Category: Other

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

In discussions on social media, I’ve been taken aback by the strength of  criticism that has been directed towards me for using an original AI image.  I’ve been told that AI is unethical, that it’s based on ‘stolen’ IP and  that it undermines the rights of creators.  I think these comments are misconceived, but the negative comments have  prompted me to reply  somewhere where they might help to sway opinion. I’ve prepared a short submission to the Government’s consultation paper on  Copyright and Artificial Intelligence.

This is a draft; if people have reasoned objections or observations, let me know of them and I’ll consider whether I need to amend them before submission. Responses to the consultation are due by 25th February.

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence: Consultation

The foundational assumptions

The consultation assumes that the protection of intellectual property is the equivalent to the protection of creative work.  There are three things wrong with that.  First, original work and the intellectual property which relates to it is commonly developed in fields which are not necessarily thought of as ‘creative’ activity.  This is most obviously the case in works of science, works of scholarship and works of nonfiction.  One of the recurring problems with debates about IP has been the failure to recognise that rules which apply to creative endeavour do not only apply to original creation.  Restrictions on the dissemination and re-use of materials represent a major impediment  to the production of academic work and nonfiction, presenting obstacles to scientific theory, modern history and  the exchange of ideas.

Second, the protection of ‘rights holders’ does not guarantee protection for to the creators of original content.  In many cases rights are held either by publishers, employers or by their successors in title. The publishers of academic works have a long history of  acquiring copyright without paying authors, minimising payments to content creators and charging authors to allow open access.  The primary effect of the copyright laws has been to defend, not the creators of intellectual property, but the interests of the businesses who have secured the rights.

Third, the copyright laws as currently constituted often act as an impediment to the development of original content.  It is difficult to generalise with confidence, because the laws of copyright internationally are in such a mess, but ‘fair dealing’ is still hugely restrictive; the effects include requirements for permission to quote, select, illustrate or use materials for the purposes of teaching.  Claims of intellectual property are routinely being made for historical texts and images, composed music, folk song, commonplace harmonic and melodic sequences; although such claims are without merit, they are used to bully and intimidate the creators of content into either paying or withdrawing their work.   There is a presumption against using material that might be copyrighted, rather than a presumption of legitimate use.

What AI is doing

The objections to AI are currently focused on the issue of ‘training’, a subject mentioned 52 times in the consultation without being defined.  ‘Large Language Modules’ are accused of ‘scraping’ original work in ways that infringe the IP of contents creators.  ‘Scraping’, as I understand it, consists primarily of examining a huge range of potential sources, and using information gleaned about techniques, the identification of relationships and constellations of words, images or other material between different sources, and outputs, to offer new material which is based on those relationships, but is not recognisably the product of any individual source.

Copyright laws are supposed to protect work from being reproduced, not from it being used.  LLMs differ from human analysts in the size, speed and criteria for use, but the core tasks employed in scraping depend on uses that in other contexts are unquestionably legitimate: perusal, selection and analysis. This, if we think about it dispassionately, is exactly what every creator, and most students of higher education, must learn to do.  Students, in order to present original arguments or designs, learn to select material and place it in a structure – selection and ordering are the preconditions of effective evaluation.  Everyone who has ever written an essay, a literature review or a story rooted in one of the basic plots can be said to be ‘scraping’.  That is also how the creative imagination works: not from thoughts run wild, but from a sense of how to mould learned material into new and unfamiliar juxtapositions.  AI may put things together in a different way, but the process of selection and analysis is equivalent to learning, and the nature of any infringement by AI is primarily a matter of scale.  ‘Scraping’ is a normal and legitimate use of source material.

The interests of users

The consultation scarcely considers the interests of users at all.  Artificial intelligence potentially offers end-users powers to produce content that could not otherwise have been developed.  These include the power to generate high-quality images, schedules, information – and to do it at little or no cost to the user.  There are problems in managing this, to be sure. Foremost among them will be to teach people how to do use AI well –  to choose the best methods and presentations.  The current lobby against AI is trying, not to make AI better or more responsible, but to stop it from doing what it is designed to do. This is a misconceived position that is intended to deny the benefits of AI to users.

I conclude that the reservation of rights to obstruct the development of AI should not be pursued.     

 

‘Low value’ degrees

The government (and, apparently, Rishi Sunak in particular) thinks it can distinguish ‘low value’ degrees from others by what happens to students shortly afterwards.  The test of a higher value degree, it seems, is whether students obtain a professional job, go into postgraduate study or start a business.

