Category Archives: the arts

The Archers: an everyday story of simple culling  the Archers from the programme folk

Robert Henderson

The  Archers is currently the subject of various story-lines  which bid fair to leave the programme a largely Archer-free zone.

The pivotal Archer  family – David and  Ruth Archer – are in the process of selling Brookfield with the intent of buying a farm hundreds of miles away in the North East of England because planning permission has been given to build a road on Brookfield land.

Jill Archer is planning to move north with David and Ruth.

Pip Archer has been away from the programme for a suspiciously long time  working for other farmers or finishing her  agricultural studies.

Tony Archer lies critical injured in hospital after  being tossed and gored by his prize bull and even if he survives is likely to be paraplegic.

Tom Archer did  a runner on his wedding  day and is now in Canada and seemingly out of contact with his family.

Helen Archer is living with Rob Titchener, a very obvious psychopath,  and is  ripe for being slaughtered in a psychotic rage, by either Titchener or his unbalanced  estranged wife Jess.

Elizabeth  Pargetter,  is in the messy aftermath of an affair with Neil Carter , who will almost certainly sue her for wrongful dismissal after she sacked him as her manager  of her events company when the affair went wrong.  This will in all probability result in massive damages for Carter which will undermine the viability  of the country estate (Lower Loxley) on which the events business depends.

Debbie Aldridge has been a long-time exile in Eastern Europe.

Kate Madikane   lives in South Africa with her black husband.

Peggy Woolley  has just turned ninety and is obviously ripe for shuffling off this mortal coil.

This looks suspiciously  like a systematic culling   of  the Archer family to allow the programme to be moulded to a shape more agreeable to the crazed politically correct minds of those who control the show. They doubtless think it is, as they would put it, “ a scandal in this day and age”  to only have a minority  of black, Asian and gay characters in the cast  and desperately want to bring in far more,  but find it very difficult to do so when there are so many white heterosexual characters  in the soap opera.

Once the Archers have been reduced to no more than a token presence, what will the programme be like? Imagine Brookfield sold to Mr Singh and the village shop run by Mrs Patel  to join the Hindu wife of the  vicar  who is also the local solicitor and   Amy  the “dual heritage” daughter of  the vicar by his deceased  Jamaican first wife,  with Amy’s Jamaican grandmother taking the place in the storyline of Jill Archer.  The ultimate dream of the programme controllers will probably  be to see Ambridge with a minority of white characters to, as they would put it, “ make Ambridge look like modern England” .

The gay quotient will also be inflated. Already there is Charlie Thomas hovering over Adam Macey with the threat of a bust up with Macey’s  “husband”, the chef at Grey Gables with the hilarious Ian Paisley voice.  The programme makers  will surely  correct  one of their glaring pc omissions to date and  introduce a lesbian relationship, although they have been strangely coy to date about girl-on-girl action.

The cull of established characters  may well go beyond the Archer family because the older characters generally are not to the taste of the politically correct. Apart from being all too white and heterosexual, they have be allowed to express, within limits, non-pc views with the intention that such views can be portrayed as anachronistic and soon to die out . Useful as that was at one time, the politically correct mind now sees no need for such “black hat” characters because it sees the process of reforming British attitudes as having moved to a point where no one can safely express non-pc views and they feel that characters doing so at best will seem at odds with the reality of England today.

What  listeners can be certain of is that the Ambridge of the future will be very difficult to recognise as the classic English farming village it was intended to be.

 

Want to win literary competitions? Pretend you’re black

I am white. I wrote this story as an experiment to test the effect of political correctness on literary competitions. I did this by creating a story which both had a black theme and was written in a way which implied the author was black. However, the judges of the competition had no certain  knowledge of my race or background.  

Black was entered in the 1996 London writers completion. It came fourth. There were several thousand entries which meant that winning was something of a lottery and, consequently, the fact that my entry made it to the last four at my first attempt masquerading as black strongly suggested that the nature of the story had influenced its choice as one of the best out of thousands.

When I attended the award ceremony there was hilarious consternation when I went up to accept the prize because the judges had all assumed that the author of black was black.  There was also a great rumble of amazement  amongst the audience – I noted a solitary black face in the entire gathering.

Although I wrote the story for the purpose described and the dismayed  look on the judges faces as I responded to my name being called was worth  a tidy fortune, the story had other purposes. I wanted to explore the mentality of blacks towards their lives in  England and just to complicate matters I distinguished the character further by making him highly intelligent. This allowed me to have him set apart from the mainstream black mentality which in turn enabled me to examine racial issues from an angle few blacks would have approached and to slaughter the holy cows of black victimhood.    

See also comments at http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2011/02/want_to_win_lit.php

Now for the story.

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Black

Robert Henderson

I’m black. Yeah. Black! Black! Black! And I mean coal skin and I mean flat nose and I mean thick lips and I mean woolly hair and I mean…what do mean? I mean I’m not your honky nigga with a skin the colour of Cappuccino and those nice Caucasian features which don’t frighten the horses or white liberals, least ways, not overmuch.

I’m going to tell you what it’s like being me,  being me being black, being me being black in Britain. And I’m going tell you  without any liberal lying and  self-delusion rockfalling the road to truth.

Let’s begin with what everyone but a blind  man can see. You’re all probably thinking that because I’m real dark, my parents are.  But that ain’t the way it necessarily works. Sure enough, my old man’s black as the proverbial Ace of Spades, but my ma’s quite a few shades lighter on the genetic Dulux chart.  Me? I’m a tint or two up the  whitey frightening level from my old man.

Fascinating subject genetics, but a touch complicated so hang on to your neurons and throb your axons for a sentence or three. You mate a pure white and a pure black and you get a mulatto. Now, a mulatto will always be a colour midway between the parents. Why? Because the child takes half the genes for colour from each of its parents. But breed two mulattos and their children can be anything from pure white to pure black because the parents can give them all their white genes or all their black genes or a mixture of both. Mate a pure white or a pure black with someone of mixed    race or mate two people of mixed race other than mulattos, and you can get every colour variation other than pure white or pure black, unless, of course, those mixed race parents have enough black or white genes to add up to pure black or pure white. You can relax those neural connections now.

Same basic genetic thing with facial features, although that’s more complicated. My ma’s got a nice refined whitey type  face  and my old man on a bad day looks like he’s auditioning for King Kong. Whose features have I got? I’ll give you one shafting guess.

Now the moral of this tale is that with a different throw of the same genetic dice I could have been one of those honky niggas which don’t frighten ol’ whitey too much. On the other hand, if my parents had been mulattos I might have been ol’ whitey or even blacker than I am.  Who says God ain’t got a fucking sense of humour? I guess He’s just sitting up  in heaven laughing his head off and saying you shouldn’t have been conceived if you can’t take a joke.

Where do I live? I live in England. I live in London. I live in Brixton just off the Railton rioting Road. Not that I have to live there, I just choose to do that. Why? Because there are lots of people who look like me and talk like me and don’t make me think that I’m a fucking freak.

Am I angry? Yeah, I’m angry, really pissed off. I walk down the street and I see a white man talking to another white man and they laugh. Now my brain tells me that they’re just laughing, but my heart says they are laughing at you, boy, laughing at you ‘cos your black and big and threatening and my heart says that they’re telling you, boy, that you don’t belong here.

The worst of it is my brain says they’re right, I don’t belong here. Intellectually I can understand exactly why whitey don’t want blacks around, don’t want me around. Flush away all the liberal anal discharge  about humans being humans being humans and what do you have? You have invasion of territory. It’s as simple as that. Well, simple to say but     not simple to act upon, not simple to cast away all them comforting sops and part truths about how the world is morally black and immorally white, not simple to desert all you know.

Back to the starting line. My old man came from Jamaica in 1959. Settled in Notting Hill.  Came with his head full of the Empire, the mother country and Pax Britannica. Them things seem not merely antiquated now, they seem incredible, but truly, brothers and sisters, that’s how it was forty or so years past.

Anyways, my old man was hardly off the boat before he had a real surprise because Mosley – yeah, that Mosley – arrived and there were white riots indubitably, categorically, beyond any argument,  saying ‘No blacks’. And here were signs on boarding houses saying ‘No blacks’. And there were     employers saying ‘No blacks’, or at least ‘No blacks’ in anything other than grovelling positions. And there were pub landlords saying ‘No blacks’. And there were neighbours saying ‘No blacks’. And there were…there were a thousand and one other things saying ‘No blacks’.

Now, you might have thought that my old man would have taken the hint and gone home. But, of course, he didn’t, just like all those other mother fucking stupid black men who wouldn’t see, perhaps couldn’t psychologically see, what was before their eyes, in their ears, about their brains,  and who now sit and whine away their old age saying “I hate England. It so cold. It no place for me when I is old.”

So my old man stayed and stayed, always talking about going back to the old backyard, but having his life quilted ever more into England. After a few years he met a nurse from Antigua – there’s an up-your-arse cliché for you. Soon they were married. A few years past that o’clock and I came into the world. Thirty one years, two hundred and twenty three  days later I’m still here, being black in England.  That’s my first humping problem.

My  second  humping  problem,  a  real  undiluted knee-you-in-the-gonads difficulty, is that  I’m not just black, I’m smart. And I don’t mean streetwise, though I’m that too. I mean smart as in very high IQ – very, very high IQ – smart as in educated, smart as in understanding without     being told, smart as in being curious about everything. That kind of smart. I’ve got a hell of a memory too, just soaks up data like sand receiving the sea, and a Rolls Royce query and retrieval system rattling around my head. Add to that diamond pointed psychological cuteness and an instinctive sense of the sociological, toss in a pristine aesthetic awareness and you’ll have some small idea of what it’s like to be inside my head.

