UKIP: The Only Way Is Down (Hopefully)

Say what you like about UKIP  but they’ve always been good comedy value. If they wanted to remain a serious force in British politics, the events of the last 8 months have conspired against them.

Once the referendum delivered the result it had longed for, UKIP’s raison d’etre expired. Within days, Nigel Farage resigned and like the rest of the Tory Brexiteers, he cut and ran. He flew across the Atlantic post-haste to prostrate himself before Donald Trump and accept a well-paying job as a political analyst for Fox News (seriously).

Farage’s departure plunged the party into a leadership election, which was won by Diane James, who resigned after 18 days in the job. She then joined the Tories.

UKIP attracted more negative coverage when two of its MEPs were involved in an altercation in the European Parliament, involving the appropriately monikered Mike Hookem and Steven Woolfe, which put the latter in hospital. The party cleared Hookem of punching Woolfe.

Woolfe himself had been tipped to succeed Farage but his hopes were dashed when he failed to deliver his nomination papers on time. He later admitted that he had “been in talks with the Tories”. No one was surprised.

Farage returned as interim leader to no one’s surprise.

With Woolfe out of the way,  UKIP’s second leadership election was won by Paul Nuttall, who immediately announced that he was going to “challenge Labour in its heartlands”. His chance to shine came in the Stoke-on-Trent Central by-election. He even had the BBC talking up his chances of winning and he still lost. The accumulation of his lies and deceptions having conspired against him.

But last week, things went from bad to worse for the Kippers. Arron Banks, one of the party’s biggest donors, announced he was leaving after allegedly falling out with the leadership. He invoiced them for his last donation of £200, 000. It isn’t personal, you see. It’s business.

Then, over the weekend, UKIP’s only MP, Douglas Carswell resigned and became an independent. Carswell, a maverick and self-confessed Ayn Rand fan (sic), had always been at odds with his party leadership. UKIP’s deputy leader, Peter Whittle,  even claimed that Carswell’s resignation was “a breath of fresh air”. A bizarre admission, for sure.

Carswell, for his part, has denied that he will return to the Tories. He told the Evening Standard:

“I’m not going to rejoin the Conservatives — I’d need to call a by-election, my wife [Clementine] would kill me and my constituents wouldn’t be too happy.

There’s always 2020.

In spite of its posturing, UKIP was never a serious anti-establishment party; it was a project for disenchanted Eurosceptic Tories and like-minded ethno-nationalists and Empire Loyalists.  Its leadership is dominated by former Tories and many of its major donors are former or current Tories. It railed against elites but is controlled by elites.

After the referendum and Farage’s resignation, UKIP was on life support. That isn’t the case any more. It’s lying lifeless on a cold slab in the mortuary waiting to be buried.

UKIP: the only way is down.

Tories, Ayn Rand and Other Things

The current Tory regime – known at Nowhere Towers as the Simulated Thatcher Government (STG) – is fixated with shrinking the state. They don’t even try to deny it. If Thatcher herself “believed” in Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, then today’s Tory government is inspired by Ayn Rand’s terrible prose. By the way, it’s widely believed that Thatcher hadn’t actually read any Hayek and her knowledge of his ideas were mediated to her by the child abuser, Sir Keith Joseph and former communist, Sir Alfred Sherman.

Four years ago, I spotted, what I’d considered to be, traces of Rand’s ‘philosophy’, “Objectivism”, contained in the 2010 Conservative election manifesto.  Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell (now a UKIP MP) wrote a book called The Plan: Twelve Months To Renew Britain. According to the pair, their book was inspired by Objectivism. They gleefully told their readers that some of their ideas had been adopted by Cameron and co. The book itself offers unsourced graphs and a lot of badly thought out remedies for a series of problems that the authors claim are caused by the state. One stand out line from the book is “the state is running at capacity” (Carswell and Hannan, 2008: 18). Does the state have a capacity? Is there a stated “capacity” for the state or is that just an empty rhetorical device? It’s a curious line to be sure. The Plan is essentially a manifesto for a nightwatchman state. Think of a land with no infrastructure, rampant crime and endemic corruption and you’re halfway there.

Rand’s influence can be heard in the language of government ministers: the insistence on “hard work” and the frequent mention of the somewhat vague concept of the “wealth creator” versus the scroungers and layabouts, resonates with the language in any one of Rand’s turgid novels, which cast the rich as downtrodden heroes and pits them against their nemesis: the moochers and looters – the latter being a shorthand for the enemies of unbridled cupidity. A couple of years ago, Bozza wrote an article for The Torygraph which claimed the rich were an “oppressed minority”.

