Where next for Chris and Vicky?

Malcolm last passed this way on 29th January.

That was prompted by all the smoke signals of a cover-up (mixed metaphor there?).

Since then we have had the confession and the two court cases. To add to the general hilarity and mirth, there may well be another trail on the way.

We are told that Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce will be available for further onward despatch, suitcases at hand, via Southwark Crown Court, 2pm on Monday. All the media reports assume gaol sentences are on the cards.  A paparazzi goat-fuck has been disorganised for English Grounds, SE1: assemble at the Horniman pub, near Hays Galleria, in good time — if not good order.

Which leaves one question hanging (and the likes of Guido Fawkes and his band of window-lickers would happily interpose “Hanging’s too good”).

The question is: why?

Apart from gratuitous thoughts of vengeance, what public good will come of incarcerating Mrs Pryce? Has she not been put upon enough?

Even the deluded and despicable Huhne has been efficiently disgraced and eliminated from public life. He will, it is hoped, next be pursued for the cost of that pointless legal action he took last September — say £100,000 or so — but he is a wealthy man, and should be able to ride it. Doubtless, like other political miscreants before him — Profumo, Aitken, Archer — he will go away and do good works.

All this is far, far beyond Malcolm’s comprehension and ulcer-rating. Instead Malcolm returns to an occasion of similar public disgrace, over a century ago:

I know not whether Laws be right,
   Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
   Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
   A year whose days are long.

But this I know, that every Law
   That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took His brother’s life,
   And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
   With a most evil fan.

This too I know — and wise it were
   If each could know the same —
That every prison that men build
   Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
   How men their brothers maim.

How to distort “news”

The Daily Mail is a low-down, dishonest, corrupting Tory rag — and needs constantly to be exposed for that. Fortunately, the Mail itself does so on a daily basis. Its whole existence is predicated to the Big Lie:

… the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Malcolm deliberately disguises the source of that quotation, lest it fall foul of Godwin’s Law.

Today’s front page is a magnificent example of the Big Lie:

The essence of the Mail piece is:

Prescott loses police commissioner poll in his own back yard of Hull to a TORY

Except the election wasn’t just for Hull: it was for the whole Humberside Constabulary area. Here is the difference:

The political complexion, as of 2010, of the parliamentary constituencies of Humberside looks very skewed:

Ten constituencies, five Tory, five Labour, which might seem an even balance. The County seats all Tory: the Borough seats tending Labour, as one might expect. A closer look at the numbers suggests the Humberside area is safe Tory country: David Davis’s Haltemprice and Howden is regarded as the second safest Tory constituency in Britain, and has never deviated from that loyalty since 1837.

Add up the 2010 results and we have 40.8% Tory, 34.2% Labour and 25% Lib Dem:

Now consider Thursday’s results of the Police and Crime Commissioner election (though Malcolm never did get the hang of how to ‘commission’ crime):

Accepting that Prescott lost on the Second Round (39,933 to 42,164 or a 48.6/51.4% two-party split), on that first count:

• Prescott caned the Tory — it is, in crude terms, a four or five per cent swing (and it has to be accepted that the “county” types turned out far, far better than the urbanites);
• the Tory vote went AWOL, barely squeaking in ahead of the independent — even the egregious Godfrey Bloom (surely one of the more disreputable and bizarre UKIP types, which itself is saying something) splitting off a sixth of the total poll;
• the Tory candidate was only rescued — just — on that second round by rolling up the odds-and-sods vote: those 19,375 who did express a second preference split for the Tory 2:1;
• the Lib Dems were totally creamed: even proportionately, more than a third of their vote evaporated.

For the record, Paul Davison — who ran that close third —  is an ex-Police Superintendent, and probably the best qualified of all the candidates.

