Some of my  family asked what I thought about the bad news at my former employer Save the Children, so here is what I think.  The recent news is that Save the Children has stood down from applying for DFID funds, as I understand it, to earn back trust following the disgrace of the sexual harassment scandal involving Save’s former CEO and his former Deputy.  To me, that’s like standing down every doctor and midwife in a busy hospital because of what happened in the CEO’s office.  Different punishments would have been possible.  However this is the one that is happening  and it’s not for me to say whether it is right.  But all the press talks about is the loss of £100 million a year, and not what it does – so I want to add a little drawing in the margins to show what it meant to me.

I ran a team that worked with country and technical expert teams at Save the Children, and cutting the jargon, we pulled together bids for large and complex programmes and helped them start up.  So I feel very sad that Save will have to sit on its hands next time it sees an opportunity to save children with DFID funds.  For some, this seems a peripheral issue, what are a few bids here or there, that’s just money.  But the programmes that we got funded really did matter and I wonder who will really pay the price for the transgressions of the men at the top.

The UK public often has a perception that there are a lot of development NGOs and that the market could probably be culled without too much damage.  I think that perception arises because public fundraising in the UK is indeed frenetically competitive – however the globe is big and the distribution of NGO activity across some parts of the world can be pretty thinly spread out, especially in conflict affected or very remote areas.  Save  had made strategic decisions about focusing more on exactly those fragile regions.  Not every organisation could make that decision, as if you don’t have the networks, legitimacy, and security systems to work there then you are taking risks, at worst with peoples’ lives.  But those that can, like Save and Oxfam, felt that they needed to support people in those places.  So if Save and Oxfam cannot be funded to do work, there are certain districts or provinces where it is extremely unlikely that any other organisation can step in, certainly not with any speed or scale.

There were times that we at Save were really uniquely well-placed and I have no doubt that lives were saved by our work because we were there.  I won’t identify specific programmes as I do not speak for Save, but just one example I know well.  In Country X, we were one of only three organisations present in the region where most child deaths were happening, and where an opportunity arose that would enable us to treat 100,000 child patients a year for acute malnutrition.  One of the other organisations was smaller than us but we worked closely with their excellent experts to harmonise technical protocols and agree how to coordinate our work.  In the acute malnutrition programme Save had worked on jointly with them, we had a 90% cure rate. The third  organisation in the region had a 50-60% cure rate, and although they had other important strengths that we wanted to see deployed, you can imagine how strongly we felt that the approach with the higher cure rate had to be the one delivered – you can do the math yourself on what that means with 100,000 seriously ill children.

The nutrition advisor told me how she used to go up and down the queue outside the clinic, among women queuing with skeletally thin children in their arms in hot, dry air; and she would look for the children who were hours rather than days from death and get them to the front of the queue for therapeutic food treatment.  Oh fuck, I thought. We wrote in sophisticated technical language but it was oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck  that drove the work.

Actually, we brought all three organisations together, and got over the tensions to become partners.  The overall programme we were part of was worth about £45m and we helped shape the whole, it ran on a plan that we sat and bashed out with some aggression and fierce honesty.  It would have been easier to ‘know our place’ and ‘stick to our knitting’, implementing what someone else told us to, but it was right to speak out for children.  Those were our values.

A lot of money?  Yes, it needed money.  But the bit that momentarily floored myself and my colleague Joe, walking down the steps after it was signed off, was saying that it was likely that 100,000 children’s lives would be saved over 4 years.  And if the world had another 80 programmes at that scale, mass child mortality would be at an end.  Of course it doesn’t really scale like that but never before had I worked for an NGO and seen the resolution of a global challenge within that achievable order of scale.  That country changed me, it made me profoundly optimistic about the future for a while. Over the next few years I was privileged to watch my growing team work with our colleagues on education, livelihoods and health programmes that would reach many tens of thousands of children more.

