A commission into care for the elderly by the NHS Confederation has revealed that the importance of compassion and dignity is often undervalued in the way care is delivered.
The report recommends that an emphasis be put on respecting the dignity of the elderly and that carers should avoid using patronising language. It also recommends that more should be done to improve the quality of life for older people, such as helping them to keep in touch with relatives, take part in activities or just having someone there to keep them company.
Sir Keith Pearson, one of the authors of the report told the BBC’s Today programme that whilst the NHS and the care home sector provided ‘excellent care’ in most instances there are small pockets in which ‘dignity has broken down’. There needed to be, he said, a culture change where people who deliver care are recruited for their values and then trained in the necessary skills.
I could not agree more, nothing so shames our society more than the shameful way we treat older people. Agreement that something must be done crosses the political divide and yet what we actually do is nothing very much apart from filling a library with reports telling us the same things over and over again.
Why could this be, are we stupid or insensitive? Have we bought wholesale into the baby boomer fiction that growing old is some sort of failing on the part of an individual rather than the destination we all arrive at unless some misfortune intervenes? Maybe; all those elements are certainly present in our attitudes to the elderly, but there is another, simpler answer to the question we always seem to overlook.
We fail to show older people the compassion they deserve because we fail to realise that compassion along with trust and respect is something people should expect from the society they live in over the whole course of their lives, not a benefit to be, grudgingly, given as their lives draw to a close. When people lives closer, less materialistic lives this was something they understood implicitly; in our atomised modern world it is a thing we have forgotten at the most dangerous of costs.
All our best impulses are rooted in promoting trust, compassion and respect from fighting the most brutally oppressive prejudices to putting works of fine art on display in galleries where they can be appreciated by the masses rather than leaving them in palaces to be ignored by aristocrats. Over the past thirty years these values have been under systematic attack from cynical politicians, a witlessly one dimensional popular culture and, it has to be said, the ignorance and complacency of people like you and I.
We recruited our leading figures in politics, business and culture precisely because they were skilled at telling us what we wanted to hear. Greed is good, because you’re worth it, there is no such thing as society; a litany of seductive selfishness with a scorpion’s sting in its tail.
Now that times are hard, harder than they have been since the thirties in some parts of the country, these same leaders don’t have the values necessary to keep people together. Instead they play on the same cynical themes that divide communities and stoke feelings of disenchantment because they have no answers and nothing of value to say.
It is right that something finally should be done about the shocking way elderly people are treated by a tiny minority of carers. Good conscientious care workers deserve to be paid properly and values for the service they deliver; cruel or incompetent ones deserve to be caught and punished, but treating a single symptom will not cure the wider disease.
The time has come for our society as a whole to bite the bullet of realising that we need to ensure that everyone regardless of age or origins has a decent quality of life. That may mean being a little less materially affluent, but in the longer term we will all be happier and healthier.
Cheese for Europe
Veteran lounge singer Englebert Humperdinck will sing the UK’s entry in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. I doubt it will do much to improve our chances of winning.
This is no reflection on the talents of Mr Humperdinck, he might not be my particular cup of musical tea, but his album sales and longevity mean he must have something the fans like.
Instead it is recognition of the fact that British performers are able to sell their records globally, ABBA aside most other European artists, even the ones who win Eurovision, are unknown outside their country of origin.
Since they will probably get nul points on the night Mr Humperdinck and his fans should just get on with enjoying taking part.
A horse; a horse….
According to evidence given to the Leveson inquiry this week former News International executive Rebekah Brooks was ‘loaned’ a retired police horse called Raisa by friends at the Met. If that wasn’t bizarre enough it turns out our own dear Prime Minister rode said horse on a number of occasions.
I can just picture him rising to the trot as his good friend Rupert sinks his claws into the country’s media. Tally-ho!
If some enterprising theatre company turns the Leveson inquiry into a stage play they are going to have to get Brian Rix in to do the script because it is rapidly turning into a total farce.
Showing posts with label uk-news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label uk-news. Show all posts
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Sunday, 19 February 2012
Pray all you want but teaching RE still isn’t a ‘priority’.
It isn’t just the earnest young evangelists on the bus who want to talk to you about god these days, everyone from the government on down is getting in on the act.
Baroness Warsi flew to the Vatican this week to make a prissy little speech about how Britain was still a Christian country, but only just, because it was being attacked from within by ‘militant secularists’. The tabloids joined together in a collective moral panic because Bideford town council, have lost a legal case brought against them by the National Secular Society and would no longer be able to begin its meetings with prayers.
A new all party group of MPs has joined the debate or maybe that should be sermon, calling for the teaching of Religious Education to be a ‘priority’ in schools in England and Wales. Liberal Democrat chair of the new group Stephen Lloyd told the BBC that in ‘today’s world where our children can be open to an enormous amount of misleading information I believe it is absolutely essential they are taught about different cultures and religions by trained and experienced RE teachers’.
To do so, they claim, RE must be included alongside Maths, English, science and a humanities subject as part of the English Baccalaureate being touted as a replacement for A Levels. A position supported by several faith groups including the Religious Education Council of England, Chair John Keast told the BBC that coalition plans to change the school curriculum could ‘challenge’ how RE is taught and that as a result the ‘RE community’ feels ‘under fire’ and welcomes the new all party group as a means of giving ‘the subject a strong profile amongst parliamentarians.’
Responding a spokeswoman for the Department of Education said ‘RE remains a statutory part of the curriculum but it is up to schools themselves how it is taught.’ Quite so; I’d like to make the case that they shouldn’t be teaching it at all.
Not too long ago a report published by the Royal Society of Arts revealed that one in four people in England struggle with basic mathematics, standards of literacy have been in decline for decades; is teaching children a pasteurised version of the world’s major religions really a priority? Wouldn’t it be more useful to teach our kids to read, write and count properly? After all most religions are more than adept at educating their younger followers and hardly need the help of well meaning educators.
This is not, I hasten to add, an attack on religion even though I am not and never have been a believer myself. Unlike the National Secular Society I don’t choose to define my lack of belief by what I am against and so can sit through the mild mannered burbling of the Lord Mayor’s Chaplin before council meetings without being offended; but schools are a special case. They bring together young people from such a wide range of cultures, classes and communities that agreeing everyone, including atheists, should pack their beliefs away whilst within their walls is vital to maintaining harmony.
As for the assault on faith Baroness Warsi and the sillier columnists on the payroll of the Daily Mail seem to see lurking around every corner it seems to me like so much sound and fury about nothing. After all we give twenty three bishops a free seat for life in our legislature, they’ve been mostly on the side of the angels in the recent debates on welfare reform, but so long as they are there believers cannot seriously claim to be an oppressed minority.
An (almost) never ending story
Author Caroline Smailes has published a novel, 99 Reasons Why, that allows its readers to choose from eleven possible endings. Speaking The Independent Ms Smailes said this would allow her readers to have ‘different reactions, interpretations and feelings about the story depending on which ending they choose.’
Crumbs; is this the end of the novel as we know it? Hardly, it is, at best, a clever if not original game played with the form of the novel; at worst it is an annoying gimmick.
A good novel gives its readers endless scope for exploring how they feel about the characters and their fate, this isn’t a brilliant new discovery; it’s why we read them.
Space- the tidy new frontier
The Swiss have, so the BBC reported this week, developed a device for cleaning up the half a million items of ‘space junk’ orbiting the earth.
Right now the Chinese are looking up at the night sky and seeing the arena in which the people’s revolution can achieve its ultimate triumph. Americans have for years seen space as a pristine frontier where they can rediscover the pioneer spirit that made their nation great. The Swiss though look up at the limitless vastness of the heavens and think ‘we really must tidy this up’; don’t you just want to shake them?
The again maybe I shouldn’t be so smug. After all if Britain had a space programme we’d probably have to cancel the inaugural mission due to there being the wrong sort of leaves on the launch pad.
Baroness Warsi flew to the Vatican this week to make a prissy little speech about how Britain was still a Christian country, but only just, because it was being attacked from within by ‘militant secularists’. The tabloids joined together in a collective moral panic because Bideford town council, have lost a legal case brought against them by the National Secular Society and would no longer be able to begin its meetings with prayers.
A new all party group of MPs has joined the debate or maybe that should be sermon, calling for the teaching of Religious Education to be a ‘priority’ in schools in England and Wales. Liberal Democrat chair of the new group Stephen Lloyd told the BBC that in ‘today’s world where our children can be open to an enormous amount of misleading information I believe it is absolutely essential they are taught about different cultures and religions by trained and experienced RE teachers’.
To do so, they claim, RE must be included alongside Maths, English, science and a humanities subject as part of the English Baccalaureate being touted as a replacement for A Levels. A position supported by several faith groups including the Religious Education Council of England, Chair John Keast told the BBC that coalition plans to change the school curriculum could ‘challenge’ how RE is taught and that as a result the ‘RE community’ feels ‘under fire’ and welcomes the new all party group as a means of giving ‘the subject a strong profile amongst parliamentarians.’
Responding a spokeswoman for the Department of Education said ‘RE remains a statutory part of the curriculum but it is up to schools themselves how it is taught.’ Quite so; I’d like to make the case that they shouldn’t be teaching it at all.
Not too long ago a report published by the Royal Society of Arts revealed that one in four people in England struggle with basic mathematics, standards of literacy have been in decline for decades; is teaching children a pasteurised version of the world’s major religions really a priority? Wouldn’t it be more useful to teach our kids to read, write and count properly? After all most religions are more than adept at educating their younger followers and hardly need the help of well meaning educators.
This is not, I hasten to add, an attack on religion even though I am not and never have been a believer myself. Unlike the National Secular Society I don’t choose to define my lack of belief by what I am against and so can sit through the mild mannered burbling of the Lord Mayor’s Chaplin before council meetings without being offended; but schools are a special case. They bring together young people from such a wide range of cultures, classes and communities that agreeing everyone, including atheists, should pack their beliefs away whilst within their walls is vital to maintaining harmony.
As for the assault on faith Baroness Warsi and the sillier columnists on the payroll of the Daily Mail seem to see lurking around every corner it seems to me like so much sound and fury about nothing. After all we give twenty three bishops a free seat for life in our legislature, they’ve been mostly on the side of the angels in the recent debates on welfare reform, but so long as they are there believers cannot seriously claim to be an oppressed minority.
An (almost) never ending story
Author Caroline Smailes has published a novel, 99 Reasons Why, that allows its readers to choose from eleven possible endings. Speaking The Independent Ms Smailes said this would allow her readers to have ‘different reactions, interpretations and feelings about the story depending on which ending they choose.’
Crumbs; is this the end of the novel as we know it? Hardly, it is, at best, a clever if not original game played with the form of the novel; at worst it is an annoying gimmick.
A good novel gives its readers endless scope for exploring how they feel about the characters and their fate, this isn’t a brilliant new discovery; it’s why we read them.
Space- the tidy new frontier
The Swiss have, so the BBC reported this week, developed a device for cleaning up the half a million items of ‘space junk’ orbiting the earth.