The real determinant was tthe total failure of second preference transfers (which, as every aficionado of Irish politics knows, is key to the whole operation). Only 27% of the odds-and-sods ballots bothered to make a second preference. That is either a failure of voter education or a clear statement by a majority to vote “neither of the above”. 51,665 second preferences did not go for either the Labour or the Tory in the final run-off — which amounts to an absolute majority of those who turned out. We should not forget the “alternative vote” was the preferred option in the Great Constitutional Débâcle of 5th May 2011. If we needed concrete evidence that AV is a sham, and no substitute for proper proportional representation, here is the concrete evidence.

Yet the Daily Mail says it was all about Prescott, and the Daily Mail is a dishonourable rag.

And the Daily Mail says it was all about the city of Hull, and nothing to do with the other lands north and south of the estuary, and, for sure, the Daily Mail is a dishonourable lie-sheet.

The worst storm in New York’s records was caused by …

… going to bed with the wrong people.

You had to assume there’d be nut cases out there to utter this tripe. The dishonour falls to … ta-rah! … Chaplain John McTernan, who apparently operates out of Liverpool, Pennsylvania.

So here’s the divine truth (or one idiot’s version thereof):

On his website Defend Proclaim The Faith, the preacher says the gathering storm must be God’s judgment on gays, and punishing the president Barack Obama for coming out in support of marriage equality.

He believes ever since George Bush Sr signed the Madrid Peace Process to divide the land of Israel in 1991, ‘America has been under God’s judgment since this event.’

McTernan said: ‘Obama is 100% behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem.

‘Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda. America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!’

It would be great to have the homosexual agenda fully defined. Perhaps it’s something like: “Oooh, that’s sooo East Coast!” (which Malcolm heard, when standing in a line for the San Francisco cable-car).

Inevitably a bit of mystical numerology has to be involved: it’s twenty-one years since the ‘perfect storm’ of October 1991:

’21 years breaks down to 7 x 3, which is a significant number with God. Three is perfection as the Godhead is three in one while seven is perfection,’ he said.

Surely no arguing with that?

 

Tagged as “human waste”

A few greybeards may remember — back in the ’80s? — that the (then broadsheet) Times caused a small sensation when it published a full-page nude. Malcolm cannot remember the context — it was presumably an advertising stunt. He seems to believe the model was Trac(e)y Neve; and the issue was a sell-out.

Anyone with a clearer recollection. please help.

Are you ready for this?

Smelling-salts to the ready.

And so to the cartoon on the main comment page of today’s Times [£].

Remember this is the Times.

It is owned by Murdoch.

It is therefore distantly related to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

Malcolm is prepared to make a small wager (give up this blogging lark?) neither of those would see this as decent political comment:

That was easy

Malcolm enjoys his sallies into Slugger O’Toole’s fragrant boudoir. At its best (and that’s frequently), Mick Fealty’s little empire provides some of the best on-line discussions on things Northern Irish and beyond. There’s been an uplifting one, these last few days, on Eric Hobsbawm, no less. Any thread initiated by Brian Walker is well worth the study.

It is a very well-run joint, too: disrespect and naughty words earn a yellow, red or — perish the thought! —black card.

Yet in Sluggerdom Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies is never far below what is actually said. This is, after all, a place of resort for the knuckle-draggers and sash-wearers of the most unreconstructed statelet in western Europe. Their wrap-the-green-flag-round-me bhoys opposite numbers are none the better.

At which point, temptation strikes. And Malcolm inevitably surrenders:

For the record, Malcolm’s current score is two yellows and one red — largely because there is at least one Slugger administrator with an abysmally-low threshold of irony.

A bit of background here:

• The Ulster Unionist Party is as fissiparous as orgiastic amoeba in eukaryotic ecstasy.
• The UUP is engaged in one of its twice-monthly spats.
• David McNarry, the MLA for Strangford is flying the coop, into the arms of Nigel Farage’s little coterie of miscreants, gay-bashers, chauvinists and golfers.
• Malcolm was awake much of the night with gout. He was not a happy bunny this morning.

And so to the post:

Which means, apart from here, that thought will never been seen again.

