Elites of one kind or another have always dominated society. It's an unavoidable fact of life. Over the centuries, various societies have devised different structures and strictures to limit the power and influence of their elites; whether by legislation, direct action or revolution. Inevitably, however, in displacing one elite group they have merely tilled the ground ready for another to come along and plant itself.
Between the two world wars, over a third of the UK workforce was employed in service; a huge army of worker ants busting their collective gut to ensure that their betters - as they preferred to think of themselves - could enjoy privileges totally disproportionate to their value to society. . Even countries which had turfed out the traditional "toffs"- Russia, China, France ,Germany - rapidly filled the vacuum with their own newly minted versions; party officials, intellectuals and others who were eager to endorse and legitimise the claims of the new rulers. Despite the popular American notion that they enjoy a "classless" society, the same was just as true in the US; and still is today.
Several things changed the status quo, at least in Great Britain. The first was the steady, if not unchallenged, rise of the Trades Union movement between the wars and after WW11. The second was the war itself. The imperatives of war forced the government of the day to turn to women to do jobs that had been the sole preserve of men. Female tractor drivers, pilots, ambulance crew, factory workers and miners filled the gaps left by men dispatched to the front line.
After the war, those men returned to a country and society they hardly recognised; bankrupt, battered and with few prospects for immediate economic recovery. Their jobs had either disappeared or, in some cases, been successfully taken by women. Their homes, if they were still standing, were in a state of disrepair and neglect. Yet, the elite - the monied classes in both town and country - expected normal Service - or more accurately servitude - to be resumed immediately.
Given this scenario, it was surprising only to the elite that the masses responded at the earliest possible opportunity by electing a Labour Government. As Hartley Shawcross is consistently misquoted as saying: "We are the masters now". Of course, the fact that Shawcross was a Baron by inheritance meant that he had always been a master, but you get the point. It was the people who now held the reins of power.
Irrespective of anything else they did, that Labour Government's legacy included two very significant achievements; the provision of universal health care through the National Health Service and through their implementartion of the Tories' Education Act 1944, a secondary education free for all pupils. At the tip of this tripartite system was the selective Grammar School, which opened up the prospect of attainment and advancement to children from even the poorest homes.
A whole generation of children was able to escape the inner-city through a grammar education. Their horizons were expanded dramatically simply through exposure to a higher form of learning. By the Sixties, it was no longer unusual for the brightest and best to make it to Oxford of Cambridge.
Of course, beneath this pinnacle of achievement was the rest of the pyramid; those who, for one reason or another, had missed out on selection. Inevitably, and ironically, Labour's own legislation had created a new elite. Rather than money or heritage this one was founded on education. It wasn't long before the Levellers -epitomised by Anthony Crosland- were plotting to destroy the grammar system because of its "unfairness". Ironically the man who said ""If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland" was himself the product of a selective education; at Highgate School and Oxford University.
In that sense, he is not merely the original template for Nu-Labour ministers and apparatchiks but could almost be regarded as their spiritual father.
Virtually every member of the current Labour administration is a product of selective education. Many of them - Harriet Harman, Tony Blair, Ed Balls, the brothers Milliband - were formed in precisely the same kind of mould as Crosland - fee-paying private schools followed by Oxbridge. Under them, the standard of education in Great Britain has been so comprehensively devalued that mediocrity is now the benchmark. Statistically, we have more pupils passing more exams than at any point in our history. Almost 50% of the school-going population gets a shot at a university education. Every year, the propaganda machine gets cranked up. The papers are full of pictures of teenagers ecstatic at discovering they have scored five As at A level. Harman, Balls, the Millibands and even Brown himself will do the rounds of the TV and Radio studios to characterise anyone who questions the exponential rise in examination grades as a reactionary blimp who doesn't appreciate the sheer effort and sacrifice "our kids" have had to make to achieve this amazing level of success.
Conversely, the international league tables for Maths, English, Physics, Geography show that we are slipping, relentlessly, down the educational ladder to share rungs with the likes of Botswana and Estonia. Many of our leading universities are having to provide British pupils with the basic Maths and language skills they need before they can even start their course proper. So a three year degree turns into four years. For poorer pupils, or those that are not so motivated, that extra year of tuition fees might translate into loans and other financial sacrifices they are not able or willing to make.
In case you think that I am reporting this second hand; think again. I work for an international engineering company that has a fresh intake of science and engineering graduates every year. We have not been approached by any British-born graduates of sufficient quality for the last two years.
