Forecasts and predictions

This week: what’s the deal with the Tories and flexible working; some notes on the shipping forecast; and my god I am angry about HS2.

There are some good things to be said for the Tory leadership election which kicked off in Manchester this week. Three of the leading candidates – Badenoch, Braverman, Patel – are non-white women, and as awful as these people and their party are, I kind of like what that says about modern Britain. Liz Truss, hilariously, is threatening to run again: the absolute banter outcome is that Rishi Sunak faces a leadership challenge before the election, and she wins. Also, the fact this campaign is happening at all means that, despite one unnerving outlier poll which showed Labour’s lead down to 10%, everyone is still expecting the Tories to lose. Badly. 

The big one, though, is this: I was not there to see it. Small mercies. 

All that said, there’ll be plenty of time to talk about this campaign for a vacancy that won’t even exist for up to 16 long, long months yet, so I’m not going to think too hard about it now.¹ Instead I’m going to narrow in on what one candidate is saying. 

“Staying off her brief alert!” begins a tweet from Politico’s Dan Bloom, sent from a fringe meeting where Badenoch was describing something as “an example of what happens if certain types of ideology are left unchecked”. Without having seen the tweet, you are extremely unlikely to be able to guess what she’s referring to: the unhinged ideology she’s decrying is councils offering their staff the chance to work a four day week.

Parts of the government are apparently obsessed with this, on the grounds it’s not value for money. This seems to be the exact opposite of the truth – offering the same service for less staff time is surely better value? – but some ministers are determined to block it, nonetheless, and are growing increasingly annoyed to find they can’t. (Central government can require councils to provide certain outputs, but it has no powers to manage individual staff contracts because that would be mad.)

It feels extremely weird that ministers should be fixating on this at all, when there’s so much else to worry about, and even weirder that it should be important enough to be the opening volley of an upcoming leadership campaign. It reminds me of the equally baffling fury about the rise of working from home, which has the potential to boost staff morale, reduce business costs, regenerate towns and suburbs at the cost of city centres, and improve quality of life – all things, you’d imagine, a pro business government hoping for re-election might get behind. 

And yet, multiple Tories have not just withheld their support, but actively opposed it, as if it’s ministers’ job to tell employers how to manage their staff. As with the four day week, this is a policy that genuinely might improve productivity and quality of life at the same time, yet what was once the party of business is against it. What do the Tories have against flexible working?

I can think of a couple of things. One is that the party is disproportionately funded by property companies: throw in Brexit, and they’re not so much the party of business these days as the party of rentiers. Then again, perhaps it’s simple class interest. Many bosses don’t like flexible working, purely because they want their staff on a tight leash – and Tories naturally align with bosses over staff. 

Those are no doubt factors. But there’s another explanation, more in line with everything else this rotten government ever does. Flexible working may be popular – but that doesn’t mean it’s popular with the sort of people who vote Tory. That group is disproportionately likely to be older, if not actually retired, and thus 

a) convinced the next generation is lazy, and

b) bitter that the next generation is getting something they didn’t. 

This also explains why the newspapers keep telling British workers they’re lazy shits who should get back to the office. They’re not insulting their readers: it’s just that most of them no longer are British workers. 

And so – as with net zero, or Brexit, or a hundred other issues – our national debate is being warped by the fact one particular section of society which buys newspaper and votes Tory, and thus gets an outside role in setting terms of debate, has a different relationship to the economy and the future than the rest of us. 

At any rate: Badenoch and the like either believe flexible working is less popular than it is; or they know exactly how popular it is, but also know that it’s not popular with the sort of person who’s going to vote in the next Tory leadership race. And remember: if the party’s polls don’t improve, and I hope they don’t, we may have over a year more of this stuff. Oh joy.

Anyway, that’s quite enough of that. Let’s talk about a British institution someone might actually feel the slightest affection for:

Dogger, southeast veering southwest: Some notes on the Shipping Forecast

1. The Shipping Forecast was first issued on 24 August 1867. This was of course a generation or so before anyone had got around to inventing radio, so for its first few decades it was issued by telegram.

2. It was the creation of one of those people whose careers are so impressive  they make the rest of us feel inadequate. Robert Fitzroy was a naval officer who, on his rise to the rank of vice admiral, captained the HMS Beagle on the voyage during which Charles Darwin would formulate his theory of natural selection. He also served two years as governor of New Zealand, during which he tried his best to protect the indigenous Māori from the behaviour of British settlers. Top man.

3. The reason he is relevant to our purposes, though, is that he also essentially invented the science of weather forecasting. In 1854 he was appointed Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade, heading the department that would grow into the Met Office. When the Royal Charter sank in a storm off the Welsh Coast in 1859, at the cost of 450 lives, Fitzroy began to wonder if it was possible to use data on what weather was doing now to predict what it might do tomorrow. From 1861, he established weather stations around the UK which transmitted weather reports back to London for collation and publication in the Times. He even coined the word “forecasting” as the new term for the process.² The first shipping forecast arrived six years later.

4. The shipping forecast has been broadcast by radio, in various forms, since around 1911. There have, however, been a few gaps: one between 1914 and 1921 (so the Met Office was not helping the enemy), and another from 1939 to 1945 (same). Oh, and early in the morning of Friday 30 May 2014, it wasn’t broadcast because someone forgot to flick a switch: listeners to Radio 4 instead heard the World Service. 

5. At the moment there are four broadcasts on BBC Radio every day: 00:48hrs, 05:20hrs, 12:01hrs and 17:54hrs (although the latter two are on longwave only). Three of these are read by the continuity announcer on duty; the early morning one is read by a weather forecaster.

6. Each broadcast sticks to very strict rules. There’s a maximum word count (350, except for the 00:48hrs broadcast which covers 31 areas instead of 30 and so gets another 30 words). There’s also a standard format:

• Gale warnings in force (if any);

• General synopsis.

• Area forecasts: wind direction/speed, weather, visibility, ship icing if any; areas can be combined if experiencing similar weather conditions;

• Coastal weather stations (00:48hrs and 05:20hrs only): wind direction/speed, precipitation if any, visibility, pressure;

• Inshore waters (00:48hrs and 05:20hrs only): wind direction/speed, weather, visibility.

7. The house style is designed to limit confusion: times are spelt out (“two-three-double-O”), and barometric pressures pronounced as whole numbers (“a thousand and five”), to ensure (I’m assuming) they can’t possibly be mixed up by any skipper who only hears half a broadcast. Wind speeds are given on the Beaufort Scale, with those up to force 7 using numbers and those above adding names for emphasis (Gale 8, Severe Gale 9, Storm 10, Violent Storm 11). “Hurricane force 12” adds the word “force” to provide even more emphasis. 

8. The forecast’s strange vocabulary actually conveys very specific meanings. “Imminent” means within six hours, “soon” is six to 12, “later” 12 to 24. In the visibility section, “good”, “moderate”, “poor” and “fog” all mean you can see up to defined distances (more than 5 nautical miles/9.3km at one end, less than 1,000m at the other). Wind direction can be “veering” (changing in a clockwise direction) or “backing” (the reverse). 

9. Time for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: where do the 31 areas in the forecast get their names?