Very few undergraduate degrees lead directly to a professional qualification; students will commonly have to go through an intermediate, professional stage in order to qualify for jobs.  What, then, are universities teaching when they offer courses in various sorts of ‘studies’ ? The answer is much the same as it would be for traditional degrees in English Literature, History or Philosophy.  Universities aren’t, for the most part, in the business of training; they’re engaged in higher education.   Students are being guided how to absorb information, select it, order it, evaluate it, and communicate it, and (increasingly) they are learning how to do that independently, without much further guidance.  Their future employers  are interested in the skills that graduates have, not in the specific knowledge they have gained during their studies.

If we ask why some courses have worse ‘outcomes’, the answer is unlikely to be found lurking in the specific knowledge area that the course has covered.  It’s much more likely to be a question of respect for the institution, status, and the background of the students.

My own first degree, for what it’s worth, was in Politics, Philosophy and Economics – the same low-value, airy-fairy course done by the likes of Rishi Sunak.  My parents disapproved.

A trial for rape

If I’ve been inactive during the last week, it’s not least because I’ve been otherwise engaged.  I’ve been on the jury for a trial in the High Court, where a man was accused of rape.  I am not at liberty to reveal any part of the jury’s discussions, but I can comment on the law.

The law relating to rape was restated in Scotland in the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009.  Section 1 begins in these terms:

If a person (“A”), with A’s penis—

(a) without another person (“B”) consenting, and

(b) without any reasonable belief that B consents,

penetrates to any extent, either intending to do so or reckless as to whether there is penetration, the vagina, anus or mouth of B then A commits an offence, to be known as the offence of rape.

There are several elements in this. The most important are

  • the identity of the person,
  • the act of penetration,
  • consent,
  • intention, and
  • the ‘reasonable belief’ of the perpetrator.

The case was found to be ‘not proven’: a  verdict available in Scottish law that is treated in practice as equivalent to acquittal, but which is distinctly not the same as ‘not guilty’.   There is a presumption of innocence, and it is for the prosecution to establish the case. That must extend to every aspect of the crime, and in this case it did not.

I’ve commented previously on some of the problems with the law relating to rape, particularly the focus on consent.  This case has made me aware of another.  The statute adds the rider of a ‘reasonable belief’ in consent to a whole slew of sexual offences, including rape, exposure, voyeurism and drugging people.  “Even the devil”, the legal proverb runs, “knows not the mind of man.” Rape and most other sexual offences should be a matter of strict liability: what matters is how people behave.

The US Supreme Court offers some very sloppy reasoning

Although I studied law for the Bar once upon a time, I never made anything of it.  After a first degree including philosophy, the claims of lawyers to be engaging in rigorous reasoning seemed at best flattering, at worst forced.

It does come as a shock, however, to read a legal judgment from America’s most senior lawyers that is not just sloppy, but destructive and slightly deranged.  It is, of course, Dobbs v Jackson Womens’ Health, the revision of settled law on abortion. There are four obvious problems with it.  The first lies in the dismissal of the relevance of the principle of  privacy – quite rightly noted, in this judgment, to cover “the right to make and implement important personal decisions without governmental interference.”  This concept is what the decision in Roe v Wade relied on. It was first laid out by Justices Warren and Brandeis in an article in the Harvard Law Review in 1890: they called it “inviolate personality”.   Justice Thomas, in this judgment, dismisses such ideas  as ‘ethereal’, for which read airy-fairy.   In doing that, he is jettisoning more than a century of legal reasoning.

Second, there is the simple objection that this judgment throws stare decisis out of the window – not just precedent, but the principle that judgements should not have to be repeatedly revisted and laws should not have to be constantly reinterpreted.  There are now nearly fifty years of intervening case law, all of which are being invalidated.

The third problem rests in the dismissal of the relevance of the 14th Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States …” Note the language: not liberty, not rights, but privileges and immunities. There are more than a hundred references to the 14th Amendment in the judgment, and every one of them refers either generally to ‘liberty’ (the main reference) or ‘rights’ (in order to deny the existence a ‘right to abortion’).  The word ‘liberty’ occurs   in the second part of the 14th Amendment – that no State shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”  That clause is  considered more than once and its relevance is rejected – but it was not the point at issue.  The effect of the ‘Privileges or Immunities’ clause, by contrast,  is relegated to the footnotes in the judgment, and not directly discussed.

