“Plebs” revisited, revisited …

Nick Robinson, on his BBC political blog, reads between the lines of Danny “Ginger Rodent” Alexander’s LibDem conference speech:

If you thought the cuts were bad, stand by for more bad news – £16bn of cuts to be precise.

The Treasury Chief Secretary, Danny Alexander, has just declared at the Lib Dem conference that the government will soon have to set out “specific plans for the £16bn of savings that are needed” in 2015 — after, that is, the current spending round ends.

What the Liberal Democrats have been doing this week is setting out their negotiating position with the Tories for the next spending round — their red lines if you like on “who pays”.

What they wanted voters to hear is that they will veto Tory proposals for a benefit freeze and cuts of £10bn to the welfare budget. However, listen hard and you’ll hear that they are not ruling out ending the link between benefit rises and inflation or other cuts in the benefit bill.

This is what Danny Alexander said: “At £220bn, welfare is one third of all public spending — and despite our painful reforms it is still rising. We will have to look at it.”

It’s going to be the middle class, the elderly, the weak, the sick, the disabled, the already- underprivileged — and the unemployed who will pay.

School-age students already are, because the much-vaunted “pupil premium” simply  does not work.  The £560 million which went to Educational Maintenance Allowances was cut to £180 million for subsidy to “low-income learners”. At the same time the “learner support fund” was rolled into this cut-price new scheme. Disabled children — including the little autistic so close to Malcolm’s own heart — are left behind, helplessly, in this Goveian rat-race.

The hike in university fees (the promise which Nick Clegg regretted and apologised for) has succeeded. It has ensured:

the largest fall in applications for over 30 years as new figures show an approximate 10% decline for the first year of entrants.

And done it a second year in succession.

Despite the “generous” pensions rise last autumn (actually it was no more than the established policy demanded, and then paid a year in arrears of rampant inflation) the basis of pensions calculation was changed — to the disadvantage of pensioners. Other subtle cuts are already happening: “free” bus passes are now being compromised (as in Norfolk); cataract treatments are being rationed; hospitals are being over-crowded and waiting times increased dramatically. And when your semi-privatised GP service lets you down, the provider can lie about it (as Serco did in Cornwall).

Disability allowances are being salami-sliced. Atos, the agency commissioned to review disability payments (or, as Simon Hoggart precisely defined it: tells disabled people on behalf of the government to stop whingeing and get back to work) shambles from cock-up to disaster.

Don’t say Neil Kinnock didn’t warn you:

It’s just that he was understating things. This lot are even nastier than Thatcher.

If all of this seems a little tired, a trifle repetitive, there’s a very good reason.

We have been here many times before. James Francis Horrabin was telling it the way it repeatedly is, for (now here’s a laugh in itself) Plebs, and deployed by Labour tat the 1929 Election:

A famous face

Paul Waugh, at PoliticsHome, has a scoop of national proportions:

… from today, the PM’s address is finally on Google StreetView for everyone to see.

The public haven’t been able to go right upto the famous black door since the mid 1990s and the days of John Major.

But perhaps the best thing is that Larry the Cat is in the pic – you have to zoom in quite close but he’s there to the left of the No.10 door. Never camera-shy is Larry.

Waugh cheekily suggests an ulterior motive:

FOOTNOTE: Google’s own co-founder Larry Page, may be more than happy to see his namesake.

About the only personality around Downing Street whose reputation does not get savaged by the media, on a routine basis, is the official Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.

A Malcolmian aside:

When the world was much younger, Malcolm and the Lady who soon thereafter entered his Life full-time wandered across Green Park.

In those gentler days of the summer of 1967, all-and-sundry were still able to treat Downing Street as just another public thoroughfare.

It was chucking-out time after some official jolly, and an assembly of the Great and the Good were on Harold Wilson’s doorstep. The Earl Attlee (who died that autumn) was wheeled out to be loaded into a limousine.

A voice in the crowd on the opposite pavement called, “Good on you, Clem”, to widespread approval and cheers.

Clem and V’s cat at Number Ten was Peter (and succeeded in office by Peter II).