But there is one minority that I still behold with a benign bewilderment, and that is the very, very rich. I mean people who have so much money they can fly by private jet, and who have gin palaces moored in Puerto Banus, and who give their kids McLaren supercars for their 18th birthdays and scour the pages of the FT’s “How to Spend It” magazine for jewel-encrusted Cartier collars for their dogs.

I am thinking of the type of people who never wear the same shirt twice, even though they shop in Jermyn Street, and who have other people almost everywhere to do their bidding: people to drive their cars and people to pick up their socks and people to rub their temples with eau de cologne and people to bid for the Munch etching at Christie’s.

From this rambling mess it’s possible to deduce that Bozza has at least been exposed to Rand’s trashy philosophy and has internalised its central premise that anyone who doesn’t create “wealth” is a leech. We must slap the rich on the backs, admire the size of their enormous wads and tell them how marvellous they are! What! According to this 2014 Guardian article by Martin Kettle, Sajid Javid (aka Uncle Fester) is also a Rand admirer. Well, blow me down! Peter Hoskin on Conservative Home writes:

Javid explained that this isn’t his favourite movie, but it is the most important to him. He first watched it on television in 1981, aged 12, and even then it struck him as “a film that was articulating what I felt”. From there, he soon read the book, wore out a VHS copy of the film, and brought his enthusiasm for all things Fountainhead with him to university. He even admitted, with a self-deprecating grin, that “I read the courtroom scene to my future wife!”

Uncle Fester’s lack of humanity certainly comes across very strongly in his media appearances, so it comes as no surprise that he would read Rand’s dull prose to his future wife. If I were his other half, I’d be thinking “Why are you reading me this shit? Do you hate me that much”?

The continued destruction of the welfare state; the attacks on the poor and disabled and the emphasis on the slippery concept of “aspiration” are clear examples of Rand’s influence on the STG’s social and economic policies. We can add to this, the compulsion to control all forms of discourse, and their tendency to render all facets of everyday life into neoliberal economisms. This can be seen in the way in which the STG and its allies in the press insist that the main opposition party adheres to the government’s doctrine of presumed fiscal rectitude, thus serving to illustrate not just their desire to shrink the state but to create an authoritarian one-party state as well. Why? Because the Tories despise opposition even if they claim otherwise. If they must deal with an opposition, it is better to deal with one that goes on the defensive every time false accusations are levelled at them.

If the Labour leadership’s rhetoric and policy positions look little different to those of the government, then you’re not really being offered a proper choice at the ballot box. You’re being offered a choice between Coke and Pepsi. Life’s a bitch. Now shut up and eat your shit sandwich.

The Labour Leadership Contest Just Became Much More Interesting

Ed Miliband’s resignation as Labour leader was a classic case of bad timing. Just when the newly elected Tory government is about to force through some of the deepest cuts to public services since the Thatcher era, the Labour Party was forced to engage in an internal dialogue rather than turn and face their apparent enemy. A week after the end of the election, the candidates who put themselves forward for the vacant position of leader were some of the blandest, most right-wing MPs in the party. Liz Kendall was the first to announce her candidacy. Kendall, a self-confessed Blairite, believes Labour came across as “too left-wing”. Hilarious. She was followed in short order by Chuka Umunna (withdrawn), Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Mary Creagh (withdrawn). The words “fag paper” and “between them” came to mind. What a dreary slate, I thought.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, to the surprise of everyone, Jeremy Corbyn threw his hat into the ring. Most political commentators believed that Corbyn, a veteran campaigner, had no chance of getting onto the ballot paper but it happened. Here’s Corbyn making his pitch on Newsnight on 8 June.

Now the Tories are lining up to tell anyone who will listen that Labour has done the wrong thing by allowing Corbyn onto the ballot. By doing this, they reckon, Labour would suffer a massive defeat in 2020 at the hands of the wobbly Tory government. Some Tories, like Ruth Davidson of the nearly defunct Scottish Conservative Party claims that she will join Labour as an affiliate to vote for Corbyn.

I seem to have a lot of traffic in my timeline saying that for a mere £3, I can change Labour's future and vote for Jeremy Corbyn. Bargain.

— Ruth Davidson MSP (@RuthDavidsonMSP) June 16, 2015

Yeah, you go and do that, Ruthie. You’re only in the Scottish Parliament because you’re on a party list. However, The Cat believes the Tories are deluding themselves and in their arrogance, they believe their message of never-ending cuts to public services, anti-working class hatred and fear is a winner with the public. They believe this because they won a slender majority on 24.3% of the vote. Hardly a mandate in anyone’s book. But I think the Tories are secretly frightened that a new narrative will emerge to challenge the primacy of neoliberalism. They under-estimate people’s anger and seek to dismiss it as the rantings of the “extreme left”. This is desperate stuff from a desperate, arrogant and out-of-touch government that is little over a month old.