I can just hear you all – black, white, brown or yellow – saying, that’s a get-you-to-the-back-of-the-uterus problem? Or maybe you’re thinking that there should be an exclamation sign rather than a question mark at the end of that sentence. Perhaps you’re down the middle correct in thinking so. So, conjure up a  Bateman cartoon, ‘The nigga who was     super intelligent!’ If you’re of an ironic  mind,  you’ll easily be able to imagine all the honkies  hitting their heads on the ceiling.

So, yes, it’s a real screwing problem and the real screwing problem is that there ain’t many people like me full stop and hardly any of them are black and in England. That’s not surprising, of course, because there are only about a million or so blacks here. That means I’m  fucked by genetic     necessity because  natural intellectual talent like mine is real rare and contingently shafted by nurture because most blacks in Britain come from working class families who never put much store by education, leastways not beyond reading, writing and counting.

But knowing the why’s and wherefores of a problem don’t signify when the problem is hurting you day by day. It ain’t  so much that I’m lonely, it’s more that almost everyone irks  me  because they seem so slow and ignorant and uninterested and as like me as chalk is to cheese. I think it’s the being uninterested which pisses me off most. Believe me, brothers and sisters, being smart means I’ve got an even bigger bird     about my neck than being black.

So, I’ve got two twenty-four carat problems I can’t do a damn thing about. I can’t make myself white. I can’t make myself stupid. In fact, it’s enough to make Jesus Christ forswear his mission. But short of moving my existence to a different plane, like creating myself a cadaver,  there’s nothing I can do but occupy a point in space and experience what may be.

You might think that I could at least pretend to be stupid but that’s more difficult than you might imagine, because being generally smart like me means that you do everything faster and better.  If you’re like me,  it don’t matter how hard you try,  sooner or later you are going to forget yourself and do something too well or understand something too easily.

But if I can’t act stupid, I can try to fit in with my peers, my fellow Jamaicans, my fellow West Indians, my fellow Afro-Caribbeans, my – God help us – fellow Africans. So, I dress in the fashion. I wear my hair in the fashion. I play  music in the fashion. I even speak in the fashion, though at times it pains me,  saying “ain’t” and “fucking”  and    suchlike, rather than speaking with a genteel vocabulary and a proper respect for case, number, mood and tense as I could, I should, I would, if being black didn’t define mylife.

But fitting into a black universe ain’t a joy ride for someone like me.  Being generally smart means that I can’t buy the black supremacist rectal effusion. When I hear some stupid nigga spouting off about how  the Roman legions invading England in 43 AD were led by a black Muslim or that    Beethoven was of African descent, I don’t merely reject it, I  find it grotesquely embarrassing.

Then you’ve got those platinum plated daydreams, Rastas, worshipping an African who lived in a way they couldn’t even begin to understand. And that ain’t just because he was living in Africa. No, they couldn’t know because Selassie was a real, live, autocratic king and who the fuck in this day Britain understands what is to be such a king or what such a king may do? How much of England have I in me? I can’t rightly say. I know that the English don’t think I’m English. I know that I don’t     feel any kinship with the English. No, that’s bullshit! What I mean to say at this point in my rage is that I don’t feel any kinship with whitey, period, full stop.

But on the other hand – there’s always another hand – I don’t feel at ease with blacks born and raised abroad in the same way that I do with blacks born and raised in England. And I don’t feel as much at ease with Africans as I do with West Indians. So it ain’t a simple straight down the line yes or no circumstance.

I reckon the English are the strangest people. You might think that a nation who ran the only world empire worthy of the  name  for a  century or three would  be  pretty cosmopolitan. You might think that a people who lived in a very mixed city like London would be cosmopolitan. You might think that a people who lived side by side with an almost equal population of blacks in Brixton would be cosmopolitan. Not on your humping life. I won’t say that no Englishman failed to go native during the Empire. I won’t say that there aren’t Englishmen who sincerely believe in  universal brotherhood. I won’t say that no Englishman ever made a genuine attempt to accept blacks as just people. But I never     met one who could do it wholly convincingly. Always the  barrier, always the sense of difference.  But then blacks never act natural with whites, although with them it’s being too aggressive just to show that they’re not uncle Toms or all over whitey just to show that they’re just like honky inside.

Once, I thought I had an English friend.  Exact physical opposite to me :  all ash blond colours and fine cut features. Moved well too, a natural athlete. Add to that the fact that he was a newly graduated, post graduate, top of the range mathematical physicist – and they don’t come much  better equipped with the wetware than that – and you’ve got a     real superior being. Charming too.

Anyways, he and I would sit as happy as sand boys talking for hour after hour about the strange world of quantum physics with its Never Neverland particles. And we would see how such things related to cause and effect, free will and a thousand other necessary consequences of being.  I’ve never felt so much in harmony with anyone.

We went on sublimely for months like this, this honky and I, but for all the pleasure I took in our talk I couldn’t help noticing that this  brilliant, engaging  whitey  wasn’t over keen to introduce me to his honky friends. And he certainly wasn’t stubbing his toes in his haste to meet any  black I knew.  So eventually I asked him why, and all this beautiful honky, this putative friend, this man I felt was so like me as to be my intellectual twin,  said was ‘It must be coincidence’. Fucking coincidence! Not, ‘I’m embarrassed by you’ or even ‘My friends might be a little put out by you’ but a ‘a coincidence.’ I could have accepted either for its honesty. That’s when I finally learned that ol’ whitey wasn’t for me. At that time he was everything for me: I was     just an idle amusement for him. That’s the epitome of white and black in England!

I reckon the secret to understanding the English is to realise that they have a superiority complex.  It don’t matter how much they’re ridiculed or insulted, they still think that they are superior, not self-consciously, but simply as part of the natural order of things. What with     never being invaded for so long and running an Empire and producing the only bootstrapped Industrial Revolution and generally being top dog in the world for a century or more, perhaps that ain’t surprising. In fact,  the English are the only people in the world who don’t have to lie about their  past to feel good.  The strangest thing is that they don’t   realise their good fortune.

Now, I’m going to say something which will surprise you, for a nigga who don’t feel any affinity with the English. I’ve had a love affair with the English language for as long as I can remember. I love its powers of description, its precision, its lyricism, its general all round utility and toughness. And I never love it more than in Chaucer’s time when it was in-your-face honest and direct and there wasn’t a black in England. The English language is psychological home to me.  Ain’t that a fine joke for a nigga like me in 1996 and in England?? Well, if you thought that joke was good, let me tell you another one.

I’m a real old theatrical at heart, but how can someone who looks like me play the great roles other than Othello? I would like to be – you all think I’m going to say Hamlet – but fuck Hamlet, a whining loser. Who do I want to play? I want to play Richard the Third, an heroic man and a tragic man. Who could wish to be more than that in his three score    years and ten? I want to play Henry the Fifth, a man transmuted. I want to play Lear and Coriolanus and any number of other honkies. I want to be all these English people, and a whole cartload more,  but I can’t simply because I’m black as black could almost be,  and I look like King Kong’s first cousin.   

One thing in particular about the English has always hacked me off into the clouds, right up into the resentment strato cumulus. You might think that they would prefer blacks to Asians, or at least West Indians to Asians. After all, we don’t really have any fucking culture except white culture, British culture, English culture.  But it don’t work like     that. No, on the whole whites prefer Asians. Why? Well, being sociologically inclined and historically cute, I could spin you a fine old tale of class and education and intellect. But I don’t believe it’s any of that, or at least, not any of that in the main.

A black can be as intelligent and as educated and as intellectually mature as can be, but somehow it don’t make any difference to ol’ whitey or, for that matter, ol’ browny or ol’ yellow, when it comes to behaving naturally with a black. In fact, I reckon ol’ yellow is the most complete    racist of the lot because he don’t just think he’s superior, he thinks everyone else is at his pleasure. To tell the truth, ol’ yellow don’t care for any other human being even in the way that I might care for a dog. Truly, brothers and sisters, may God help us all if the East comes West again.

But that’s a digression. Back to the problem. Or rather, on with the problem. So what is this devil’s mark which makes human beings sit apart as surely as if they were models cast from opposing dies? I reckon it has to be physical. Why? Because we know that immigrants of like physical type ton the majority receiving population can integrate absolutely in a couple of generations. That don’t mean that such immigrants necessarily must or do  assimilate absolutely,  but at least it’s possible. That’s never the case where the immigrant is of a different racial type. So, my brain tells me that racial prejudice, racial separateness or whatever you     want to name it , has to be down to good old Nature, red in tooth and claw and never asking more from an organism than that it passes down its genes to another generation. I must own that this matter of racial prejudice fascinates me. Thought about for a long, long time. I reckon it’s all down to S E X.  You see,  there’s  something  called assortative mating which is common throughout  the animal kingdom. Now, that’s just a bit of jargon for saying like goes to like, or more correctly that certain aspects of an animal, such as  size or colouring, become  signals for mating.  So animals seek other animals which resemble themselves in these particulars. For why? Because any animal wishes to mate successfully. For a physical peculiarity to be chosen as a mating signal, it must be commonly found within a species. Ergo, an animal’s best chance of ensuring that it’s offspring mate is to produce offspring which closely resemble the majority of its species.

