Is there any point to this Iraq inquiry?

I think I've answered my own question. Any testimony the government is comfortable with will be heard in open court. If there is anything the government (or Tony Blair) doesn't want us to know it will be heard in secret, or not at all. In time (at least a year we are now told) some anodyne report will be published that nproves nothing, exonerates everyone and promises to learn lessons from some of the minor cock-ups.

Heigh ho!

Making a killing

- What can we do about these Taleban wallahs? We're being killed by all these bad headlines. Soldiers dying, wounded ... Can't we put a stop to it?

- More soldiers, more equipment?

- Not on old boy! GB has spoken! We need to find a battle we can win.

- Well sir, there is the court option.

- The court option?

- Yes sir, two soldiers have been given an increased compensation award on a court ruling. We could appeal that. We're bound to win in a higher court if we put enough resources behind it.

- How much s involved?

- Not very much sir, but there is a principle at stake.

- Principle! Of course. Yes I like that. We need more principled action around here.

- So you approve sir.

- Absolutely. Get the legal boys on it right away. A battle we can win. That's cheered me up immensely.

No surprise

Guido reports today that MPs have surreptitiously increase their subsistence allowance from £400 a month to £500. As before no receipts are required. Expect then to see reports next year of increased allowances for MPs. Obviously they don't care about public opinion. Obviously they don't need to care about public opinion because the electoral machinery of our so-called democracy has been stitched up to keep out potential renegades.

The lesson that might be learned from Ian Gibson's defenestration is that what really doesn't pay is to question the policies of party leadership.

The Left and Islam

Martin Bright appears to be held in high regard in media circles. I am not sure why because what I have read of his writing appears to be long on dogma and short on thoughtful analysis. He used to be editor of the once highly respected New Statesman - a weekly I read regularly in the 1960s - until he was kicked out for being too critical of Gordon Brown's government. He now writes a blog for the Spectator's Coffee House - I assume amongst other activities.

His place at the New Statesman has been taken by one Mehdi Hasan who apparently has this to say:

“The kaffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to the teachings of Islam, the rational message of the Quran; they are described in the Quran as, quote, “a people of no intelligence”, Allah describes them as; not of no morality, not as people of no belief - people of “no intelligence” - because they’re incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God. In this respect, the Quran describes the atheists as “cattle”, as cattle of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world.”

What is more dispiriting is Martin Bright's response:

What can I say? Nothing at all. I am speechless.

Fortunately most of Martin Bright's respondents are not speechless and most were able to provide good analyses of the state of affairs we have come to, whereby the left have unthinkingly embraced Islamic thinking because it is not Christian or not Jewish.

We have all grown up in ignorance of Islam. Most of us were taught about Christianity and Judaism as we were growing up and to a degree these religions have become thoroughly westernized. There were flirtations with Arabism 100 years ago by such as T E Lawrence but such interest never entered the mainstream, so now when we have to belatedly pay attention we are caught without any framework of knowledge to properly place Islam.

Most people on the left of politics in the 1960s could reassure themselves that the policies they were pursuing would make society a better place. There was an ideology worth fighting for. We may now look back on that period as the high water mark of state socialism. The inexorable trend to excessive central control, capture of programs by special interest groups has led to a gradual undermining of all those good intentions. Worse, many of these services are downright counterproductive. Almost everyone now realizes that, even at an unconscious level, and this has left many adherents to the left with an attachment that has been stripped of its core ideology.

Vacuums will always be filled and it is perhaps no surprise that those with highly defined viewpoints, like the IRA or militant Islam will fill open minds.

Hugh Stowell Brown

It is astonishing what you can find on the internet these days. I knew about Hugh Stowell Brown and his association with Wolverton but had hitherto been unable to access his memoirs. Fortunately someone has taken the trouble to put this online recently so I was able to read his account.

Brown was a Manxman and the son of a cleric. He came to England as a 16 year old, worked as a surveyor for a while and in August 1840 came to Wolverton as an apprentice fitter - for which he was paid 4s a week. He worked there for 3 and a half years before deciding to become a Methodist minister, eventually preaching in Liverpool and achieving a degree of fame.