As Vox Political points out,

You can always tell when Tories are afraid of someone – they produce newspaper articles saying that he’s rubbish.

Let the character assassinations and hatchet-jobs commence, eh? Dan Hodges, who’s become a sort of cross between a pantomime villain and Norma Desmond, was first out of the traps; his kecks round his ankles and shite on his hands, with this smear job titled “Jeremy Corbyn proves the lunatic wing of the Labour Party is still calling the shots”. Jeez, what is it with this guy Hodges?

So he made it. Jeremy Corbyn is on the leadership ballot. Bats––t crazy Labour is alive and well.

The opening paragraph encapsulates the article’s tone. From there it’s a sharp descent into melodrama and paranoia. Halfway down the article, Dismal Dan cites this Tweet from Dizzy Doug Carswell, UKIP’s only MP.

Things must be getting pretty desperate for Dan (geddit?) if he has to quote a Kipper for support. Who will he quote next? David Starkey? Paul Kagame? But Carswell’s getting ahead of himself. His party isn’t exactly in the best shape at the moment.What with the infighting, the resignations that aren’t really resignations and the defection of the suspended MEP, Janice Atkinson, to the Euro Parliament’s far-right grouping. Remember her? She called a Thai constituent a “ting tong”.

Jeremy Corbyn’s presence on the ballot paper means an alternative discourse can at last be heard. The media outlets will continue to do their best to smear Corbyn and those who support him, but there is a large body of voters who simply aren’t being represented by the Tories and the Kippers; the two butt-ugly faces of capitalism. Fleet Street and the rest of the mainstream media zombies don’t seem to understand this. Now there is a chance. Now there is a glimmer of hope. Even if Corbyn doesn’t win the leadership of the party, the rest of the candidates will have to listen. If they don’t, they can kiss any chance of a victory in 2020 goodbye.

One thing that you can’t deny is that the Labour Party leadership election just became much more interesting.

Politicians Then And Now. Carswell, Hogg and Douglas-Home. No Contest

This is a sort of follow on blog from yesterday. Douglas Carswell, the UKIP MP for Clacton likened anti-austerity protesters to a “lynch mob”. He was being melodramatic. I was watching a programme a few weeks ago that looked at election hustings from the 1960s and 1970s. It was fascinating how much contact politicians had with the general public. This was an age when politicians possessed oratorical skills. These days, politicians do all they can to avoid contact with the public who elects them and when they make speeches, they sound as though they’re reading from a phone book.

I found this clip on YouTube. It’s of Quintin Hogg, aka Lord Hailsham and father of former Tory MP, Douglas Hogg. Hogg takes offence to someone in the crowd brandishing a Labour Party placard and lashes out at it with his stick. The year is 1964.

What a charming fellow.

Labour won a small majority and the Tories left a massive balance of trade deficit after 13 years in power.

In the same election, the accidental Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home had to escape “potentially violent hecklers” by climbing through the back window of a hall.

Can you imagine Carswell having to do the same thing? No, I can’t either. He’d be cowering in a cupboard shouting for his mummy.

Britain’s Right And Their Opposition To Protest

The British Right (the Tories and Kippers) will tell anyone who will listen that they’re democrats. One form of democracy which they don’t approve of is the protest. Since the general election, there have been a number of anti-austerity protests up and down the country. The Tories seem to believe that because they won 24.3% of the vote, that should be the end of the matter. People should just put up with austerity. The Tories have never been known to brook opposition. If anything, they despise it. That’s why Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council and the metropolitan county councils.

Yesterday’s anti-austerity protest on the day of the State Opening of Parliament is a case in point. UKIP’s sole MP, Douglas Carswell was caught up in the protests and like all good right-wingers, he lapsed into melodrama. He told The Guardian,

“It got extremely, extremely nasty. Their intentions were pretty murderous and I needed a lot of police officers to prevent them from attacking me,”

He had a bottle of water thrown over him. Wow. It’s not as though someone threw a bottle of warm piss over him. This has the feel of “Mummy, those beastly protesters gave me dirty looks! Make them stop!”. Carswell continues,

“I was stunned. I think MPs should be able to go about their business. It was incredibly intimidating. It was like a lynch mob on the streets of London. I thought this was a country where we had democracy and discussed the issues. “It just got incredibly ugly. It was an attempted lynching. I am in a state of shock. I do not want to have to worry about going about my business.”

The phrase “lynch mob” (which was also picked up by the Daily Mail) is typically hyperbolic, but that’s what Tories, Kippers and their supporters are like. I mean, why use reasoned arguments, when you can use melodrama and mendacity instead? Carswell told The [Notionally] Independent,

“If this is the way the extreme left behave now, I do not think it bodes well for the future.”