A weighty wet

There are numerous reasons for admiring William Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill, Provost of Slough Comprehensive Eton College, Fellow of All Souls, Oxford — if only because he survived the Thatcher years, as a Tory MP, as a wringing wet — and, despite his remarkable intellect, therefore never granted a government post. John Major promptly put him into the Cabinet. A wise move.

Today Waldegrave has a remarkable and important article in pride of place on page 19 of The Times,  below Peter Brookes’s ever tasty political cartoon.  It is headed:

True Conservatives believe in a strong state

Trust free enterprise to sell cars. But the State is the protector of the weak and stands for values above self-interest.

You’ll have major difficulties accessing that, even if you subscribe to the Times‘s apology for an on-line service, so here it is:

Conservative should never make the mistake of falling in love with free enterprise. When they do, they make fools of themselves. We should follow Adam Smith. Free markets where there is good competition are good ways of producing things, yes; but we should be as sceptical as he was about the marketeers. “People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

Nothing in the behaviour of G4S, Barclays traders (and those of many other banks) or of GlaxoSmithKline’s US sales force would have surprised him. He had seen the South Sea Bubble, which made even the activities of Lehman Brothers look like a picnic.

Do not misunderstand me; these regular disasters, comical afterwards but disastrous at the time, do not mean we should all start ploughing through Marx or Miliband Senior again. But they should remind us that free enterprise is like democracy, in Churchill’s bon mot: the worst system except for all the others that have been tried. It is only tolerable if you subject it to constant sceptical pressure. It only works if it is hedged around by the values of the crusty old reactionaries whom its buccaneering proponents despise: regimental colonels and bishops and quiet people on village committees and old-fashioned civil servants whose moral sentiments comes from somewhere else. Getting sentimental about free enterprise is like getting sentimental about Darwinism or gravity: it is a category mistake.

In the old days, the genius of British Conservatism was to have taken not only Smith (and read him) but, in addition, Edmund Burke (and read him, too) as their favourite books. That is, if they read any books at all. Actually, many did just as well believing in common sense and common decency.

Tories knew that people and nations did not live by bread alone. We believed in the State — strong and uncorrupt in the ideal vision: the protector of the weak, and the focus of all those values greater than self-interest. Agreed, the State was not much food at producing groceries or motor cars — let the markets do that, while watching them like a lynx to spot the rackets. Agreed also, of course, that if the Sate consumes everything, you have the catastrophe of fascism or communism. What wise Conservatives seek is the right balance.

Margaret Thatcher found a nation out of balance, where the State had wandered far from its proper role and was making a frightful mess of all sorts of things that it had no need or business to be doing. She gave a heroic shove to get free enterprise going again and, partly for its own protection, returned the State to something nearer its proper role.

Now we are in danger of getting the balance wrong in exactly the opposite way. Private equity firms owning care homes? All the mutuals (the old building societies, the A, the RAC) sold off as “brands” and largely ruined? The British Civil Service on short-time contracts and bonuses, to encourage civil servants to behave more like investment bankers? Contractors not just supplying the Armed Forces, but getting pretty near to taking over their roles? This is not a Tory world.

And what a perfect lesson the fates have sent us to remind us of the truth. Who do we have to send for when the contractors conjure up one of their predictable fiascos? The poor bloody infantry, and the cavalry too.

Quite a lot of people who believe it is a given that private companies are always more efficient than the public service have never worked in real private enterprise. As Irving Kristol, the American intellectual and writer, said, an awful lot of people who favour unbridled competition have tenure. My experience tells me that there is no incompetence whatsoever of which the public sector is capable that cannot be matched in spades by the private sector. Citizens sit dumbfounded watching the beautiful advertisements telling us that banks or insurance companies really care about us, when we know first hand it is mostly bunk.

A couple of years ago, we moved house. Of the dozens of bodies with which one cannot avoid entanglement in this horrible process, the ones with the biggest advertising budgets were the worst: Sky, BT, British Gas, EDF, banks. It wasn’t just the estate agents. Only two lots were any good: one private (a family firm, I think) Cadogan Tate, the removals people — excellent. One public: the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea — courteous, quick and efficient. Private good, public bad just is not true. It is, at best, a draw. What matters is the way that organisation is run.