So, are we take it that the real world we have to deal with every day is wrong? That 22 year old graduates cannot write a proper sentence or do basic arithmetic not through lack of intelligence but shoddy education? Or do we believe the government when it says these young people have enjoyed the benefits of a hugely successful education system? And, therefore, if they can't do basic arithmetic they must, by definition, be terminally thick?
Because the only alternative is to assume that our Government is deliberately and consistently lying to us. And that it is being aided and abetted in those lies by the bulk of the public educational establishment.
If so, what is its purpose?
Well, we are back to the elite again, are we not. The Balls, Harmans, Straws, Millibands have arrived where they are by virtue being better prepared, better briefed and better connected. In other words, they have all enjoyed the fruits of a selective education. Irrespective of the school they went to or its location, their educational environment would have been challenging, invigorating, disciplined, competitive and achievement oriented.
These are the very attributes that they are, systematically, trying to excise from the modern school experience. Children - sorry KIDS - must not be stretched, challenged or forced to compete. Above all,they must not be subject to discipline.
After all, what is the point of becoming an elite if you provide the same opportunities for another fifty million or so people to join you at the top of the greasy pole. Far better for everyone if you dumb the system down, even while denying that you are doing so. Make mediocrity the new gold standard and then only a very few will ever escape the great mass of the ill-educated to challenge your position at the top.
Thursday, 19 June 2008
Sunday, 15 June 2008
Yet another Brown miscalculation
In typical fashion, Not so Flash Gordon saw the resignation of David Davis as another opportunity to land a blow from his great clunking fist on the opposition. Yet again of course, this man that the political sycophants have always characterised as the consummate politician, has miscalulated. As usual, he took his soundings not from the people who really matter - the electorate - but from the coterie of advisers and clingers-on that pass for his policy advisors. They, crippled by the same kind of narrow perspective as their master, saw in Davis a man who was going against the wishes of his political masters and, incredulously, was willing to sacrifice a high-flying political career on a matter of principle. Of course, to the party of Mandelson, Prescott and Blair, this was such an alien concept that they, gleefully, concluded that he must have lost his marbles.
Accordingly, Brown started an immediate tour of his media lackeys to opine long and loudly that Davis's resignation was not a statement of intent, a stand against the sovietising of our country, but a symptom of the deep divisions in the Conservative Party. Incredibly, the man who had just spent an estimated £1.2 billion of our money to bribe Ian Paisley's motley crew and various dissenting Labour die-hards into backing 42 days detention without trial, labelled Davis's resignation a mere stunt.
From a brief trawl through the weekend's papers, it is already obvious that Brown has backed the wrong horse once again. In fact, not just backed the wrong horse but entered it into the wrong race. The Davis resignation has already achieved one thing that Brown didn't want. It has brought the whole subject of the State, unchecked bureaucracy and our crumbling democracy to the forefront of the political debate. Brown - miscalculating again - then made a snap decision on the Irish Electorate's emphatic rejection of the Lisbon Treaty; namely that it would not alter his mind one iota. Coming hard on the heels of mocking Davis for standing up for our civil liberties and democracy, it only served to highlight NSF Gordon's inherent contempt for the British People and our democratic traditions. He will be gone before long.
If Brown himself were not bad enough, most of the other occupants of the Westminster Asylum - including the media pack that feeds off the offal the politicians choose to throw them - were not far behind; snarling their disbelief at what Davis had done. Their protestations that he is undermining Parliament sound particularly lame coming from a group of MPs who are happy to have most of our rules invented in Brussels and have just voted to hand over what little power remains at the earliest opportunity.
What really scared them of course was not that he had resigned, but the fact that he, apparently, did so as a matter of principle. Good Lord what sort of world are we living in when a man with his snout just a whisker's breath away from the trough of Government and all the perks, prestige and priviledge that entails, willingly gives it all up on a point of PRINCIPLE? What sort of precedent could he be setting? What sort of ideas might it give the constituents of other MPs; next thing you know, they might all start wanting their Member of Parliament to act like the Honourable Member that he or she is supposed to be.
And that would never do, Would it?
Accordingly, Brown started an immediate tour of his media lackeys to opine long and loudly that Davis's resignation was not a statement of intent, a stand against the sovietising of our country, but a symptom of the deep divisions in the Conservative Party. Incredibly, the man who had just spent an estimated £1.2 billion of our money to bribe Ian Paisley's motley crew and various dissenting Labour die-hards into backing 42 days detention without trial, labelled Davis's resignation a mere stunt.