Carswell’s characterization of the protesters as “extreme left” chimes with the recent paranoid warnings of government ministers, because in the eyes of Tories and Kippers, anyone who protests against cuts is on the “extreme left”. If you look at the comments thread below The Guardian article, you will see a large number of right-wing keyboard warriors all spouting the same nonsense. “Why aren’t they working” and “soap-dodgers” being the most clichéd refrains, thus showing us the Right’s glaring lack of originality when it comes to hurling insults at their enemies.

The political right never protests because it doesn’t have to, and even when it’s not in power, it’s still pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Even during the Nu Labour years, Britain’s political right stayed indoors and let their lackeys in the ‘free press’ get on with the job of printing lies. Not one of them protested (unless you count The Countryside Alliance protest in 2002 in which a few hundred thousand braying toffs and their hangers-on demonstrated against the Hunting Act). This tells us something about Britain’s political right and those who support them: they are deferential, spineless whingers and they’ll touch their forelocks to anyone in authority. Their idea of resistance is to make the occasional joke about students and those horrible “loony lefties”. It’s so terribly English. Yah?

Finally, The Cat would like to remind readers that Carswell is a fan of Ayn Rand, who once characterized the poor and dispossessed as “moochers”. Protesters were also regarded in a similarly disparaging light. That’s the kind of world Dougie inhabits and it’s a frightening one.

You’re Only Allowed To Be Anti-Establishment If You’re Part Of The Establishment. It’s The British Way

He drinks beer and smokes tabs. So what?

UKIP is an anti-establishment party, or at least this is what our beloved media and the party itself tells us. Its leader, the beer-swilling, chain-smoking Nigel Farage, even goes so far as to claim that his party is a “People’s Army”. Laughable. This is a party that is bankrolled by former Tory funders and whose top table is replete with ex-Tories, the latest being Dizzy Doug Carswell, the self-styled libertarian who has decidedly conservative impulses. Confused? Well, so are they. Hell, they don’t even have any policies of note, other than leaving the European Union and “pulling up the drawbridge”. Even when Farage is questioned about his party’s policies, he disavows them. Being a ‘libertarian’, he suggested that the army should be deployed to deal with disorder.  He also tells Andrew Neil that the party’s 2015 manifesto will be similar to the 2010 manifesto. Really? He also admits to wanting flat taxes. I wonder how many of his working class supporters realise how much it will cripple them to pay the same rate of tax as a billionaire?

Watching the reports from last week’s by-elections, I couldn’t help thinking that the people who were being interviewed on camera, who told us they were voting UKIP, weren’t in full possession of their faculties. “UKIP represents change” one opined, while another claimed that UKIP would “shake up the establishment”. Yes, of course they will. It’s like the political satire we get on television: it’s so anti-establishment that it’s produced by scions of the establishment who gently mock their own kind and receive OBEs for their “contribution to British comedy”. It reminds me of Henry Ford’s famous dictum: “you can have any car you like as long as it’s black”. For our media, it’s a case of “You can have any anti-establishment party you like, as long as it’s led by a former commodity trading ex-public school boy and former Tory, and his ex-Tory chums and financial backers”.

Yes, people are turned off by the main political parties but voting UKIP won’t change a thing. If anything, successes for UKIP make it more likely that this country will be pushed further to the right as the three main parties compete with each other to out-UKIP UKIP. British politics has traditionally been seen as the province of the aristocracy and the wealthy. To change British politics for the better, we need to abolish the monarchy and the institutions that stem from it (the House of Lords) and create new transparent democratic institutions in their place. This means greater public involvement with politics. The people of Scotland are already engaging in this process. Isn’t it time the rest of HMP United Kingdom did the same?

A better world is possible.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#13)

This week’s comment was left on this blog by Dizzy Doug Carswell, Randist and sometime writing partner of the Lyin’ King. Carswell – bless his cotton socks – has actually criticized Le Pen’s Front National (it’s run like a family business rather than a political party).

The shocking truth is that the most popular political party in France, according to one recent poll, is the Front National, supported by almost one in four French voters.

The Front National is beyond the pale.  They are not simply a protest party, but extreme. Their political philosophy, in so far as they have one, seems to me to derive from a reading of Jean Raspail’s dystopian novel, the Camp of the Saints.  Pessimistic, they seem to lack any uplifting vision of France or the future.

So far, so good but then Carswell falls back on the same old nonsense about “tax and spend” as if governments don’t tax people and don’t spend money.

Tax and spend decisions in France – and indeed in Greece and elsewhere – are no longer made those the voters elect, but by Eurocrats. So French – and Greek – voters and politicians no longer have responsibility for making the big political choices.

And if you take responsibility away from the people, they behave irresponsibly.

Nothing like a simplistic analysis.