Now, humans are genuinely different from any other animalbecause  they’re  both much brighter and  vastly  more self-conscious. So they don’t just select mates according to  physical signals. They chose mates using class, wealth, education and culture as their mating signals. But they also select mates by racial type and all historical experience is that racial type is the most emphatic assortative mating signal. Worse, to the liberal way of thinking, men, being self-conscious and creators of culture apply the  same criteria when  selecting their friends and acquaintances. That’s why, brothers and sisters, that’s why you have racial prejudice.

Why, you might well ask, if this assortative mating is so powerful do a goodly number of white women breed with black men? Well, you must first understand that assortative mating is only a tendency not an absolute natural law. Then you must realise that the overwhelming majority of white women breed with white men. Which leaves us with the white women who do breed with black men.

The stripped truth is that most of them are working class and uneducated and broke. So they ain’t got a lot to offer any white man worth anything. Which means that they have a choice only between some idle do nothing white no hoper and a black with money or prospects. Of course, that ain’t the only  reason that white women go with black men, but it’s a common   reason.

Why don’t white men breed with black women as often as white women breed with white men? Well, that’s real simple, it’s the men who set the agenda in any society. Always has been and always will be. A woman takes her status from her man and a man must preserve his status. Now, if I belong to the highest status racial type in a society, I take a mighty risk in having children of mixed race because they will be discriminated against. Consequently, I don’t do it, well, not if I’m smart I don’t.  

Do I like white women? Well, I like the look of them. But the trouble is that they never act natural with a black man. In fact, whites never act natural with blacks. Even if a white  woman’s trying to be nice, it’s all self-indulgent guilt or nervous bonhomie or unintentional superiority.

And black women? Well, black women tend to get on with honky more than black men because they don’t threaten and there’s always good old S E X. Black women are  always trying to straighten their hair and whiten their skin.  But it don’t do most of them no good in the end because black men don’t like it more often than not and white men ain’t likely to take  sexual notice. Real sad, ain’t it?

Who do I most despise? Taking one thing with another it’s the ol’ liberal whitey, forever going on about how awful racism  is and how wonderfully tolerant he is and how intolerant others are. Yet this sonofabitch can’t even bear to send his children to school with our children. And isn’t it strange that these people, who are forever going on about how they are the friends of coloured folk,  always seem to live in places which don’t have many black folks actually entering their lives in any meaningful sense? And that’s true whether it’s liberals  living far, far away from those black and brown faces which frighten them so much, or in one of their “gentrified” places,  close by where black and brown faces abound, but set aside from the black and brown faces by leafy squares and wagonloads of money.

You don’t believe me? Then take a trip to the ancestral home of white liberals. Go to Hampstead and something seems odd. You are in central London but there’s precious few black and brown faces. If you walk on the two main shopping streets, perhaps you’ll see one coloured face in six. But you get off those two streets and it’s an ocean of honky.

The thing to understand about ol’ liberal whitey is that he is a masochist, and masochists only enjoy pain which they can control. So, they will tell the black man anything so long as they don’t have to actually live with the black man or send their children to school with the black man or  spend any significant amount of their own money helping the black man or letting the black man have a slice of their ruling class     pie.

If you want understand how much I despise liberals, let me say that I’ve got vastly more respect for the white working class. At least they tell the truth about how they feel.

Truth to tell, the time’s long past for some honest talking by  blacks about blacks in Britain.  There  are  some exceptionally stupid blacks in public places who think that white liberals mean what they say. There are some even stupider blacks in public places who don’t believe that liberals mean what they say, but think that it doesn’t matter because  circumstances  will  always  make  the  white establishment behave as though it believed what liberals say.  And there are some quite stupendously stupid niggas who believe that and also think that they can insult ol’ whitey to their heart’s content for ever without ol’ whitey taking enough offence to do something.  Ain’t that something!

Now, my brain tells me that minorities are always going to be fucked by the majority, tells me that if a minority makes a big thing about being separate, they’re putting up signs saying persecute us, tells me that if a minority becomes more privileged than the majority, it is shouting from the rooftops, get those gas ovens working! But blacks don’t want to hear such things. No, blacks want to hear fairy tales. Blacks want to behave as though they are miraculously  protected by God. What mother fuckingly stupid niggas.

Perhaps it ain’t their fault. It’s just stupid black people and stupid white people living out a fantasy. Can you imagine what will happen if race riots really start to take hold? I can. Let’s suppose that we have a nice little rising in  Brixton or Toxteth or St Paul’s. Let’s suppose further that  a dozen whites are killed and perhaps a hundred or so  are injured. Pretty small beer by international standards, but that’s all it will take in safe, cosy old England to make ol’ liberal whitey run like the wind for cover. That brothers and sisters is when you’ll all discover that you’ve been living in a dream.  What, you say, what if blacks are killed? Ah well there’s your want of intellect, there’s your emotional     blindness. It don’t matter how many niggas are killed because we are a small minority. In the end we have to lose. That’s the political arithmetic.

Now don’t get me wrong, I can get myself up in the indignation stratosphere about slavery and the way blacks were treated for a long time after slavery died. Late at night, with a few drinks inside me and the pulsing radical brothers and sisters whispering in my ear, I can be shouting for  reparations for blacks, demanding the world to smooth     away the past.  But that’s just weak self-indulgence and  a  form of slave mentality, for all I’m doing is asking honky to control my life as surely as if I was on a plantation. I’m saying to honky, you give me money for hurts never done to me or my father or grandfather or great grandfather nor done  by you or your father or grandfather or  great     grandfather. Put like that, it don’t seem reasonable.  Even more to the point, put like that such reparations seem like fairy gold.

Why don’t I go and live in Jamaica? Well, the truth is that’ve been there. And the even bigger truth is that I didn’t like it there, didn’t fit in. For Jamaicans I was always an outsider. In fact, they called me Englishman. There’s a fucking irony for you.

But it wasn’t just that. I was bored in Kingston and if you’re bored in Kingston, boy! will you be bored anywhere else in the West Indies. In London I can always find something to do. And everything works, more or less anyhow.  And then there’s that little old British welfare state with     its benefits and its free education and its free health service. You only sniff at that if you’ve got it and don’t know that you’ve been born. Try living in a country without them things and see how you get on.

Who  do I blame for this suppurating  mess of a racial predicament? Well, I would like to just say ol’ whitey, nice and clean and simple. The trouble is, in my heart of hearts,  don’t feel that ol’ whitey is to blame, or at least, not ol’ whitey generally. No the honky side of the blame equation is all those self-deluding liberals and internationalist     simpletons dreaming their dream of the brotherhood of man plus the Pax Britannica merchants who wanted to pretend that the peoples of the Empire were just one big happy fucking family. And you can add to them all the white cowards in power who weren’t deluded,  but didn’t have the backbone to stop what was happening back in the fifties.

That’s the honky side of the blame equation. And the black side?  There we find all the stupid blacks who thought that they could Uncle Tom their way to whitey heaven. Behind them come those blacks who believe ol’ liberal whitey or pretend to believe him.

But most of all I blame my father and my mother and all those other selfish, stupid niggas who came here, found racism all about them, yet stayed and had sons and daughters knowing full well that their sons and daughters and their children and their children ad infinitum would suffer the same rejection.  And one last thing. To go back to where we began,  I’m really sick of hearing those mothers and fathers standing round now saying “I hate England. It so cold. It no place for me when I old.” Well, it never was no place for you when you was young or middle aged but you stayed. So don’t stand there now whining as though it’s anybody’s fault but your own.  

Perhaps the trouble with the English is that they are too controlled, too law abiding. Perhaps if riots had been real serious in the beginning. Perhaps…a thousand times perhaps.

 Jesus! What a fucking mess!

The future of Englishness in films

It  may  be that the present popularity of Englishness  in  films  will pass,  although it shows no sign of doing so soon.  But  even if overtly English films do not maintain their  present  high global profile the use of English actors, whether playing “English”  or not,   will  surely  continue for there is an immense cast list  of  acting talent  in  England – I never cease to marvel at exactly how  good  the average English actor is.

There is a problem with films projecting Englishness , a narrowness of subject. What is missing from most modern English films, or at least those which get a wide release,   is the representation of English society  outside  the  middle  and  upper classes,  something  which was  the  staple  of  British  cinema  in the Fifties and Sixties.  Films set in  the  second world war have been long out of fashion – these by their nature  tended to depict  people of all classes – and there is nothing equivalent  now to  the flow of Ealing comedies and their ilk or even the  Carry  On films.

Good  films  which  deal with a broader range of  English  society  and character are still being made.  Some of the best in the last 15  years are Croupier, Last Orders,  Nil by Mouth, Twenty-four Hour People, Sexy Beast,   Human Traffic, The Full Monty,  Football Factory, and My Summer of Love  and many of the films of by Mike Leigh,  especially  Life  is Sweet,  High Hopes,  Naked,  Career Girls, last orders  and  Vera Drake.   But these,  with the odd exceptions such as The Full Monty  and Vera Drake, get little international exposure.

Nonetheless,  the  fact that films such as the Full Monty and  the  two Guy  Ritchie  “mockney”  gangster films Lock,  Stock  and  Two  Smoking Barrels   and  Snatch  did  have  significant  international   success, including  success  in  America,  does suggest that  the  appetite  for Englishness  is not  simply a liking  for middle class and upper  class Englishness.  It  could  be  that it is simply  a  lack  of  widespread distribution  of  films with workingclass English settings  that  sways Englishness   in   modern   films  towards   the   middle/upper   class representation.

