Panicology
Page 14
The situation is not easy for governments to manage as they do not have complete control over who comes into a country. This reflects both basic human rights – the right of residents to live with their families and the freedom to marry or adopt whom they wish – and a range of international agreements relating to refugees or the free movement of people. But governments do have control over the flow of some migrants, and they choose to exercise this policy in very different ways. Australia and Canada, for example, select people on the basis of various characteristics such as language proficiency, work experience, age and education. Their systems are transparent and often pointed to as models for other developed countries to follow.
Setting the quotas at the right level for the countries which pursue that route is another challenge – too many, too rapidly and there will be difficulties finding work and integrating; too few and the potential benefits will not accrue to the host country, with labour shortages persisting and the best migrants going elsewhere. Often where countries have set targets there is little rationale for the chosen figure, it being the result of ‘political judgement’ with the consequence that they fail to attract wide support. Temporary migration, based on a permit system, might be appealing to a sceptical public and might be acceptable for some categories of low-skilled workers, but such newcomers are likely to be less adaptable and integrate more slowly. Ongoing, regular labour needs are unlikely to be met most satisfactorily by recycling temporary workers.
A major focus of controversy in Europe since 2004 has been the impact of the accession of ten countries to the EU in May of that year, taking the number of members to twenty-five. Membership was increased again at the beginning of 2007 with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania. With membership came the free movement of people and an extensive debate up to accession surrounding the likely numbers of eastern Europeans – the population of the ten countries was about 73 million – who would choose to move west.
Initially, only Ireland, Sweden and the UK offered unrestricted access to their labour markets for the citizens of the new EU members. Perhaps because of the restrictions in other countries, the inflow of migrants to them, and the UK in particular, was much larger than expected. More than 170,000 people from eastern Europe applied to work in Britain in the first eleven months, and others came without permits, much higher than the official government estimates, made before accession, of between 5,000 and 13,000 in a year. The gap between the forecast and outturn was very damaging to the government’s reputation for policy competence, and the size of the inflow led to arguments about funding for public housing and schooling. Two years after accession the government admitted that about 600,000 people from the new EU countries had come to work in Britain. Over half of those who came were from Poland. One government publication said that 2005 ‘saw the largest ever entry of foreign workers to the UK, totalling some 400,000’.4 The distribution of the new workers within the country was very uneven, with nearly half coming to London. The emigration was so large that it has caused concerns in the countries of origin.
Much of the furore surrounding immigration, which can be a significant and beneficial activity, reflects the media and public attitudes to a relatively small number of system abuses by asylum seekers, people traffickers or others engaged in illegal activity – and might well have a racist undertone. In the early 1990s, the possibilities for migration to developed countries were very limited, but the successful flight of refugees quickly focused attention on asylum seeking as a means of entry for those seeking a better life.
The vast majority of asylum seekers – up to 90 per cent in many periods in many countries – fail to have their claim for asylum recognized, reducing the legitimacy of this route. The number seeking asylum in developed countries has almost halved compared to 2000, but still amounted to 300,000 in 2005, with over 25,000 asylum seekers in each of the UK, France and Germany. The very high and rising levels in the 1990s put national processing systems and public sympathy under considerable strain. Even so, refugees and other persons admitted for humanitarian reasons, and their accompanying families, currently account for no more than 10 per cent of long-term migration in developed countries.
Abuses of the system attract large headlines and strong public criticism. In 2006, a group of 150 HIV-positive women, mainly from South Africa, Eritrea, Uganda and Zimbabwe, refused to leave Canada, seeking asylum, having attended an AIDS conference in Toronto. Back in 2000, an Afghan airliner on an internal flight was hijacked and diverted to London’s Stansted airport, at which point sixty of the 150 passengers claimed asylum. People who do not have the entitlement to stay in a country might opt to enter into a bogus marriage. The government has said publicly that there might be 2,000 ‘sham’ marriages in Britain annually, but leaked memos from the Home Office said that there could have been around 15,000 each year,5 itself probably an underestimate, prior to a clampdown in 2006.
Half the developed countries now have foreign-born populations representing at least 10 per cent of their total populations. Adding offspring can take the percentage with a recent immigrant background to 40 per cent or more in some countries. In practice, figures are likely to be larger since some legal immigrants and most illegal immigrants will not be counted in the official population figures. Illegal immigrants often cannot join their municipal population register, frequently the source of the numbers, as they do not have a valid residence permit, and often they will choose not to complete a census form, concealing their presence rather than risk being found. Foreign-born residents make up over 20 per cent of the officially counted population in Luxembourg, Switzerland and Australia, about 13 per cent in Germany and the US and a little less in the UK, France and Netherlands.
