simply put, we need to take the same approach to the benefits system as the banks – fraudsters must feel the full force of the law and we must aim to clarify the rules to make things more difficult for those who simply avoid doing their duty. Meanwhile, we must make take care that the problem minority are not allowed to tarnish the whole system.
Just as we all depend on having access to banks, we all depend on Social Security. It's a safety net for society and it's insurance for us as individuals – that portion of our taxes that goes toward supporting it is not just there to provide for other people, it's there to ensure that we, too, will receive support if we should ever fall on hard times. In a recession, this is something people should be acutely aware of. Politicians and tabloid journalists frequently complain about benefit claimants having a sense of entitlement, but they should feel entitled to draw upon a system that their taxes have contributed to. Why do bankers have a sense of entitlement to large bonuses when their companies are making losses? Why do some of Mr Cameron's front bench colleagues have a sense of entitlement to inherited wealth and, well, titles? If we are to question the entitlement of the poor it should cut both ways.
There are real problems with the Welfare State and there are fictitious ones. It's time our leaders stopped play-fighting with the latter and took responsible measures to introduce genuine reform and make Social Security a better system for everyone.
Saturday, 7 May 2011
Minority Report
Two days on from Scotland's election, a fair bit has already been written about the gender imbalance in parliament. Only a third of MSPs now are women. Personally this doesn't worry me too much - below a third and I'd start to worry, but variation to that degree is, I think, something we can expect to see from time to time without any special cause. (Of course, only time will tell if it sometimes varies in the other direction.) Any concern I might have is further mitigated by the calibre of our female MSPs. With women like Nicola Sturgeon, Annabel Goldie and Margo MacDonald around, what women may lack in numbers they make up for in talent and force of personality.
What we should perhaps be more worried about is the shortage of representation of key minority groups in parliament. The new intake gives us only two non-white MSPs - 1.5% - whereas 11% of Scotland's population falls into this group. Of the two, one (Humza Yousaf) is only twenty five but already has some impressive achievements to his name and seems a promising new talent. The other is Hanzala Malik. Those familiar with him from his work on Glasgow City Council are not exactly expecting great things. Of course, they shouldn't be obliged to carry any extra burden beyond what we ordinarily expect of MSPs, but the fact remains that young people will look to them for an example if their first impression of parliament is that it's a white people's club they have little hope of joining.
The same issue applies to openly lgbt people. There were four in the last parliament and, so far as I can discern, five in this one (two have left). Patrick Harvie is, of course, a formidable (though very likeable) presence and punches well above his weight, being particularly good at courting media attention, whilst the SNP's Marco Biagi seems likely to achieve big things. Still, their numbers fall well short of the Westminster government's estimate that 6% of the population is lgbt, a figure considered by many lgbt groups and academics to be a considerable underestimate. Again, the impression is given that parliament is for a particular type of person and, among other things, that person is straight.
62% of MSPs are (or pretend to be) straight white men.
As far as age variation goes, the Scottish parliament is fairly impressive, with around 3% of MSPs in their twenties, 12% in their thirties, 30% in their forties, 33% in their fifties and the rest older. That there are no truly elderly MSPs probably reflects on the youth of the parliament itself; the oldest politicians in any such institution tend to be long-serving incumbents. At any rate, this matches up fairly well against positions in industry and academia with comparable levels of responsibility, suggesting that age discrimination isn't something we need to be concerned about.
With this balance in mind, however, it's all the more remarkable how few disabled MSPs there are. Holyrood just got its first blind MSP in Dennis Robertson and Margo MacDonald has spoken extensively about her experiences with Parkinson's disease; there are also a few MSPs with minor sensory and mobility impairments; but this is in stark contrast to the 14% of the general population identified as disabled in official statistics, especially allowing for the fact that people are more likely to be disabled from their forties onwards. Of course, not all disabled people are capable of working outside their own homes, or at all, but it's still evident that something is wrong here.
What can and should be done about this? "It ought to be about merit," many people protest, quite understandably. Of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with any individual MSP being straight, white, male and able-bodied, but when most of them are, that's a big problem. It means that parliament lacks the experience and expertise to be properly representative; it lacks the depth of perspective available to more balanced groups. Parliament is poorer for it - we are all poorer for it - and to make things worse, it's a self-reinforcing problem.
This applies for two reasons. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, young people considering careers in politics are often put off if they perceive people like themselves as being excluded. Secondly, those from minority groups who do want to give it a try are less likely to have useful social contacts who can help them along the way. It would be nice to think that, in modern Scotland, people would socialise across the boundaries or things like race, sexual orientation and disability/able-bodied status, but research demonstrates that this isn't the case; or that, at any rate, it is proportionally a much less successful form of networking than that conducted within such groups. This is something which, one hopes, will change in time, but it may need a few nudges to do so.
This brings us to the big question: what can be done to remedy the imbalances in parliament? Many people shrink in horror from the term positive discrimination, yet the example of Westminster demonstrates its success - numbers of women in the House of Commons have increased dramatically since it was introduced on certain party shortlists. The counter-argument to this is that rushing women through the system means many reach positions of power despite a shortage of experience or talent, and this is indeed a problem, but the short term difficulty (along with the short term unpleasantness of any form of discrimination) must be balanced against the long term gains - the generational difference that is made when newcomers are able to find the role models and make the connections that would otherwise have been unavailable to them. There is, after all, no reason why these newcomers should be lacking in ability.
If it is used, positive discrimination has to be a party thing - it is not something that parliament as an institution can do. This means that parties have to take responsibility for the imbalances among their own MSPs. The Greens have the best record for this (taking into account their candidates as well), but none of the other major parties in Scotland is significantly worse than its opponents. All seem to want to move forward and address the problem. It is a matter, for each one, of figuring out how best to do so within its own party structures.
One final point - it is a notable characteristic of parties which employ positive discrimination to advance women that their ambitious men complain about having to work harder to get to the top. From a party perspective, this means additional gains - not only a better gender balance but more capable, more accomplished male candidates. Any smart party will therefore ask not how can we make things easier for women? but how can we make things harder for men? A tough, competitive party environment that doesn't let anybody cruise by on traditional advantages will result in stronger politicians getting to the top and should improve a party's chances of electoral success.
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