It is a great shame that such films do not get a broader release.  Take a  film  like  Last Orders.  The cast alone tells you  it  is  worth  seeing:  Michael Caine,  Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone,  Tom  Courtney, David  Hemmings and Helen Mirren.   It  is  a  film  which  traces  the  lives  of  four  working class Englishmen from the 1930s to almost the present day. It is  a master class in showing how even the lives of the poor  can carry  the  full  weight  of  drama.   I doubt whether it was shown  on  a  hundred  screens in England.

Sadly, the greatest  problem for our filmmakers is  getting  their   films into cinemas,  not least  because  the  main distributors  in Britain concentrates  almost  exclusively  on  “safe”  commercial films backed by massive marketing,  which  means  in practice the showing  of  “surefire” Hollywood products. Many English films never see a cinema screen and others receive such  a limited distribution they might as well have been left in the can. Many do not deserve to, especially those funded by lottery money. That public money  would  have  been better spent buying  a  national  distribution network.  That would have given British filmmakers the reassurance that  if  they  produced  something  halfway decent it  would  get  a  decent distribution.  Fewer  films would be made no doubt but  more  would  be worthy of showing widely and more would be shown.   A more rounded view of Englishness would also be on show.  Variety being the spice of life, that  would  be  the greatest guarantee of  the  continuing  health  of English cinema,  for there can only be so much of a market for one type of Englishness.

America’s love-hate affair with England in films

When  you go to the cinema think of how often English legends  such  as  Robin  Hood are used by Americans. Reflect on how,  until  recently  at  least,   American  universities  would  give  as  a  matter  of  course  considerable time to the study of writers such as Shakespeare and  Jane  Austen.   These things happen naturally and without  self-consciousness because  English culture and history is part of American history.

Despite  the recent US appetite for Englishness on film  they  have  a  schizophrenic  relationship  with  this  country.   They produce  Anglophobe  abortions such as Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot”  –  a film   set in the American War of Independence which depicted the  18th Century  British  as  Nazis –  are  vestigially  paranoid  about  “King George”  and constantly use the English in films as stage villains.

Overtly,   Americans  ignore  their English origins.  The  most  absurd example  of  this  on celluloid I have come  across   occurred  in  the feature film  length cartoon Pocohontas which dealt with the  Jamestown settlement  of 1607,  the first permanent English settlement  in  North America.    The  leader of the expedition,  John Smith,  was  given  an American  accent  while the rest of the crew had English  ones  ranging from  stage cockney  to upper class cad.

The  consequence of this denial of their origins makes America  a  very peculiar  country in that it lacks a coherent foundation  story.   King  George  and  the British are the villains and  American  colonists  the  heroes … and that’s about it. There is a great blank hole in American history,  namely,  where did they and their dominant culture come from?  The answer of course is England.

Ultimately  the  USA is the child of England:  no  England,  no  United States.   The nonexistence  of the United States  alone would have made a  colossal difference to the history of the past two centuries and  to the present day,  not least because it is and has been for a century or more  responsible  for a tremendous proportion  of  global   scientific discovery  and  technological development.  If the  English   had  done nothing more than lay the foundation of the United States it would have done a mighty thing.

At  this  point I can hear the cry of many:  why the  English  not  the British?  Was  not the United States formed as much by  the  Scots  and Irish  as by the English?  There will even be those who will press  the claims of the Germans.   A little careful thought will show that no one but the English could have been responsible,  although many peoples and cultures   have   subsequently  added to the  considerable  variety  of American life

The  English were the numerically dominant settlers from the  Jamestown settlement  in 1607 until the Revolution.  Moreover,  and this  is  the vital  matter,  they were overwhelmingly the dominant settlers for  the first  one  hundred years.  Even  in 1776  English  descended  settlers formed,  according to the historical section of the American Bureau  of Census,  nearly sixty percent of the population and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain.

This  English  predominance  may not seem  important  at  first  glance because of the immense non-Anglo-Saxon immigration which occurred from the eighteenth century onwards.  Would not, a reasonable man might ask, would not the later immigration swamp the earlier simply because of its greater  scale?  The answer is no – at least until  the  relaxation  of immigration  rules  in the sixties – because the numbers  of  non-Anglo Saxons  coming into America were always  very small compared  with  the existing population of the USA.

When immigrants enter a country their descendents will generally  adopt the  social and cultural colouring of the native population.  The  only general  exception  to  this well attested sociological fact  is  in  a situation of conquest, although even there the invader if few in number will  become integrated through intermarriage and the general  pressure of  the  culture  of  the  majority  population  working  through   the generations.    Thus at any time in the development of the USA the bulk of  the population were practisers of a general culture which  strongly reflected  that  of  the  original  colonisers,   namely  the  English.

Immigrants were therefore inclined to adopt the same culture.  America’s  English origins spread throughout her culture.  Her  law  is  founded on English common law. The most famous of American law officers  is  the English office of  sheriff.  Congress imitates  the  eighteenth century British Constitution (President = King;  Senate = Lords;  House of  Representatives  =  The  House of Commons)  with,  of  course,  the difference  of  a  codified constitution.   (It would  incidentally  be truer  to describe the British Constitution as uncodified  rather  than unwritten).  It  is  an  irony that their   system  of  government  has retained   a  large  degree  of  the   monarchical   and   aristocratic principles   whilst  that of Britain has  removed  power  remorselessly from  King  and aristocracy and placed it resolutely in  the  hands  of elected   representatives  who  have  no  formal  mandate  beyond   the representation of their constituents.

The  Declaration  of  Independence is full of  phrases  and  sentiments redolent of English liberty.  The prime political texts of the American revolution  were those of the Englishmen John Locke and Tom Paine.  The American  Constitution is designed to alleviate faults in  the  British Constitution not to abrogate it utterly. The first ten amendments which form  the  American  Bill of Rights draw  their  inspiration  from  the English  Bill  of Rights granted by William of  Orange.   The  American Revolution was conducted by men whose whole thought was in the English political tradition.

The  English influence is written deeply into the American   landscape. Take  a  map  of the States and see how many of  the  place  names  are English,  even outside the original thirteen colonies which formed  the USA. Note that they are divided into parishes and counties.

Above  all  other  cultural influences  stands  the  English  language. Bismarck thought that the fact that America spoke English was the  most significant  political  fact of his time. I am inclined to  agree  with him.  But at a more  fundamental level, the simple fact that English is spoken  by Americans as their first language  means that their  thought processes will be broadly similar to that of the English.  Language  is the ultimate colonisation of a people.

Moreover,  the  English spoken by the majority of Americans   is  still very much the English of their forebears. It is, for example,  far less mutated  than  the English spoken in India.   The English  have  little difficulty  in understanding Americans whatever their regional  origin. Indeed,  it may come as a surprise to many Americans that  the  average Englishman  probably finds it easier to understand most American  forms of  speech  than some  British accents and  dialects.  Americans  often affect  not to understand English accents, but it is amazing  how  well they can understand them when they need something.  Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that  “America  and  England  are two countries  divided  by  a  common language”  was witty but,  as with so much of what he said,  utterly at variance with reality.

The English heritage in America  is far from spent,  not merely in  its  language  and institutions,  but also in the fact that  more  Americans  have some form of English lineage than any other group and even if  the  do  not  think of themselves as English by descent,    the  personality traits of the English in as far as they are genetically determined  are passed   on  and   reinforced  by  those  extant  cultural  relics   of Englishness.

There  is a special relationship between England and America but it  is not the one beloved of politicians. The special relationship is one  of history and culture.  American culture is an evolved Englishness,  much added to superficially but still remarkably and recognisably English.

What applies to the USA, broadly applies  also to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Even American actors go English . Those  old enough to remember the classic age of Hollywood will  recall the habit of American stars appearing in films with an English  context to resolutely refuse to make any attempt to adopt an English accent. In recent years there has been a complete reversal of this. To list just a few  big names:  Johnny Depp (The Libertine, From Hell,  Pirates of the Caribbean and Corpse Bride),  Julianne Moore (The End of the  Affair), John  Malkhovitch (The Libertine),  Gwyneth Paltrow (Emma  and  Sliding Doors),  Reese Witherspoon (Vanity Fair),   Danny Huston (The  Constant Gardener), Liv Ulman,  Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood and  Sam Astin (all Lord of the Rings), Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta) . Non-American  foreign  actors have also been doing their  bit.  Russell Crowe (Master and Commander), Brendan Gleeson (Troy), Eric Bana (Troy), Cate Blanchett (The End of the Affair), Nicole Kidman (The Others), Natalie Portman (V for Vendetta).

The  success  of English films in  America also gives the  lie  to  the American’s frequent claim that they cannot understand what the  English say because they “kinda talk funny”.  This fantasy is mercilessly guyed in the film The Limey where Terrence Stamp plays a cockney gangster  in America  and  the  American  characters  constantly  say  they   cannot understand him.  In fact, as anyone who has had dealings with Americans will know they can all understand very well – when they want something.

It  is  perhaps not so surprising that films with  RP  speakers  in  it should  be understood by Americans,  but  it is noteworthy  that   they also  watched  in large numbers the two Guy  Ritchie  mockney  gangster films which were full of the cockney vernacular.  They watched in  even greater numbers Johnny Depp’s hilarious take off of Rolling Stone Keith Richard in Pirates of the Caribbean.