His account of Wolverton is invaluable because he gives us a view from the shop floor. Other contemporary accounts that survive were from visitors who tended to be impressed by the wonder rather than the reality. Although the days were long the men found ways of slacking off when the foreman was not looking, therefore pacing their day within the unreasonable demands of the machine.

He is also highly critical of the incumbents of the local churches and poor church attendance - a view which contradicts our received picture of Victorian church attendance. He also notes, unsurprisingly, the amount of heavy drinking that went on.

One young man with whom he shared lodgings was Edward Hayes, who a few years later set up his own engineering company, first making agricultural machinery and then moving into the manufacture of yachts and tug boats. One of Hayes surviving boats is on display at the Milton Keynes Museum.

A spoonful of Sugar

I have no objection to “Suralan” Sugar as a businessman or even as a television entertainer. I have wayched and enjoyed the Apprentice series. I don’t even object to his appointment to the House of Lords - he wouldn’t be the first millionaire to be so rewarded for making suitable contributions in the right places.
But it does stick in my craw that the Son of the Manse should lecture us endlessly about his values and then appoint a man who is the avowed embodiment of the very opposite of these so-called values.
Once again the moral compass is spinning!

Reducing Shakespeare

My stock answer, when challenged as to the point of studying Shakespeare, went something like this. Reading is known to be a good way of developing one’s vocabulary and fluency with language. Shakespeare tells interesting stories and is generally acclaimed as one of the best writers in English of all time. So the study of Shakespeare can usually meet two or more objectives. Yes it is difficult and challenging but what do you think would be best for you - trying to climb a mountain or climbing three steps to your house so that you can flop on the couch?
It was with some surprise, even shock, when I was supply teaching at a school in Portsmouth some ten years ago, that I found they were teaching Macbeth to some weaker students by showing them a ten minute cartoon film of the story and asking them to write a paragraph about it. This apparently satisfied the demands of the National Curriculum to include Shakespeare at GCSE!
No dumbing down here!

School's out!

The social engineers are at it again. Not content with slowly wrecking an working education system over a generation or two they now continue to believe that the answer is more tinkering, more attention and resources for the unambitious and unworthy, more quotas, more dumbing down and more blithe ignoring of hard working students who happen to have parents who care about their future.
Whatever Mr Milburn may parrot from manifestos past the answer is surely not there.
Let me go back in time. I went to a Grammar School in 1953. They had been invented only a few years earlier and GCE only on 1951. The school had been there since 1908 when it operated as a County Secondary School taking students from North Buckinghamshire towns and villages either on a scholarship or on a fee paying basis. The fees were something like £10 per annum in the 1930s, according to my other.
When it became a Grammar School in 1946 it scarcely missed a beat. Most of the teachers had been there before the war and continued thereafter. Teachers did not move much in those days, unless to become a head. The school hierarchy was very simple - a head, a senior master, a senior mistress, and the rest were simply teachers.
The point here is that schools were stable institutions. An uncle of mine left the army in 1945, trained as a teacher, found a job in his home town, and stayed there for his entire career. he was not untypical of his generation.
The pass rate for the 11+ in my day was about 20-25% so most of my friends went to the Secondary Modern where they received a more rudimentary education. They had no science labs and they did not do French. They probably spent more time doing woodwork or domestic science and they were not burdened with homework. It did not compare with today’s curriculum.
What I can report is what happened to some of my friends and contemporaries who left school at 15. One became a newspaper reporter, one started as an apprentice butcher and eventually went on to become a hotel owner, one started as an office boy in an insurance office and retired as a millionaire, another now owns his own printing business in New York city, one joined the police and rose to the rank of inspector; several took up trade apprenticeships and went on to steady if unspectacular careers. Those of us who went to the Grammar School filled jobs in the Civil Service, Banks, Teaching, and middle management in industry. Since I didn’t hang out with rougher characters I can’t speak for how they turned out but what I have represented is a fair cross section of the middle ranks of society.
Have things really changed that much? We are told that the gap between rich and poor has widened, but that may only be because the rich have become very much richer. The broad swathe of people are still in the middle. On the other and it may well be that those members of society who are not interested in much beyond their immediate needs are still happy to use their disposable income in beer and fags.
In my day those of us who get to the Grammar School were generally grateful for the opportunity and made something of it. Equally, those who didn’t got on with life and made the best of the opportunities they did have. The idea that children were consigned to oblivion at the age of 11 was never remotely true and was usually asserted by well-to-do left wingers who had no experience of how most of us lived. That hasn’t changed either.
George Orwell came to the conclusion many years ago that revolutions are usually initiated by the well-to-do middle classes who massively resent the rich who have so much more. ordinary people are not much bothered and are more interested in getting on with their lives with minimal interference. So the revolution in education has been brought about by people who resent the Etons and Harrows while having no understanding of what most people want or need from education. Grammar Schools, which tended to model themselves on the better Public Schools, had to go.At the same time they decided to make schools larger and more unmanageable - misunderstanding the concept of “economies of scale”.
At each stage in this revolution schools and their masters happily took on every social issue and slowly squeezed out the one thing they used to do well - academic teaching. Tests were massaged, statistics engineered, money squandered as futile attempts were made to prove that the idea of the comprehensive school was the right one.
And there is nothing wrong with the Comprehensive school as an institution which draws upon its neighbourhood. Many countries do this successfully, but they haven’t built huge monolithic housing estates.
Far better to accept that this is England

