The New Papacy

Everybody seems to be getting excited about Tony Blair becoming EU President. I think that possibility was torpedoed yesterday by Gordon Brown's clumsy support.
But surely the real concern is the office itself. We are assured on one hand that this is merely a President of the Council - no more than a Chairman of the Board - while Blair's people are clearly campaigning for a bigger role closer to that of the President of the United States, and one thing we can all be certain about is that over time this will be the evolution of the European Presidency.
Now I am not necessarily against this. I am no clinger to the pretensions of Britain's imperial past. I am not a little Englander. There are clear advantages to a federation of nations particularly in this so-called global economy. My concern is the evolution of a profoundly undemocratic system of governance. European nations have, after centuries of struggle, developed systems of government which take some account of the wishes of the governed whereas the EU has steadfastly set its face against consultation. Thus we end up with a constitution with no popular mandate, a European Parliament with no influence and now a President who is to be chosen by an effective College of Cardinals.
Black smoke or white smoke a President will be imposed upon us. The mediaeval Papacy returns!

Time to move on indeed

I listened to Tony McNulty try to explain himself at lunchtime. He convinced himself, although not me. Apparently he did everything within the rules, the investigating committee changed the rules, he was happy to comply with the committee's wish that he should pay the money back, he was sorry for whatever it was he should be sorry about, now was the time to "move on".
I don't think my jaw was the only one to drop to the floor. Our present crop of politicians are oblivious to embarrassment and impervious to shame. And even more incredible, we are being subjected to arguments that if we don't offer good pay and perks to prospective MPs we will not attract the best candidates for the job! Words fail me! They really do! McNulty, let us remember, was a minister, presumably one of the best and brightest the current system can offer the voting public. And what does he represent? A certain skill in presenting himself to the Westminster media and an unshakeable belief that everything his party thinks up and does, however misconceived and benighted, is good for us.
It is time to move on - to a new parliament and a new government.

Getting on yer bike!

I listened to Digby Jones this morning observe that unemployed people in England are reluctant to move away from home to where the jobs are. Apparently this is never a problem in North America and may suggest why they recover from recessions more easily. Yesterday I was talking to a man from Yorkshire who had relocated in my home town - he was surprised to observe how many families he encountered who could illustrate three and four generations of residence in the area.
Two random observations on the same phenomenon. However, in the case of Wolverton it was not always so. In 1838 the manor had a small rural population not much above 200. The new railway works was forced to, and di, reruit from all over the country.The early censuses illustrate this with many coming from Scotland and the North East together with representatives from all across the country. As the century moves on the second generation, those born in Wolverton, were able to find work in the expanding railway works, and so this went on for a third and fourth and fifth generation.
Wolverton was fairly lucky in that the Council, anticipating the decline in the railways, made efforts to attract new companies and the later development of Milton Keynes meant that there was plenty of work. Men did move in the fifties and sixties to Coventry and Luton to take high paying jobs in the car industry, but in the main the population remained settled.
There are however many parts of this country where work is scarce and, if Digby Jones is right, many parts where there is a shortage of workers. Government policy over the past decade or so has been to provide welfare for the unemployed in high unemployment areas and to bring in immigrants where there are labour shortages.
Can this continue to make sense in a weak economy? Perhaps we need to reprise the circumstances which led many of our nineteenth forbears to leave their ancestral villages and find work in the new towns.