Now comes our Comment of the Week. This one is from someone who calls themselves “artemis in france”. While Carswell attributes the rise in FN’s fortunes to opposition to the European Union, Art of Piss thinks it’s all about those ‘dirty’ foreigners.

This screed joins ever single hate-filled dot that right-wing cretins like this one love so much.  Notice how Art of Piss lumps together the two vilified groups du jour in the minds of European fascists and ethno-nationalists: Muslims and Roma. He also manages to finish with the obligatory “Marxist diktats” that are apparently a characteristic of the very neoliberal EU.  How odd. What I find bizarre about this comment is the way Art of Piss claims the Roma protested against the “face veil ban”. Did they? Then there’s his “Many suburbs of Paris ressemble (sic) Baghdad”. How so? He does not say. I think it’s because he sees loads of Les Arabes living les banlieux. Non? I suspect that his only knowledge of Baghdad comes from pictures on the telly that have been refracted through the lens of his own cultural relativism. He’s never been there.

Remember if you see a Telegraph comment that deserves to be included in Comment of the Week, then please send an email with a screenshot together with a link to the blog or article to: buddyhell@hotmail.com

While Europe is on strike, Britain’s unions sit on their hands

If you don’t know by now, Europe’s unions have walked out on strike today in protest against the austerity measures being implemented by their governments. Meanwhile in Britain, there’s nothing.

A month ago, the TUC leadership proudly announced that they had consulted its members on whether or not to go for a general strike. Since then nothing has happened. It’s all gone a bit quiet.

Like it or not, the UK is geographically located in Europe, not the USA or the middle of the Atlantic  So what happened? It seems to me that our union leaders talk a good talk but when it comes to real action, they’re completely inert. They should be telling their members to express solidarity with their continental comrades and walk out. Instead, they pontificate, prevaricate and procrastinate while the government walks all over us.

A few weeks ago,  Dizzy Doug Carswell claimed that there was “no austerity in Britain”. Such sentiments come from the same wellspring as “there’s no poverty in Britain”. But that’s relativistic tosh. This may not be India or Chad, but for a supposedly rich nation, people are going hungry and many are forced to make the choice between food and heating.

Are we that cowed in this country that we can’t bring ourselves to strike back against those who inflict daily punishments on the nation’s workers, the disabled, the elderly and the poor?

The TUC is weak and led by a bureaucracy that would rather pimp its members to the nation’s rapacious capitalists than fight for jobs.

Identifying the attacks on state education

There isn’t a week that goes by when some Tory or their pals in the press are complaining about the state education system. Over the years I’ve heard all kinds of excuses from the Right with regards to state education but none as feeble as those dreamt up by Gove and the authors of The Plan, Dan Hannan and Douglas Carswell. For them and so many other right-wingers, state education teaches children nothing and they identify the history syllabus as one of the prime suspects. Into this discourse they have smuggled in notions such as parental choice. Gove designed the free school to subvert and erode the state system. I shall return to Hannan and Carswell later.

If we go back to the beginning of the comprehensive education system we can see why the Tories are so adamant that it should be destroyed. In the years before the comprehensive system, pupils were required to take the 11 plus exam. A pass meant advancement to a local grammar school, failure meant going to the local secondary modern, secondary technical school or an art school, if you were lucky. The comprehensive system was supposed to level the playing field and perhaps this is what the Right hates about it the most. The Tories have demanded the reinstatement of grammar schools, not because they will lead to greater social mobility, as they erroneously claim, but because they (the Tories) are devoted entirely to nostalgia.

Policy Exchange’s Neil O’Brien is, as you’d expect, a champion of Pob’s harebrained education policies. Writing in the Torygraph on May 1, 2012, he says,

Lots of people have written about the blistering pace of Michael Gove’s school reforms. Half of secondary schools are now either academies, or on their way to becoming so. The programme started in 2002, but by April 2010, just before the election, there were 203 academies, as of 1 April 2012, 1,641 out of a total of 3,261 secondary schools were academies.
That’s an impressive rate of change. Lots of them are schools “converting” to academy status. Some people – particularly on the on the left – want the government to focus more on “classic” sponsored academies, where a failing school is shut and replaced with a new one. That’s an important model, and it is good that Gove has responded by announcing a shut-and-replace programme for failing primary schools.

Let’s deal first with this idea that schools that sign up for academy status will be better than those that remain in the state system. Many academies are actually Pupil Referral Units and, because of their nature, these places have a high turnover of pupils. It’s easy, therefore, to claim that you’re meeting targets when the pupil cohort changes from week-to-week. The second thing that needs to be dealt with is this focus on “classical” education. This idea has been borrowed extensively from the public schools with their focus on Latin and the Classics and it’s easy to see why: those who propose this model have either attended public schools or wished they had gone to one (Toby Young). But how well would such schools serve their pupils? Will they have the same advantages as their counterparts in the public schools? Unlikely, that’s down to such things as social and economic capital. If your family has a deficit of these kinds of capital then you can forget about social and professional advancement. If you go for a job in, say, the media, and the kid next to you has been to Marlborough College and you’ve been to a local academy or free school, guess which one out of the pair of you is going to land the job? You’ve guessed it; it isn’t going to be you.