Right now the Chinese are looking up at the night sky and seeing the arena in which the people’s revolution can achieve its ultimate triumph. Americans have for years seen space as a pristine frontier where they can rediscover the pioneer spirit that made their nation great. The Swiss though look up at the limitless vastness of the heavens and think ‘we really must tidy this up’; don’t you just want to shake them?
The again maybe I shouldn’t be so smug. After all if Britain had a space programme we’d probably have to cancel the inaugural mission due to there being the wrong sort of leaves on the launch pad.
Sunday, 18 December 2011
Shops, snow and sticky backed plastic.
Philip Larkin famously described Christmas as a ‘slathering Niagara of nonsense’, as it rumbles towards us yet again the politicians have skipped town, for twenty five days if you please, and so the news has been rather thin of late. Thin, but not without its points of interest:
SHOP UNTIL THE PENNY DROPS.
This week Mary Portas, the absurdly self titled ‘Queen of Shops’ published her long awaited report on the state of the British high street. As expected it made for gloomy reading and also proved again why such exercises are almost always flawed.
Her recommendations for reviving the high street are sound, lower business rates, less punitive parking fees; more small businesses and fewer soulless chain stores, they are also, sadly, all too predictable. Frankly you could have gone into any saloon bar in the country bought a few of the regulars a drink and gathered the same opinions for a fraction of the cost of retaining Ms Portas.
The whole thing seems painfully like the sort of silliness New Labour used to delight in, identifying a problem it couldn’t (or wouldn’t) solve, get a ‘celebrity to write a report about it and then kick the whole thing into the long grass. It has to be said the Portas, someone who cuts a rather alarming figure rather like one of Dr Who’s more chilling adversaries, has played her part in this pantomime perfectly, trotting around Camden Market with David Cameron and generally filling her lungs with the oxygen of publicity. She even managed to sound sincere about wanting to rescue the nation’s high streets; you’d never think the company she runs also does publicity for mall monster Westfield.
As for the poor old high street I don’t see its revival happening any time soon. Online retailing is hoovering up more customers by the day and George Osborne’s cuts are holding councils back from giving small businesses the breaks they so desperately need. Another celebrity physician has swept into the ward to make her diagnosis, but the poor old patient is no closer to being cured.
DAVE DOES DO GOD.
Unlike his toothsome predecessor but one Prime Minister David Cameron does do god and at an event in Oxford this week to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible he made a speech telling us so.
He went further by enjoining everyone else to do god too as an antidote to the UK’s ‘moral decline.’ I am not a believer but I am willing to admit that Christianity, and other faiths, have many good points; what they don’t have though is a monopoly on goodness and to suggest they do is foolish.
This, as Richard Dawkins writes in the New Statesman this week, is something that David Cameron and his colleagues know all too well, however they also seem to subscribe to the patronising view that faith is somehow ‘good’ for the proles, mostly because it keeps them in their place.
That people are able to worship freely is one of the benchmarks against which we test our democracy, but religion and politics should be kept separate. The alternative to this is the sort of hypocrisy where candidates for office trundle about the landscape thumping pulpits and making saying things they don’t mean to credulous audiences that will be visited upon American voters when the primaries get into full swing next month.
SNOW JOKE
It’s snowed again, hardly a surprising occurrence in December but it always seems to catch we Brits out. This time round though there have, to date anyway, been no repeats of the media hand wringing about mounting chaos, this time last year the Daily Mail was all but predicting national extinction at the hands of a few snowflakes.
Whatever could be different this time round, have councils bought in more grit, are heating bills lower, has our national infrastructure gone through a renaissance that has somehow slipped under my personal radar? Nope, don’t think so. Do you think then the reticence of our, mostly, right wing press on this issue has something to do with any ‘snow chaos’ being this time the result of Boy George’s failed economic policies rather than ‘Labour profligacy’; or am I just being cynical?
LOWERING THE BLUE PETER
Blue Peter, required viewing when I was a boy, is on its last legs, the BBC haven’t cancelled the show but by shifting it into digital limbo with a repeat later in the week means it could soon go the way of Crackerjack and the Clangers.
Despite not usually being a fan of nostalgia this makes me feel quite sad. Even when I watched the programme back in the late seventies it seemed like a theme park version of a safe fifties Britain where everyone had good manners and knew their place; there was always honey for tea and nothing bad ever happened. That, I suppose, was the programme’s charm and I’m sure later attempts to make it more ‘relevant’ have mostly spoiled things; it will still be a shame to see it go though.
Quite where fans of nostalgic nonsense will go for their weekly fix now I don’t know. Perhaps they will have to take to watching Midsomer Murders or reading Michael Gove’s ever sillier ‘visions’ for how our schools should be run.
SHOP UNTIL THE PENNY DROPS.
This week Mary Portas, the absurdly self titled ‘Queen of Shops’ published her long awaited report on the state of the British high street. As expected it made for gloomy reading and also proved again why such exercises are almost always flawed.
Her recommendations for reviving the high street are sound, lower business rates, less punitive parking fees; more small businesses and fewer soulless chain stores, they are also, sadly, all too predictable. Frankly you could have gone into any saloon bar in the country bought a few of the regulars a drink and gathered the same opinions for a fraction of the cost of retaining Ms Portas.
The whole thing seems painfully like the sort of silliness New Labour used to delight in, identifying a problem it couldn’t (or wouldn’t) solve, get a ‘celebrity to write a report about it and then kick the whole thing into the long grass. It has to be said the Portas, someone who cuts a rather alarming figure rather like one of Dr Who’s more chilling adversaries, has played her part in this pantomime perfectly, trotting around Camden Market with David Cameron and generally filling her lungs with the oxygen of publicity. She even managed to sound sincere about wanting to rescue the nation’s high streets; you’d never think the company she runs also does publicity for mall monster Westfield.
As for the poor old high street I don’t see its revival happening any time soon. Online retailing is hoovering up more customers by the day and George Osborne’s cuts are holding councils back from giving small businesses the breaks they so desperately need. Another celebrity physician has swept into the ward to make her diagnosis, but the poor old patient is no closer to being cured.
DAVE DOES DO GOD.
Unlike his toothsome predecessor but one Prime Minister David Cameron does do god and at an event in Oxford this week to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible he made a speech telling us so.
He went further by enjoining everyone else to do god too as an antidote to the UK’s ‘moral decline.’ I am not a believer but I am willing to admit that Christianity, and other faiths, have many good points; what they don’t have though is a monopoly on goodness and to suggest they do is foolish.
This, as Richard Dawkins writes in the New Statesman this week, is something that David Cameron and his colleagues know all too well, however they also seem to subscribe to the patronising view that faith is somehow ‘good’ for the proles, mostly because it keeps them in their place.
That people are able to worship freely is one of the benchmarks against which we test our democracy, but religion and politics should be kept separate. The alternative to this is the sort of hypocrisy where candidates for office trundle about the landscape thumping pulpits and making saying things they don’t mean to credulous audiences that will be visited upon American voters when the primaries get into full swing next month.
SNOW JOKE
It’s snowed again, hardly a surprising occurrence in December but it always seems to catch we Brits out. This time round though there have, to date anyway, been no repeats of the media hand wringing about mounting chaos, this time last year the Daily Mail was all but predicting national extinction at the hands of a few snowflakes.
Whatever could be different this time round, have councils bought in more grit, are heating bills lower, has our national infrastructure gone through a renaissance that has somehow slipped under my personal radar? Nope, don’t think so. Do you think then the reticence of our, mostly, right wing press on this issue has something to do with any ‘snow chaos’ being this time the result of Boy George’s failed economic policies rather than ‘Labour profligacy’; or am I just being cynical?
LOWERING THE BLUE PETER
Blue Peter, required viewing when I was a boy, is on its last legs, the BBC haven’t cancelled the show but by shifting it into digital limbo with a repeat later in the week means it could soon go the way of Crackerjack and the Clangers.
Despite not usually being a fan of nostalgia this makes me feel quite sad. Even when I watched the programme back in the late seventies it seemed like a theme park version of a safe fifties Britain where everyone had good manners and knew their place; there was always honey for tea and nothing bad ever happened. That, I suppose, was the programme’s charm and I’m sure later attempts to make it more ‘relevant’ have mostly spoiled things; it will still be a shame to see it go though.
Quite where fans of nostalgic nonsense will go for their weekly fix now I don’t know. Perhaps they will have to take to watching Midsomer Murders or reading Michael Gove’s ever sillier ‘visions’ for how our schools should be run.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Britain needs a strong parliament not an ‘unelected king’ as Prime Minister.
The Queen could be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the House of Commons were Britain to become a republic. Before too many red faced retired colonels living in the home counties have apoplexy this is the opinion of veteran left wing firebrand Tony Benn not, alas, a prediction of what will happen come the revolution.
Giving evidence to the commons political and constitutional reform committee as they examine whether or not the UK needs a written constitution, this week he said ‘The problem with a directly elected head of state is you get a conflict between two sources of authority,’ meaning in this hypothetical case between a president and a prime minister. The solution to this, he suggested, would be to maintain the symbolism of an unelected head of state minus the monarchical powers.
Mr Benn went on to add that ‘If you’re looking for a titular head of state I think the Speaker of the House of Commons would be perfect- he’s respected, he understands the constitution.’ I’m not sure those comments could be applied to the present incumbent the pocket sized bundle of self promotion that is John Bercow; but several of his predecessors, Betty Boothroyd for example, certainly had sufficient dignity to carry the role off.
Tony Benn originally made the proposal that the Queen be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the Commons back in 1991 along with attacking the way successive governments have retained the powers traditionally held by the monarch and used them to impose their will on parliament. He told the committee that ‘we live in a modern parliamentary democracy, but the crown powers have been retained’ making the prime minister ‘in effect the unelected king.’
This, he went on to say, had created a political system that was ‘defective’ and he urged MPs to ensure that whatever conclusion they reach on having a written constitution the resulting document ‘protects the rights of ordinary people.’
To many people on the left Tony Benn is a sort of living history exhibit, an exemplar of values that they feel themselves to have moved on from as they have become more sophisticated; or cynical, about how they do business. Despite this patronising dismissal he, like most members of the awkward squad, has an annoying habit of being right.
However much republicans (and I include myself in that camp) might wish for Britain to grow up and stop playing mawkish nursery games with the toys of empire the monarchy is here to stay. Their presence is too bound up with our romantic ideas of national identity and the Royals themselves are too adept at playing the survival game for their public support to dip low enough to make abolition a realistic possibility.
Where Tony Benn is right though is to express concerns about the way successive residents of 10 Downing Street have used the royal prerogative to ride roughshod over the democratic process. These powers bundled together by archaic habit more properly belong to the people through the parliament they elect, without a commitment to enshrine that principle at its heart any future written constitution will only ever be so much dead prose scratched onto parchment.