This summer we have seen some events that will be remembered when, happily, most of the politics and the muddles have long been forgotten. The Jubilee: a nation saying thank you to someone who embodies a supreme commitment to public service, to all the things the market cannot provide. The discovery of the Higgs Boson: billions spent on brilliant science and engineering by patient taxpayers (It would be good if the scientists remembered to say thank you), not for any short-term utilitarian  gain, perhaps for no utilitarian gain ever — and certainly no gain for the long-gone ministers who agreed to spend the money. And then the Spanish showing how, if you play football as a team game rather than as a collection of egos, you play it incomparably better. There is more to come: in spite of G4S, there will be wonderful heroism and heart-wrenching disappointment in the OLympics as competitors achieve or do not achieve dreams that they would not sell for money.

Of course there is money in or behind all these things — ridiculous money in football, billions spent at CERN, and if you sold the Crown Jewels you could probably pay for the tailplane of a Typhoon fighter. But the highest service, the heroic discovery and the purest sport represent dreams that the market does not generate.

David Cameron knows this: his Big Society was about people doing things because they are good in themselves, not because someone will pay you. If he can tune that Tory string again, he will have returned British Conservatism to its best roots, and its most electorally successful roots. We should be the party that the electorate trusts to oversee a free-enterprise economy, because the electorate understands that we know that free enterprise, vital though it is, is not the only, or even the most important part of the story of a nation.

There’s not a paragraph where a pettifogging lefty, such as Malcolm, could not find nits to pick. That hint of flag-waving and Union-Jack-wrapping might set sensitive teeth on edge. Yet Waldegrave is writing for a particular audience, perhaps arraigned in at least three tiers: the hoi polloi up in the gods, the dress circle who commission these things, and the critical political gallery in the stalls; and he exploits his opportunity with consummate dramatic and diplomatic skill. He has the status to demand his place in the prestige spot of The Times: he gets way with  it with well-greased subtlety. The nod to Thatcher, who barely tolerated him. A sly self-congratulation (did you spot it?). He writes well, using down-to- earth terms, mixed with elevated reference.  And he uses that archaeological fragment, the semi-colon.

A good read.

Coir thief

Alexander Pope had a shrewd eye for relationships:

I am his majesty’s dog at Kew.
Pray, sir, whose dog are you?

Malcolm somehow recalls that John Berryman identified that as the shortest, real poem in the English canon: “real” because it encapsulated an eternal truth. All of us, like King William’s dog — apparently a pug, are obliged to someone, something.

Kipling had the same conceit in The Land:

Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto, I, who own the River-field,
Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs 
All sorts of powers and profits which—are neither mine nor theirs,

I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish—but Hobden tickles—I can shoot—but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

and concludes:

… whoever pays the taxes old Mus’ Hobden owns the land.

What makes that even more relevant is the book from which the poem is taken is A Diversity of Creatures.

Mr Cook

Whenever Malcolm ventures into the garden of Redfellow Hovel he has the same awareness of being owned, being manipulated, being part of a great chain of being.

There is a whole hierarchy of bird and beast to which he is subservient. The visiting family of owls — one dusk there were five of them in the beech tree — have been absent these many years; but the urban fox beats his regular path each dawn. Stag beetles rummage along the leaf mould. In damp corners toads appear without prior warning. Generations of blackbird (there was a grand-sire who did a perfect, and unnerving imitation of a Trimphone’s trilling), thrush and blue-tit expect to be fed and watered.

The worst tyrant of the lot is Mr Cook, a perky, posturing, highly-opinionated (and let’s you know it) male robin. He is named in respect for and honour of a lost socialist leader, who had the decency to resign over the Iraq war.

The character likeness is truly remarkable.

Whenever grass is being cut, or weeding being done, or some other intrusion into his domain occurs, Mr Cook comes along, perches nearby, observes, and gives advice. As soon as the task has been completed, Mr Cook investigates thoroughly and locates supper.

The Eden Project

Last autumn the Lady in his Life and Malcolm spent a day at the fabulous Eden Project, near St Austell.

Resisting the  do-it-yourself beehive, complete with bees, they came away from the gift-shop with a notion.