In a classic US legal article, Some fundamental conceptions (1913),  Wesley Hohfeld explains what a privilege is, and cites legal cases to back that up. A privilege is a special form of legal liberty: when people have a privilege, he explains, they are legally “under no duty to do otherwise”.    Ever since Roe v Wade, women seeking an abortion have been under no duty to do otherwise.  Roe v Wade established a specific privilege that has been the law for nearly fifty years. The 14th Amendment explicitly extends protection to people’s privileges, for the express purpose of ensuring that the States cannot resile from them, and the Supreme Court has flatly refused to apply it.

The fourth problem stems from the bizarre reading of the 14th Amendment as a purely historical document relating to a single point in time.  The judgment complains, more than once, that Roe v Wade did not review the law as it stood in 1868, the year when the 14th Amendment was passed.  At this point, the reasoning tips from strained into sinister. In 1868, women could not vote – an 1875 judgment, Minor v Happerset,  explained that being citizens did mean that women had voting rights. Votes for women are protected by a further constitutional amendment, the 19th, but votes for African Americans aren’t – those have been assumed to be protected by the 14th. If the interpretation of the 14th has to go back to its pristine state in 1868, then by the same argument, the Court could now throw out the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the 1965 Voting Rights Act – and we know there are politicians out there who would love that to happen.

The main issue on which one might say the justices have a point is that the judgment in Roe is very prescriptive about implementation: they could have opined that the Court had previously exceeded its authority, loosening the straps by delegating more authority to State governments to interpret the law.   What the Court has done instead is, metaphorically speaking, to set fire to the building – they have begun a  bonfire of the precedents, and it is not going to stop here.  The decision, to borrow a phrase from the judgment, is ‘egregiously wrong’.

Additional note, 4th October 2022.  After I wrote this, I read Common Good Constitutionalism by Adrian Vermeule.   Writing before this judgment, he identifies two of the issues which I was complaining about here: the doctrine of ‘originalism’, which is delusional, and the degree to which the Court allows precedents to build before junking them.  If he’s right, and I’ve no reason to think he isn’t, this sort of nonsense has become par for the course.

 

Academic freedom: where do we draw the line?

Currently there are two prominent controversies relating to ‘academic freedom’.  One is the case of Kathleen Stock, who has written a book that is critical of the concept of ‘gender identity’.   Professor Stock has been the subject of threats and anonymous vilification, and has been disowned by her university’s union.  The other is the case of David Miller, who has not just used his teaching position to declare that there is a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, but has accused Jewish students in his university of taking part in it and being the pawns of a malign foreign power.

I think these two cases are rather different.  Miller’s embrace of conspiracy theory is odiously racist, but there are lots of objectionable positions that people take in British universities – among them, people who will happily argue for eugenics, racial inferiority, and survival of the fittest. The academic advocates for letting Covid rip have contributed to the deaths of more people than they could have if they’d gone into a lecture theatre firing a sub-machine gun.   If Professor  Miller had stopped at conspiracy theory,  I doubt that much would have happened.   The line he crossed was to level an accusation at a group of students within his university who should be “directly targeted”.  Miller claims, probably correctly, that this is not unlawful: defamation only becomes unlawful when it relates to identifiable individuals within a group.  But academic freedom is not unlimited, any more than any other sort of freedom.  It cannot be legitimate to threaten or invite people to attack those  who are subject to your authority: that is an abuse of power.

Kathleen Stock’s position is very different.  She has been accused of ‘transphobia’ for daring to take a different view from other people.  The statement from her local union branch comments that “Public discourses regularly devalue the lives of trans and nonbinary people, and appeals to both employment rights and academic freedom are often instrumentalised.”  Maybe so, but that has nothing to do with Kathleen Stock. I have read her book, Material Girls, and I did not see anything there which might suggest that trans people do not have the right to live their own lives in their own way .  She writes, on the contrary:

Trans people are trans people. We should get over it.  They deserve to be safe, to be visible throughout society without shame or stigma, and to have exactly the life opportunities non-trans people do.  Their transness makes no difference to any of this.  What trans people don’t deserve, however, is to be publicly represented in philosophical terms that make no sense.

Her main objections are to subjective claims to a gender identity, and from there to men who wish to occupy the same spaces as women.   (I think she dismisses the  social construction of gender rather too easily, and tends to conflate it with subjective self-identification – but so do her opponents.  Law, finance, culture and language are also socially constructed; that doesn’t mean they are subjective. Nor is gender.)  There is a discussion to be had, and if we cannot accommodate that discussion in reasoned terms, we will all be the poorer.