Tony Benn is right the current political system is ‘defective’, parliament needs to wrestle back power from the executive, it also needs to shed the sheen of slick professionalism and become more reflective of the Britain outside the charmed circle of Oxbridge and the public schools. Even more importantly there needs to be a rejuvenation of grassroots politics in this country, the power to choose who stands for election to a seat in parliament as well as who wins the contest has to be put back into the hands of party activists and local communities.
Whether or not the monarchy with its faintly childish pomp and circumstance; its gilded coaches and dressing up box uniforms trundles on is hardly important in the larger scheme of things, the real revolution lies in handing power back to parliament and through it to the people. I’m sure that is something Tony Benn would agree with because as he has often said, democracy is the most revolutionary idea of them all.
Giving evidence to the commons political and constitutional reform committee as they examine whether or not the UK needs a written constitution, this week he said ‘The problem with a directly elected head of state is you get a conflict between two sources of authority,’ meaning in this hypothetical case between a president and a prime minister. The solution to this, he suggested, would be to maintain the symbolism of an unelected head of state minus the monarchical powers.
Mr Benn went on to add that ‘If you’re looking for a titular head of state I think the Speaker of the House of Commons would be perfect- he’s respected, he understands the constitution.’ I’m not sure those comments could be applied to the present incumbent the pocket sized bundle of self promotion that is John Bercow; but several of his predecessors, Betty Boothroyd for example, certainly had sufficient dignity to carry the role off.
Tony Benn originally made the proposal that the Queen be replaced as head of state by the Speaker of the Commons back in 1991 along with attacking the way successive governments have retained the powers traditionally held by the monarch and used them to impose their will on parliament. He told the committee that ‘we live in a modern parliamentary democracy, but the crown powers have been retained’ making the prime minister ‘in effect the unelected king.’
This, he went on to say, had created a political system that was ‘defective’ and he urged MPs to ensure that whatever conclusion they reach on having a written constitution the resulting document ‘protects the rights of ordinary people.’
To many people on the left Tony Benn is a sort of living history exhibit, an exemplar of values that they feel themselves to have moved on from as they have become more sophisticated; or cynical, about how they do business. Despite this patronising dismissal he, like most members of the awkward squad, has an annoying habit of being right.
However much republicans (and I include myself in that camp) might wish for Britain to grow up and stop playing mawkish nursery games with the toys of empire the monarchy is here to stay. Their presence is too bound up with our romantic ideas of national identity and the Royals themselves are too adept at playing the survival game for their public support to dip low enough to make abolition a realistic possibility.
Where Tony Benn is right though is to express concerns about the way successive residents of 10 Downing Street have used the royal prerogative to ride roughshod over the democratic process. These powers bundled together by archaic habit more properly belong to the people through the parliament they elect, without a commitment to enshrine that principle at its heart any future written constitution will only ever be so much dead prose scratched onto parchment.
Tony Benn is right the current political system is ‘defective’, parliament needs to wrestle back power from the executive, it also needs to shed the sheen of slick professionalism and become more reflective of the Britain outside the charmed circle of Oxbridge and the public schools. Even more importantly there needs to be a rejuvenation of grassroots politics in this country, the power to choose who stands for election to a seat in parliament as well as who wins the contest has to be put back into the hands of party activists and local communities.
Whether or not the monarchy with its faintly childish pomp and circumstance; its gilded coaches and dressing up box uniforms trundles on is hardly important in the larger scheme of things, the real revolution lies in handing power back to parliament and through it to the people. I’m sure that is something Tony Benn would agree with because as he has often said, democracy is the most revolutionary idea of them all.
Sunday, 14 August 2011
Only building a consensus on how to heal our society can save it from descending into chaos.
This week the eyes of the world were on Britain because this was the week when our city centres went up in flames.
Before we go any further some important cards have to be put on the table. The riots that started in Tottenham and spread to other areas of London and then to cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool were wrong, despite shrill claims to the contrary they had nothing to do with either the troubled relationship between the Metropolitan Police and young black males or the government spending cuts. They were the vicious and inexcusable actions of a mob who seemed to be enraged with the world for not obliging by providing them with the objects they desired, designer trainers and flat screen televisions for the most part, without having to put in any effort of their own.
Legitimate questions remain to be asked about the shooting by the Met of Mark Duggan; taking to the streets in protest against spending cuts or any other government policy is a fundamental democratic right; both of these things have been seriously compromised by the actions of the mob. The moment you throw a brick through a window then however just your cause may have been beforehand you instantly remove yourself from the political argument.
In a statement to the House of Commons Prime Minister David Cameron said ‘What we have seen on the streets of London and other cities is completely unacceptable,’ he described the actions of the rioters as ‘criminality pure and simple;’ and pledged that his government would not ‘allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets.’ All of which was very much par for the political course, even though the debate that followed was heavy on posturing and light on forensic analysis of the situation.
I am less convinced though by some of the things he has said outside of parliament, earlier in the week he described pockets of British society as being ‘sick’ and has expressed support for taking draconian measures such as removing benefits from convicted rioters and evicting them from council housing against people who ‘loot an pillage their own community.’ Perhaps he imagines that by making people who live chaotic lives characterized in many cased by addiction and extreme violence destitute and homeless too will cause them to renounce their evil ways and become church wardens. His response when challenged on this by a reporter on the BBC’s Northwest Tonight programme: ‘Obviously that will mean they’ve got to be housed somewhere- they’ll have to find housing in the private sector- and that will be tougher for them, but they should have thought of that beforehand,’ suggest that his mouth was accelerating rapidly through the gears whilst his brain still had the handbrake on.
Labour leader Ed Milliband’s response to the situation was little better and seemed to consist of a hand wringing admission that he regretted that ‘inequality wasn’t reduced under the last Labour government,’ and that under the premierships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown Labour ‘did better at building up the fabric of our country than the ethic of our country.’ His analysis of why the riots happened extended no further than blaming it on a ‘me first culture’ and his prescribed solution is for a public inquiry to be held. Quite what this would produce other than another volume to add to the commons library is unclear. Aides pointed out that unlike Deputy PM Nick Clegg Mr Milliband got a favourable reception when he toured the riot torn streets of the capital; mostly you suspect because hardly anyone recognized him.
The response of the right to the riots seems to be a sort of crisis of wounded machismo, the Prime Minister and other senior government figures dropped the ball dramatically by not returning to the UK soon enough so now they jerking their knees frantically to prove how tough they really are. The left seem to be hamstrung by an unwillingness to make judgements and a characteristic obsession with process. None of this sets us on a path towards finding a solution to the underlying cause of the unrest.
To do that politicians would need to face up to something they fear more than an angry mob armed with Molotov cocktails; the need to build a cross party consensus on how to heal our broken society. That would involve the left having to admit the value of responsibility and self restraint and that liberal ideals are meaningless if they are not allied to a willingness to differentiate between good and bad behaviour and how both should be responded to; the right having to admit that the market can’t solve every problem, sometimes government has to be big enough to step in and take a hand and that it isn’t just the kids on the local council estate who behave in a ‘feral’ and selfish manner much of the city is culpable of that sort of thing too.
Consensus is not, of course the same as unthinking conformity, that is partly what got us into this mess, there is still a role for a robust exchange between the government and opposition and within both political parties on matters of policy, but the overall framework would be a shared desire to work towards the common good.
Instead we have been presented so far with a massive and massively ineffectual displacement activity that may well exacerbate the problems of our atomised society. A really tough response would be to punish criminal behaviour whilst understanding its underlying causes; working for the long term to build a society that includes everyone and a popular culture that offers the young a more positive aspiration that a futile chase after fame.
None of that could be achieved quickly or without difficulty, but what is the alternative? More riots and more panic stricken thrashing around disguised as making a tough response to disorder on the part of our disconnected political leaders whilst the chaos on the streets gets a little worse each time. I doubt very much that that is what the vast majority of people living in poor areas who daily face up to the difficulties of their lives without rioting in the streets want; and it is certainly not what they or the rest of us deserve.
Before we go any further some important cards have to be put on the table. The riots that started in Tottenham and spread to other areas of London and then to cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool were wrong, despite shrill claims to the contrary they had nothing to do with either the troubled relationship between the Metropolitan Police and young black males or the government spending cuts. They were the vicious and inexcusable actions of a mob who seemed to be enraged with the world for not obliging by providing them with the objects they desired, designer trainers and flat screen televisions for the most part, without having to put in any effort of their own.
Legitimate questions remain to be asked about the shooting by the Met of Mark Duggan; taking to the streets in protest against spending cuts or any other government policy is a fundamental democratic right; both of these things have been seriously compromised by the actions of the mob. The moment you throw a brick through a window then however just your cause may have been beforehand you instantly remove yourself from the political argument.
In a statement to the House of Commons Prime Minister David Cameron said ‘What we have seen on the streets of London and other cities is completely unacceptable,’ he described the actions of the rioters as ‘criminality pure and simple;’ and pledged that his government would not ‘allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets.’ All of which was very much par for the political course, even though the debate that followed was heavy on posturing and light on forensic analysis of the situation.
I am less convinced though by some of the things he has said outside of parliament, earlier in the week he described pockets of British society as being ‘sick’ and has expressed support for taking draconian measures such as removing benefits from convicted rioters and evicting them from council housing against people who ‘loot an pillage their own community.’ Perhaps he imagines that by making people who live chaotic lives characterized in many cased by addiction and extreme violence destitute and homeless too will cause them to renounce their evil ways and become church wardens. His response when challenged on this by a reporter on the BBC’s Northwest Tonight programme: ‘Obviously that will mean they’ve got to be housed somewhere- they’ll have to find housing in the private sector- and that will be tougher for them, but they should have thought of that beforehand,’ suggest that his mouth was accelerating rapidly through the gears whilst his brain still had the handbrake on.
Labour leader Ed Milliband’s response to the situation was little better and seemed to consist of a hand wringing admission that he regretted that ‘inequality wasn’t reduced under the last Labour government,’ and that under the premierships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown Labour ‘did better at building up the fabric of our country than the ethic of our country.’ His analysis of why the riots happened extended no further than blaming it on a ‘me first culture’ and his prescribed solution is for a public inquiry to be held. Quite what this would produce other than another volume to add to the commons library is unclear. Aides pointed out that unlike Deputy PM Nick Clegg Mr Milliband got a favourable reception when he toured the riot torn streets of the capital; mostly you suspect because hardly anyone recognized him.
The response of the right to the riots seems to be a sort of crisis of wounded machismo, the Prime Minister and other senior government figures dropped the ball dramatically by not returning to the UK soon enough so now they jerking their knees frantically to prove how tough they really are. The left seem to be hamstrung by an unwillingness to make judgements and a characteristic obsession with process. None of this sets us on a path towards finding a solution to the underlying cause of the unrest.
To do that politicians would need to face up to something they fear more than an angry mob armed with Molotov cocktails; the need to build a cross party consensus on how to heal our broken society. That would involve the left having to admit the value of responsibility and self restraint and that liberal ideals are meaningless if they are not allied to a willingness to differentiate between good and bad behaviour and how both should be responded to; the right having to admit that the market can’t solve every problem, sometimes government has to be big enough to step in and take a hand and that it isn’t just the kids on the local council estate who behave in a ‘feral’ and selfish manner much of the city is culpable of that sort of thing too.