Come October, in the English climate, hanging baskets are getting quite manky. So, a winter option: plant them with evergreen succulents. He shoots! He scores!

Come spring, Mr Cook gets nest-building. Hanging baskets need liners. Malcolm had used coconut coir. Mr Cook thoroughly approved.

As a result, Malcolm’s hanging baskets are slowly-but-surely being dismantled. In the process they are looking hairier by the day.

Somehow it all seems quite proper.

S-CIGM.

Fret not, patient reader, this will get all political, partisan and polemical in a paragraph or three.

However, Malcolm chooses to start in the choir stalls of St Nicholas Parish Church, Wells-next-the-Sea. Since St Nicholas spectacularly burned down, and was rebuilt in later Victorian times, it held no exotic distractions such as the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum’s Hugo van der Goes (above).

In St Nicholas, he half-attended to well-meaning sermons, and developed a taste for the rituals of the Church of England. That didn’t prevent him becoming progressively agnostic over the years. Since the Church of England, and to almost the same extent the Church of Ireland, makes no great demands on its adherents, there’s plenty of time and scope to reflect on ecclesiastical architecture, and the sinuous prose of the 1662 prayer book. And to half-attend to well-meant sermons.

Out of all that evolves a Self-Correcting Internalised Guilt Mechanism (hereinafter, and above, S-CIGM).

In extreme cases (and Malcolm is sociopathic) that also requires taking the faults of the wider world upon one’s self. The evils of the divisive capitalist society have to be confronted, and corrected by continued engagement with The Guardian and Tribune Magazine, as well as annual subscription to the Labour Party and CAMRA.

For the same reason, Malcolm each evening carried home with him personal guilt for his failures as an educator: that Tommy still couldn’t grasp the distinction of its and it’s; and Tracey, bewildered by the text of King Lear, asked “Can’t we just watch the video?”

On the other hand …

There are those at the other end of the scale, who missed out on S-CIGM. These know instinctively it is all someone else’s fault.

It’s all there In the beginning in Genesis 3, vv. 12-13. It was all her fault! It was all that damned snake’s fault!

Serial criminals lacking a S-CIGM can blame society: Well, you shouldn’t have left it lying around! and You should have stopped me earlier!

By definition politicians are serial criminals

The further to the political Right they are, the closer they come to [Godwin's Law alert!] the Eichmann Defence.

We need not look too far for examples. As here:

Cameron left ‘exposed’ by Cabinet Secretary

Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has been blamed by close allies of David Cameron for failing to protect the Prime Minister from the pitfalls of creating the Leveson inquiry, according to reports. Mr Heywood has been accused of being too enthusiastic in advocating such an open inquiry.

More of that exculpation, lack of S-CIGM, serpentine seduction and passing-the-buck in today’s Times, it seems.

A cover up

Hugo van der Goes had the discreetly-positioned male hand, and the Iris flower.

A Malcolmian aside

Hold it just there:

The flower symbolism associated with the iris is faith, wisdom, cherished friendship, hope, valor, my compliments, promise in love, wisdom. Irises were used in Mary Gardens. The blade-shaped foliage denotes the sorrows which ‘pierced her heart.’ The iris is the emblem of both France and Florence, Italy. The fleur-de-lis, one of the most well-known of all symbols, is derived from the shape of the iris flower. The fleur-de-lis is a symbol of the royal family in France and is the state flower of Tennessee.

Political figures, finding themselves over-exposed, have their equivalent of the hand and iris — those all-purpose, faceless-but-ever-helpful “Sources close to“. These are, presumably, Self-Correcting Externalised Guilt Mechanisms [S-CEGMs, perhaps]. In the spirit of “getting the retaliation in first”, they feature heavily elsewhere, as in the Daily Mail:

A blame game has started behind the door of Number 10 Downing Street over who thought it was a good idea to set up the Leveson Inquiry, it was claimed today.

Sources close to David Cameron say his most senior civil servant is being blamed for not protecting him from the firestorm caused by the probe, despite the Prime Minister setting it up so enthusiastically less than a year ago.

Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has been branded not ‘cautious’ enough about the pitfalls of the Inquiry by Mr Cameron’s allies, which has since exposed how close he and his colleagues got to the Murdoch empire.

The new co-ordinate

You may have had your demoiselle , sprig or sprog bring home a maths homework. Something like this:

The pour little brat then has to work out a whole series of pointless (indeed!) co-ordinates.

A year or two later, the geography teacher sends home the same exercise. Bit bigger brat has to interpret co-ordinates on a map. Since the maths and geography teachers are daggers drawn, the school doesn’t have an effective curricular map, and the National Curriculum doesn’t specify how to make the connection, it’s Yogi Berra’s déjà vu all over again.

Applying today’s lesson to political commentators

It used to be simple: left and right, readable and turgid.

Suddenly it’s got much more complicated.

Consider Iain Martin, usually to be found stabled at the Telegraph or, in his even more demotic moments, at the Mail (right, readable — somewhere around “A” on the matrix above). As a result of a useful piece on the highly-enjoyable, enforced self-defenestration of Chris Huhne, Martin is in some small spat with Mike Smithson at Political Betting (right, barely readable — let’s say “B” as above). Then there’s also John Rentoul at the Sindy tending away from Martin (Rentoul could possibly be “C”. Which, by default, leaves Malcolm at “D”. Hmmm …)

The tissue/issue before us is …

Will the ConDem coalition survive for the full five years? Will election day, as promised, be 7th May 2015?

Behind the public verbiage, Malcolm has the distinct impression that the Labour Party types have, quite literally in view of funding problems, been banking on precisely that. In that view, it oesn’t matter whether Ed Miliband cuts the mustard right now. Any opinion-polling is, at best, no more than trending; and at current percentages of 41, 40, 10  that’s one heck of a long way up from 29, 36, 23 in May 2010.

What matters is getting the little ConDem ducks in a line in forty months time.

So Martin’s thesis matters.

What put this into Malcolm’s [-3,-4] mind was (as they say on all the best ballot papers) “none of the above”. It was off-stage left, above the fold (a trifle populist, but say -2, +4) Kenny Farquharson in Scotland on Sunday. Farquharson uses the marital analogy to suggest:

What happens when marriages of convenience become inconvenient? No, this isn’t a question about the torrid revenge saga of Chris Huhne, his lover and his ex-wife.

This is a different marital conundrum, about a relationship at the heart of British politics that’s clearly in trouble. I believe David Cameron will decide well before the end of his five-year marriage of convenience with the Lib Dems that he wants out early. No doubt he will explain himself to Nick Clegg in the time-honoured way: “It’s not you, dear – it’s me.”

Looked at from a narrow Tory point of view – go on, try it – there’s a case for arguing the coalition has served its purpose. It was necessary in 2010 to put a Conservative prime minister into Number 10, but why prolong it? There will have to be a parting of the ways – politically, at least – in the run-up to a general election. So why not short-circuit the process and go to the country earlier?

That puts the grub on the table as robustly as one might expect in any Dundonian household.

Meanwhile the Tory press was queuing up this Sunday morning to put the same boot in. The Sunday Times bewailed that:

The Prime Minister’s problem is more basic. People no longer know what he stands for, if they ever did, and he is radiating weakness from Downing Street.

Actually, the whole Murdoch machine seems to be working up a fine froth over bankers’ bonuses, and how despicably wrong Downing Street has been not to ladle out mega-bucks. Sallies against Cameron should be read in that light. Watch for the Boris Johnson juggernaut’s wheels to be well greased in weeks to come, provided BoJo remains sound on boardroom lucre.

True Kremlinologics should be applied to the Sunday Telegraph‘s editorial (remembering that Iain Martin’s seminal piece appeared adjacent). It starts well for Bullingdon Dave:

David Cameron’s leadership of the Coalition of Tories and Liberal Democrats has in many ways been outstandingly successful. The partnership is in good shape. There have been resignations from the Cabinet, such as Chris Huhne’s last week, but they have happened for personal rather than political reasons. On the whole, Mr Cameron has kept Conservatives and Lib Dems united, and prevented party divisions, historically the bane of coalitions in Britain, from damaging the Government.