The public stoning of Nick Griffin

Griffin is clearly an inadequate man and to my mind fits the profile of wannabee politicians who can't or won't make their way in the mainstream parties. Better, they believe, to be a big fish in a small pond than to be a small one in an ocean.
Even so, last night's roasting on Question Time was hardly edifying. Dimbleby, all the panelists and the selected audience all lined up to take pot shots at Griffin and a kind of mob mentality prevailed. In a normal question time the news issues of the day (postal strike, Afghanistan) are the topics for questions and each panelist is invited to offer their views on the subject. In my view they should have stuck to that format. Instead all these issues were ignored so that the panelists and the audience could tell us what a venomous lot the BNP are.
Let's calmly take stock of the situation. The BNP are picking up votes from (probably white) working class labour voters who have got tired of being taken for granted. They have been patronized for a decade or more, patted on the head and told not to worry about immigration because it was good for the economy. In the mean time they read tabloid stories about illegal immigrants, lost records, the inability to deport criminals, queue jumping for council accommodation and so on. Even if none of this is true (as we are told by government) there is a perception that it is. And perception is everything in politics.
The BNP has the tiniest toe-hold in the body politic. It has taken the Liberal party 60 years to go from 6 seats to 60 and it took the labour Party a very long time to become the dominant party. British politics changes at a glacial pace.
I know there is the example of Nazi germany, but both Germany and Italy were barely 50 years old as countries in 1920 and the instability of the post WWI period made them ripe for a struggle between the communists and the fascists. Both were fighting for a totalitarian state. The fascists won that round, but in the end the totalitarian state could not survive in Europe - a didn't. However, we all had a nasty scare and a lot of blood was shed. Too much to ever want to go through that again.
I would agree that we need to be ever vigilant, but I am not sure that Nick Griffin is worth the effort that the establishment has expended in the last few days. he is nowhere near as powerful as Oswald Moseley was and is really a political pygmy, in my view.
Did this public stoning do any good? I suspect that the Question Time viewers were never likely to consider a vote for the BNP. I for one have not even bothered to find out what their policies are. They are not going to represent me. I am simply not interested. However, the ones who do vote for them are unlikely to be Question Time viewers and all they will get out of this isthe reporting prior to the event and today's news stories. Will this change their mind?

A little learning

Because my birthday falls at the end of August I was always the youngest in my class. Fifty years later I learned that this had put me at some disadvantage and looking back I can see the truth of this. It took me until I was about 13 or 14 before I could fully compete with my peers.
However I did not feel especially disadvantaged at the time; I probably tried harder and I suppose I have been rewarded for that in the long run. Neither my teachers nor my parents knew about this phenomenon. My parents talked from time-to-time about my being a "late developer" but I wasn't really. I just developed later than the older boys in my class - in other words, at a normal rate.
My point here is that because nobody knew that there was a problem, there was no problem.
This morning I listened to Ed Balls reject the idea of raising the school starting age to 6 because "we have to identify problems early and intervene early". This remark seems to encapsulate the problem and my intuition tells me that early intervention often creates problems where none might exist, if children were simply allowed to mature at their own rate.
England leads the world in starting children at school early and it has to be said that the results are no better at the other end than other developed countries, and in some cases a lot worse. My children started school at the age of 6 in Canada and as adults they turned out just as well as if they had started at 5.
I remember reading about 40 years ago about the theory of "learning readiness" put forward by some educational psychologists. The concept was that at certain ages you could easily accept learning that had been difficult at an earlier age. So, for example, a boy of 8 could start learning to read and in two months would be on par with those who had been reading for three years. And these observations were made from a time when some children started school later.
We have become obsessed with add-on solutions rather than radical ones. We start our children in school too early, but rather than recognize the value of children being allowed to grow. There obvious difficulties with children coming into school at 4 or 5 so strategies that emphasize play over learning are developed. 40 years ago when infant school teachers discovered that children struggled with the letters of the alphabet developed the so-called Infant Teaching Alphabet so that children could learn vowels phonetically and then go on to learn the real alphabet when they were ready. I wonder what happened to that? Now there seems to be a movement to get children to start school earlier, give them piles of homework.
And what are the results? The evidence would suggest that there are more children who come out of school functionally illiterate than at any time since public schooling was made compulsory in 1870. Government figures have been manipulated to demonstrate otherwise but the empirical evidence clearly shows that we have significant issues.
I don't want to romanticize my schooling. In those days schools were poorly resourced and under-equipped. Lighting was only turned on in the afternoon in the darkest days of winter because to leave them on would be too costly. Paper was very scarce. However, we did learn. I remember learning multiplication tables by rote in infant school and learning to read but not much else. It was a stern establishment and play was only allowed in the yard at "playtime". We presumably consolidated this knowledge at Primary School for four years where we had no homework. Homework only began for me when I went to Grammar School and for my contemporaries who went to Secondary Modern not at all. If I were to judge by results none of this mattered. Of my friends and contemporaries who went to the Secondary Modern School, one had a career as a newspaper reporter, another became a senior police officer, another an insurance agent, another a hotel manager, another a printer and another a successful artist. Others took on apprenticeships and followed these with trade careers. Some filled ordinary unskilled jobs. I don't remember any of them unable to read and write at a functional level at the age of 11.
Something, or perhaps many things, have gone wrong since those days. We should perhaps look at the intervention of well-meaning control-freaks. Children are now controlled and organized at school and at play. Parents are controlled at every level of activity. Schoolteachers are subject to controls that disallow any professional initiative. Cui bono?