Consensus is not, of course the same as unthinking conformity, that is partly what got us into this mess, there is still a role for a robust exchange between the government and opposition and within both political parties on matters of policy, but the overall framework would be a shared desire to work towards the common good.
Instead we have been presented so far with a massive and massively ineffectual displacement activity that may well exacerbate the problems of our atomised society. A really tough response would be to punish criminal behaviour whilst understanding its underlying causes; working for the long term to build a society that includes everyone and a popular culture that offers the young a more positive aspiration that a futile chase after fame.
None of that could be achieved quickly or without difficulty, but what is the alternative? More riots and more panic stricken thrashing around disguised as making a tough response to disorder on the part of our disconnected political leaders whilst the chaos on the streets gets a little worse each time. I doubt very much that that is what the vast majority of people living in poor areas who daily face up to the difficulties of their lives without rioting in the streets want; and it is certainly not what they or the rest of us deserve.
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Breaking News: It snows in winter.
On Tuesday morning I woke up early to find that it had snowed in the night. A perfect white blanket had rounded the outlines of the familiar suburban landscape, the only marks spoiling its surface were the footprints left by a fox following a track its ancestors had laid down long before mine had stopped painting themselves blue.
Snow has a strange effect on the British psyche, for the first day or so we wander around like starry eyed toddlers wondering at how it makes even the most mundane view resemble something out of Narnia; then the magic wears off and the problems start.
If you had played a game of bingo with the week’s news coverage the words, ‘snow’, ‘tailback’, ‘closures’ and ‘chaos’ would have been certain to get you a high score. Egged on by a 24 hour news media that loves a ‘big freeze’ almost as much as it loves a good war you could have been forgiven for thinking the country was on the verge of collapse.
The same media also spent much of the week recycling the tired myths about the ‘Blitz Spirit’ and ‘Dunkirk’ that are staples of the commenting classes whenever Britain experiences a ‘crisis’. Actually the crisis turned out to be something of a damp squib, people living in remoter areas experienced genuine hardship and deserved more help than they received, for everyone else it was either a minor inconvenience or an excuse for a good skive.
Take the school closures, more than four thousand at the height of the cold snap; some schools I’ll admit, those in the highlands of Scotland or on the Yorkshire moors for example, had no option but to close. Others though, meaning any school in an urban area could and should have stayed open, partly because of the problems sending children home will cause for parents who can’t stay away from work without losing pay whatever the weather, but mostly because education is too important to be interrupted by bad weather that hardly came out of the blue so to speak.
There lies the real reason why so many people felt a mounting tide of frustration at the way a medium sized nuclear power appeared to be rendered helpless by a handful of snowflakes was the way the weather seemed to catch the authorities by surprise. The endless news footage featured a parade of major and minor figures in local and national government queuing up to say they hadn’t been expecting snow before Christmas. These are, of course, the same people who earlier in the year told the same journalists they hadn’t been expecting snow after Christmas either; just when did they expect it?
I don’t doubt that there were shady deals done behind closed doors when FIFA met in Zurich this week to decide that they wouldn’t give the 2018 World Cup to England after all, despite millions being spent on a the bid and the ‘three lions’, aka David Beckham, David Cameron and Prince William being flown out to seal the deal, but our inability to deal with four inches of can hardly have worked in our favour. A nation floored by a few inches of snow hardly shows the organisational acumen needed to take on a major project and make it work.
Things might be different when the 2012 Olympics come to London, but the evidence of the Millennium Dome and the way we have handled the last three cold snaps means I’m not getting my hopes up. Until we get out act together to the point where a few inches of snow don’t bring the nation to a halt I’d advise everyone else to do the same.
Snow has a strange effect on the British psyche, for the first day or so we wander around like starry eyed toddlers wondering at how it makes even the most mundane view resemble something out of Narnia; then the magic wears off and the problems start.
If you had played a game of bingo with the week’s news coverage the words, ‘snow’, ‘tailback’, ‘closures’ and ‘chaos’ would have been certain to get you a high score. Egged on by a 24 hour news media that loves a ‘big freeze’ almost as much as it loves a good war you could have been forgiven for thinking the country was on the verge of collapse.
The same media also spent much of the week recycling the tired myths about the ‘Blitz Spirit’ and ‘Dunkirk’ that are staples of the commenting classes whenever Britain experiences a ‘crisis’. Actually the crisis turned out to be something of a damp squib, people living in remoter areas experienced genuine hardship and deserved more help than they received, for everyone else it was either a minor inconvenience or an excuse for a good skive.
Take the school closures, more than four thousand at the height of the cold snap; some schools I’ll admit, those in the highlands of Scotland or on the Yorkshire moors for example, had no option but to close. Others though, meaning any school in an urban area could and should have stayed open, partly because of the problems sending children home will cause for parents who can’t stay away from work without losing pay whatever the weather, but mostly because education is too important to be interrupted by bad weather that hardly came out of the blue so to speak.
There lies the real reason why so many people felt a mounting tide of frustration at the way a medium sized nuclear power appeared to be rendered helpless by a handful of snowflakes was the way the weather seemed to catch the authorities by surprise. The endless news footage featured a parade of major and minor figures in local and national government queuing up to say they hadn’t been expecting snow before Christmas. These are, of course, the same people who earlier in the year told the same journalists they hadn’t been expecting snow after Christmas either; just when did they expect it?
I don’t doubt that there were shady deals done behind closed doors when FIFA met in Zurich this week to decide that they wouldn’t give the 2018 World Cup to England after all, despite millions being spent on a the bid and the ‘three lions’, aka David Beckham, David Cameron and Prince William being flown out to seal the deal, but our inability to deal with four inches of can hardly have worked in our favour. A nation floored by a few inches of snow hardly shows the organisational acumen needed to take on a major project and make it work.
Things might be different when the 2012 Olympics come to London, but the evidence of the Millennium Dome and the way we have handled the last three cold snaps means I’m not getting my hopes up. Until we get out act together to the point where a few inches of snow don’t bring the nation to a halt I’d advise everyone else to do the same.
Friday, 16 July 2010
No more heroes-just thugs like ‘Moaty.’
Piles of filling station bought flowers mouldering in a heap, attached to each one a card professing love and admiration for someone the people who laid the flowers have never met, it’s raining and the writing on the cards is starting to run. This could be outside Kensington Palace in the summer of 1997 or just about anywhere in the wake of a newsworthy tragedy at any time since.
In fact the tributes turning into mulch on the municipal grass are lying on a riverbank in the Northumbrian town of Rothbury and have been laid in honour of Raoul Moat, a low rent thug turned celebrity murderer.
It feels like taking a dose of cod liver oil served up on an oversize silver spoon but I find myself agreeing with David Cameron when he said at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday of this week: ‘I cannot understand any wave, however small, of sympathy for this man.’ Like Mr Cameron and most other people I am able to see Moat for what he was ‘a callous murderer, full stop, end of story.’
The trouble is that for a large section of the population the full stop Moat’s miserable life came to last Friday night is part of a different and very disturbing story. One that paints him as a heroic rebel and was celebrated by a Facebook page with 35,000 members, most of whom left illiterate comments supporting Moat for standing up to the authorities.
The page has since been deleted but not before a spokeswoman for Facebook had piously told the press that since the site encourages discussion of issues in the media: ‘we sometimes find people discussing topics others may find distasteful, however that in itself is not a reason to stop a debate from happening.’ Thank you for clearing that up, I know how free speech works, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about just what some people use their freedom to speak about.
Ok granting the status of ‘legend’ to men like Raoul Moat is nothing new, in the eighteenth century huge crowds turned out to cheer highwaymen to the gallows and people sang ballads about their crimes that turned them into decaffeinated romantic heroes for people who had never heard of romanticism. Later cinema audiences thrilled to the gun toting antics of screen gangsters such as James Cagney and Edward G Robinson.
The difference between those instances and what we’re seeing here is that an integral part of the myth of the highwayman or the gangster was that sooner or later they faced the consequences of their actions, be that at the end of a rope or lying on the steps of a church as their moll tells a stone faced cop that they ‘used to be a somebody.’ Lionizing a criminal is silly but harmless subversion so long as it is framed by an understanding that in real life people have to be answerable for their actions, when that breaks down things turn deadly.
Yes Moat had his problems, someone should have listened to his pleas for psychiatric help, the police were guilty of some degree of grandstanding during the week it took to corner him; but this can never excuse what he did.
Even though most people in Britain didn’t write messages of support to Raoul Moat on Facebook or lay flowers at the shrine erected in his honour we should all share some of the blame for his being turned into a hero in the first place, not least because we have all conspired in turning the notion of heroism from a Homeric ideal into a label applied to inept footballers, self indulgent celebrities and now violently dysfunctional thugs.
If the lionization of a man like Raoul Moat is really the sort of ‘legend’ our society wants to tell itself at the start of the twenty first century; then we’ve got serious problems.
In fact the tributes turning into mulch on the municipal grass are lying on a riverbank in the Northumbrian town of Rothbury and have been laid in honour of Raoul Moat, a low rent thug turned celebrity murderer.
It feels like taking a dose of cod liver oil served up on an oversize silver spoon but I find myself agreeing with David Cameron when he said at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday of this week: ‘I cannot understand any wave, however small, of sympathy for this man.’ Like Mr Cameron and most other people I am able to see Moat for what he was ‘a callous murderer, full stop, end of story.’
The trouble is that for a large section of the population the full stop Moat’s miserable life came to last Friday night is part of a different and very disturbing story. One that paints him as a heroic rebel and was celebrated by a Facebook page with 35,000 members, most of whom left illiterate comments supporting Moat for standing up to the authorities.
The page has since been deleted but not before a spokeswoman for Facebook had piously told the press that since the site encourages discussion of issues in the media: ‘we sometimes find people discussing topics others may find distasteful, however that in itself is not a reason to stop a debate from happening.’ Thank you for clearing that up, I know how free speech works, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about just what some people use their freedom to speak about.
Ok granting the status of ‘legend’ to men like Raoul Moat is nothing new, in the eighteenth century huge crowds turned out to cheer highwaymen to the gallows and people sang ballads about their crimes that turned them into decaffeinated romantic heroes for people who had never heard of romanticism. Later cinema audiences thrilled to the gun toting antics of screen gangsters such as James Cagney and Edward G Robinson.
The difference between those instances and what we’re seeing here is that an integral part of the myth of the highwayman or the gangster was that sooner or later they faced the consequences of their actions, be that at the end of a rope or lying on the steps of a church as their moll tells a stone faced cop that they ‘used to be a somebody.’ Lionizing a criminal is silly but harmless subversion so long as it is framed by an understanding that in real life people have to be answerable for their actions, when that breaks down things turn deadly.
Yes Moat had his problems, someone should have listened to his pleas for psychiatric help, the police were guilty of some degree of grandstanding during the week it took to corner him; but this can never excuse what he did.