Note the On the whole. Rapidly followed by up to a point and growing concerns. There are no fewer than seven concerns in this piece. Apart from that one and the sub-headline’s omnibus growing concerns among his supporters about the direction of his leadership, they deal with:

• foreign aid;
• the wider message the Government is sending to wealth creators (boardroom billionaires to you and the rest of humanity: see the wit and wisdom of Old Man Murdoch, above);
• wind-farms (albeit in a comment);
• nukes (ditto);
• his habit of watering down, or even ditching, proposals that he has brandished or actually put in place (ditto repeat, as Malcolm’s Mum would have said. That one has Europhobic undertones, of course).

Which covers an awful lot of waterfront.

What about Ben Brogan?

Well, Malcolm puts Brogan’s co-ordinates around +3, +4. He had a very Broganish piece earlier this last week, which may be the seed-bed from which these other commentators have plucked the thinnings. Brogan was essentially arguing that Cameron was intending to steal the middle political ground:

Backbenchers are nervous because they see the Liberal Democrats picking at the ties that bind them to the Coalition. Nick Clegg is pursuing a deliberate strategy of differentiation, to make sure voters notice his party. When, some Tories ask, is David Cameron going to do the same and reveal himself to the voters as a Conservative? When are we going to see some Tory differentiation?

Three events this week underscore why there is unmistakeable unease on the Tory side. The first was Mr Cameron’s equivocation on the issue of the £1 million bonus offered to the RBS boss, Stephen Hester. To Conservatives who believe in the basics of contracts, capitalism and confidence in the City, the Prime Minister’s intervention on the side of popular opinion driven by the anti-capitalist Left looked opportunistic and weak. Above all, it looked like pandering to the campaign against wealth being waged by Mr Clegg. Second, last night’s calculated stripping of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood will compound that impression of a Conservative doing fundamentally un-conservative things. And the third culminated yesterday in Mr Cameron’s statement to the Commons on the outcome of the eurozone negotiations. Tory backbenchers competed to ask him why he had given ground substantially on the workings of the new treaty, just weeks after vowing to stand firm. Again, the charge in the air was pointed: having basked in their support when he delivered his “No!” to the EU, he now preferred to curry favour with Mr Clegg by compromising.

Re-reading that suggest the true Tory requires big bucks for bankers, respec’ for the honours system, staunch and unbending Euroscepticism, and heavy dissing of the LibDems and the anti-capitalist Left (on which latter point Malcolm mutters, “If only …”.

The Big One

Malcolm remains convinced what will break the ConDems is Europe.

So Malcolm will be watching one spot with considerable interest. For convenience, he happily lifts this summing up  from a New Statesman piece by Samira Shackle:

George Osborne has said that Britain could provide more funds to the IMF if there is a “strong case” for an increase. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Chancellor said that he would consider increasing Britain’s contributions above the £10bn extra already pledged, if there were adequate reassurances.

This is nothing new: Osborne has been laying the foundations for an increased British contribution for a while. It’s vital for Britain that the IMF has enough cash to help struggling eurozone countries, because of our geographical position and trade links with Europe. But David Cameron gained some serious brownie points with his party when he opted out of further contributions to the eurozone bailout, and it will be difficult for the government to sell this as anything but propping up the eurozone by another name.

There is no way that cannot go before the Commons. On what has been already said, there is little chance of Labour not opposing any transfer to a eurozone support-fund, however it is filtered through the IMF. The Tory press will not wear a bail-out either. The Tory Whips will have sleepless nights. On this one Clegg and the LibDems have a magnificent chance to “differentiate” themselves from the Tory revanchists.

Memo to self:

On 25th October 2011, 79 Tories voted against the Whip for an EU referendum. Add two tellers. A further fifteen abstained. That’s half the backbench parliamentary party.

The next General Election may be sooner than we have thought.

The Finnish model (and Diane Abbott)

No, sadly not that one (as right).

What is worrying, though, is the first page 0f Google images for “Finnish model” turns up endless leggy lovelies — and a single anti-tank gun.

