UFO Info Week-End

Drug tests are increasingly required for job applications such tests rarely differentiate between drugs taken at times affecting job performance

Drug tests are increasingly required for job applications; such tests rarely differentiate between drugs taken at times affecting job performance, and at other moments altogether. Keystrokes are monitored; office walls removed; unions, generally, discouraged.Companies are also colonising their workers’ leisure time. Could it be that the freedoms so loudly proclaimed for high streets and hospitals are shrinking elsewhere? The modern workplace certainly suggests so: besides demanding more of employees’ time, employers increasingly want their “flexibility”, or compliance, with whatever tasks are set, whenever they are set. Yet reliably high standards of state provision, with their accompanying need to raise taxes, are no longer an option any party offers.Meanwhile all this compulsory choice raises a suspicion. Few people like or have the capacity actually to “choose” their GP; they just want to be kept well.

“Working-class parents” in particular, found the IPPR, “are more likely to prefer the local school.”Were schools and opticians’ and doctors’ surgeries to be of an assured standard, such a preference might well be the norm. The heresy discovered by both the Audit Commission and the IPPR is that at least one parent in 10 is simply refusing to choose. to manipulate what are increasingly complex systems of choice and recruitment”.Then again, this is a substantial effort to make. Less tangibly, they had “the knowledge, skills and contacts … These parents were more able to drive their children to school; to pay for expensive public transport; to buy private tutoring to help with entrance exams.

In 1994 the Institute for Public Policy Research found that “middle-class parents in particular are exploiting the market in education [by] bringing their social and cultural advantages to bear”. Each parent’s choice, therefore, narrows the choices of every other parent.Of course, some choosers are more equal than others. These are not increased by the offering of “preferences” to all its users. The state education system, like other systems of state provision, has finite resources. Parental choice, meanwhile, was no choice at all for the 19 per cent who had failed to secure a place at their favoured school.It is hardly surprising. Schools with good reputations were besieged; schools with bad ones were bleeding pupils; this overcrowding and undercapacity is wasting pounds 100m a year. Last week, the Audit Commission reported that the Conservatives’ attempts to let parents choose for their children had created “gridlock”.

The modern citizen has reason to panic.This is exactly what seems to be happening in schools. Yet the working week is lengthening, and jobs are in short supply, just as whole new vistas of unfamiliar decision-making – about health and pensions and education – are opening up. Soya beans can be found in two-thirds of processed food products.Even given adequate facts, consumers need to be able to consider them – to have the time, the confidence, and the expertise. The supermarkets were forced to display all soya as the same, customers to take their chance. Critics of this process feared that the bacterial gene added to the soya could be a health risk.In October, however, when the new beans were harvested, Monsanto announced that it was too expensive – for them – to separate out the genetically altered variety from the natural ones they grew alongside. In particular, the supermarkets were concerned about a new strain of soya, developed by an American company called Monsanto to resist weedkillers. At the beginning of this year, the British chains promised that genetically altered food products would be labelled as such.