IT begins …

Frank Turner is a bit of an acquired taste. There’s a YouTube vid of his Isabel (which is not available in the UK) and, failing that, it’s here (but doesn’t want to embed):

I’ll admit that I am scared of what I don’t understand.
But darling, if you’re there, gentle voice and soothing hands,
to quiet my despair, to shore up all my plans, darling, if you’re there…
And so the world has changed, and I must change as well.
The machines we’ve made will damn us into hell.
And the time will come when all must save themselves.
I will save my soul in the arms of Isabel.

For the purposes of right now, it’s Isabel Hardman in the Spectator blog:

Allowing Iain Duncan Smith to dig his heels in at the Work and Pensions department in last week’s reshuffle sent out two messages. The first was that the Prime Minister is not as authoritative as he should be: telling someone that you’d rather they moved to one department, but that it’s ok for them to remain where they are isn’t exactly ‘butch’, to borrow the PM’s own favourite word. The second is that the Prime Minister was worried about the future of the DWP’s reforms, and was keen to put someone else in charge of implementing the behemoth computer system for the universal credit, even though events meant he was unable to do so.

Instantly, Frank Turner’s convoluted lyric starts to make sense. Especially the bit about the hellishly damnable machines.

Infernal information technology 1

With good reason, then, Liam Byrne was being demanding in the Commons today:

It is quite clear that the Treasury thinks there will be a state of chaos around Universal Credit. The Cabinet Office thinks there is chaos, Number 10 thinks there is chaos. Surely it is time he told the House exactly what is going on, and put before us the business case that he is trying to keep secret from this House, or is there something that he is trying to hide?’

Let’s be honest, here: is there anyone who can put “government department” and “new computer system” in close proximity, without a frisson of fear? And this one will cost “no more than £2.5 billion”. So, let’s not remember the (what was it?) £11 billion , or £12 billion, even  £15 billion, (depending on your source) thrown at computerising NHS records. Lest we forget, that, too, was priced originally at £2.3 billion. Hold on to your wallets.

In general, then, and without reservation, we can safely predict:

• the Universal credit system is a great idea —
• but so was the Titanic, and the Groundnut Scheme, and the Poll Tax, and railway privatisation, etc., etc.
• The Universal Credit system will in due course collapse,
• but a whole generation of computer whizzes and IT bods will retire, in comfort, to country estates.

But, darling Isabel, keep doing what you do so well with your gentle voice and soothing hands.

Do No Evil (domestic version)

If one thing is ever certain and crystal-clear, it is when government “reforms”, it comes back to bite them.

Any moment now Michael Gove’s Great Educational Crusade will be seen to be an unmitigated disaster. Certainly the treatment of thirty Bradford parents, left to find new schools a week before the start of term, should start minds working, opinions forming. Particularly so, since Gove’s Department (which would never gamble with the future of our children) made promises to those parents as late as June. If, as claimed by Labour, Gove’s expenditure on aborted “Free Schools” already amounts to £2.3 million, he has serious questions which must be answered.

Parliament understands government waste. It rarely manages to comprehend the human pain involved in last-minute shifts of policy, such as this Bradford “One In A Million Free School” (only wrong by a factor of 2.3, then).

There is worse …

And, on the BBC website, here it comes —

Atos appeal woman Cecilia Burns from Strabane has died

A cancer sufferer, who had her benefits cut by government officials who said she was fit to work, has died.

Cecilia Burns, 51, from Strabane, County Tyrone, had started a campaign in February to have the decision overturned.

Ms Burns had her benefits cut after she was assessed by government contractor Atos Healthcare.

She had her benefits reinstated just a few weeks ago but died on Monday.

This is not an isolated case. Here’s another one:

Karen Sherlock died on 8 June [this year], just a fortnight after she was told that she would be eligible once again to receive out-of-work disability benefits.

ATOS seems hardly to have a caring attitude to its assessments:

One of the two Atos staff members now being investigated says on his Facebook page that he is an administrator at one of the company’s medical examination centres.

Describing his job, he says he does “everything office-wise and having to put up with parasitic wankers at the same time”.

The other staff member caught out is a nurse, who says on her Facebook page that she carries out WCAs for Atos.