I wish people in NGOs talked about impact targets instead of fundraising targets.  We did talk about results and quality but in NGO-world if you are successful in securing large amounts of money, people assume you are driven by money. But, no, not really.  It was never about the money.  It was only ever about what it did.    And that’s why I believe that it’s a tragedy that Save is not going to be turning DFID funds into therapeutic food, science equipment for schools, making orphanages safer, helping refugee families to survive, and all the other very many things it does for children.  I hope that this period is short, and that it can get back to its job of transforming children’s lives very soon.

Before the referendum I pledged to write to my MP if there was a no vote pleading for the wishes of the Scots to be respected for greater devolution of powers, whichever way the vote has gone.  But as things turned out, there was no need to lobby for further devolution (yet) as that was promised, ooh, whole days before the election, without about as much thought gone into it beforehand as I put into choosing my lunch.

I hoped very much it would be a ‘no’ as my family crosses England, Scotland and countries outside the UK altogether, and the run up to the referendum was a period of great frustration for many of us denied not just a vote, but a voice altogether.  As time wore on, I sympathised with more of the ‘Yes’ campaign, especially every time the  parties in the rest of the UK rattled their sabres about leaving the EU.  My husband  would apparently have been eligible for citizenship (although ironically, not eligible to vote) and I indulged in one of my daydreams of moving to Edinburgh and watching from afar should UKIP really start tearing the UK to shreds.  Still, the ‘no’ vote came as a relief, but it was sad and there was no celebration. I knew how the ‘Yes’ voters must have felt because I know how devastated I would have been if they had won. I thought ‘that’s how I would have thought about them if they’d won,’ when I heard people in Scotland on the ‘Yes’ side who were furious in their grief, like David Greig who said: ‘The result was, in those final weeks, a feeling arose that if we voted Yes we’d be yoked to a grieving, lunatic, hostile nation to the south.’

And then, repulsively, as things have turned out, there has been a huge spillover from the Scottish referendum into ‘English Votes for English Laws’, claims of greater tax powers for London, (even for Croydon), party politicking with the legal soup we call the Constitution. There is no national leadership. We’ll go to Dundee for the first time since the referendum in a couple of weeks and see what the mood is there, but down South, the only mood I’ve seen is, ‘so enough of that brief interruption where we talked about Scotland for a fortnight, let’s go back to talking about me.’  And the only thing in all this I might get a vote on is London.

I complain that there is no-one talking about the common good, nobody talking about cooperation or trying to heal the injuries in relationships between people since the referendum, and no wider appeal to the fact that a few months ago, politicians here were vowing that we were ‘better together,’ in the general landgrabs on resources and party-political constitutional rigging that is going on at the moment.

I hoped that Scotland would not separate, and I don’t believe that London, or any region, should take further steps towards isolating its budget from the rest of the country – because it is too short a step from there to refusing help to parts of the country that need help. We are all interdependent, and likely to become more so. Why should London keep its tax revenues itself when its workers commute in from the counties all around? Why aren’t we giving away some of that money to create jobs nearer where people live,  rather than proposing to make the centrifugal force of London even stronger?  Why not take some of the pressure off London, and its overheated housing bubble and over-stressed infrastructure?

Even worse, people seem to be abandoning the idea of mutual help.  Climate change could bring about floods or other disasters in the richest or poorest parts of Britain, and so we never know when we might need the help of a city or region in another part of the country.  Many of us don’t know what the changing economy will bring for us and so community should become more important to us, not less.   I can’t imagine saying to my family that I would vote for London to keep more of its own tax revenue, if I had even the smallest reason to believe that that over time would mean London staking a claim to its ‘own’ money and not contributing to the public purse to help parts of the country that will never be so well off.

Which is not to say that more devolution might­­­­ not help. We have  social problems and economic inequality in the UK, and perhaps devolution would lead to innovations in governance based on a deep understanding of the local context. Local charities, small businesses and social enterprises might find new roles based on closer access to power and a more pragmatic, tactical, human scale politics that is less combative and ideological. If we could have that, and still have the idea of helping and being helped, and of thinking actively about how the country as a whole can develop, not just the city or region we are in, I would vote for that.  The post-referendum debate could have become about citizen engagement rather than gone straight to taxes, and maybe it still could.