Even though most people in Britain didn’t write messages of support to Raoul Moat on Facebook or lay flowers at the shrine erected in his honour we should all share some of the blame for his being turned into a hero in the first place, not least because we have all conspired in turning the notion of heroism from a Homeric ideal into a label applied to inept footballers, self indulgent celebrities and now violently dysfunctional thugs.
If the lionization of a man like Raoul Moat is really the sort of ‘legend’ our society wants to tell itself at the start of the twenty first century; then we’ve got serious problems.
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Spare the rod to promote learning.
Sit up straight! Stop sniggering at the back of the room! Head teachers in England are to be given greater powers to search pupils suspected of bringing weapons into school and given clearer guidance on restraining disruptive students as part of a government drive to improve behaviour.
They’ve certainly got their work cut out, according to Ofstead behaviour in one in six schools is no better than ‘satisfactory’, last year 8130 students were permanently excluded from school, 2230 of those were excluded for violent assault on a teacher or another student. Bad behaviour, it seems, isn’t just a problem; it’s a full blown epidemic.
Announcing the plans Schools Minister Nick Gibb said there was too much ‘low level disruption’ in schools and that his aim was to ensure that parents were able to feel ‘the classroom to which they send their children is a safe place where that can learn.’
Alan Steer, a former education advisor to the Labour government, welcomed the proposals, including granting anonymity to teachers against whom allegations of assault have been made, but described elements of the programme such as the use of after school detentions as ‘fluff.’ The real way to improve student behaviour was, he said, ‘to continually raise the standards of teaching.’
Chris Keates of teaching union NASUWT also expressed concern about the use of ‘reasonable’ force to restrain disruptive students, saying it might put teachers at risk if malicious allegations made by students who ‘know their rights but not their responsibilities.’
There is no question that discipline is an important part of the learning process, but in what appears to be an attempt to play to the gallery of popular opinion, the government risks making the mistake of thinking a ‘tough’ teacher and a ‘good’ teacher are one and the same. They aren’t, as anyone who didn’t go to Eton knows only too well.
We can all remember the tough teachers, every school however liberal had at least one, from our schooldays, martinets who ruled with a rod of iron, but were they the teachers from whom we learnt the most? Probably not, as Alan Steer points out discipline can make a students stay in their seats, but only good, meaning engaging, teaching can make them learn and want to go on doing so throughout their lifetime.
Sadly the sort of teaching that engages students imagination, often because it strays from, but never entirely abandons, the set curriculum and even, horror of horrors, encourages them to think for themselves has been the biggest casualty of the slow collapse of our education system over the past quarter century. Schools long ago stopped being seats of learning and became instead vast machines dedicated to churning out statistics for bureaucrats.
Bad behaviour is the most noticeable price we pay for allowing this to happen, particularly amongst boys for whom sitting cooped up in a classroom is a form of torture when what they most want to do is be active. Even the well behaved students lose out under the current system because rather than learning how to value knowledge and use it as a buttress for independent thought they learn instead how to regurgitate key words and pre digested answers. Useful skills if you’re going to be a junior minister, but not in any other field.
By all means give teachers the power to impose discipline in their classrooms, but if we really want to solve the problem of low level disruption the government has to take the bigger step of setting them free to engage their students in something more than just preparing for an endless round of exams.
They’ve certainly got their work cut out, according to Ofstead behaviour in one in six schools is no better than ‘satisfactory’, last year 8130 students were permanently excluded from school, 2230 of those were excluded for violent assault on a teacher or another student. Bad behaviour, it seems, isn’t just a problem; it’s a full blown epidemic.
Announcing the plans Schools Minister Nick Gibb said there was too much ‘low level disruption’ in schools and that his aim was to ensure that parents were able to feel ‘the classroom to which they send their children is a safe place where that can learn.’
Alan Steer, a former education advisor to the Labour government, welcomed the proposals, including granting anonymity to teachers against whom allegations of assault have been made, but described elements of the programme such as the use of after school detentions as ‘fluff.’ The real way to improve student behaviour was, he said, ‘to continually raise the standards of teaching.’
Chris Keates of teaching union NASUWT also expressed concern about the use of ‘reasonable’ force to restrain disruptive students, saying it might put teachers at risk if malicious allegations made by students who ‘know their rights but not their responsibilities.’
There is no question that discipline is an important part of the learning process, but in what appears to be an attempt to play to the gallery of popular opinion, the government risks making the mistake of thinking a ‘tough’ teacher and a ‘good’ teacher are one and the same. They aren’t, as anyone who didn’t go to Eton knows only too well.
We can all remember the tough teachers, every school however liberal had at least one, from our schooldays, martinets who ruled with a rod of iron, but were they the teachers from whom we learnt the most? Probably not, as Alan Steer points out discipline can make a students stay in their seats, but only good, meaning engaging, teaching can make them learn and want to go on doing so throughout their lifetime.
Sadly the sort of teaching that engages students imagination, often because it strays from, but never entirely abandons, the set curriculum and even, horror of horrors, encourages them to think for themselves has been the biggest casualty of the slow collapse of our education system over the past quarter century. Schools long ago stopped being seats of learning and became instead vast machines dedicated to churning out statistics for bureaucrats.
Bad behaviour is the most noticeable price we pay for allowing this to happen, particularly amongst boys for whom sitting cooped up in a classroom is a form of torture when what they most want to do is be active. Even the well behaved students lose out under the current system because rather than learning how to value knowledge and use it as a buttress for independent thought they learn instead how to regurgitate key words and pre digested answers. Useful skills if you’re going to be a junior minister, but not in any other field.
By all means give teachers the power to impose discipline in their classrooms, but if we really want to solve the problem of low level disruption the government has to take the bigger step of setting them free to engage their students in something more than just preparing for an endless round of exams.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Gordon Brown experiences his ‘horseshoe nail’ moment.
Politics, particularly during an election season, can be a strange business, one where great changes of fortune are heralded by seemingly minor events. As the nursery rhyme has it, the most historic of battles are often lost for the want of a horseshoe nail.
This week saw one such event and the almost certain ending of any hope that Gordon Brown will still be Prime Minister this time next week.
It took the shape of an, as he thought, private comment about Rochdale pensioner Gillian Duffy, who Brown had met on the campaign trail and described to his aides as a ‘bigoted woman’ because she had the temerity to mention the unmentionable subject of immigration. In a piece of the bad luck that has dogged his tenure in Downing Street from day one our soon to be ex premier still had his microphone on and the whole sorry exchange was recorded and then played back to him live on national radio.
To his credit Brown looked horrified when his words were played back to him and made a personal apology; it was, though, too little done far too late. An ugly truth about his character and that of the party he leads had been brought out into the open.
Behind the carefully constructed PR and the pose of being a pretty straight bunch of guys; the brave talk about having a ‘moral compass’ and wanting to reach out to ordinary voters New Labour is a seething mass of paranoia totally divorced from the experiences and concerns of their core voters, or of anyone else living outside the Westminster bubble. At some level everyone who voted for them knew this, and I include myself in this group, but so long as we acknowledge it things could go on as they always had. Now we have seen their true colours they can no longer claim out vote and nothing will ever be the same again.
Bigotgate, as the incident was quickly dubbed by the media, wasn’t the only thing that went wrong for the Labour Party this week; just the most graphically damaging.
In a moment of pure slapstick the party’s charmless schools secretary Ed Balls was snubbed by Peppa Pig, a cartoon character much admired by the under fives m’lud, who refused to appear alongside him at the launch of the party’s children’s policy.
On a more serious note two broadsheet newspapers withdrew their support form Labour, it isn’t, perhaps, such a surprise that the Times prefers the Tories, but the news that the Guardian is backing the Liberal Democrats because they share its stance on electoral reform is, in terms of condemnation, roughly equivalent to the Tablet dropping the Vatican in favour of Lambeth Palace.
This is how the New Labour project that began with such high hopes in 1997 ends, not with a bang or a whimper; just endless bitter recriminations. That and a deep sense of betrayal felt by people all over the country for whom socialism is more than just an ideological pose, even if they don’t use the word it is the code by which they live their lives, they are the people New Labour let down by taking their support for granted.
Gordon Brown, like any senior politician, must have considered what his place in history might be, this week he found out. He will be listed alongside Lloyd George, not in the sense of being a ‘great’ prime minister, but in the sense of being a venal man who led his party into political irrelevance. It is a verdict the events of this week show he richly deserves.
This week saw one such event and the almost certain ending of any hope that Gordon Brown will still be Prime Minister this time next week.
It took the shape of an, as he thought, private comment about Rochdale pensioner Gillian Duffy, who Brown had met on the campaign trail and described to his aides as a ‘bigoted woman’ because she had the temerity to mention the unmentionable subject of immigration. In a piece of the bad luck that has dogged his tenure in Downing Street from day one our soon to be ex premier still had his microphone on and the whole sorry exchange was recorded and then played back to him live on national radio.
To his credit Brown looked horrified when his words were played back to him and made a personal apology; it was, though, too little done far too late. An ugly truth about his character and that of the party he leads had been brought out into the open.
Behind the carefully constructed PR and the pose of being a pretty straight bunch of guys; the brave talk about having a ‘moral compass’ and wanting to reach out to ordinary voters New Labour is a seething mass of paranoia totally divorced from the experiences and concerns of their core voters, or of anyone else living outside the Westminster bubble. At some level everyone who voted for them knew this, and I include myself in this group, but so long as we acknowledge it things could go on as they always had. Now we have seen their true colours they can no longer claim out vote and nothing will ever be the same again.
Bigotgate, as the incident was quickly dubbed by the media, wasn’t the only thing that went wrong for the Labour Party this week; just the most graphically damaging.
In a moment of pure slapstick the party’s charmless schools secretary Ed Balls was snubbed by Peppa Pig, a cartoon character much admired by the under fives m’lud, who refused to appear alongside him at the launch of the party’s children’s policy.
On a more serious note two broadsheet newspapers withdrew their support form Labour, it isn’t, perhaps, such a surprise that the Times prefers the Tories, but the news that the Guardian is backing the Liberal Democrats because they share its stance on electoral reform is, in terms of condemnation, roughly equivalent to the Tablet dropping the Vatican in favour of Lambeth Palace.
This is how the New Labour project that began with such high hopes in 1997 ends, not with a bang or a whimper; just endless bitter recriminations. That and a deep sense of betrayal felt by people all over the country for whom socialism is more than just an ideological pose, even if they don’t use the word it is the code by which they live their lives, they are the people New Labour let down by taking their support for granted.
Gordon Brown, like any senior politician, must have considered what his place in history might be, this week he found out. He will be listed alongside Lloyd George, not in the sense of being a ‘great’ prime minister, but in the sense of being a venal man who led his party into political irrelevance. It is a verdict the events of this week show he richly deserves.
Friday, 26 March 2010
Cabs for hire, more like the four stooges.
Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt, Geoff Hoon and Margaret Moran, remember those names; they belong to the four stooges who broke British democracy once and for all with their greed and stupidity.