Work in progress

In the course of the last year, I’ve spent much of my time writing two How to fix the welfare statebooks.  I have just sent the final copy of the first to Policy Press, who will be publishing it early in 2022. It’s called How to fix the welfare state, and it reviews a series of problems and issues in British social services. It’s a personal take on the welfare state; I had things to say, and thought it was time to say them. Each of the chapters in the book outlines the structure of services, the impact of some false and misleading narratives, and the real problems that need to be addressed. The book outlines where approaches to the services have gone wrong, and makes suggestions about what they need to do to get things right.

I can be reasonably confident that this won’t be my last book, because the second is virtually finished.  It’s a work of general political theory, called, for now at least, Government for the people. It looks at the way the role of governments around the world have changed to take on responsibility for public welfare.

 

The problems with behavioural genetics are far from being resolved

An article about behavioural genetics has attracted a certain amount of attention from people who believe this sort of thing.  The article, by Paige Harden, is trying to rehabilitate this research, which has an appalling record.  The study has been tainted by fabrication and fraud.  And, of course by mass murder.  (There’s a good history in Carlson, 2001, The Unfit.)

The search for evidence that genes determine behaviour has lasted about 150 years, and still has a long way to go.  No-one has been able to establish any real proof that any of our behaviour is genetically determined.  However, that last point is  disputed by the keepers of the faith.  Harden writes:

“A meta-analysis of results from 50 years of twin studies … concluded in 2015 that genes do, in fact, make a difference for these types of social and behavioural outcomes – for people’s cognitive ability, personality, sexual behaviour, educational attainment and income. In fact, this finding is so consistent that it’s long been enshrined as the ‘first law of behavioural genetics’: everything is heritable. That is, variation in every aspect of human psychology and behaviour, and variation in every social outcome that’s influenced by one’s behaviour, is influenced by the genetic differences among us. Despite making different assumptions from twin studies, GWAS [genome-wide association study] results converge on the same answer: which genes you happen to inherit from your parents makes a difference for socially valued life outcomes, such as how far you go in school.”

Let’s take this apart.  The first thing to note is the claim that genes ‘make a difference’.  That is plausible enough, but it slides into a different argument as the article goes on: that “genes have causal power for people’s lives.”   That’s rather more than making a difference.  In the study she cites, the authors claim to demonstrate that genetics account for up to 13% of the variance in educational attainment.  Put that another way: at least 87% of the variance is not associated with the genomics.

The central problem with the claim that this has ‘causal power’ is that genes don’t actually determine development; they only establish a pattern.  The article that the author cites on the ‘laws’ of behavioural genetics comments:  “ Development is fundamentally nonlinear, interactive, and difficult to control experimentally.”  Just so – but it’s development that really matters.  Take, for example, the case of height.  That, according to Harden, is down to “the environmental and genetic accidents of one’s birth.”  Well, not quite.   Height is not set at birth. It’s the product of a phenotype – the cumulative development of a human body, conditioned by its genome, in its interaction with the environment.   There are exceptions, at the extremes – but they are exceptions. We know that people have been getting taller in every generation; that would not be possible if height were fixed by the genes.  We also know that people who are not well fed are liable to be stunted; that would be impossible, too.  Height is influenced by genes but is not determined by them.    And we should expect nothing more than that to be true of any developmental factor – such as weight, language development, sporting prowess or academic attainment.

The second problem lies in the idea of ‘heritability’.   In animal breeding, heritability is generally put down to genes, because the main differences between animals that matter to breeders are probably those conditioned at birth.  We don’t breed humans for their physical attributes, and there are a few other differences.  Human behaviour isn’t hard-wired – humans have fewer genes than most complex animals, and we should expect (and can observe) fewer inborn, instinctive behaviours.  The relative lack of fixed, instinctive behaviour is compensated for by a different mechanism: socialisation, mainly in families.  Families share a great deal, including a more or less common environment, language, cultural practice, leisure activities and diet.  Estimates for the heritability of obesity vary between 40% and 70%.  That does not mean obesity is genetically caused, only that it runs in families.  We cannot be certain for any individual whether their obesity is generated by a genetic blueprint, but there is a clue: obesity has been rising rapidly.   As the gene pool changes only very slowly over time, we can take it that the change is social.

Third, there is the reliance on twin studies.  For more than 50 years, twin studies have been an unfailing source of bad science.  The central assumption behind twin studies is that twins who are identical (monozygotic, or MZ) will manifest the same behaviours on that account; twins who are not identical will share 50% of genes, making them more like each other than ordinary siblings would be.  There are several problems with this.