But I’d have to be more sure about it than I am. Maybe local systems would develop new power elites, and cronyism could thrive. Maybe competitiveness between neighbours would result in a race to the bottom and an attempt to export one unit’s problems to the next. Southwark Council’s leader being wined and dined in Cannes by companies he then sells housing estates to, isn’t a great advert for localism.

Maybe one day I’ll vote for London to be a city-state, but I don’t think so. I have family ties to Dundee, East Devon, York and parts of Lincolnshire. I have studied in Leeds, Norwich and Cambridge. I have daydreamed about moving to Edinburgh or the North Essex coast. And I can’t begin to list the places that I have got to know and like because friends hail from there or have moved there. And that’s just the UK. Many of my friends are bi- or tri-national and multilingual, and I can’t imagine trying to unravel their lives, or force them to choose one identity and reject half their family through something like the Scottish vote.

In the days after the referendum, I decided after years of dithering, to apply for British citizenship.  Partly I’m tired of having paid taxes for 18 years without representation, partly scared of the way that the mood against Europe threatens the basis on which I’m here.  But also because the Scottish referendum made me realise how viscerally and passionately I care about Britishness.  I agree with Billy Connolly when he talked about his distrust of nationalism, and his sense of community with people beyond national borders. I was raised to believe in solidarity more than in national borders.  But you have to have an identity of belonging to convince people that you are arguing constructively from a position of love, and British politics and culture, including the left-wing and the ‘Yes’ campaign have gone down the path that says that a geographic identity is the primary form of belonging.  So I will apply to be British, and I feel happy about it. We have so many identities and the power of Britishness, it has felt to me now that I have decided to apply for citizenship, is that you can be British and something else too: a Yorkshireman, a Scot, a Finn – and that’s just my closest family. But if that identity does not mean mutual help, it cannot build anything else, and has only a symbolic role. Losing all that mutual help in a spate of local devolution would be a long-term injury that would outweigh any short-term economic benefit.  If I become part of that system then I will be able to vote for mutual help.

In the run up to World Statistics Day, I thought, well I like stats myself, but really, it’s hard to convey what’s emotional about them. Then I realised that some of the most charged moments of my working life have been triggered by a statistic.

Statistics cursed my first job. I spent three months of my life laboriously data-inputting a set of survey results into SPSS, then endured a month-long argument with my boss of the time because I was convinced that our results showed that the female professionals we were studying earned less than the men. He was absolutely sure that I was being ideological. He pulled rank and I muttered mutinously and impotently until the end of my contract. For the record, I was right.

After that I went to work for a family planning organisation, where rows raged about people who were considered ‘Malthusians’ (caricatured as neurotics terrified by the thought of large populations of people who weren’t likely to go to the same sort of school as them) rather than us activists who cared about women’s rights to plan their families.

Then there was the time I had a battle royal with a close friend who picked up a proposal for an HIV programme that I was writing. I was using a certain government’s HIV statistics, my friend had worked on HIV in the country under question, and he was absolutely convinced that the government data was wrong. I knew my proposal would not get funded unless I used the data. He said I was using data that I knew was a lie, and that made me a liar. I called him an idiot idealist. For the record, he was right.

I accepted that I was burnt out when the mortality and morbidity statistics I worked with every day had lost the ability to move me. I moved out of the sector for a while until I was ready to work with data about death again.

Now I’m back with a different set of questions. Why are donors mostly unwilling to help NGOs invest in their statistical capability? Why are there no incentives or requirements for NGOs and private sector providers to share their data with one another and with donors – not just through ad hoc and interactions but as a global strategy? Every NGO I have worked with has been desperate to deliver value for money so that we can deliver our promises. We work with statistics about sad facts and we are outraged by the stories those statistics tell. But generalities only help a bit, while better data would help us work in more targeted ways and ultimately save more lives. Data should not be seen as a luxury but as a driving force in the way we work.

(Btw, on a feminist angle the rehabilitation of Florence Nightingale from sentimental generally nice person to ‘passionate statistician’ health campaigner, look at: http://www.rss.org.uk/main.asp?group=&page=1321&event=1170&month=&year=&date