They were caught out in a ‘sting’ operation run jointly by Channel Four and the Sunday Times offering to use their influence as members of parliament, and in the case of Hoon, Hewitt and Byers as former ministers of the crown in return for generous fees from lobbying companies.
Stephen Byers, charmingly, used the phrase that sums up their tawdry attitude to the public trust by describing himself as a ‘sort of cab for hire’, for a fee of around £5000 per day he would happily tout the interests of anyone who paid him around Whitehall. For all I know he would even south of the river after five o’clock, something real London cabbies never do, but they, at least, are trying to make an honest living.
Not surprisingly the Tories have seized on this latest incidence of Labour MP’s on the fiddle to claim the moral high ground, even though their own benches are home to more than a few ‘cabs for hire’, with Sir George Young, their shadow leader of the house calling for the matter to be ‘fully and impartially investigated’.
Good luck with that, as the saying goes, because at the moment there seems to be little enthusiasm on the part of the government for an enquiry, maybe there are a few too many skeletons in the Labour Party cupboard for that to be advisable this side of an election. Deputy party leader Harriet Harman said the issue had been looked into and that she was satisfied that any decisions made had been free from the ‘impropriety’ alleged by the media.
Well that’s ok then, we won’t worry our fluffy little heads about this any more and get back to being enthralled by the antics of the various leaders’ wives; as John Wayne might have put it the hell we will!
Last summer we all found the MP’s expenses scandal with its duck houses, bath plugs and mucky movies mildly amusing, how very small beer British political corruption seemed in comparison to that in other European countries. This time round we could comfort ourselves by saying that this sort of thing always happens when a government is running out of steam.
We can dredge up memories of the cash for questions scandal that did so much harm to John Major’s government during its dog days, in particular we will recall Neil Hamilton and his too close relationship with Harrods owner Mohammed Al-Fayed, we didn’t much like him then but his willingness to turn himself into a figure of fun since has won him a soft spot in our hearts.
It all contributes to the lie we like to tell ourselves in this country that politics is really a sort of Carry On film complete with sex scandals and dodgy characters out for the main chance. If that’s what we want to go on thinking after this latest debacle then we’re wrong; dangerously so in fact.
This is not something out of an Ealing comedy; it is a serious threat to our society and the democratic values upon which it is based. There is a real risk that Byers, Hewitt et al are low down on a rotten totem pole of potential corruption that reaches to the heart of government.
Gordon Brown may well be able to dodge holding an investigation into the activities of ex ministers for hire; he won’t though be able to escape the judgement of the public at the ballot box, even if it is expressed by record numbers of people not bothering to vote at all. Even that won’t end the problem though; a parliament largely filled with shiny new MP’s untainted by any hint of corruption will still be at a disadvantage caused by the people now heading for the sunset, or the Lords, with their pockets stuffed with cash. They will lack the one thing necessary for truly effective government; the trust of the British people.
And another thing:
Scientists have discovered yet another miracle weapon for combating obesity, it is, wait for it; seaweed.
My guess is that it stops you getting fat because it tastes so god awful nobody in their right mind would ask for seconds of any dish in which it had been used as an ingredient.
The death was announced this week of Harry Carpenter, for many years the voice of boxing on the BBC. He was, by all accounts, a true gent, a man who knew and was loved by everyone who was anyone in the fight game over the past fifty years, not least because he mastered the difficult trick of combining knowledge and passion for his chosen sport with an ability to share both with the viewing public.
How very different from the loud and excitable presenters covering sport for television today for whom the audience are only bit players in the epic drama of their personal ambition; truly we will never see his like again.
They were caught out in a ‘sting’ operation run jointly by Channel Four and the Sunday Times offering to use their influence as members of parliament, and in the case of Hoon, Hewitt and Byers as former ministers of the crown in return for generous fees from lobbying companies.
Stephen Byers, charmingly, used the phrase that sums up their tawdry attitude to the public trust by describing himself as a ‘sort of cab for hire’, for a fee of around £5000 per day he would happily tout the interests of anyone who paid him around Whitehall. For all I know he would even south of the river after five o’clock, something real London cabbies never do, but they, at least, are trying to make an honest living.
Not surprisingly the Tories have seized on this latest incidence of Labour MP’s on the fiddle to claim the moral high ground, even though their own benches are home to more than a few ‘cabs for hire’, with Sir George Young, their shadow leader of the house calling for the matter to be ‘fully and impartially investigated’.
Good luck with that, as the saying goes, because at the moment there seems to be little enthusiasm on the part of the government for an enquiry, maybe there are a few too many skeletons in the Labour Party cupboard for that to be advisable this side of an election. Deputy party leader Harriet Harman said the issue had been looked into and that she was satisfied that any decisions made had been free from the ‘impropriety’ alleged by the media.
Well that’s ok then, we won’t worry our fluffy little heads about this any more and get back to being enthralled by the antics of the various leaders’ wives; as John Wayne might have put it the hell we will!
Last summer we all found the MP’s expenses scandal with its duck houses, bath plugs and mucky movies mildly amusing, how very small beer British political corruption seemed in comparison to that in other European countries. This time round we could comfort ourselves by saying that this sort of thing always happens when a government is running out of steam.
We can dredge up memories of the cash for questions scandal that did so much harm to John Major’s government during its dog days, in particular we will recall Neil Hamilton and his too close relationship with Harrods owner Mohammed Al-Fayed, we didn’t much like him then but his willingness to turn himself into a figure of fun since has won him a soft spot in our hearts.
It all contributes to the lie we like to tell ourselves in this country that politics is really a sort of Carry On film complete with sex scandals and dodgy characters out for the main chance. If that’s what we want to go on thinking after this latest debacle then we’re wrong; dangerously so in fact.
This is not something out of an Ealing comedy; it is a serious threat to our society and the democratic values upon which it is based. There is a real risk that Byers, Hewitt et al are low down on a rotten totem pole of potential corruption that reaches to the heart of government.
Gordon Brown may well be able to dodge holding an investigation into the activities of ex ministers for hire; he won’t though be able to escape the judgement of the public at the ballot box, even if it is expressed by record numbers of people not bothering to vote at all. Even that won’t end the problem though; a parliament largely filled with shiny new MP’s untainted by any hint of corruption will still be at a disadvantage caused by the people now heading for the sunset, or the Lords, with their pockets stuffed with cash. They will lack the one thing necessary for truly effective government; the trust of the British people.
And another thing:
Scientists have discovered yet another miracle weapon for combating obesity, it is, wait for it; seaweed.
My guess is that it stops you getting fat because it tastes so god awful nobody in their right mind would ask for seconds of any dish in which it had been used as an ingredient.
The death was announced this week of Harry Carpenter, for many years the voice of boxing on the BBC. He was, by all accounts, a true gent, a man who knew and was loved by everyone who was anyone in the fight game over the past fifty years, not least because he mastered the difficult trick of combining knowledge and passion for his chosen sport with an ability to share both with the viewing public.
How very different from the loud and excitable presenters covering sport for television today for whom the audience are only bit players in the epic drama of their personal ambition; truly we will never see his like again.
Friday, 26 February 2010
No common sense please; we’re talking about, well you know….
This Tuesday the world as we know it cam to an end, well it did if you are an ‘activist’ on either side of the ugly row over how sex education is delivered in British schools.
The liberals think the sky has come crashing down because the government has caved in to pressure from faith groups and ‘watered down’ plans to teach children about sexual relationships by framing part of what they say with the beliefs of their particular creed; conservatives, meanwhile are still in the most frightful tizzy about the dread word S*E*X even being mentioned in a classroom context. Everybody knows babies are deposited under gooseberry bushes by the stork and anyone who says any different is a danger to the nation’s morals.
I surprised myself this week by simultaneously feeling sympathy for Schools minister Ed Balls and recognising him as speaking, for once with the voice of common sense, when he told the BBC’s Today programme that the amendment to the bill allowed faith schools to say, for example ‘we as a religion believe contraception is wrong’, but not to turn a reasonable statement of a faith based position into a refusal to discuss the subject at all.
This, despite the best efforts of several campaign groups who really should know better to say otherwise, is by no means a charter for unrestrained bigotry, its merely the sort of compromise sensible people make in order to get on with the business of living in harmony.
Unfortunately whenever the subject of sex rears its head all common sense seems to go out of the window. I well remember my own school sex education lessons, or lesson since we only ever had one. We were all herded into the school hall at the age of about twelve and sat down in front of a television programme that began with some bad cartoon images of unidentified body parts and a stentorian voice intoning ‘boys and girls are different’ and didn’t go into much more detail about the subject over the forty minutes that followed. Frankly we’d have probably learnt more about sexual relations from watching an episode of the Benny Hill Show.
There is a serious problem here, the discussion about a vital issue, namely how we teach our young people that there is more than one type of relationship and that it is better to wait until you’ve abandoned childish things once and for all before entering into any of them, has become totally divorced from reality. Both sides have adopted extreme positions from which they refuse to retreat for the sake of their collective ego.
Let’s be honest, ignorance about sex does not automatically lead to chastity, a liberal acceptance that young people by their very nature will want to experiment with relationships has to be backed by a recognition that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. Worst of all the ugly squabble about sex education allows a very British belief that sex is either smutty fun or a cause of toe curling embarrassment that should have been consigned to the dustbin of history long ago to be endlessly perpetuated.
What young people need is to be given the fact about sexual relations that will allow them to make informed decisions and the moral courage to ignore peer pressure and wait for the right person and circumstances. They will never get that until the debate about how the subject is taught in schools becomes more mature that it is at present.
Ban the bomb and build a better future.
Britain’s former top soldier Sir Richard Dannatt, now a defence advisor to the Conservative Party, has said the government was right to renew the Trident missile system ‘but only on a very narrow points decision.’
He went on to say that none of the three main parties had much enthusiasm for maintaining the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and things might be different in five years time.
Five years; just who do we think we’re deterring with this relic of the cold war right now?
Our troops are fighting a very hot war in Afghanistan without the equipment they need and facing huge casualties as a result, at home the public purse strings are being tightened to breaking point and even more swinging cuts are promised for after the election, if either Labour or the Tories want to cut the deficit and regain a little public trust after what looks like being the most angry election in British political history they would be wise to scrap this monument to cold war hubris and invest the money saved in building for the future.
And another thing:
After a week of rumours and revelations I’m more or less convinced there is not so much a grain as a whole darned boulder of truth in the stories about Gordon Brown’s volcanic temper.
He was; of course, wrong to take his frustrations out on his aides and hurling mobile phones around like a stroppy toddler does little to add lustre to the office of state once held by Gladstone and Churchill. Spare a thought though for the two Downing Street employees who phoned the National Bullying Helpline only to have their concerns passed, admittedly anonymously, on to the media. Isn’t betraying their trust also a form of bullying?
Full marks to UKIP MEP Nigel Farage who this week scandalised the stuffy European Parliament by describing EU President Herman Von Rumpoy as having the ‘charisma of a wet rag’ and looking like ‘a second rate bank clerk.’