  • Any similarities within families may well reflect similar environmental factors. That point is acknowledged by Harden.  Identical twins generally have social environments which are very similar indeed, and certainly more similar than fraternal twins. That’s why past studies tried to concentrate on identical twins reared apart – the problem being that (a) not enough twins are reared apart to make for a valid study, and (b) that even when twins are reared apart, social services agencies try to match their environments to the greatest possible extent.
  • Twins are not representative of general experience.  All twins have a different experience from other babies, and an experience which is similar to each other. They are typically born prematurely; they have to share the divided attention of parents, in a  different way to siblings; and because they have been born at the same time their environment and experience will be more alike than other siblings.
  • There is the common assumption of genetic similarity.  In most studies that is based not on hard genetic evidence but (believe it or not) on the impressions of the parent.  It should be no surprise that parents who think their children are more alike treat them as more alike.
  • Nearly all studies discard information about twins where one is disabled – a not uncommon issue – even though that disability means that children with the same genes clearly have different experiences.

What, we might reasonably ask, can twin studies prove?  The standard scientific approach is not to prove a hypothesis; it is to disprove it.  Identical twins cannot show us that something is genetically caused, because of confounding factors that cannot be controlled for.  What identical twins might be able to show us are the circumstances which are not genetic in origin, because if MZ  twins were to act differently we would know that the difference between them could not be attributed to their genes. There is  some presumptive evidence, for what it’s worth, that MZ twins can and do have different sexualities – the same in two thirds of cases, different in one-third.  If that happens at all, it isn’t genetically determined – though, being of a sceptical bent, I do wonder about the sampling and the lack of specific genetics which lie behind that finding.  I don’t expect behavioural geneticists to do the work to test this properly, because of course they are already convinced that everything is driven by genes.  Unfortunately, that presumption undermines the studies they make.

Fourth, there is the use of big data.  If we were serious about identifying genetic effects, we should be able to identify behaviours which exist only when a gene or set of genes is present, and which do not exist when those genes are not present.  We can do this with current genetic medicine – the same approach which last year saved my life; I know exactly which set of genes has malfunctioned, what it has done and what the best treatment is.  The GWAS research referred to might, in principle, be able to show something of the kind about behaviour – but the signs are not good.  Take the major study of genes and educational attainment cited above.  It processed data for 1.1 million adults and identified 1271 relevant gene clusters, that is ‘genome-wide significant SNPs’ .  A previous study, done on 294,000 adults, had found that they were able to explain only 3.2% of the variance.  In this study, the authors report that “A joint (multi-phenotype) analysis of educational attainment and three related cognitive phenotypes generates polygenic scores that explain 11–13% of the variance in educational attainment and 7–10% of the variance in cognitive performance.”

Taking that result at face value, what does it tell us? The most striking finding, which I’ve already pointed to, is that genetic analysis does not explain at least 87% of the variance, and in the worst case it did not explain 96%.  Genes may have an influence, along with lots of other things, but – if we trust the figures – it’s not a big one.

Now, let’s be a bit rougher on this research.  The first objection is straightforward:  association is not causation.  Even if the association was higher, it wouldn’t actually prove a causal link.  There has to be a specific generative mechanism, and that’s never been established.

Second, the stats weren’t developed to deal with numbers this big.  People often suppose that associations in bigger data sets are more reliable than associations in smaller ones. That’s not necessarily true; the larger the number, the more systemic imbalances can be amplified.

Third, this is a fishing expedition.  Whenever you deal with massive numbers of observations, there are going to be associations arising by chance.  The bigger the numbers, the more apparently significant associations there are going to be.  The claims in this study might, I think, be compared to the work on astrology, seeking to prove that people born under particular star-signs move into certain occupations.  Austin et al report, in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, no less (2006 59 pp 964-969) that people born under Gemini and Libra had increased mortality after infarcts treated by aspirin.  Make the sample big enough, and you’ll find some pattern.  Just don’t try to invest it with meaning.

Last, and not least, these associations might simply mask the real influences.   There are lots of other reasons why people might have higher or lower educational attainment – class, poverty, family background, language – and a comparison of educational attainment with selected elements of the genome doesn’t bother controlling for them.