The appetite for Englishness in films

What qualifies as a “culturally English film”?  How about this:   it is a film which either has an English context such as The Libertine or has a  cast  which  consists wholly or largely of  English  actors  playing “English”, for example, Girl with  Pearl Earing.

English  themes  and English actors have always had a good bite of  the Anglophone filmic cherry,  but they are making   a particularly  strong showing in recent years.  A look at the all time global box office, that is,  money taken solely at the box office, is revealing.

Of  the ten  largest grossing English language films in history,  six  have an indubitably English ambiance:   Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton), Lord of the Rings: the return of the king  and two each of the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Carribean.  The odd men out are Avatar, Titanic, Toy Story 3 and  the Dark Knight.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films

Three of the odd men out  have significant  English  flavour,  whether from overtly  English  characters  (Titanic, Shrek) ,   a  story  with  English  associations (Titanic) or actors using an English persona (Star Wars,  for  example, the  characters of Obi wan Kenobi,  the Galactic President and   C3PO).

The six highest grossing English language film franchises are in descending order Harry Potter, Star Wars, James Bond, Shrek, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Carribean.  http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/111362/highest-grossing-film-franchises . Of these only Star Wars and Shrek do not have a specifically English tone.   (The Chronicles of Narnia and  His Dark Materials – both very English in tone – also have the making of lasting franchises. )

It is true that those  films and franchises are are ranked on revenues unadjusted for inflation.* However, that does not stop them for being a a good  pointer to what was popular.  What they tell us is that there is a considerable appetite for Englishness amongst modern film goers. (It is also true that adjusting for inflation has its problems  because of changing exchange rates and multiplying tickets sold by an average present-day ticket price is a dubious practice because ticket sale data is often dubious, especially for older films).

What is the attraction of Englishness?

It  is obvious why Englishness should have appeal within  England,  but why does it have international appeal? The fact that we have English is our  language might seem  a significant advantage internationally,  but it  is  doubtful whether that advantage actually counts  for  much   in practice  because English films are competing against large numbers  of other  Anglophone films,  including the output of the most potent  film industry in the world, that of America.

If  it  is not the language is it  the nature of the  films  themselves which attract?  Perhaps part of the  reason for the recent success lies in the type of Englishness that is  generally  depicted.  What  foreign audiences see most are versions of  middle and upper class Englishness.

Often  this  is a version of Englishness which has a  large  dollop  of fantasy such as  that shown in “Notting Hill”  or is Englishness in  an historical  setting,  with Jane Austen and  Dickens   adaptions   being perennial favourites.  But even these films,  somewhat distant as  they may  be from the realities of modern English life,  still have  a  very English feel to them. The settings are English,  the voices are English and above all the  personalities are English.

Such  films  have  the  dramatic advantage of  both  appealing  to  the foreigner’s general stereotype of the English, which is largely derived from the English middle and upper classes, and of providing unusual and glamorous settings.  Such themes and settings also mean these are often characters   who have influence and power and a good deal to lose,  all good dramatic material.

There  is also the legacy of the British Empire,  an institution  which was  not only dominated by the English in terms of personnel  but  also culturally – the history and literature taught to colonial peoples  was English  to  the end and the institutions implanted –  Parliaments  and Common  Law – were English institutions.  Even after the end of  Empire the   BBC,  particularly the World Service,  continued to  project  the middle/upper  class version of Englishness through the dominant use  of received pronunciation speakers.

The   Empire   was  an institution  which  affected  not  merely  those peoples  and  territories  which were  formally  colonised   but  other  countries such as Argentina,   countries which were  heavily influenced  by English capital and settlers.   Nor was the Empire simply that which existed at its end,  vast as that  was in both geographical and  ethnic scope.  There  is  also  the USA, which  was  an  English  founded  and culturally dominated state, hence the fact that its language is English and  its  most  important public  institutions  variations  of  English institutions. More of the USA later.

Perhaps  there is also a purely aesthetic aspect of the attraction.  It could  be that the English middle class/upper class persona  is  simply arresting,  interesting in itself. In particular,  perhaps that persona seems specially  apt for characters in position of power and privilege.

It  is  worth noting that important  people  in English language  films dealing  with  historical  subjects  have  long  been  acknowledged  by Hollywood   to  be best played by English received  pronunciation  (RP) speakers.  This  trait began early in the history of  the  Talkies  and continues to this day.  In the recent film Troy only Brad Pitt  playing Achilles “disgraced” himself by  not being able to muster a serviceable RP  voice.  Received  pronunciation and the  persona  it  creates   may naturally   seem  authoritative not merely to the English but  to  many other peoples, even if those peoples are not naturally well disposed to the English.

The dramatic shape  of English films must also play its part.  Take the three great English “franchises”:   LOTR, Harry Potter and James  Bond. In  addition to their Englishness they  all have  very strong  dramatic architecture.

Tolkein wrote the Lord of the Rings as a conscious attempt to create an English  myth  and  he does admirably  evoke  a  rural  pre-industrial,  timeless  England.    He also succeeded in creating an English Odyssey, a  world  full of the magical and fantastical.   Harry  Potter  is  the English public school story brought up to date and cunningly mixed with magic and co-education. Bond is the spy thriller plus social cachet.

The LOTR appeals to  the deep human  thirst   for myths,  of  something utterly beyond the everyday. It is a world of trolls and magicians,  of warriors  and beautiful high born ladies.   Tolkein  is first  rate  at creating  archetypes,  especially   Sauran (Evil),  Gandulf  (the  good magician  with a touch of the messiah) and Aragorn (the  perfect  hero, noble  in thought and deed,  beautiful,   great at arms,   gracious  in manner,  brave  beyond what is human and above all  utterly  resolute).

LOTR attracts for the same reasons the Odyssey and Iliad have  captured the  imagination  for the better part of  three thousand years.  It  is epic.

The  English public school story succeeds firstly because it is  gives, Jane Austen-like, a small, enclosed  society upon which to hang a drama. The  traditional English Public school story has verve.  The  boys  are anything  but  solemn.  There  is a good  variety  of  personality  and  interest.  There is competition within forms,  within houses,  and with other  schools.  Games loom large. The interplay between characters  is between adults and children,  something which is rare in other types of films where children are generally absent or peripheral.  But   the  success  of the public school story  is  more  than  just  a  setting. One only has to see an American attempt at the same theme such as  Dead  Poets  Society to realise that merely setting a  story  in  a boarding school is not enough. Dead Poets Society is dreadfully earnest and  the boys so lacking in genuine high spirits as to be mere  wraiths compared to the robust English fictional schoolboy in the line from Tom Brown  and Scud East onwards through to Bob Cherry and  William Brown.

There  is  an  essence of Englishness which needs to be  added  to  the setting. The Harry Potter phenomenon is not difficult to explain.  Add magic  to the   traditional   public  school  mixture  and   the   already   rich opportunities for plot and character are greatly multiplied.  Children, despite  the  hype  about adult Potter devotees,   make  up  the  large majority  of  Potter  fans.  They naturally  gravitate  towards  school stories   because it is their world. Children also adore  the  idea  of magic,  not  least because the world of  children,  particularly  young children,  is subjectively magical because the child  is  inexperienced and   deals  with  what they do not understand by  comforting  acts  of imagination.    The secret of HP’s success is Rowling’s creation  of  a convincing  children’s  world  which  includes   the  escape  from  the everyday.

As  for Bond,  spy stories  are of course widely popular but none  have the  glamour or lasting power of Bond.  That is because   Bond is  much more  than  a spy.  He is a state authorised killer but  he is  also  a gent,  an old Etonian,  expelled at the age of 14 for having an  affair with  one of the school’s maids,  and a practised seducer of  women  in adult life.  Such a background allows him to move in privileged circles with  their concomitant glamour.   Bond  is a gentleman heavy  just  as Raffles  is  a gentleman burglar.  He gives  the viewer the  thrill  of violence and sex wrapped in gentility.

The irrelevance of “relevance”

The  success  of films such as LOTR and Harry Potter dismay  those  who believe  that  people  will  only show an interest  in  that  which  is relevant to their lives.  How, they wail,  can people  be so fascinated by   the  depiction  of societies so unlike,  at  least  superficially, their  own  experience?  How  can the  creatures  of  privilege  be  so attractive?   The  obvious answer is simple:  human beings  most  enjoy dramas  which  are removed from the familiar mandating   of  their  own lives.

There  is  nothing  new in this. Shakespeare’s plays are  full  of  the doings  of kings,   nobles and gentry which dominate the doings of  the common  man,   yet  from  their  first  performances   they  played  to audiences  with  a  large  proportion drawn from  the  lower  ranks  of society.  Films   from their early days have done a  roaring  trade  in showing  the  great at work and play.    In the heyday of  the  British boys’  comic,  George Orwell wrote an essay wondering about the immense fascination which the Greyfriars stories (those with Billy Bunter,  Bob Cherry et al) held for working class boys who bought the Magnet in vast numbers.  They  did  so for the same reason  that  workingclass  adults watched  films  of lives different  from  their own but not so removed from their understanding to be alien: it provided  exciting  novelty without weirdness.  That is probably much of the answer  to why Englishness is popular in film today.

*In  real  terms  earlier films such as Gone With  the  Wind  had  world  grosses  larger than the films listed above,  but the circumstances  of  modern  film distribution are completely different from what they  were  when Gone with the Wind was made (1940),  or even what they were twenty  years  ago.  When  Gone With the Wind came out the  only  way  for  the  ordinary  person to see a film when it was released was in a cinema,  a  situation  which essentially remained   until the advent of  videotape.  Now the ordinary person can not only go to the cinema, they can get the film  not long after its release on DVD and often see it on  television within a year.