She has repeatedly posted messages that refer to disabled people who attend her assessment centre as “down and outs”.

ATOS have already received, last financial year — 2011-12, £112 million for these “fitness to work” assessments. Each face-to-face assessment therefore costs over £150. Four in every ten appeals against assessment succeed. The National Audit Office is severely unimpressed by ATOS, and by the way the Department of Work and Pensions continues to shovel public money at a sordid and failing operation.

Meanwhile the Department of Work and Pensions deals with criticism on “a good day to bury bad news” basis:

The government appears to have delayed publishing crucial evidence that undermines a key part of its controversial welfare reform bill until weeks after the legislation completed its passage through the House of Commons.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) report, which details the growth in the number of claimants of disability living allowance (DLA), appears to have been signed off by its author in May, weeks before MPs began the bill’s critical report stage.

But the statistics were only published last week, while MPs were on holiday and weeks after the bill had passed through the Commons.

Now, were the pious God-fearing Right Honourable Iain Duncan Smith MP, the DWP’s own Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros of our time, to traverse the lanes and by-ways around God-fearing Strabane, he is likely to find those roadside hand-painted boards, which are a delightful addition to the countryside of God-fearing Northern Ireland.

He is certain there to find the Book of Numbers, chapter 32, verse 23:

Behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out.

Two questions: 2 Is “failure” essential for educational success?

In recent days the English press (note Malcolm is always precise in referring to nationality) has been hailing the school exam results. For a change, not just because of photo-ops up-leaping-skirts and down-bewildered-blouses.

No, we had such gems as the Times reckoning any decline in A-level grades was a good thing, because a 2% “failure” rate meant the qualification was worthless. On the contrary: good pastoral advice and guidance means the minimum of students waste a year or two of their young lives in a hopeless pursuit of an impossible attainment.

All that apart, it’s good to see the Observer chewing over what all this amounted to. Particularly when the paper’s main political spot is back in the hands of Andrew Rawnsley, and he is on-track:

Mr Gove … always said that he would not greet exam results as his Labour predecessors did by patting himself on the back and saying: “What a good boy am I.” How could he, after all? It would have been rather hypocritical when his has been a strident voice alleging that the value of GCSEs and A-levels has been corroded by the “dumbing down” of exams and the over-generous awarding of grades.

So in his first two Augusts as education secretary, when records continued to be broken, Mr Gove did not look terribly content. He has had to wait until now to find something to celebrate about the exam results season. “Brilliant!” he cried as GCSE grades fell for the first time in the exams’ 24 years of existence. “More children are failing.” Well, all right, he didn’t quite say that, at least not out loud. But he looked pretty satisfied to me and, given all that he has said in the past about making exams tougher, he ought to be happy about that and the dip the previous week in A-level grades.

He has had to stress, of course, that he put no direct pressure on Ofqual, the regulator, to force down grades. The regulator has in turn denied that there was any heavy breathing down its neck from the education secretary. Ofqual’s boss assured viewers of Newsnight that she took her “independence” so seriously that she had never had a single conversation with Mr Gove about grades. Some people have found this hard to believe, but I am inclined to take both him and her at their word. The education secretary would not need invite her in for a coffee for the head of Ofqual to know that he wants to make it harder to achieve pass and top grades. He would not need to do so because he has swished the cane of “academic rigour” in countless interviews and speeches in which he has made it abundantly clear that this is what he wants to happen.

There’s a flavour there of Tom Hood’s Faithless Sally Brown:

They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton toll’d the bell.

Gove did not need to give explicit instruction to Ofqual chief regulator Glenys Stacey. Recall that Gove has systematically replaced anyone who questioned his diktat in education. One of his early appointments was Isabel Nisbet to head Ofqual,  succeeding Ed Ball’s appointee, Kathleen Tattersall. A political appointment; but not political enough, for Nisbet went on record:

There are certain types of questions you get asked a lot when you are the chief executive of the qualifications regulator Ofqual. As today is officially my last day in the job, I can answer them pretty bluntly.