His outburst may have got him cast into outer darkness so far as Brussels is concerned, but Farage, who plans to stand against commons speaker John Bercow at the general election, could cut a real dash at Westminster. If only because he would have the time of his life popping the inflated egos of his fellow parliamentarians like so many cheap balloons.
And finally, Cheryl Cole is to split for her footballer husband Ashley after he was caught playing away yet again.
She’s the nation’s sweetheart and determined to make it big in America; he’s a fading footballer with a charming habit of texting naked pictures of himself to female fans, anyone surprised that their union has ended in the divorce courts is going to be in for a real shock if they ever find out what bears get up to in the woods.
The liberals think the sky has come crashing down because the government has caved in to pressure from faith groups and ‘watered down’ plans to teach children about sexual relationships by framing part of what they say with the beliefs of their particular creed; conservatives, meanwhile are still in the most frightful tizzy about the dread word S*E*X even being mentioned in a classroom context. Everybody knows babies are deposited under gooseberry bushes by the stork and anyone who says any different is a danger to the nation’s morals.
I surprised myself this week by simultaneously feeling sympathy for Schools minister Ed Balls and recognising him as speaking, for once with the voice of common sense, when he told the BBC’s Today programme that the amendment to the bill allowed faith schools to say, for example ‘we as a religion believe contraception is wrong’, but not to turn a reasonable statement of a faith based position into a refusal to discuss the subject at all.
This, despite the best efforts of several campaign groups who really should know better to say otherwise, is by no means a charter for unrestrained bigotry, its merely the sort of compromise sensible people make in order to get on with the business of living in harmony.
Unfortunately whenever the subject of sex rears its head all common sense seems to go out of the window. I well remember my own school sex education lessons, or lesson since we only ever had one. We were all herded into the school hall at the age of about twelve and sat down in front of a television programme that began with some bad cartoon images of unidentified body parts and a stentorian voice intoning ‘boys and girls are different’ and didn’t go into much more detail about the subject over the forty minutes that followed. Frankly we’d have probably learnt more about sexual relations from watching an episode of the Benny Hill Show.
There is a serious problem here, the discussion about a vital issue, namely how we teach our young people that there is more than one type of relationship and that it is better to wait until you’ve abandoned childish things once and for all before entering into any of them, has become totally divorced from reality. Both sides have adopted extreme positions from which they refuse to retreat for the sake of their collective ego.
Let’s be honest, ignorance about sex does not automatically lead to chastity, a liberal acceptance that young people by their very nature will want to experiment with relationships has to be backed by a recognition that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand. Worst of all the ugly squabble about sex education allows a very British belief that sex is either smutty fun or a cause of toe curling embarrassment that should have been consigned to the dustbin of history long ago to be endlessly perpetuated.
What young people need is to be given the fact about sexual relations that will allow them to make informed decisions and the moral courage to ignore peer pressure and wait for the right person and circumstances. They will never get that until the debate about how the subject is taught in schools becomes more mature that it is at present.
Ban the bomb and build a better future.
Britain’s former top soldier Sir Richard Dannatt, now a defence advisor to the Conservative Party, has said the government was right to renew the Trident missile system ‘but only on a very narrow points decision.’
He went on to say that none of the three main parties had much enthusiasm for maintaining the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and things might be different in five years time.
Five years; just who do we think we’re deterring with this relic of the cold war right now?
Our troops are fighting a very hot war in Afghanistan without the equipment they need and facing huge casualties as a result, at home the public purse strings are being tightened to breaking point and even more swinging cuts are promised for after the election, if either Labour or the Tories want to cut the deficit and regain a little public trust after what looks like being the most angry election in British political history they would be wise to scrap this monument to cold war hubris and invest the money saved in building for the future.
And another thing:
After a week of rumours and revelations I’m more or less convinced there is not so much a grain as a whole darned boulder of truth in the stories about Gordon Brown’s volcanic temper.
He was; of course, wrong to take his frustrations out on his aides and hurling mobile phones around like a stroppy toddler does little to add lustre to the office of state once held by Gladstone and Churchill. Spare a thought though for the two Downing Street employees who phoned the National Bullying Helpline only to have their concerns passed, admittedly anonymously, on to the media. Isn’t betraying their trust also a form of bullying?
Full marks to UKIP MEP Nigel Farage who this week scandalised the stuffy European Parliament by describing EU President Herman Von Rumpoy as having the ‘charisma of a wet rag’ and looking like ‘a second rate bank clerk.’
His outburst may have got him cast into outer darkness so far as Brussels is concerned, but Farage, who plans to stand against commons speaker John Bercow at the general election, could cut a real dash at Westminster. If only because he would have the time of his life popping the inflated egos of his fellow parliamentarians like so many cheap balloons.
And finally, Cheryl Cole is to split for her footballer husband Ashley after he was caught playing away yet again.
She’s the nation’s sweetheart and determined to make it big in America; he’s a fading footballer with a charming habit of texting naked pictures of himself to female fans, anyone surprised that their union has ended in the divorce courts is going to be in for a real shock if they ever find out what bears get up to in the woods.
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Learning the wrong lessons about adult education.
Britain is broken and it is all the fault of the baby boomers, the lucky generation born between the end of the war and the mid sixties. That’s the line most of the media and all three main political parties have taken and run with like a dog chasing sticks in a suburban park for the past couple of years.
I don’t usually give much in the way of credence to rumours of impending national decline, Britain has been going to the dogs since before Julius Cesar landed and things still seem to shake out ok most of the time, this week though a story floated onto my radar that gave me cause to feel a lot less sanguine.
According to the Association of Colleges (AOC) further education colleges across the UK could face cuts to their funding of up to 16% as the current government or the next grapples with spiralling public sector debt. The axe, if it falls, will see courses in construction and GCSE and A Level courses cut and the same blow will be dealt to the provision of courses for adults struggling to reach Level 2 in Maths or English.
AOC Chief Executive Martin Doel told the BBC this week that his members understood the challenge faced by the government as it struggles to balance the books and placate a nervous stock market but said that they feared the loss of ‘high quality courses that are essential to economic recovery.’
Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) took up the case saying ‘the government has rightly identified education as a key driver of social mobility, making cuts to adult learning now would be an outrageous affront to the millions of people it promised not to let down.’
What, you might ask, has all of this got to do with the baby boomers, the generation we love to hate for having every opportunity you can think of handed to them on a plate and wasting the lot? The answer is quite simple, further education colleges, along with the former polytechnics that later turned themselves into universities like so many bookish caterpillars, are the concrete symbol of all the generation that still provides most of our ruling elite stands for.
They are, depending on your political persuasion, the engines of egalitarianism, a means of transforming education into a common good rather than something people who are too rich to ever really need it enjoy amidst dreaming spires; or a hothouse for dangerously ‘progressive’ ideas that have brought about social and economic chaos. The most notable feature, of course, of the baby boomers is their unfailing ability to mistake one extreme position or another for the moral high ground.
Those of us living in a less rarefied, meaning anywhere outside Notting Hill or Islington, know that colleges are something much more prosaic and more important; they’re the difference between success and failure.
Colleges are where kids, many of them boys, the perennial underachievers in the educational steeplechase, who were bored rigid by school get the chance to discover that education can be something other than tedious; it can be useful and even inspiring. Many people don’t make this discovery until they have experienced the daily grind of having a dead end job or having no job at all, which is why adult education is more important now than ever. F Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, life does have a second act and education is the tool we use to write its script.
There is also another argument to be made in favour of adult education, one that many people in and out of politics in this country find troubling because it requires them to believe in something. Education is a force for good not just because it helps to produce an efficient workforce to power the country out of the economic doldrums, but because it has the power to create fully rounded citizens by exposing participants to new ideas and teaching them the value of questioning everything.
This used to be something the ambitious men (and not a few women too) who formed the backbone of British civic life and could be found in the ranks of every political party represented at Westminster understood implicitly. Their descendents, many of whom benefited from a free university education, have forgotten this vital truth, meaning that by failing to value the benefits of education, education, education, they risk creating economic and social problems for which future generations will pay a heavy price.
Source: bbc.co.uk
I don’t usually give much in the way of credence to rumours of impending national decline, Britain has been going to the dogs since before Julius Cesar landed and things still seem to shake out ok most of the time, this week though a story floated onto my radar that gave me cause to feel a lot less sanguine.
According to the Association of Colleges (AOC) further education colleges across the UK could face cuts to their funding of up to 16% as the current government or the next grapples with spiralling public sector debt. The axe, if it falls, will see courses in construction and GCSE and A Level courses cut and the same blow will be dealt to the provision of courses for adults struggling to reach Level 2 in Maths or English.
AOC Chief Executive Martin Doel told the BBC this week that his members understood the challenge faced by the government as it struggles to balance the books and placate a nervous stock market but said that they feared the loss of ‘high quality courses that are essential to economic recovery.’
Sally Hunt, General Secretary of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) took up the case saying ‘the government has rightly identified education as a key driver of social mobility, making cuts to adult learning now would be an outrageous affront to the millions of people it promised not to let down.’
What, you might ask, has all of this got to do with the baby boomers, the generation we love to hate for having every opportunity you can think of handed to them on a plate and wasting the lot? The answer is quite simple, further education colleges, along with the former polytechnics that later turned themselves into universities like so many bookish caterpillars, are the concrete symbol of all the generation that still provides most of our ruling elite stands for.
They are, depending on your political persuasion, the engines of egalitarianism, a means of transforming education into a common good rather than something people who are too rich to ever really need it enjoy amidst dreaming spires; or a hothouse for dangerously ‘progressive’ ideas that have brought about social and economic chaos. The most notable feature, of course, of the baby boomers is their unfailing ability to mistake one extreme position or another for the moral high ground.
Those of us living in a less rarefied, meaning anywhere outside Notting Hill or Islington, know that colleges are something much more prosaic and more important; they’re the difference between success and failure.
Colleges are where kids, many of them boys, the perennial underachievers in the educational steeplechase, who were bored rigid by school get the chance to discover that education can be something other than tedious; it can be useful and even inspiring. Many people don’t make this discovery until they have experienced the daily grind of having a dead end job or having no job at all, which is why adult education is more important now than ever. F Scott Fitzgerald was wrong, life does have a second act and education is the tool we use to write its script.
There is also another argument to be made in favour of adult education, one that many people in and out of politics in this country find troubling because it requires them to believe in something. Education is a force for good not just because it helps to produce an efficient workforce to power the country out of the economic doldrums, but because it has the power to create fully rounded citizens by exposing participants to new ideas and teaching them the value of questioning everything.
This used to be something the ambitious men (and not a few women too) who formed the backbone of British civic life and could be found in the ranks of every political party represented at Westminster understood implicitly. Their descendents, many of whom benefited from a free university education, have forgotten this vital truth, meaning that by failing to value the benefits of education, education, education, they risk creating economic and social problems for which future generations will pay a heavy price.
Source: bbc.co.uk
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Harman’s class act.
This week Harriet Harman, long since identified as the standard bearer for all things out of touch and politically correct in the demonology on modern British politics, did something that requires considerable courage; she broached the subject of social class and its influence on the life chances of individuals.