Englishness in Films – Master and Commander

Released 2003  

Director Peter Weir

Main cast

Captain Jack Aubrey …. Russell Crowe

Dr. Stephen Maturin …. Paul Bettany

First Lt. Thomas Pullings …. James D’Arcy

Second Lt. William Mowett …. Edward Woodall

Midshipman Lord William Blakeney …. Max Pirkis

Barrett Bonden, Captain’s Coxswain…. Billy Boyd

This is a most unusual form of “chase” film.   Adapted from the  Patrick O’Brien novel of the same title,  it is  set  in 1805. (O’Brien’s book  has  the  privateer as American,  but in the post-liberty world of 911 America Hollywood and American bad guys do not go together.)   A  Royal Navy frigate The Surprise with orders to “burn, sink, or take her a prize” is in pursuit of  a French  privateer Acheron  which has been preying on British  shipping on  the  Spanish  Main (the mainland of the American continent enclosing the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico). The Acheron is eventually captured after a chase which includes going round the Horn.

As  a dramatic vehicle,  a  ship  has the same advantages  as the  country-house,   boarding  school,  POW  camp  or  small village: it is a self-contained world with sufficient numbers of  people to be interesting but not too many  to   overwhelm the action or the development of character.  And so it proves here.   

Although it is an action film,  it is about as far from being the mindless if enjoyable mayhem of a Terminator film as  can be  imagined.  The  fight  scenes,  broadsides  and  boarding parties  included,  take perhaps thirty minutes out  of  more than  two  hours.    This  allows  plenty  of  time  for  the development of character,  most notably between  the captain, Jack Aubrey,  and his ship’s surgeon and naturalist,  Stephen  Maturin.  But  there is also space  for  other  subordinate stories such as the friendship between two midshipman,  which        has elements of Tom Brown and Scud East.  

Russell  Crowe as  Aubrey and Paul Bettany   as Maturin,  are both  first  rate.   Crowe does what  he  did  in  Gladiator,  inhabit a role which allows his ability to portray a man with both  natural authority and  humanity full reign,  this  time with bonus of being the nearest thing to an absolute  monarch known to English society,   captain of  a Royal Naval ship at the  beginning of the 19th century.   (His RP English  accent is  almost  perfect – the odd  vowel  sound  goes awry.) 

As  for Bettany,  he showed what he suggested in A  beautiful mind,  that rarest of qualities in an actor: the portrayal of intellect.  Probably only Ralph Fiennes amongst  present  day actors  could  do it as well and he with more  coldness  than Bettany, who made his character here a thoroughly sympathetic one.  There is an exquisite scene when Maturin has to operate on himself to remove a bullet  beneath his ribs.    He  asked          Crowe  whether he is up to assisting him with a steady  hand.  “My  dear doctor,  “  replies Crowe,  “I have spent  my  life around  blood and wounds.”  A few minutes into the  operation Crowe looks distinctly queasy and Bettany between grimaces of  pain  allows himself a triumphant smile.   Almost  worth  the price of entrance in itself.

The supporting cast are uniformly good,  especially the  very young midshipmen – their age historically correct: Nelson was a captain by the age of 20 – one of whom has an arm amputated early  in the film – no anaesthetic mind –  and then  becomes Bettany’s protege as a naturalist.

The  film  is visually beautiful and  exciting.  With  ninety percent at least of the film set on the Surprise at sea,  the ocean  is seen in all its  states from doldrum calm  to  Cape Horn belligerent.    The small part of the story which is  on  land takes place in  the Galapagos where Maturin indulges his naturalist’s passion.  Those scenes have a cold,  uncluttered beauty about them.

Above all it is also an intensely  English film.    The cast, even where they are technically other than English,  such  as Maturin   (supposedly  an  Irishman),  are  all   played   as Englishmen  and  the entire crew – with the  exception  of  a nervous midshipman who tops himself –  all behave well. It is simply the best advert for Englishness seen on the screen for many a long year.

There  is  a small amount of “England expects”  dialogue  but really  very  little  considering the context  of  the  film. Instead, the  “advert”  for England consists  simply  of Englishmen behaving well.

How Thatcher became the useful idiot of the education progressives

When Margaret Thatcher came to power many thought she would attempt to undo the damage of the comprehensive experiment and progressive methods, damage which was already visible. In her 11 years in power she not only failed to repair the damage, but she  made things worse through  her attempts to translate her free market ideology into education.

The Thatcher Governments neither reinstituted the grammar schools (or an equivalent) nor drove out the anti-examination, anti-competitive ethos of the teaching profession.  Instead,  Margaret Thatcher contented herself with introducing  Thatcherite ideas such as a national curriculum and league tables and by  encouraging parents and pupils (and later university students) to  think of themselves as consumers while leaving things much as they were in terms of teaching methods, mentality and administrative structure. 

This  bizarre marriage of the prevailing progressive ideology  with Thatcherite ideals would have been unsuccessful at the best of times because the two were simply incompatible.  But the Thatcherite part of the equation was in practice more or less nullified as a means to raise standards.  Over  the 18 years of the Thatcher and Major  governments,  the educational establishment persuaded the Tories that not only should the comprehensive settlement be left unchanged, but that the O Level/CSE exams should be scrapped in favour of GCSE, that more and more coursework should be introduced into school exam marks, that the national curriculum tests should move from simple evaluations of the three “Rs” and a few other subjects to  overblown and time consuming events, that polytechnics should become universities  and that the numbers in higher education should rise to previously undreamt of levels.

Thatcherism  extended more dramatically  into  higher  education. University grants were first allowed to wither on the vine through inadequate uprating and then abolished. In their place came student loans to be repaid after graduation. The post-war ideal of free higher  education finally died with the introduction of tuition fees by in the 1990s.  Students suddenly found themselves faced with debts of £10,000 or more on graduation with future students living under the threat of ever rising fees.

When people pay for something they become resentful if they feel that they do not get what they pay for. In the case of university students they object to not merely failing their degree entirely, but even to getting a poor degree. That any failure to gain a good degree is largely due to themselves is lost in the resentment that something has been  paid for which has not been delivered.  Of course,  the undergraduate is not paying the full cost of their tuition  and they receive a loan on very favourable non-commercial terms.  But because they do end up with a hefty debt at the end of their degree, that makes any perceived academic failure more poignant that it was in the days of grants and no tuition fees.

Although the  relationship between the teacher and the taught  was changed by tuition fees and loans, that in itself would not have been too damaging for university standards. In the end  a disgruntled student can do little unless they have money to go to law, which few do. Nor, in all probability,  would the courts be eager to get involved in disturbing the ideal of academic freedom.  What was damaging was the ending in 1988  of university  funding  by block grants  from a central  awarding authority, the University Grants Committee (UGC). The UGC was replaced by the Universities Funding Council (UFC) and block  grants were replaced by state money primarily attached to students (quality of teaching and research were also taken into account). The more students, the more income.  Universities were immediately changed from places which awarded degrees as they chose to award them based on academic performance to institutions which were anxious to “sell” their wares to students.  To do this they needed to present themselves as a university which not only failed few people but awarded most students “good” degrees.  The upshot was that the proportion of First Class and Upper Second degrees rose inexorably until today  around two thirds of students in the UK receive one or other of them and one third receive Lower Seconds or worse.  (Forty years ago  the proportions  were roughly reversed with a third receiving Firsts and Upper Seconds and two thirds Lower Seconds or worse.) 

The decline of the universities was hastened by the vast  and unprecedented expansion of those in higher education:

“The number of students at university had risen from 321,000   in the early 1960s to 671,000 in 1979. By 1996 it was headed   for 1.5 million, far in excess of the target of 560,000   places set by Robbins thirty years earlier. At the Labour   Party Conference in September 1997, Tony Blair promised   another 500,000 places at university by 2002.” Dominic Hobson The National Wealth p 325.

The increase in numbers was not matched with an increase in funding. The consequence was a substantial increase in  the student/teacher ratio, less tutorial and lecture time and a tendency to favour cheaper arts and social science courses over expensive science degrees.  In addition, although staff did not increase in line with student numbers, they did rise and competition for the best staff increased, with the inevitable consequence that the universities at the bottom of the pile – almost exclusively the polytechnics which became universities in 1992 – became institutions which should be described as universities only when the word is placed in inverted commas, with drop out rates previously unheard of in England.

The consequences of the Thatcher period were, as in so many areas, the very reverse of what she supposedly stood for. Just as the European Common Market undermined British sovereignty more than any other single treaty EU treaty agreement rather than achieving Thatcher’s intended aim of strengthening Britain’s position within the EU, so her education reforms promoted the ideas of those who were supposedly her sworn ideological enemies, the progressives. Thatcher became their useful idiot.

English education and the great grade inflation fraud

English education has suffered greatly from its politicisation in the liberal internationalist interest, but even more fundamental damage was done by progressive teaching methods which failed to provide many children with an adequate grasp the three ‘Rs’ (and left a depressing number either completely  illiterate or what is coyly called “functionally illiterate”, while  most are unable to do simple arithmetic and lack any sense of number or proportion,  so that they have no idea whether the sums they poked into their calculators produced answers which were correct.