“Are A-levels and GCSEs getting easier?” I don’t believe that they are – although I do acknowledge the evidence that teachers and candidates are now much better drilled in preparing for them.

“Is level 3 hair and beauty really as difficult as A-level maths?” Frankly, I don’t care about this kind of extreme comparison, and neither do university maths departments, nor the employers of apprentice hairdressers and beauticians. The important thing is that exams and qualifications should be fit for purpose – they should be demanding, assess what they are supposed to, support the progression that they claim to, and reinforce the best teaching and learning.

Eminently sane, logical, so out-of-kilter with the Goveian dogma. Thus we arrive, a dog-whistle away, at Glenys Stacey. Who explicitly takes personal responsibility for directing a shift in grading;  and tells the BBC and the nation (ignore the sexist legs that obsess Youtube), “I am tightening up …”

All we need to know now is how, why and when the edict went forth to the exam boards to raise the barrier. Parliamentary committee members are doubtless sharpening claws already for that cat-fight.

Glenys Stacey had already had a stab at the issue in her presentation of October 2011, Standard bearing: A new look at standards. She was already indicating that past comparisons were the order of the day:

we should continue to prioritise comparable outcomes over comparable performance.

That means the biggest enemy of the system is that nebulous but ever-present bug-bear, “grade-inflation”:

In reality, the differences between the two are very subtle – perhaps the difference of a single mark on one or two units contributing to an A level, but we can see … that the cumulative effect of small changes can be considerable.

Those of you with long memories will be thinking this is a return to the norm referencing used for A levels between 1963 and 1987, where approximately 10 per cent of students in each subject were expected to achieve a grade A, 15 per cent were expected to achieve a B, and so on. But that’s not what we’re doing. We know there are differences in the entry between subject and between awarding organisations, and we have more sophisticated ways of predicting the outcomes for a cohort of students, and we’re certainly not proposing to abandon those.

Our guiding principle has been one of comparable outcomes. All other things being equal, we’d expect the results for a particular cohort of students to be comparable with the results of the previous year’s students. When we talk about ‘comparable performance’, we mean senior examiners looking at the work the students have produced and comparing it to the work of the previous year’s students. 

Which can only mean that we are applying some degree of ‘norm-referencing’ (limiting this year’s results to the same parameters as previous years’) — except we’re not, and we shall maintain that with endless formulae of words.

For those new to this debate, the question amounts to a simple one: do we mark the papers, or do we mark the cohort. If this years’ students are comparable to previous generations (and statistically they should be) we can award the “top” 10% and a-grade, and work down the deciles. No grade inflation possible there.

Except that’s not how the system works, not how the National Curriculum works, not how schools have been forced to work, not how teachers have been obliged to teach (in Ms Nisbet’s unfortunate word, above, “drilled”), not how students have “learned”.

For absolutely everything taught and learned under the National Curriculum is — or should be, objective and “criterion-referenced”. Take, for example, English — which is at the centre of this year’s hoo-hah. Here are the prescribed criteria for writing at C-grade:

Learners’ writing shows successful adaptation of form and style to different tasks and for various purposes. They use a range of sentence structures and varied vocabulary to create different effects and engage the reader’s interest. Paragraphing is used effectively to make the sequence of events or development of ideas coherent and clear to the reader. Sentence structures are varied; punctuation and spelling are accurate and sometimes bold. 

What that means, in practice, is that

• writing at C-grade
  • shows accurate spelling and sentencing;
  • is well paragraphed;
  • has a fluent, apt style;
  • apt vocabulary;
  • describes and explains logically;
  • narrative is controlled ;
  • and the set tasks are completed.
• writing at D-grade
  • has some repeated spelling mistakes which go beyond occasional ‘typos’;
  • confuses the use of full stop and comma;
  • paragraphs are mostly accurate;
  • tyle is mostly apt;
  • here is  some lack of fluency
  • and the set tasks are largely covered.