Doc Stanley, also writing in the Telegraph, is pleased with Gove’s ‘reforms’, he gushes,

But they also promise to raise standards and, with the hint of more vocational learning, make us competitive again with our European partners. Anyone who has worked in education can confirm that all too often the learning process has been reduced to meeting targets in fields of knowledge that feel removed from students’ lives. Hopefully we can now say “goodbye” to the straightjackets of silly, wooly GCSEs that were approached with all the educational rigour of a Sudoku and “hello” to a more nuanced system better designed for the individual’s needs and aspirations. And the fact is that O-levels were tougher and, therefore, more internationally respected.

Along with free schools and academies, Gove wants to resurrect long-dead qualifications. The ‘O’ Level, as Stanley asserts, is “tougher”. Of course, all those who are in favour of a return to the ‘O’ Level have conveniently forgotten that it was their idol, Margaret Thatcher, who abolished it and replaced it with GCSEs in the 1980s.

But it is the assertion that state school pupils cannot “write their own names” or identify the capital of this country or that, which appears to be the Right’s main line of attack. While they assume that those who have been to state schools are inferior to those in the public schools, it is worth considering those public school pupils who leave with poor qualifications but still end up with a top job in the Cittie.

This files in the face of the assertion that all those pupils who go to public school will be smarter than those who did not. All they have is a level of articulacy that is greater than their counterparts elsewhere and it is this that they to use to mask their poor intellects.

Martin Stephen the former “High Master” of the prestigious St. Paul’s School in Barnes airs his prejudices,

I thought it was immoral that so many parents were denied their first choice of school. I thought it was immoral that one of the richest countries in the world, and one which spends billions on its schools, cannot even get its pupils in the Top 10 of the international league tables. I thought it was immoral that unions’ knee-jerk reaction to any criticism is to defend the status quo, and that so rarely, if ever, have they themselves led the drive to raise standards. I thought it was immoral that the unions have never accepted that it is in their and their members’ interests to drive bad teachers out of the profession, instead of just complaining when their inaction leaves the Secretary of State for Education no option other than to do it. I thought moral professional associations such as the British Medical Association and the Law Society recognised that they had a duty the patient and the client that they received good service, so did not have to leave it to Government to strike out of the profession members who failed to meet high standards in their treatment of the patient, the client – or the parent and child. I thought it was immoral that the unions seemed always to listen to their members, and not to the parent or the child. I thought it was immoral to think that schools existed for teachers, when the truth (and sometimes a very painful truth) was that teachers and schools exist for the child.

This whole idea of “choice” is misleading: if a school is full, then there are, by definition, no more places on offer. In other words, if you wanted to get your kid into that school, then you should have pulled your finger out long ago and put in the necessary effort. Here, Stephen, like the rest of the Right, blames the unions for the alleged failures of the state system. He also suggests that the state sector is full of “bad teachers”. What Stephen doesn’t dare mention is the fact that teachers in the state system are paid less than their counterparts in public school, have to work with larger classes and are over-burdened with paperwork. Now who is to blame for that? I think it’s only fair to point out that Stephen, as well as being High Master of St Paul’s, was educated at Uppingham, a public school in Rutland. He is also the chairman of Clarendon Academies Group and is the Director of Education at GEMS Education.

Those who constantly attack the state school system do so, almost always, from a position of privilege. Hannan and Carswell spend a great deal of time lambasting the state system but both of them went to public school: Hannan went to Marlborough and Carswell went to Charterhouse. Their understanding of the state education system is entirely based upon a cultural relativism, which is informed by their social class. Therefore their attacks on the state school system are little more than a poorly-disguised form of class disgust. I would further argue that neither author has had any direct experience of the system that they criticize. Yet they feel that they are in a position to pass judgement on a system that they know nothing about. Hannan and Carswell’s book has formed the template for a variety of insane government policies and you can bet that if this government remains in power after 2015, then education vouchers will be introduced.

Applied to the field of education, the traditional voucher scheme may be likened to the mass privatisations of the Thatcher years. The equivalent of the sale of council homes would be to give every parent with school-age children the right to demand, from his local authority, the sum that it would spent on his child, and to take that sum where he pleases.
2008:81

Great in theory but in practice, it’s unworkable and will only lead to a two tier system where those parents who cannot afford ‘choice’ will have no option but to accept a lower standard of education for their children. This is known as social Darwinism where I come from. Hannan and Carswell aren’t interested in such things and tell us.