The most obvious consequence of the gradual decline in educational standards  was an erosion in exam quality.  At first it was small things. Practical exams for science O Levels were dropped. Then came multiple choice questions. The curricula in all subjects  shrank.  New,  less academic subjects such as media studies found their  way into the exam system and elbowed the academic aside. Eventually  came the ultimate corruption of the exam system with the introduction of continuous assessment.  With  the fall in school standards, the  universities and polytechnics inevitably had to drop their standards. 

The  corruption of exam standards was further driven by a desire to expand the numbers of children passing school exams and the numbers going on to Higher Education.  To this end O Levels and the old CSE exams for less able pupils were abolished in the 1980s  and replaced with the General Certificate of Education (GCSE). Around the same time a decision was made to vastly increase the numbers of students in Higher Education. To make this policy more attractive to would-be students, the polytechnics were renamed universities in 1992, with the consequence that more than 100 institutions with that title were suddenly competing for students, with as we shall see later, evil effects.

The consequence of having a single exam (GCSE) for all 16 year olds was predictable: to prevent embarrassing numbers of failures, the standard of the new exam had to be reduced below that of the already much less demanding O Levels of the 1980s (even so, in 2005 around 30 per cent of children fail to gain five GCSEs at C grade or higher.) The upshot was that the GCSE candidates either left school at 16  lacking even  the rudiments of education needed to fill run-of-the-mill jobs – many are functionally illiterate and even more lack basic numeracy –   or entered A Level courses woefully under-prepared, especially in subjects such as maths.  A Levels and degree courses were again, of necessity, reduced in standard to adapt to pupils and students who were substantially under-prepared compared with those arriving under the pre-GCSE examination regime.

At the same time as standards were eroding, the Tories introduced in the 1980s the madness of league tables and targets.  The consequence of these – not just in education but generally – is to distract from the actual purpose of what an organisation is supposed to do and to promote dishonesty in the pursuit of attaining the targets and showing well in league tables. 

The league tables provoked even more tampering with the academic standards of school exams as examination boards competed with one another to produce the “best” results, that is, ever higher pass rates and grades and schools chose the examination board most likely to give them ostensible examination success.

The  response of both politicians and educationalists  to the inexorable rise in GCSE and A Level results since GCSE was introduced has been to hail them as evidence that educational standards are continually rising. Such claims have the same relationship to reality as Soviet figures for the turnip harvest or tractor production.  All that has happened is that both the difficulty of exams and the severity of marking has been reduced.  In 2004 an A Grade in GCSE Maths  from Edexcel, one of the largest exam boards, could be gained with 45 per cent (Daily Telegraph 18 9 2004), while a “B” grade at one Board in 2004 (OCR)  could be a obtained with a mere 17 per cent (Sunday Telegraph 16 1 2005).  (When challenged about lowered grade marks, those setting the exams claim that the questions are becoming  more difficult.)  Course work, which counts towards the overall exam mark,  is reported as being either routinely plagiarised from the Web or showing other evidence of being  other than the pupil’s unaided work. 

In addition to the lowering of exam marks and the fraud of continuous assessment, school exams have begun to shift from final tests  to  modular exams which are taken throughout the course. Hence, pupils on such courses never take an exam which tests them on their entire course. 

Of course, all this change to school exams, combined with the introduction of the national curriculum tests,  creates a great deal of extra work for teachers and distracts them from the actual task of teaching – pupils are tested at 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18.  It has also spawned a truly monstrous examination bureaucracy,  which according to a recent report from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (a state body) costs £610 million per year (Daily Telegraph 14 2 2005) and has left the country desperately scrabbling around for  examiners.

The  frequent complaints of university teachers about the inadequacy of the students coming to them  and the even more  vociferous  complaints of employers about applicants who lack competence in even the three “Rs” are pretty substantial straws in the wind suggesting a general educational failure. My own direct experience of youngsters all too often bears out such complaints –  I find especially depressing recent graduates with good degrees from top universities who are  bizarrely ignorant of their degree subjects and poorly equipped to research or analyse.

The universities also joined in the grade inflation caucus race.  I went to University in the late sixties. In those days – when less than 10% of UK school-leavers went to university – Oxford and Cambridge awarded around 40%  of undergraduates the top two degree classifications . The newer universities were much stingier, many awarding only  4-5% of firsts and 30% of upper seconds.  They did this to establish their credibility.  Now it is common for universities to award  firsts to more than 15% of undergraduates and firsts and  upper seconds to two thirds of those who graduate.  A recent (I Jan 2011) Sunday  Telegraph  investigation discovered “The universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland’s oldest university, where Prince William met fiancée Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970.

“Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970.  At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970. “http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8235115/Dumbing-down-of-university-grades-revealed.html

There was some grade inflation before the late eighties but it was small compared with what has happened since. Until, the late eighties universities received their funding in the form of a block grant from a government body called the Universities Grants Committee ((UGC) This meant there was no temptation to inflate degree awards because the money did not follow the individual student. The UGC was scrapped in 1989 and the money attached to each individual student. This changed the relationship between  the university and student from being one where the student was seen as just that to one where the student became primarily a bringer of money. This relationship changed again with  first the abolition of grants and then the introduction of fees which made placed the student in the position of customer.

Anecdotes are always tricky as evidence,  so let us consider an objective fact which explains why widespread educational incompetence is inevitable in the circumstances which have been created.  IQ  is normally distributed within a population, that is it forms a Bell Curve with most people clustering in the middle of the curve and a few people at the extremes of the curve. Such a distribution means that the proportion of the population with IQs substantially above the average is quite small – approximately 25 per cent of the UK population have IQs of 110 or more.  Now, it is true that IQ as a measure of academic success is not infallible, not least because motivation is necessary as well as intellect.  But what is true is that a decent IQ is necessary for  academic success. Put another way, someone with an IQ of 150 may or may not take a First in maths: someone with an IQ of 90 never will.

The way IQ is distributed means that the ideal of an exam suited to everyone (GCSE) is a literal nonsense, because that which would test the brightest would be beyond the large majority and even that which the majority could cope with would be beyond those in the lower part of the ability range. The grades awarded for GCSE bear this out.  The  large numbers of those getting the top marks mean that the exam is too easy for the brightest, while the 30 per cent or so of school-leavers who cannot attain 5 passes at C grade or better tell you it is too difficult for the lower part of the academic ability continuum. 

 A similar problem of fitting exams to a very wide ability range has affected universities. Tony Blair set a target of 50 per cent of either school-leavers or people under the age of 28 (the target seems to move) to be in Higher Education – at the beginning of  2005 the percentage is over 40 per cent. Blair’s target meant that many of those at university will have mediocre IQs. 

Let us  assume for the sake of simplicity  that 50 per cent of school-leavers is the target rather than 50 per cent of those under 28. There are only around 25 per cent of people with IQs of 110 or higher in any age group. If every one of those 25 per cent went to university (50 per cent of those scheduled to go to university if the Blair target is met) it would still leave the other half of those going to university  to be found from those with IQs of less than 109. Hence, with 50 per cent of school-leavers at university,  at least half the  people taking degrees would have, as a matter of necessity,  moderate IQs.  In fact, the position is worse than that,  because significant numbers of those with IQs substantially above average will not go  to university.  That means even more than 50 per cent of students would have moderate IQs. Trying to set degree courses suitable for people with,  say,  IQs  ranging  from 90-160 cannot be a  practical proposition.

The coalition government has not committed themselves to Blair’s 50% target but neither have they said it will not the reached or even exceeded, the Government line being anyone who wants to go to universitty should go.

The upshot of all this is that the better  universities can no longer trust an A at A Level to be a true reflection of excellence because so many people are awarded As and a new A* grade has been introduced in the hope that it will distinguish outstanding candidates.  However, this is unlikely to be a long-term solution as it is a sound bet that A* will be awarded in ever greater numbers.

English education, immigration and political correctness

What allowed progressive education to go from being a primarily a method and philosophy of teaching to a potent political ideology was mass immigration.  Originally the progressive view of immigrants was that they must be assimilated into English society.  When it became clear by the mid-seventies that assimilation was not going to work, progressive educationalists rapidly switched to the doctrine which became  multiculturalism.  By the early eighties assimilation was a dirty word in educational circles.  The educationalists were followed by the politicians.

Multiculturalism was embraced as a mainstream political ideal in the late 1970s because politicians did not know what to do about mass coloured  immigration and its consequences. Both Labour and the Conservatives initially promoted the French solution to immigration – make them black and brown Britons. But by the end of the seventies integration  was deemed by our political elite to be a failure at best and oppression at worst. Multiculturalism was its successor. Once it became the new official doctrine, the many eager Anglophobic and internationalist hands in English education and the mass media were free to give reign to their natural instincts.

The idea behind multiculturalism is that it squares the immigration circle of  unassimilable immigrants and a resentful native mass by saying everyone may live in their own cultural bubble. In practice, this required the suppression of British interests and the silencing of British dissidents  on one side and the promotion of minority cultures  and the privileging of the immigrant minorities on the other.

 English history  and culture ceased to be taught in schools in any meaningful way. Where  it was part of the curriculum, it was the subject of ever increasing denigration. Politicians of all parties gradually became more and more reluctant to speak out for the interests of the native Briton. Laws were passed – most notably the Race Relations Act of 1976 and the Public Order Act of 1986 – potentially making it an offence to tell the unvarnished truth about race and  immigration or make any telling criticism of any minority ethnic group.