Concern about the lingering uncertainty of the numbers is compounded in people’s minds by the uncertainty over the economic contribution of immigrants. The newspapers do not help to clarify the situation. On the one hand, we are told ‘80 per cent of migrants are a net drain on the economy’, arguing that only one in five earn over the £27,000 a year required to make a net economic input over the course of a lifetime. And on the other, ‘Spanish study points to benefits of immigration’, arguing that national per capita output might have fallen in the last decade instead of increasing at a healthy rate had it not been for the influx of immigrants. Whatever the truth, the rapid change in some parts of some cities due to the high levels of recent immigration has been unsettling to many long-term residents.
Losing Control of Your Vehicle
‘Jets fly on despite engine failures’ Sunday Telegraph
Illicit cargoes, human or otherwise, produce their share of scare stories, but the modes of transport they choose are not regarded by the media in quite the same way as many other hazards. Although some people are genuinely terrified of particular forms of transport, especially flying, their fears are not translated into headlines anticipating disaster as they are for diseases or violent crime. Why is this?
The obvious answer seems to be that transport disasters actually happen often enough to satisfy the media’s demand for excitement – with speculative alerts before the event replaced by righteous fulmination after it. Each nation has its own roll call of disasters recalled in locations of rail crashes, names of ships that have sunk, or the flight numbers of planes lost.
A contradictory explanation for the absence of scare stories is that transport is too much an essential part of daily life for us to entertain them. The evidence of our continued survival of the daily car or train journey gives them the lie. Travel must be safe.
Both of these perceptions are false. Moving around is intrinsically dangerous. Transport accidents are the leading cause of accidental deaths after falls. In England and Wales, 2,740 people died in transport accidents during 2005, three-quarters of them men.1 Yet when measured by the distances covered and other gains to the traveller, travel is considered pretty safe, and it’s getting safer all the time. Its high benefit-to-cost ratio makes us prepared to accept
the real dangers of travel. This pill is sweetened by the fact that transport often lacks the essential ‘dread’ factor that arises in the case of risks that are ‘globally catastrophic’ or where ‘little preventive control’ is possible.2 A transport disaster, by contrast, mainly affects those taking the transport and does have the possibility of preventive control exercised by a human driver.
Nevertheless, there are reasons why we might be alarmed. We travel ever greater distances, whether commuting to work, taking cheap flights on holiday, or making longer round trips to grander but more remote supermarkets and other facilities. It is natural to ask how safe we are. They may not inspire dread, but transport accidents do have some unpleasant characteristics that mark them out from other risks. They occur across the board to all age groups and social classes. It is therefore not easy for one community to reassure itself of its own safety because the risk is greater for another, as may be the case with illness or violence. Transport accidents are also responsible for more years of lost life than many other accidents – people tend to fall off ladders in their dotage but off bikes in their prime.
The Department for Transport collates deaths and injuries in Britain per billion kilometres travelled for many modes of transport. In the last decade, there were no fatalities attributed to crashes of UK-registered airlines. Buses and coaches were responsible for 0.3 deaths per billion kilometres travelled. The equivalent figures for other forms of transport were: by water 0.3, by rail 0.4, vans 0.9, cars 2.8, cycling 38, walking 49.3
Except perhaps to a statistician, these figures at first seem impossibly low. A billion kilometres is an awfully long way. With 2.8 deaths per billion kilometres for car travel, it seems you can expect to drive nearly 400 million kilometres before, on average, you meet your maker. Is car travel really this safe? How come there is carnage on the roads? The answer is simply that the roads are so busy. It is all car users taken together who rack up this number of kilometres between fatalities. There are about 30 million cars in the UK, which travel an average of 15,000 kilometres each. Based on these figures, we can calculate the average total annual death toll suffered by car occupants as 2.8 per billion × 30 million × 15,000. This comes to 1,260. The usually quoted official figure of around 3,500 deaths annually covers all road accidents in Britain including those involving other forms of transport as well as pedestrians.
Different forms of transport are often in competition. We face a choice of flying or taking the train on holiday. We drive, cycle or walk to the shops. This competition extends to the way that respective transport industries choose to present these already opaque statistics. Where journeys are long, it is advantageous to quote the accident rate per distance travelled, as above. Airlines come out safest by this measure. Where journeys are short, it is better to quote the accident rate per journey. By this measure, air is more dangerous than going by foot, and the bus comes out safest. By both of these measures, however, motorcycles come out as the most dangerous means of transport of those included in the survey, with 113 fatalities per billion kilometres, or 1,640 per billion journeys – forty times more dangerous than cars. The only regular form of transport popularly believed to be more dangerous than the motorcycle is perhaps the helicopter. The Department for Transport does not include helicopter travel in its survey. However, figures for US civil helicopter travel confirm this suspicion, giving a fatality rate of 6,200 per billion journeys.4
These data may not be strictly intercomparable since the statistics tend to be recorded in slightly different ways for each form of transport. However, they do permit some broad conclusions to be drawn. As the result for motorcycles highlights, we face the greatest risks when we ourselves are at the controls. Per kilometre travelled, motorcycle, foot, pedal cycle and car are the most dangerous forms of transport, with rail, bus and air the safest. According to the risk psychologist Paul Slovic: ‘the public seems willing to accept voluntary risks roughly 1000 times greater than involuntary risks at a given level of benefit.’5 If this is anything like true, then car travel, which is only nine times as dangerous as going by bus or train, is a freedom that we are unlikely to relinquish. This may help to explain why, despite a high level of preventable fatalities, initiatives to improve car and road safety progress only slowly.