Opponents of parental choice might argue that parents are not always best qualified to exercise choice. While we do not accept this argument, it is certainly the case that if responsibility is taken away from people, they behave less responsibly. Parents have, by and large, been denied responsibility for their child’s education, with too many decisions made for them in our ‘like-it-or-lump-it’ education system.
2008:81

Hyperbole and guff. This is not a “like-it-or-lump-it” educational system; it is a geographical arrangement that is designed to produce some notion of fairness. While it is not ideal, it is not necessarily an entirely flawed system either. It is assumed that, like other services provided by public institutions, education is a marketable commodity and that the entire educational system should be subjected to this process of reification in order to magically transform it into a ‘product’.

We also need to ask ourselves what is the purpose of school. The current educational system, as it is arranged, perpetuates class divisions. Gramsci (2001) would argue that the current system and the one proposed, reinforces and reproduces the hegemony of the dominant culture. The public schools of Britain existed to reproduce the ruling class and its values. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, education was outside the means of the peasantry and the urban proletariat and they were thus excluded from the political structures of the country. The aim should not be to create a system of reinforced inequalities but to create a decent state educational system for everyone regardless of class. Free schools and academies are nothing less than cash cows for friends of the government.

References
Carswell, D. and Hannan, D. (2008), The Plan – Twelve Months to Renew Britain. London: Self-published

Gramsci, Antonio (2001), Selections From The Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Life on Hannan World (Part 2)

That Littlejohn fella. He was right!

A couple of weeks ago, I had the misfortune of reading a blog in which Dear Dan cited the repugnant Richard Littlejohn. If you cite Littlejohn to support your argument, you’re at the top of a slippery slope.

First he says,

The grimly efficient Chris Grayling aims to rescue millions from this wretched state. Pilot tests run under the last government yielded astonishing results. When claimants were reassessed in Aberdeen and Burnley, 30 per cent of them were passed fit for work, and another 30 per cent classified as capable of some work.

Then he links to Littlejohn, Britain’s version of Rush Limbaugh.

To understand the magnitude of the task he faces, though, the minister should read this article by Richard Littlejohn (you have to scroll down to the penultimate entry). A woman from Essex was shifted from Jobseekers’ Allowance to Incapacity Benefit three years ago because she is allergic to rubber. The Department of Work and Pensions argued that such a condition needn’t preclude all forms of employment. According to the DWP lawyer: “Her allergy, although inconvenient, has not prevented her from leading a relatively normal life — shopping, socialising, travelling on public transport.” The judges, however, ruled in favour of the claimant: a decision that may encourage others to challenge their reassessment in court.

You can read the original Littlejohn article here but you need to scroll down the page to find the actual article titled “Our amazing India rubber benefit rules”.  If you look at the first article, you can see that it harks back to the 1980’s and the “Loony Left council” articles that filled the pages of the Tory tabloid press. These days, a few Torygraph bloggers use the same style. Plus ça change.

The title of Hannan’s blog is dishonest “Can 2.6 million people be too ill to work”?  Where does he get this figure from? You get the feeling Hannan is the sort of person who sees clinical depression as the ‘blues’ and a little ‘hard work’ will cure that. All they need to do is “snap out of it”. But it isn’t that easy if you suffer from depression.   Here’s the crux of the blog

Between 1971, when Invalidity Benefit was introduced, and the mid-1980s, there were typically around 700,000 claimants. Today, there are 2.6 million (the name was changed to Incapacity Benefit in 1995). We have, tragically, encouraged some people to arrange their affairs around qualifying for the allowance.

There’s only one problem with that figure. It’s wrong. But in order to ram the point home, he includes an image of Wayne and Waynetta Slob. Cheap.

This article from FullFact.org debunks the myth of 2.6 million.  It also does so here. Here’s a snippet,

The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that when they have completed the 1.5 million assessments 23 per cent of these people will be fit for work – not 94 per cent, or even 75 per cent. This demonstrates how misguided it is to apply a statistic related to ESA applicants across the board to all Incapacity Benefit claimants.

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Eh?

In another blog, Hannan apologizes for the Empire and gets in some praise for his hero, Enoch Powell. The blog has the title “In all the coverage of the atrocities in Kenya, two words are missing”. And which words are those, Dear Dan?

The British Empire was a surprisingly peaceable place. There were sporadic insurgencies, of course, and brutal wars in Ireland, India, Cyprus and Palestine; but many colonies were brought to independence without a shot being fired in anger.

This narrative of the Empire skips over many inconvenient truths to promote the idea that the British Empire – as opposed to the other empires – was, in spite of its evident failures,  a force for good. The rest of the paragraph gets a little confused.

The Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was the exception. The mutineers were uncommonly ruthless, perpetrating monstrous atrocities against loyalist and neutral Kenyans, of whom nearly 3,000 were murdered. The response was commensurately severe: 1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process.

On the one hand he condemns the actions of the so-called Mau Mau and on the other, he tells us that the response to the rebels (whom he refers to as mutineers) was severe. But this was always the response when native people were yoked to a greater, colonizing nation. They fight to wrest control of their land from the invader and will kill anyone who is seen as a collaborator. Presumably the resistance movements of World War II cut no ice?

In the second paragraph, he uses the atrocities committed at the Hola Camp to have a pop at the Guardian.

Abuses took place in the internment centres, culminating in the beating to death of eleven detainees by security guards at the Hola camp. Guardianistas, of course, slot the episode neatly into their evil-imperialists-versus-nice-natives narrative.

Mmmm, hmmm, Let’s read the rest,

But the point about the Hola killings is that they led to an outcry in the House of Commons, a wave of revulsion in the country, and a hastening of the independence process.

What he doesn’t mention is how long it took for anyone to complain.

Linking to this blog, he says,

I’m not a great fan of empires – we would have done far better to have carried on with our unofficial protectorates and trading outposts than to assume responsibility for large tracts of land – but there is little doubt that, as empires go, ours was relatively benign. Niall Ferguson makes the obvious but rarely remarked point that, for most of the countries under British dominion, the alternative was not unmolested evolution towards modernity, but conquest by someone else: France, Germany, Turkey, Russia, Japan or – worst of all – Belgium.

Yes, that’s the same Niall Ferguson who teaches what he and Carswell describe as “proper history”.  Are protectorates any less wrong that colonies? Not really, but this piece of lazy thinking implies that “if we hadn’t have colonized them,  some other power would have done so and the situation would have been much worse”. Belgium, as he rightly points out, was one of the worst colonizers. King Leopold II treated the Congo as his own personal property and subjected the natives to horrific and barbaric treatment. But the Congo was called  a “Free State”, that is to say, a country where the normal rule of law and civil and human rights are suspended in order to pursue a tidy profit.  It is an idea that gets most Randists moist. This site promotes the idea of a free state. But it’s a vision that exists outside of history and reality.  The BBC reports on the Lekki Free Trade Zone in Nigeria and tells us that other African countires are following suit. Is this another Scramble for Africa? Recently the government announced its intention to create so-called Enterprise Zones. Guess what that means for workers? The only people who get excited about these zones are parasites.

Ironically, the MP who brought the Hola Camp abuses to the attention of the Commons was the mercurial Enoch Powell, who would later go on to deliver his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell was a fervent free-marketeer and like those who give unquestioning devotion to the classical liberal model, he promoted that idea in isolation from the historical facts. This blog is, as much as anything else, an effort to rehabilitate the reputation of Powell by constructing a new, kinder memory of him outside of the materialism of history. Thatcher appropriated the memory of Churchill and isolated his wartime premiership from the rest of his inglorious past. It was a mistake and it came back to haunt her.

On to today’s blog and Hannan claims that the money that this country (sic) has given to the Portuguese bailout could have been spent on

254,150 nurses (there are around 390,000 nurses in the NHS)

114,109 NHS doctors (more than the actual total of 110,000)

180,575 police constables (there are 170,000 police officers in the UK)

194,553 teachers (out of 450,000)

246,856 Army privates (as against 106,550 actual regulars, of all ranks)

What’s so ironic about his figures for doctors and nurses is that, not so long ago, he appeared on Fox News to tell the American people that the “NHS was a 60 year old mistake”.

This blog is a mix of anti-EU sensationalism and snide attacks on his political enemies.

He takes a cheap swipe at the March of the Alternative

So where is the “March for the Alternative”? Where are all the students, Socialist Workers and trade union activists who thronged through London just a couple of weeks ago?

At the end he adds this,

So where is the TUC? Where is UK Uncut? Where are all those who asserted last month that a much smaller sum meant the end of social security in Britain? Are they missing something? Or am I?

There are none so deaf as those that refuse to hear, Dan. Tell you what, if you’re so fired up about the bailout, why don’t you organize your own march? There’s nothing stopping you. Or maybe the Rally Against Debt, which has so far attracted little support and that he supported on his blog, is more his thing? I understand, that like Hon Tobes, he’s chickened out of appearing at the rally. The fact of the matter is that the bailout of Portugal is part of a series of mistakes made by countries who adopted the neoliberal economic model in an attempt to play with the big boys of the G20 nations. This is the same economic model that was forced onto this country by the Thatcher government in the 1980’s.

Naturally, such facts are always met with silence. I wonder why?