So it should be a matter of “tick the box and get the grade”. Except, of course, Ms Stacey is subjective — and blatantly so — in her ”I am tightening up …”

It appears the only way schools can maintain the grading for their “better” students, as Ms Stacey constantly ratchets the grade-barriers,  is to ensure that there are more at the other end. For if we up the dunderhead ratio, we maintain the numerical comparison with former years.

Surely something wrong.

And it’s only Monday

Meanwhile, from the BBC website:

London 2012 Games lanes: Traffic delays of two hours

Drivers coming into London have faced delays of up to two hours after new restrictions came into force for the Olympics.

Lane restrictions have begun to be applied on the A12, A13 and A40…

Don’t mind us. We only live here.

It gets my goat!

A recent essay, Japanese Knotweed on the Causeway Coast, County Antrim, by Linda Stewart on the ever-excellent NALIL site drew attention to a real problem with the local environment. An earlier piece, also by Stewart in the BelTel, had somehow slipped past Malcolm’s notice.

Anyone who has encountered Japanese knotweed knows it is a right bastard, and can be a very expensive enemy. Take the Royal Horticultural Society’s word on that:

Although rather attractive, Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) is a real thug as it spreads rapidly. In winter the plant dies back beneath ground but by early summer the bamboo-like stems shoot to over 2.1m (7ft), suppressing all other growth. Eradication requires steely determination as it is very hard to remove by hand or with chemicals.

The Great White Hope, announced just before the last General Election, was going to be Aphalara itadori, a plant louse which — literally — saps the strength of the plant. The “itadori” (Japanese, apparently, for “pain-remover”) is the native name of the plant, so this louse might seem to be species specific — though, knowing the luck of the average agronomist, once imported and having seen off the knotweed, our creepy-crawly former friends are as likely to turn to proper crops.

Whether the ConDem government has a knotweed policy is not clear from the ever-elastic Coalition Agreement.

Anyway, good luck to the folk of North Antrim. As we go into the ever-exciting “marching season”, it must be nice to have something really important for them to be worried about.

Meanwhile …

In the shrubbery of Staten Island (that’s the fifth borough of New York City that gets largely forgotten, and known to tourists only from the free sight-seeing trip on the ferry) something is stirring.

There the problem is phragmites. Malcolm reckons that means the common reed, and wonders what is the difficulty. It seems that an alien variant (Phragmites australis) has displaced the native species across much of North America.

However, the brave souls of the New York parks department are introducing a secret weapon: a score of Nubian goats.

The Staten Island site, the developing Freshkills Park (actually a series of interconnecting open spaces),  is interesting for a couple of reasons. It is the biggest reclamation and land-improvement undertaken by the City for decades. Much of the site historically was New York City’s trash-heap, and — almost immediately after it was formally closed — part became the dumping ground for a couple of million tons of debris and waste from the World Trade Centre.

A Malcolmian aside

Fresh Kills is nothing murderous in itself. There are quite a few “kills” in and around what used to be Nieuw-Amsterdam, and the word derives from the Middle Dutch “kille”, meaning water-course or creek.

Fresh Kills, though, provided huge reserves of New Yorker wit, mainly because of the quantity of garbage that was carried there. Towards the end of its life, the tip was many metres taller than the Statue of Liberty, and was cited as the only rubbish heap visible from space.

For several years Kim and Scott Myles up in Astoria, Queens, ran a cottage industry, making “5 Boroughs Ice-Cream”. The gimmick was the naming: “rich white vanilla” was Upper East Side, chocolate was South Bronx Cha-Cha, and so on. The crunch came with Staten Island Landfill (brownie, fudge and cherry dumped together). This offended so much that a sticker had to be added to the packaging. Irony doesn’t work in the States.

The brand died, and the Myles menage debunked to the West Coast.

If all that’s  anyway”interesting”, what is amazing is one sentence from that New York Times piece:

The cost of renting the goats from Larry Cihanek of Rhinebeck, N.Y., is $20,625 for the six weeks.

That $172, a bit over £100, per goat, per week.

Put that costing to the Northern Irish Department of the Environment and they’d be all fouled up like Hogan’s goat.