The situation is very different in UK rail travel where a rapid sequence of tragic accidents – Clapham, Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Potters Bar – has focused a harsh media spotlight on ‘failings’ in the industry. These events attained a visibility arguably greater than that warranted by the loss of life incurred, partly because they provided a focus for broader public concerns about the effects of the recent privatization of the railways. Even including these disasters, the record of the railways before and after privatization is one of continuing safety improvement. Up until 2006, the Health and Safety Executive monitored the number of ‘significant incidents’ on the railways, including collisions and derailments affecting passenger services, but excluding accidents involving level crossings. These have fallen from around one significant incident per million journey miles in 1975 to 0.2 per million miles today.6
The statistics reflect the unequal pressures on private and public transport. All the accident rates surveyed by the Department of Transport have improved compared to those for the previous decade, except for motorcycling which has become marginally more dangerous.7
The improvement for other individual forms of transport – cars, pedal cycles and pedestrians – is around 10 per cent. Cycling fatalities have fallen from 44.6 to 38.0 per billion kilometres, for example – but there is still a long way to go before we reach the 12 fatalities per billion kilometres seen in the Netherlands.8 Car travel, too, has become consistently safer in developed nations. A rare opportunity to make a long-term comparison came when the German Federal Statistics Office decided to mark its centenary of keeping track of road accidents. In 1907, there were 4,864 recorded traffic accidents in Germany, in which 145 people were killed and 2,419 injured, out of a car population of just 27,026. In 2005, 5,362 people were killed on German roads, but there were 56.3 million cars. The comparison led the Reuters news agency to draw the conclusion: ‘German drivers 56 times safer now’. In Europe, deaths per kilometre driven have been declining steadily by about 4 per cent a year as the combined consequence of increasing car safety, safer roads and tougher driving tests.
Turning to public transport, rail passenger fatalities have declined by 33 per cent, to 0.4 per billion kilometres in 1995–2004 from 0.6 in the previous decade. Buses have come down by 25 per cent to 0.3 from 0.4. Water transport appears to have improved most dramatically of all, reaching 0.3 deaths per billion kilometres travelled from 2.6, although this is explained by the high figure for the decade from 1985 to 1994 due to the capsize of the cross-Channel ferry Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987 with the loss of 193 lives. All of these improvements are significantly greater than for individual transport.
The perception of who is in control is important in determining how we respond to transport dangers. A lone car driver takes an entirely voluntary risk when he or she gets behind the wheel. That person’s passengers take an involuntary risk if they share the journey. However, this involuntariness is mitigated by the fact that they can see the driver and can take a view as to how reliable he or she is. Passengers in a train or a plane face an additional involuntary degree of separation because they must put their trust in an unseen driver. In reality, this driver may have little operational control and may only be there at all as a figurehead to reassure the public, so that passengers are in practice putting their trust in a system.
In September 2006, a German magnetic levitation train crashed while on a high-speed test run near the Dutch border. Most of the twenty-nine passengers on the experimental journey were killed, along with two employees of the company developing the train who were on the ground. ‘At least 21 die as driverless train crashes into maintenance truck’, reported the Guardian. The key word for the media here is ‘d
riverless’ – it was repeated in the first sentence of the story and in a text highlight. (The journalists who went to work that day on certain stretches of the London Underground were presumably unaware that they too were riding in driverless trains.)
The implication is that a driver would have seen the truck and stopped the train – which is almost certainly not the case at high speeds. Such perceptions will need to change if we are to gain an accurate impression of travel hazards in the future. Developments in transport technology already make travel generally safer. Would-be disaster headlines now betray small miracles. ‘Passengers escape after 100 mph express derails’, reported The Times in 2006 after a train (with a driver) hit a car that had been driven on to the tracks. ‘Jets fly on despite engine failures’ was the Sunday Telegraph headline accompanying ‘news’ that more than twenty British passenger planes had not crashed on long-haul flights over the previous five years when they had suffered problems forcing pilots to shut down an engine.
Airlines are now keen to make flying cheaper by using planes without pilots. Flight control technology makes this feasible, but it is judged that the public is not yet ready for this innovation. On the roads, the decline in car fatalities could become much sharper as cars too are equipped with computer devices to monitor and control driving. Jeremy Clarkson will undoubtedly complain that such measures cramp his style, and there will equally undoubtedly be aggrieved tales of unfortunate people who suffer accidents nevertheless and who now hold the new technology to blame for them. But overall, accidents and lives will be saved if we can bear to let go of the controls.