In a speech made to left leaning think tank Compass last Thursday she said, ahead of a government sponsored report due to be released next week, that while she recognised the continued presence of racial and gender related prejudice there was ‘overarching and interweaving with these a persistent inequality of social class.’
The report is expected to show that children from poorer backgrounds are less well prepared to start school and that the average lifespan in wealthy areas is thirteen years longer than in disadvantaged ones. She went on to say the government had used ‘public policy interventions to halt the rising tide of inequality,’ much of which she said had been created during the years of Conservative rule from 1979 to 1997.
Responding to the speech Ms Harman’s Tory shadow Theresa May said that ‘over the past twelve years social mobility has stalled’ and claimed that faced with this all the Labour Party could do was ‘reach for the old fashioned response of class war.’
A Tory government, she said, would ‘deal with the causes of poverty and inequality, including educational failure, family breakdown and worklessness.’
In a week when the nation recoiled in horror from the details of the brutal attack carried out by two boys, aged respectively ten and eleven, in the former mining town of Edlington the hysterical tone of the debate may come across as distasteful but its subject matter is no less pertinent.
For the past quarter of a century social class, specifically the seemingly unstoppable growth of a feral underclass has been a subject nobody has wanted to talk about. The Tories tried to distract attention from it by claiming to have abolished the class system by allowing people to buy their council housed, the small matter of social housing being needed for a reason and if it disappears the problems it provided for will only become worse doesn’t seem to have registered on their radar. New Labour, as part of its admittedly brilliant marketing strategy under Tony Blair in the mid nineties sold everybody the notion that we’re all middle class now, at least we were so long as their new friends in the city kept coming through with limitless credit. Now that credit has dried up many of the people who maxed out their cards trying to ‘live the dream’ have got a ringside seat as it turns into a nightmare.
Recently class has made it back onto the agenda with David Cameron promising in his speech to the Tory party conference that the Conservatives would be the ‘party of the poor’, to date though his prescription for mending ‘broken Britain’ seems to consist of little more than a lukewarm promise of a tax break for married couples. There are people on the right talking sensibly about tackling inequality such as former party leader Iain Duncan Smith, but, like Labour’s Frank Field in the nineties, he is likely to be relegated to the fringes of the party once it returns to government.
The real burden of tackling social inequality rests with the Labour Party because issues of class are the reason for its existence. They are also what could bring about its destruction since the areas where the greatest hardships have been felt over the past quarter century also happen to be, nominally at least, Labour strongholds.
In her awkward, right-on way Harriet Harman seems to have recognised that Labour has to start talking about class, it’s too late for doing so to save them from losing the coming election, but it might just give the party a foundation upon which to build a new identity, one based on policy rather than the dark arts of spin.
In a speech made to left leaning think tank Compass last Thursday she said, ahead of a government sponsored report due to be released next week, that while she recognised the continued presence of racial and gender related prejudice there was ‘overarching and interweaving with these a persistent inequality of social class.’
The report is expected to show that children from poorer backgrounds are less well prepared to start school and that the average lifespan in wealthy areas is thirteen years longer than in disadvantaged ones. She went on to say the government had used ‘public policy interventions to halt the rising tide of inequality,’ much of which she said had been created during the years of Conservative rule from 1979 to 1997.
Responding to the speech Ms Harman’s Tory shadow Theresa May said that ‘over the past twelve years social mobility has stalled’ and claimed that faced with this all the Labour Party could do was ‘reach for the old fashioned response of class war.’
A Tory government, she said, would ‘deal with the causes of poverty and inequality, including educational failure, family breakdown and worklessness.’
In a week when the nation recoiled in horror from the details of the brutal attack carried out by two boys, aged respectively ten and eleven, in the former mining town of Edlington the hysterical tone of the debate may come across as distasteful but its subject matter is no less pertinent.
For the past quarter of a century social class, specifically the seemingly unstoppable growth of a feral underclass has been a subject nobody has wanted to talk about. The Tories tried to distract attention from it by claiming to have abolished the class system by allowing people to buy their council housed, the small matter of social housing being needed for a reason and if it disappears the problems it provided for will only become worse doesn’t seem to have registered on their radar. New Labour, as part of its admittedly brilliant marketing strategy under Tony Blair in the mid nineties sold everybody the notion that we’re all middle class now, at least we were so long as their new friends in the city kept coming through with limitless credit. Now that credit has dried up many of the people who maxed out their cards trying to ‘live the dream’ have got a ringside seat as it turns into a nightmare.
Recently class has made it back onto the agenda with David Cameron promising in his speech to the Tory party conference that the Conservatives would be the ‘party of the poor’, to date though his prescription for mending ‘broken Britain’ seems to consist of little more than a lukewarm promise of a tax break for married couples. There are people on the right talking sensibly about tackling inequality such as former party leader Iain Duncan Smith, but, like Labour’s Frank Field in the nineties, he is likely to be relegated to the fringes of the party once it returns to government.
The real burden of tackling social inequality rests with the Labour Party because issues of class are the reason for its existence. They are also what could bring about its destruction since the areas where the greatest hardships have been felt over the past quarter century also happen to be, nominally at least, Labour strongholds.
In her awkward, right-on way Harriet Harman seems to have recognised that Labour has to start talking about class, it’s too late for doing so to save them from losing the coming election, but it might just give the party a foundation upon which to build a new identity, one based on policy rather than the dark arts of spin.
Friday, 8 January 2010
Nothing to say for Britain’s tongue tied teens.
The grunting uncommunicative teenager is one of the classic cartoon images of modern British adolescence, if the findings of a YouGov poll released this week are correct it could hide an uncomfortable reality.
The poll, in which 1015 parents were questioned, found that 1in6 children in the UK, a quarter of them boys, had trouble learning to speak and out of these more than half had little or no access to help.
The report was carried out on the instructions of Jean Gross, England’s first ‘Communication Champion’, who told the BBC on the day its findings were announced ‘Our ability to talk is fundamental and underpins everything else. Learning to talk is one of the most important skills a child can master.’
Six out of ten of the parents questioned by YouGov agreed, saying that the ability to talk, listen and understand was the most important skill for a child to master in its early years, I shudder to think what the other four people questioned gave as an answer. Maybe they didn’t give an answer at all; maybe they just grunted.
You could be facetious about teenagers who pepper every sentence they utter with ‘like’ and ‘whatever’, isn’t that just how teenagers have always talked, meaning in a patois totally baffling to anyone over twenty five. That would be a mistake, yes teens have always used slang to separate their identity from that of their parents, doing so is a part of growing up and becoming a person in your own right, but there is huge gulf between that and being dangerously inarticulate.
Think of the slouching, hooded, binge drinking teenagers so beloved of tabloid columnists out to scare their readers and at the root of their problems is often an inability to communicate on either a written or verbal level, in fact the two are closely related. A student who finds it difficult to make his point verbally is hardly likely to ask for help with his lessons and so the cycle of exclusion gets more vicious with every turn.
I must admit to being more than a little dubious about the ability of a government appointed ‘Communication Champion’, complete with an office in central London staffed by a marching corps of civil servants to address the problems. Ms Gross could, and should, campaign for parents to be given more flexible working hours to allow them to spend more time interacting with their children, reading a picture book with mother (or father for that matter) is a splendid way for a child to learn about things like turn taking in conversation and to expand its vocabulary, but as cutting the budget deficit becomes ever more of a priority she may face a long struggle before she can produce even the most modest of results.
Perhaps we should, instead, think about the way in which personal interaction is being steadily eroded from our everyday lives. We shop, bank and, increasingly, socialise online and even supermarket checkouts have are rapidly being automated, all of which is undeniably quicker and more cost effective. At least it is if you count the cost in financial terms alone, the social cost though is quite different.
A child who experiences the interaction involved in running errands for its parents to the neighbourhood shops learns, without the addition of another burden on the already groaning national curriculum, how to interact in social situations, a skill that will be invaluable in later life. It would be a tragedy if our paranoia about child abduction and love of technology were to mean that future generations would be denied that experience.
One of the lighter notes to be found in the YouGov survey was that the most common first word spoken by babies in the UK is ‘Dadda’, experts claim this is because the ‘da’ sound is easy to reproduce. If we aren’t careful in a few years time baby’s first words might be ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ instead.
Source: bbc.co.uk
The poll, in which 1015 parents were questioned, found that 1in6 children in the UK, a quarter of them boys, had trouble learning to speak and out of these more than half had little or no access to help.
The report was carried out on the instructions of Jean Gross, England’s first ‘Communication Champion’, who told the BBC on the day its findings were announced ‘Our ability to talk is fundamental and underpins everything else. Learning to talk is one of the most important skills a child can master.’
Six out of ten of the parents questioned by YouGov agreed, saying that the ability to talk, listen and understand was the most important skill for a child to master in its early years, I shudder to think what the other four people questioned gave as an answer. Maybe they didn’t give an answer at all; maybe they just grunted.
You could be facetious about teenagers who pepper every sentence they utter with ‘like’ and ‘whatever’, isn’t that just how teenagers have always talked, meaning in a patois totally baffling to anyone over twenty five. That would be a mistake, yes teens have always used slang to separate their identity from that of their parents, doing so is a part of growing up and becoming a person in your own right, but there is huge gulf between that and being dangerously inarticulate.
Think of the slouching, hooded, binge drinking teenagers so beloved of tabloid columnists out to scare their readers and at the root of their problems is often an inability to communicate on either a written or verbal level, in fact the two are closely related. A student who finds it difficult to make his point verbally is hardly likely to ask for help with his lessons and so the cycle of exclusion gets more vicious with every turn.
I must admit to being more than a little dubious about the ability of a government appointed ‘Communication Champion’, complete with an office in central London staffed by a marching corps of civil servants to address the problems. Ms Gross could, and should, campaign for parents to be given more flexible working hours to allow them to spend more time interacting with their children, reading a picture book with mother (or father for that matter) is a splendid way for a child to learn about things like turn taking in conversation and to expand its vocabulary, but as cutting the budget deficit becomes ever more of a priority she may face a long struggle before she can produce even the most modest of results.
Perhaps we should, instead, think about the way in which personal interaction is being steadily eroded from our everyday lives. We shop, bank and, increasingly, socialise online and even supermarket checkouts have are rapidly being automated, all of which is undeniably quicker and more cost effective. At least it is if you count the cost in financial terms alone, the social cost though is quite different.
A child who experiences the interaction involved in running errands for its parents to the neighbourhood shops learns, without the addition of another burden on the already groaning national curriculum, how to interact in social situations, a skill that will be invaluable in later life. It would be a tragedy if our paranoia about child abduction and love of technology were to mean that future generations would be denied that experience.
One of the lighter notes to be found in the YouGov survey was that the most common first word spoken by babies in the UK is ‘Dadda’, experts claim this is because the ‘da’ sound is easy to reproduce. If we aren’t careful in a few years time baby’s first words might be ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ instead.
Source: bbc.co.uk
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