As the new elite doctrine of multiculturalism became established, it became necessary not only for the elite themselves to espouse it but anyone who worked for the elite. Any public servant, any member of the media, any senior businessman, an professional person, was brought within the net. This produced the situation we have today whereby no honest speaking about any subject within the pc ambit is allowed in public without the person being shouted down and in all probability becoming either a non-person or forced to make a public “confession” reminiscent of those during the Cultural Revolution.

Most importantly,  multiculturalism  allowed the progressives to portray Englishness as just one competing culture amongst many, all of which were equally “valid”.  This had two primary implications: other cultures should be given equal consideration within the curriculum and any promotion of one culture over another was illegitimate. In fact, these  implications were never followed through.  Practicality meant that the multiplicity of cultures in England could not all have equal billing,  while the promotion English culture was deemed to be “oppressive” both because they are the dominant “ethnic” group in England and because of their “evil” imperial, slave-trading past. The educationalists’ cut the Gordian knot by treating the inclusion  of items of any culture other than English within the school curriculum as a “good”, while insisting that references to England and her people should always be derogatory and guilt inducing.

The better part of a quarter of century of this policy has resulted in English  education system being successfully subverted.  English cultural content has been marvellously diluted  and  denigration of the English is routine bar one thing: the liberal bigot invariably lauds the toleration of the English towards immigrants, a claim at odds both with historical reality and the liberal’s general claim that England is a peculiarly wicked and undeserving place.

 English education  has officially become not a way of enlarging the mind and opening up intellectual doors, but merely a means to produce  “good” politically correct citizens and  workers equipped for  the modern jobs market.  The last Labour Government has decreed that pupils are no longer to be pupils but “learners”.  The desired ends for these “learners”  are “Be healthy; stay safe; enjoy and achieve; make a positive contribution; and achieve economic well being.”  (Daily Telegraph 19 2 2005). This is a programme couched in language remarkably similar to those of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. 

The  Blair Government  introduced citizenship lessons in schools – I will leave readers to guess what makes a good citizen in the Blairite mind – and played with the idea of  introducing  a citizenship ceremony for all 18-year-olds. The present coalition shows no sign of radically altering matters because they are always trying to do two mutually exclusive things at the same time: get rid of some of the more outlandish examples of political correctnmess whilst appearing to be very politically correct. The consequence is little movement as the one impulse tends to cancel out the other.

English education and the triumph of the progressives

By the time the second Wilson government was elected in 1974, progressive education had gone a fair way to obtaining the stranglehold it  has today and to developing from an educational theory into a political doctrine.

Progressive or child-centred educational theories have a long history. The idea that the child should not be actively, (and to the progressive mind  oppressively)  educated by adults but be  provided with the opportunity to learn as its nature drives it to learn, is not in itself an ignoble idea and people throughout history have expressed concern about the stultifying of children through too strict a regime. However,  all ideas, once they harden into an ideology have a nasty habit of being driven to extremes,  becoming both fundamentally unreasonable and impracticable. Rousseau made what we now called child-centred education unreasonable in the 18th century by taking it to the extremes of believing that children would “naturally” find their true  nature  and intellectual level if  placed in  the  right circumstances, that it was European society  that corrupted the individual – from this mentality the Romantic fantasy of the noble savage emerged.  It is as good an example of an intellectual construction  unrelated to reality as one could find.  That the vast majority of children do not respond positively to undirected education and a general lack of adult authority is clear to anyone who has had anything to do with children, let alone having been responsible for their formal education, a process, incidentally,  which is primarily concerned with teaching children things they would not naturally learn or even come into contact with if left to their own devices.

 Rousseau’s  intellectual  descendents  followed  consciously  or unconsciously in his  mistaken wake.  Those  in England in the  nineteen sixties and seventies were both extreme in their progressive beliefs and politically motivated. They not only  believed that children should not be actively instructed,  but also that the power relationship between  teachers and pupils should become one  of equality. (This idea  has just reached its reductio ad absurdum with Ofsted introducing various questionnaires to be completed by  pupils  at primary schools,  secondary schools and sixth form colleges. The  pupils  will  assess their schools’  performance  through  these questionnaires, which will only be seen by Ofsted – Daily Telegraph 19 2 2005)

Whole class teaching with the teacher at the front of the class gradually gave way to groups of children clustered around tables and enjoying only sporadic contact with their teacher.  Children hearing their teachers spouting progressive mantras about  non-oppressive teaching and the evil of exams, responded in an absolutely predictable way: they became ill-disciplined and utterly disinclined to learn.  These  traits were reinforced by the growing failure  of  the comprehensive system to even equip many of them with the basic tools to learn: literacy and numeracy and the general lack of intellectual challenge  with which they were faced.  A child who has spent his or her  years before the age of 14 (when the 16-year-old school exam courses begin) being asked to do nothing demanding is inevitably going to be daunted if they are suddenly faced with a Shakespeare  text or Newton’s laws of motion.

This  lack of intellectual challenge arose because  educational progressives saw  it as their duty to socially engineer class differences out of society. Academically,  this desire translated itself into  a tendency towards ensuring a  general mediocrity of performance throughout the comprehensive schools  rather than an attempt to raise the academic horizons of children from poor  homes. Not only were exams frowned upon but competition of any sort was deemed to be harmful. Children were, the progressives said, damaged by failure and consequently opportunities for demonstrable failure must  be removed. 

When  it came to the content of the academic curricula,  the progressives attacked on two fronts. One was what might be  broadly called the “I hate everything about England” policy, which overtly despised and denigrated everything that England had ever done or was.  The other was to promote social egalitarianism.  Nowhere was this seen more perniciously than in the teaching of history.  Complaints about an over concentration on “Kings and Queens” history had long existed, but no one in the mainstream academic world seriously suggested that such history was unimportant. Now it was to be considered worthless because it was not “relevant” to the lives of the pupils.  Facts and chronology were replaced by “historical empathy”  and investigative skills. Where once pupils would have learnt of Henry V, Wellington and the Great Reform Bill, they now were asked to imagine that they were a peasant in 14th Century England or an African slave on a slave ship, going to market in the New World.  The results of such “empathy” were  not judged in relation to the historical record, but as exercises in their own right. Whatever this is, it is not historical understanding.

Other disciplines were contaminated by the same mentality. A  subject was judged by its “relevance” to the pupil or the difficulty theaverage pupil had in mastering it.  Shakespeare was deemed too difficult and remote for workingclass children and  traditional maths was largely replaced by modern maths”, which instead of teaching children how to complete a calculation or demonstrate a theorem, attempted, with precious little success, to teach esoterica such as Set theory and the theory of numbers. 

When teaching is largely removed from facts, the assessment of the work of those taught becomes nothing more than the opinion  of the teacher. This inevitably resulted in the prejudices of the teacher being reflected in their pupils work and the teacher’s  marking. In 2005 this means political correctness wins the day. History teaching, and the teaching of other subjects such as geography which can be given a PC colouring, has become little better than propaganda. This would be unfortunate if the propaganda promoted English history and culture uncritically. But to have anti-English propaganda in English schools and universities is positively suicidal. That it is state policy is barely credible.

The extent to which the state has embraced the politically correct, anti-British line is illustrated by this letter to the Daily Telegraph  from  Chris  McGovern the director of the  History  Curriculum Association, which campaigns against the failure to teach British history fairly or comprehensively:

  SIR–The landmarks of British history have become optional parts of the national curriculum (report Sept. 10). They  appear only as italicised examples of what is permissible to teach.

 However, this permission is offered in guarded terms. A  guidance letter already sent to every school in the country  states:  “… we would also like to emphasise that it  is  very much up to individual schools to determine whether or  not to use the italicised examples”. However, there is no  such equivocation about teaching history through a host of  politically correct social themes. Failure to filter history  through such perspectives as gender, race, agent and cultural  diversity will be in breach of the law. (Daily Telegraph 13 9 1999).

Skills more important than facts

 Alongside this process of de-factualisation grew the pernicious idea that the learning of “skills” was more important than knowledge.  This resulted in the absurdity of children being taught how to “research” a topic rather than being taught a subject. The idea that one can have any understanding of a subject without a proper grasp of its  content is best described as bonkers. Anyone who has ever been asked to do anything of any complexity with which they are unfamiliar will know from painful experience how difficult it is to suddenly master the knowledge needed to perform  the task – attempting to assemble flat-pack furniture from the instructions is a good way of learning this sad fact. 

There is also the growing obsession with technology as a teaching medium. There is the Daily Telegraph education editor, John Clare writing on 26 1 2005 under the title “Is learning a thing of the past?

 Something very odd is happening in secondary schools. The   focus of teaching is switching from imparting knowledge to   preparing pupils for employment  – in, ironically, the   “knowledge economy”. The change, unannounced and undiscussed,   is being brought about through the wholesale introduction of   computer technology….

 According to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority]  Thirteen-year-olds, instead of learning about Henry VIII,  should search the internet for images of the king – “old,  young, fat,  thin” – and use these to “produce leaflets  presenting different  views of him”. Fourteen-year-olds,  instead of learning about the First World War, should  “produce presentations to sell a history trip to  the  battlefields in northern France, tailoring the content and  form to the perceived needs of their audience”.

 Teaching history, in other words, is secondary. The point is  to get pupils searching the internet, selecting websites,  learning  about word-processing, data collection, desktop  publishing and making PowerPoint presentations of their  conclusions. The effect of this, intended or otherwise, is to rob English children of any meaningful knowledge of their history.