Tristram Hunt and Karl Rove

You can't condemn Tristram Hunt for lack of imagination. In a Guardian article the other day he interprets Andrew Lansley's apparently unguarded comments about ring-fencing NHS spending and making budget cuts elsewhere in 2011 as a prime example of Karl Rove's school of "down and dirty" politics.

Let me see if I have understood the argument. Lansley says in an interview that ring-fencing NHS spending in 2011 will probably mean cuts of about 10% in all other departments. Gordon Brown immediately jumps in and hints darkly that cuts by the Conservatives will lead to shoeless children and little old ladies out on the streets in mid-winter. It turns out that Lansley was using the governments own figures. Undeterred Brown and his cabinet continue with the lie that there will be continuous investment under Labour and only the Conservatives will cut. The media for once are awake, as indeed are political bloggers. They examine the figures and find that the Conservatives are speaking the truth on this matter and that Brown is determined to carry on lying.

In Mr Hunt's mind this is an illuminating example of dirty politics on the part of the Conservatives. How very devious of them to expose Brown's lying and indeed to bring the media along with them.

Obviously we would all be much better off if the lies were allowed to continue and the media continued to behave themselves!

Parenting

Last night I was in conversation into the small hours with some young people. The subject veered at one point to Attention Deficit Disorder and similar syndromes. Some of the women there had young children of school age. I think I was mildly surprised that they regarded ADD as hokum. They all seemed to accept that children will misbehave and boys in particular will push the envelope and are often more difficult; however they were all of a mind that firm and consistent discipline (and patience) was the answer rather than drugs. They were all in agreement that some teachers tend to ascribe any difficulty to ADD and frequently refer them.

Of course I agree with their position. there is no substitute for good old fashioned "common sense" and tried and tested methods for rearing children. Why is it that all the accumulated experience of centuries must be tossed aside in favour of "expert" intervention and a (usually) chemical solution. These young parents are right to be concerned that their children may be subdued temporarily by chemicals when no one knows the long term impact of such intervention.

It is only two generations ago that children were corrected and punished if necessary. It wasn't always fair from the child's point of view, but it worked. I cannot remember an instance of a child in my own experience of primary and secondary school who could not be handled by a teacher. Now it appears that there are many in today's schools who cannot be tamed by present day methods.

So, no consistent rules from split families, indulgent treatment from parents who feel guilty about spending too much time away from their children, a refusal to allow teachers to act in loco parentis in any meaningful way, a lot of hand-wringing from the authorities and we end up with a vacuum that is filled by self-appointed "experts" who are happy to prescribe any theoretical solution to a problem they have no personal commitment to.

And as with so many areas of life nowadays, the hard solution - in this case old fashioned parenting - is the one many people like to avoid.

One ray of hope however (and the women I was listening to last night are probably not representative) is that some mothers and fathers are still committed to oold fashioned parenting.