Labour is found guilty of institutional racism

The Twitter-sphere is full of misinformation about the judgement of the Equality and Human Rights Commission about the Labour Party’s conduct towards Jews.  There are two rather serious misunderstandings doing the rounds.  The first is the mistaken claim that “the EHRC did not find that Labour was institutionally antisemitic”.  Here is an example, ‘liked’ by more than 1500 people :

 The EHRC report does not refer to ‘institutional racism’ at all.  However, the report does specifically and directly confine itself to actions which can be said to have been the responsibility of the Labour Party, as a collective organisation.   The methodology is explained in Annex 3.    It follows that report’s finding of unlawful conduct is, precisely, a finding against the Labour Party as an institution.  So yes, the Labour Party has been found guilty of institutional racism.

The second claim, as expressed by serial provocateur Chris Williamson, is based in a related misunderstanding: that “Despite cries about ‘institutional anti-Semitism’ and an ‘existential threat to British Jews’, the EHRC based its report on a tiny sample of 70 complaints made over a three-year period. It only found two examples of supposed ‘unlawful harassment’ – out of half a million members.”  The report did not look at the conduct of members (let alone that of former members such as Mr Williamson).    The actions of individuals, former members, and members communicating to other members in an individual capacity, were expressly excluded from the scope of the inquiry (p 127). What the EHRC was looking for was something different: actions which could legitimately be said to be conduct of the Labour Party, rather than of individuals.  And that is what the report has condemned.

I think there is some cause for regret here.  The report’s careful and measured tone doesn’t really get the point over to people who have convinced themselves, over a period of years, that the accusations of racism were fabricated – an allegation that is racist in itself.  There are references in the report to the suggestion that complaints about racism were ‘smears’ – that was a major part of the two examples of institutional harassment – but there is not the warning that was needed to explain to people that if they continued to maintain that position, it would amount to further harassment.  The EHRC needed to say it in terms.

 

Grading students’ work

Reversing previous decisions about the grades awarded to students whose education has been interrupted makes some kind of sense, but only some.  The problem is that we expect grades to mean three somewhat different things, all at once.

In the first place, grades are given for achievement – reflecting the knowledge, skills and competencies that students have demonstrated.  This is problematic in the current situation, because even if the grades are given fairly, they will reflect the position of students who will have done several months less work or development than previous cohorts have done.

Second, grades are supposed to represent potential – not what students have actually  achieved, but what they might be capable of doing with further development.  If present achievement gave us a clear guide to the future, that might work – but it doesn’t, and there’s always been the suspicion that it says more about the preparedness of the school and the resources that school students are offered than it does of the abilities of the pupil.  This was a problem before the pandemic, and it will be a problem long after it.  The truth is that we only have very unreliable predictors of what students might be capable of – A levels, in particular, often make over-fine distinctions between very narrow bands across the grades, and are a weak guide to university performance.

Third, the grades represent opportunities, and impose limits on those opportunities.  If a student wants to study medicine, for example, the opening will depend more on high academic performance than it does on personal experience, sensitivity, commitment or interpersonal skills (the sort of thing that we used explore in interviews for social work places).

The emphasis on opportunity is the argument that has carried the day.   In Scotland, the decision will make it possible for more than 3000 students to go into a university course they wouldn’t otherwise have been admitted to.  Many people will look at that and say: why not?   But there is an objection: increased opportunities within the current system might just mean that people have more opportunity to fail.  The French system opens doors to everyone with the Baccalaureat, but it fails half the students after the first year.  In the UK, the institutions with the most liberal admissions policies are also likely to be the lower status institutions, and they may lose  up to 20% of their students as the course goes on.   It doesn’t follow that we’re wasting those students’ time, but  far too many university courses work on the principle that students must ‘sink or swim’.  I’d be more confident in the process if at the outset there were more engagement with students and more emphasis on developing the skills they’ll need to qualify.

My private thanks to the NHS

I didn’t join the final ‘clap for the NHS’.  On that day, I had gone for blood tests in the early afternoon.  The medical practice is 45 minutes away from the nearest hospital and labs, so analysis took a little time, but I was called back to go directly to to Victoria Hospital, in Kirkcaldy, within two hours of seeing the GP.

The care I received was exemplary.  It had first to be confirmed that I did not have Covid-19.   After that, everything worked as it was supposed to.  The GP identified the problem and took the necessary steps to deal with it, at great speed.  There was a coordinated response from a range of different consultants and specialities,  supported by specialist services in Edinburgh and Southampton.  The nursing staff in particular were thoroughly professional, warm, polite and good-humoured.  What I owe them all is immeasurable.