Pay up AND resign

This would be my message to MPs who have abused and fiddled the system. The present (frankly unbelievable) outcry that the "rules" have now been changed by Sir Thomas Legg and that it's "unfair" to MPs just won't wash. I am fed up with them, and I suspect that I am one of millions. This is by far the worst, sleaziest, self-serving bunch of MPs in my memory. Don't forget we still have serving ministers who have fiddled their expenses and an Attorney-General who has broken the law and several Lords who have manipulated legislation for quite substantial under-the-table payments.
I refuse to listen to any more whining. Pay back what you have filched from the taxpayer, then resign! That's my message to all MPs.  And if they think they can get away with it by fillibustering until the next election I say go after them, just as HMRC resolutely pursues taxpayers who default. Give them no peace until they pay the money back. I hope then that this will be the last we hear of any of them

Calling MPs to account

I just flew in from Amman this afternoon to discover headlines about MP's expenses. The committee that Gordon Brown has hurriedly set up has apparently called it as it is rather than find ways of excusing MPs. No further honours for Sir Thomas Legge then.
What is astonsihing about today's story is that Labour MPs are going around complaining that they are not being treated fairly! Because they did everything within the so-called rules that they happily manipulated and are now being judged by a proper standard the word is that they now feel affronted.
Expect some protests that everything they claimed was in good faith!

The Wannabee Peace Prize

My immediate reaction on hearing that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize was "What for?" It appears that everyone else has had the same reaction.
The Nobel Peace Prize has had some pretty dubious recipients but most, if not all of them had done something in order to merit consideration and not always very nice things either.
Obama has made some good speeches and has a good rhetorical style but his first few months in office suggest that he is still learning on the job. Give him time and there may be some worthy achievements but this award is premature and frankly debases the prize. Obviously the Nobel Committee are anxious (over-anxious?) to jump on the Obama bandwagon. However, it is very poor judgement. Expect the Nobel Prize for Economics to go to Gordon Brown.

The deal is done. Let's live with it!

After the Irish vote the EU Constitution known as the Lisbon Treaty is pretty much a fixture. It has been imposed from above and I suspect that in time the people who were never consulted at any stage will have questions and some serious reaction. That time is not now. The majority will never find the inclination or time to reason through all the possible abstract outcomes of a constitutional document. They are far reaching and often the outcomes are unintended. The Barons who drew up Magna Carta, for example, did not imagine that it might apply to the rights of ordinary people. More recently the drafters of the Canadian Constitution could not have anticipated that one of its first applications was to allow supermarkets unrestricted hours.
On the one hand our political leaders were right to assume that a constitution is a difficult document to explain, but on the other they were seriously wrong to leave their voters in the dark. There will be a price to pay when voters discover (as at some future point they surely will) that this treaty does impact negatively on their daily lives.
However the deal is done and I rather think we should accept it and get on with life. Most European governments have a lot to attend to in the restoration of the economy and this is particularly true of the British Government.
Which brings me to the ideologues, those in UKIP and the Conservative Party for whom nothing short of withdrawal from the EU will do. Having watched this lot reduce the Conservative Party to an ineffectual rump in the 1990s it would be particularly galling if, on the eve of restoring some half-decent government to the UK, that these ideological clowns became rampant again. Cameron's government will have a big task in cleaning up the irresponsible mess left by Brown. No voter will or should be interested in abstract arguments about the EU.
The deal is done. It was not by democratic choice. Let us now accept that and learn to live with it.

Health and Safety

Here is a picture of workmen at the Citadel historic site in Amman, Jordan. They were laying roads, paths and doing some landscaping. It was in effect a building site as well as a tourist site.

The Jordanians appear to take the very practical view that there was no need for work to stop on either front - the builders carried on building; the tourists carried on touring. Both groups sensibly kept out of each other's way.
How refreshing it is that the Health and Safety lobby has not had the opportunity to spread its deadening tentacles to this part of the world.