On this occasion Malcolm’s mind is on things intellectual, particularly because LinkedIn directed his attention to an article in The Atlantic. This piece, by Anu Partanen (very much the model of a Finnish journalist working in NYC), is written specifically for the American audience; but has strong resonances for the English version of education, as promulgated by Gove and his acolytes.

Gove & co originally had the hots for the Swedish model until that relationship went sour:

The Swedish model of free schools, lauded by the Conservatives, has not significantly improved pupils’ academic achievement, a study suggests.

The research, published in Research in Public Policy, found the biggest beneficiaries tended to be pupils from educated, professional homes.

The Swedish model has influenced the government’s free schools policy.

Education Secretary Michael Gove believes free schools will lead to higher standards in England’s schools.

In Sweden, non-profit and for-profit organisations are able to set up and run schools which are publicly funded, but independent from government control.

 Of course, in the swivel-eyes of ConHome types, Gove was adrift in missing out on the for-profit bit:

In a fresh blow to the coalition’s free school programme, Nick Clegg has pledged that for-profit schools shall remain banned. This is unfortunate and does not make sense. By displaying continuing hostility towards profit-making schools, his ideological convictions are at odds with his progressive goals: without the profit motive, the prospect of a broad-based free school revolution – with the potential of increasing social mobility and improving educational standards for all – looks grim.

The can is finessed to Clegg, but surely (especially while Lansley was taking stick over the NHS “reforms”) Gove would not happily privatise the English state education system? At least not yet. So the “free schools” lack the profit motive. Even so, there is a way round that: a private operation “sponsors” a “free school”: curiously, as many activities and services as possible are then contracted back, at cost-plus, to the “sponsor”. It’s the way you sell’em.

Now, with the Swedish model proving a false floozy, can a swerve in affections be long delayed? So the political language subtly alters: no more Swedes, it’s now “Nordic” or Finnish”.

That is what made Malcolm take an interest in Anu Partanen’s essay:

… lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life — Newsweek ranked it number one last year — and Finland’s national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland’s schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top…

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model — long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorisation — Finland’s success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation’s education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

Remember: it was those PISA comparisons that got the Blairites and the Goveians are hot-and-sweaty in the first place. Then Partanen drops the other shoe:

 Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K[indergatern] or a Ph.D.

All publicly financed. That won’t wash with the ConHome crowd.

Nor will two further “issues”:

• “There’s no word for accountability in Finnish, … Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

 Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school …

Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools…

There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

And, in the ConHome mind-set, it gets worse and worse:

• … the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view … this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn’t a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland’s students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland — unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway — was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

Got that? The keys to wholesale educational improvements are two:

• trust the professionals, the teachers;
• restore an egalitarian ethos.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to the petty-scandal of the day and Diane Abbott. Yes, she was silly at best, and misguided at worst (though a bit of whitey-bashing will not go too far wrong in certain Hackney communities). Only a cruel long-in-the-tooth begrudger would recall that Diane has had her previous problems with Finns and Finnish models nurses. Where she, like so many other avowedly “socialist” minds go wrong is to step back from the real problem with England’s (and it is specifically England’s) growing social divisions.

Next time: Speak for England, Diane! 

Mais où sont les soleils d’antan?

1959 was a magnificent summer, long, hot: just what a tired Tory government needed to a groom the Great British public for Macmillan’s never had it so good autumn election.

That summer Malcolm’s mid-teen alter ego had his first regular job. At a time when “unemployment” was measured in hundreds-of-thousands, not multi-millions, a sprog — however hamfisted and inept — readily found summer employment. This job was at Claxton’s mineral water factory in Park Road, Wells-next-the-Sea. And the future Malcolm spent the early hours of a sweltering Bank Holiday Monday humping crates of whistle-wetter across the sand-dunes to Wells’s beach café.

Claxton’s was the very epitome of localism. The business involved inserted aerated sugar water, with one of a variety of syrup flavourings, into recycled bottles. These concoctions were then distributed, under the trade-name of Selwel, by a single lorry around the immediate locality. As Malcolm’s memory has it, the pineapple flavour was the most nauseating, but the grapefruit had a decent piquancy, and the ginger beer (in traditional squat brown glass) was the pick of the bunch. John Claxton (son of the below-mentioned, who was by then sadly deceased) was doing a worthwhile job, providing a useful local service, and employing a couple of women, a few blokes in the works and on the lorry, and a summer casual or two. Just the kind of establishment that Dave Bullingdon should approve, encourage and foster.