From a brief trawl through the weekend's papers, it is already obvious that Brown has backed the wrong horse once again. In fact, not just backed the wrong horse but entered it into the wrong race. The Davis resignation has already achieved one thing that Brown didn't want. It has brought the whole subject of the State, unchecked bureaucracy and our crumbling democracy to the forefront of the political debate. Brown - miscalculating again - then made a snap decision on the Irish Electorate's emphatic rejection of the Lisbon Treaty; namely that it would not alter his mind one iota. Coming hard on the heels of mocking Davis for standing up for our civil liberties and democracy, it only served to highlight NSF Gordon's inherent contempt for the British People and our democratic traditions. He will be gone before long.
If Brown himself were not bad enough, most of the other occupants of the Westminster Asylum - including the media pack that feeds off the offal the politicians choose to throw them - were not far behind; snarling their disbelief at what Davis had done. Their protestations that he is undermining Parliament sound particularly lame coming from a group of MPs who are happy to have most of our rules invented in Brussels and have just voted to hand over what little power remains at the earliest opportunity.
What really scared them of course was not that he had resigned, but the fact that he, apparently, did so as a matter of principle. Good Lord what sort of world are we living in when a man with his snout just a whisker's breath away from the trough of Government and all the perks, prestige and priviledge that entails, willingly gives it all up on a point of PRINCIPLE? What sort of precedent could he be setting? What sort of ideas might it give the constituents of other MPs; next thing you know, they might all start wanting their Member of Parliament to act like the Honourable Member that he or she is supposed to be.
And that would never do, Would it?
Monday, 9 June 2008
The 42 day smokescreen
People who represent a clear and present danger to the security of our country should be locked up for 42 days without trial. That is the message that Jacqui Smith has been peddling so assiduously for the last month or so.
Why 42 days ? Who has actually analysed previous security breaches in such detail that they have been able to calculate the precise number of days the authorities would need to be certain of gaining a conviction in the future? 42 is such an exact number. Why not 50; or 60 days? After all they are equally nice, equally rounded numbers.
The answer, of course, is that the number of days is neither here nor there. It could just as easily be 102 or 12.
The only true purpose of the 42 day detention debate has been to create a smoke screen. Think about it. What is currently wending its way through the entrails of the British parliamentary system that will have a far more dramatic and long-term effect on democracy in this country than any 42 day detention policy?
Identity Cards, perhaps?
No, this is even more serious than Nu Labour's plan to turn each of us into a human bar code.
Then it must be the Police database containing the DNA of over a million innocent people, right?Close, but no cigar.
It's the Lisbon Treaty, stupid.
While Jacqui and Gordon - who would surely have been a white crimplene suited Seventies cabaret act in another life - have been insisting on the need to imprison anyone they want for 42 days without trial, the bill to enable the Lisbon Teaty is about to be debated in the House of Lords having been rammed through the Commons by the battering ram of vested interests known as the Europhile tendency.
It is a strange creature, Europe. Poll after poll demonstrates that the British people are heartily sick of being sucked any further into its web. More people than ever are calling not just for the ties to be loosened but severed completely. Yet, our political elite conspires to bind us ever closer, mocking our protests while denying that we have anything to protest about in the first place.
That elite includes not just the current crop of party leaders but all of their predecessors from the Seventies onwards; including Maggie Thatcher. She, like the rest, knew precisely the nature of our relationship with Europe. She and they have accepted for many years that the eventual aim was a United States of Europe in which Great Britain would become a province with slightly fewer powers than, say, Georgia currently does in relation to the federal government of the USA.
Peter Lilley made this plain in the Commons last week. As he said, over 80% of all the laws and regulations to which we now have to adhere start their life inside the EU Commission. Our Government Ministers like to claim these bits of legislation as their own. But only to maintain the fiction that anything they or anyone else at Westminster does, has any real effect on life in modern Britain.
The truth is, of course, that our feeble, mediocre Parliament is an anachronism. Its members are as relevant as a sail in a submarine; as powerless as the Queen has been for the last fifty years. But, still they go on posturing, posing and conniving in dark corners as if it matters a jot which of them ends up as Party leader or deputy leader. Occasionally, in a moment of lucidity or honesty, one of their number spills the beans. This time it is Peter Lilley. In the past, William Hague has come close to admitting the same thing; that the House of Commons is to Brussels what your local Town Hall used to be to Westminster.
Nobody takes very much notice for the simple reason that every effort is made to divert our attention. Every time a major European story is about to grab the headlines, the media are chucked another, more juicy bone to get their collective teeths into. It's been Nu labour's way of manipulating the news since its very first days in office. The lickspittles otherwise known as political journalists play along happily with the charade; willingly recycling rumours and briefings to keep the pot boiling and everyone's attention from the debate that really matters; what is happening to our democracy as the tentacles of Europa wrap themselves ever tighter around us.
This time is no different. We have been told in no uncertain terms that there will be no referendum. The elite has closed ranks. Doubters have, as usual, been branded Eurosceptics and Little Englanders. Meanwhile, Gordon and Jacqui, abetted by their media chums, continue to do their bit; puffing out billows of chaff about 42 days detention to keep the European question firmly off the radar.
Once the Lisbon Treaty passes the Lords, the fog will clear and we will all be sailing full-steam for the sunlit uplands of Europe. (Unless the Irish chuck a large Celtic spanner in the works of course and chuck the whole idea of the Lisbon Treaty out on its ear. ) Either way, with Lisbon resolved, just watch how quickly Gordon caves in to back-bench demands for a fresh debate on the whole question of detention without trial.
Why 42 days ? Who has actually analysed previous security breaches in such detail that they have been able to calculate the precise number of days the authorities would need to be certain of gaining a conviction in the future? 42 is such an exact number. Why not 50; or 60 days? After all they are equally nice, equally rounded numbers.
The answer, of course, is that the number of days is neither here nor there. It could just as easily be 102 or 12.
The only true purpose of the 42 day detention debate has been to create a smoke screen. Think about it. What is currently wending its way through the entrails of the British parliamentary system that will have a far more dramatic and long-term effect on democracy in this country than any 42 day detention policy?
Identity Cards, perhaps?
No, this is even more serious than Nu Labour's plan to turn each of us into a human bar code.
Then it must be the Police database containing the DNA of over a million innocent people, right?Close, but no cigar.
It's the Lisbon Treaty, stupid.
While Jacqui and Gordon - who would surely have been a white crimplene suited Seventies cabaret act in another life - have been insisting on the need to imprison anyone they want for 42 days without trial, the bill to enable the Lisbon Teaty is about to be debated in the House of Lords having been rammed through the Commons by the battering ram of vested interests known as the Europhile tendency.
It is a strange creature, Europe. Poll after poll demonstrates that the British people are heartily sick of being sucked any further into its web. More people than ever are calling not just for the ties to be loosened but severed completely. Yet, our political elite conspires to bind us ever closer, mocking our protests while denying that we have anything to protest about in the first place.
That elite includes not just the current crop of party leaders but all of their predecessors from the Seventies onwards; including Maggie Thatcher. She, like the rest, knew precisely the nature of our relationship with Europe. She and they have accepted for many years that the eventual aim was a United States of Europe in which Great Britain would become a province with slightly fewer powers than, say, Georgia currently does in relation to the federal government of the USA.
Peter Lilley made this plain in the Commons last week. As he said, over 80% of all the laws and regulations to which we now have to adhere start their life inside the EU Commission. Our Government Ministers like to claim these bits of legislation as their own. But only to maintain the fiction that anything they or anyone else at Westminster does, has any real effect on life in modern Britain.
The truth is, of course, that our feeble, mediocre Parliament is an anachronism. Its members are as relevant as a sail in a submarine; as powerless as the Queen has been for the last fifty years. But, still they go on posturing, posing and conniving in dark corners as if it matters a jot which of them ends up as Party leader or deputy leader. Occasionally, in a moment of lucidity or honesty, one of their number spills the beans. This time it is Peter Lilley. In the past, William Hague has come close to admitting the same thing; that the House of Commons is to Brussels what your local Town Hall used to be to Westminster.
Nobody takes very much notice for the simple reason that every effort is made to divert our attention. Every time a major European story is about to grab the headlines, the media are chucked another, more juicy bone to get their collective teeths into. It's been Nu labour's way of manipulating the news since its very first days in office. The lickspittles otherwise known as political journalists play along happily with the charade; willingly recycling rumours and briefings to keep the pot boiling and everyone's attention from the debate that really matters; what is happening to our democracy as the tentacles of Europa wrap themselves ever tighter around us.
This time is no different. We have been told in no uncertain terms that there will be no referendum. The elite has closed ranks. Doubters have, as usual, been branded Eurosceptics and Little Englanders. Meanwhile, Gordon and Jacqui, abetted by their media chums, continue to do their bit; puffing out billows of chaff about 42 days detention to keep the European question firmly off the radar.
Once the Lisbon Treaty passes the Lords, the fog will clear and we will all be sailing full-steam for the sunlit uplands of Europe. (Unless the Irish chuck a large Celtic spanner in the works of course and chuck the whole idea of the Lisbon Treaty out on its ear. ) Either way, with Lisbon resolved, just watch how quickly Gordon caves in to back-bench demands for a fresh debate on the whole question of detention without trial.
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