An establishment which, sooner rather than later, would be driven out of business by the multinationals with their one-size-fits-all products and blanket advertising. Just the kind of combine that keeps Dave Bullingdon’s Tory boys in election expenses.

Half-a-century on …

… what has changed?

What hasn’t! And much of it, admittedly, for the better for many of us. On the one hand, back in the late ’50s, Malcolm’s uncles and cousins were sweating in Hallamshire pits and Rotherham steelworks — the miner’s lung and the cancers have now had them all, …

And the pithead baths is a supermarket now.

Any moment now Malcolm will be reaching for the iTunes icon and summoning up Boyce:

Certainly the Rhondda is far more scenic than it was in the days of the slag-heaps — the Council even has the odd Tory (some “independents” and three LibDem fellow-travellers) but no longer anyone from the CP.

Which iTunes play-list would lead straight into Phil Coulter.

Ah, why wait? Let’s do it for the hell of a good thing!

And it’s a damn good vid.

Hardly relevant, perhaps, for Derry (another place for which Malcolm has considerable affection) has suffered far, far worse than the bourgeoisification of Wells.

But, Malcolm, what now provokes this nostalgia?

Well, into his mailbox popped one of those estate-agent prompts. Herein lies the pain:

Or, as the song had it:

… oh, my God, what have they done
To the town I loved so well?

Turning himself in

It took only a few hours (and heavy mockery from the liberal — and, in the case of the Daily Mail, illiberal commentariat) for the Met Police to resile on their advice to grass on your local Kropotkinite:

The Metropolitan police initiated an embarrassing climbdown after a police station in Belgravia, west London, published a leaflet asking the public and businesses to report anyone with anarchist sympathies.

The call for information on a political rather than criminal group echoed a similar appeal for information about al-Qaida activity and “could have been better worded”, Scotland Yard admitted.

City of Westminster police’s “counter-terrorist focus desk” had last week called for anti-anarchist whistleblowers, stating next to an anarchist emblem: “Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”

There is, of course, no such thing as the City of Westminster police: the Guardian got that bit adrift. The thought of the successors to Dame Shirley Porter having their own private Reichssicherheitshauptamt is just too hard to swallow. Heaven knows Blasted Boris and his (ex-Westminster) buddy Malthouse at City Hall is bad enough:

To lose one Chief Commissioner, Mayor Johnson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

I’ll come clean, guv ….

Obviously Malcolm would be swept up among the “usual suspects” in any Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver — now we’ve got the Velodrome; it’s only a matter of putting it to appropriate use.

After all, round about 1963 did Malcolm not read, cover-to cover, George Woodcock on Anarchism? Had applied himself so assiduously to his proper studies as he did to such matters, he would have succeeded better. For a brief while about then Malcolm could have stood in Front Square of TCD (or, more likely, sat in the side-bar of O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street) and expatiated on the semantic differences between threads of ideas: Proudhon and the mutualists, Bakhunin and the collectivists … Even now, he can indulge in the songs and stories and (as here) rants of an unreconstructed Wobbly like Utah Phillips:

Come to think of it, Woodcock probably still is on the attic shelves. Bang to rights/lefts/ but not centres, your honour.

Time to declare

• When the powers that be are so obtuse they assume the loafers and lay-bouts of Hackney squats have some constructive and deliberative ideology,
• when opposition-to-the-establishment is identified as “anarchism”,
• when authority is being as bone-headed, as obtuse as that lot in (significantly) the Belgravia cop-shop,

— there is only one correct response:

Unbridled ambition

A short while back, Malcolm’s grandson (aged seven) returned from school, all fired up.

He had been chosen for the advanced language development group.

He informed his parents:

• his ambition was to use the word perseverance ten times tomorrow!
• he required a dictionary, encyclopedia and thesaurus beside his bed when he woke up!

And then there’s this as the headline story on Political Scrapbook: