Tag Archives: science

Elite Mischief – Gordon Brown and The Francis Crick Institute

I was recently contacted by Bloomberg News and asked to comment on the  Francis Crick Institute, a massive research laboratory which is being built in central London  on land immediately behind the British library and a road’s width  from the Eurostar terminal.  The laboratory will be handling dangerous toxins and consequently the site is deeply unsuitable both  because of the risk of an accidental escape of toxins  or terrorism.

In addition to the security dangers, the land was sold improperly by the Department of Culture Media and Sport.  The bid was by public tender withe DCMS secretary of state making a decision on strict criteria. The sale was improper because Gordon Brown when Prime Minister intervened consistently to ensure it went to the consortium backing the Francis Crick Institute.

I met with Mrs Gerlin on 8 November. Whether she will use the story remains to be seen.

The full details can be found by following links given in my Briefing Note  to Mrs Gerlin dated 9 November.

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Mr Robert Henderson

October 25, 2012

Dear Mr Henderson,

I am a healthcare reporter for Bloomberg News in London. I am working on a story about the Crick Institute, which is to be located near your home. I have read some of your objections to it on your blog and have tried reaching you by email with no success.

I would be interested in speaking to you and would like to arrange to meet you near the site. Are you able to meet with me the week of Nov. 6-8? I will be away from London until then, but if you think you have the time, please call my office  (020 7673 2907) and leave a message or send me an email at agerlin@bloomberg.net.

Thank you for your attention.

Kind regards

Andrea Gerlin

Reporter

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Andrea Gerlin

BLOOMBERG NEWSROOM

City Gate House

39-45 Finsbury Square

London EC2A 1PO

Tel: 0207 330 7500

9 November 2012
Dear Andrea,

Let me summarise our meeting today.  The stories for you in the Francis Crick Institute project are these:

1. Gordon Brown’s interference with the DCMS bidding process.   The bids were meant to be assessed only by the DCMS ministers.  The documents which you saw today showed that Brown was interfering as early as 1 August 2007, the day before the expressions of interest closed, and che ontinued to be involved right up to the announcement he made in the Commons in November 2007.  These documents show unambiguously that  the bidding  for the land was a sham with the Consortium bid behind what is now the Francis Crick Institute actively supported by Brown from the beginning. See http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/gordon-browns-involvement-in-the-sale-of-the-land-to-ukcrmi/

2. The failure of the unsuccessful bidders to take action when I  sent them the details of Brown’s  interference with the bidding process which meant they had expended  their time and money for nothing. This is almost certainly due to the fact that the serious  bidders  rely heavily on public contracts and did not want to put future contracts in jeopardy by making a fuss about this bogus contract bidding. See http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/the-failed-bidders-notified-that-the-bidding-process-was-a-sham/     and http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/notification-of-the-contamination-of-the-bidding-process-to-the-lead-contractor/

3. The failure of the officers of Camden Counci l who prepared  the brief for the planning committee  to include the details of Brown’s interference with the bidding process in the brief. See http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/challenge-to-the-granting-of-planning-permision/ and http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/camdens-response-to-my-notification-of-planning-permission-irregularities/

4. The failure of  the Mayor of London to take up the question of Gordon Brown’s interference with the bidding process  after I had sent him the details. See http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/notification-of-planning-irregularities-to-boris-johnson/ and http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/boris-johnson-gives-the-go-ahead-to-ukcmri-laboratory/

5. The new leader of the Green Party in Britain, Natalie Bennett,  took a leading role in the opposition to the laboratory, including giving evidence before the Science and Technology select committee.  Despite having ready access to the media as she was then a Guardian online editor , Natalie refused to use the evidence of Brown’s interference with the bidding process.   Try as  I might I never got a meaningful explanation for why she would not use the material . At the least there is a considerable disjunction between her public promotion of herself as a Green campaigner  and her failure to use information which, apart from being a potent weapon in the fight against the siting of the laboratory , was a first rate political story in its own right. As her politics are well to the left (see http://www.nataliebennett.co.uk/) , a plausible motive for her failure to use the  information would be her unwillingness to damage a prime minister and a party with which she had much sympathy. See http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-new-leader-of-the-greens-knows-how-to-keep-mum/

6. The biohazard and terrorist dangers. These include the use by the Consortium of a non-existent classification of biohazard level 3+. They have been persistently challenged on this and never given a straight answer.  The section on security in this post covers the issue – http://ukcmri.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/objection-to-ukcmri-planning-application-for-a-research-centre-in-brill-place-london-nw1/

These issues are serendipitous as news stories because there is a cataract of elite misbehaviour still hitting the public, a substantial part of which involves the ill consequences of privatisation through the putting of public work out to private contract. I send by separate email a selection of recent media stories about privatisation, both wholesale and piecemeal, which will give you an idea of how disorderly public contract awarding has become and how prone to corrupt practices.

To make  the subject as accessible as I can for you I have placed below links to every post made on the UKCRMI blog (I managed to sort out the lost posts after you went). If you click on them they should take you to each post directly. The titles of the links are self-explanatory. 

I am willing to make available to you any of my documentation which is not already on the UKCRMI blog; to give Bloomberg an interview to be broadcast or appear in written form and write an article for Bloomberg.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

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Links to UKCRMI blog posts
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Re:Francis Crick Institute – Briefing noteTuesday, 13 November, 2012 9:15

From:
“Andrea Gerlin (BLOOMBERG/ NEWSROOM:)” <agerlin@bloomberg.net>

View contact details

To:
anywhere156@yahoo.co.uk
Robert,
Thank you for talking with me and for sending me further details. I
will take a look at this material and let you know if I have any
questions.
Regards,
Andrea Gerlin
Bloomberg News, London

Human accomplishment and the English

Robert Henderson

In  his  book  “Human  Accomplishment”   the  American  Charles  Murray
calculates  the  contribution  to  civilisation  made  by   individuals
throughout  history  up until 1950.  To give his calculations  as  much
objectivity  as possible he measures  the amount of attention given  to
an  individual   by  specialists in their  field in   sources  such  as
biographical  dictionaries – put crudely, the greater the frequency  of
mention and the larger the space devoted to an individual,  the  higher
they score.

Murray  quantifies   achievements  under  the  headings  of   astronomy
(Galileo  and  Kepler  tied  for  first  place),  biology  (Darwin  and
Aristotle),  chemistry (Lavoisier),  earth sciences  (Lyell),   physics
(Newton  and  Einstein),   mathematics  (Euler),   medicine   (Pasteur,
Hippocrates  and  Koch),   technology  (Edison  and  Watt),    combined
scientific (Newton), Chinese philosophy (Confucious), Indian philosophy
(Sankara), Western philosophy (Aristotle), Western music (Beethoven and
Mozart),  Chinese  painting  (Gu  Kaizhi  and  Zhao  Mengfu),  Japanese
painting  (Sesshu,  Sotatsu and Korin),   Western  art  (Michelangelo),
Arabic  literature,  (al-Mutanabbi) Chinese literature (Du Fu),  Indian
literature  (Kalidasa),   Japanese  literature  (Basho  and  Chikamatsu
Monzaemon), Western literature (Shakespeare).  

Objections have been made to Murray’s methodology such as the fact that
many  of the great achievements of the past,  especially in  the  arts,
have  been anonymous,  which give it a bias towards the modern  period,
and    fears that it has a built-in Western bias –  the  representation
of  non-Western  figures in the science  and technology  categories  is
minimal.   Nothing can be done about anonymity – it is  worth  pointing
out  that the majority of those heading the categories lived  at  least
several  centuries  ago  – but  Murray  substantially   guards  against
pro-Western  bias with the breadth and number of his sources and it  is
simply  a fact that science and advanced technology arose only  in  the
past few centuries and that both are essentially Western  achievements.
It  is  also noteworthy that Murray’s  method only places  one  of  his
fellow   countrymen  at  number  one  in  any  category    (Edison   in
technology).  If  any bias exists it is unlikely to  be  conscious.  At
worst,  Murray’s  findings  can be seem as a fair  rating   of  Western
achievement.

The list of those heading the various categories (see second  paragraph
above)   suggests  that  Murray’s method is pretty  sound  despite  any
possible methodological  shortcomings,  because those who come top  are
all men of extreme achievement.  There might be arguments over  whether
Aristotle should take precedence over Plato or Kant,   but no one could
honestly argue that Aristotle was an obviously unworthy winner of first
place in the philosophy category.

Of the 13 categories which  can include Westerners (they are  obviously
excluded  from  non-European  literature  and  art),   Englishmen   are
undisputed firsts or share  first place with one other in four: biology
Darwin   with  Aristotle;   Physics  Newton  with  Einstein;   combined
scientific  Newton  alone;  Western literature Shakespeare  alone.   No
other  nation  has  more  than two representatives  at  the  top  of  a
category.  The thirteen Western including categories have a total of 18
people in  sole or joint first place.  England  has nearly a quarter of
those  in first place and more than a quarter of the 15 who  are  drawn
from the modern period, say 1500 AD onwards.   

Apart  from those coming first,   the English show strongly in most  of
the Western qualifying categories (especially in physics – 9 out of the
top 20, technology – 8 out of the top twenty – and Western literature).
The  major  exceptions  are   Western art  and   music,  where  English
representation  is mediocre.   I think most people who think about  the
matter  at  all  would feel those  cultural  strengths  and  weaknesses
represent the reality of English history and society.     

The fact that England shows so strongly in Murray’s exercise  gives the
lie  to  the common representation of the  English  as  unintellectual.
Moreover,  there is much more to human intellectual accomplishment than
the fields covered by Murray,  most notably the writing of  history and
the social sciences,  areas in which England has  been at the forefront
throughout the modern period: think Gibbon,  Macaulay,  Herbert Spencer
and Keynes. 

English intellectual history is a long one.  It can reasonably be  said
to  begin  in  the early eighth  century   with  Bede’s  Ecclesiastical
History of the English,  which amongst other things firmly  establishes
the  English  as  a people before England as  a  kingdom  existed  (“At
present  there  are  in Britain…five languages  and  four  nations  –
English, British, Irish and Picts…” Book One).  

In the late ninth century comes Alfred the Great,  a  king  whose reign
was  one  of  constant struggle against the Danes,   but   who  thought
enough of learning to teach himself to read as an adult and then engage
in  translations  into Old English of  devotional works  such  as  Pope
Gregory’s Pastoral Care,   Bede’s Ecclesiastical History  and Boethius’
The Consolation of Philosophy.

From Alfred’s reign  comes the Anglo-Saxon Journal (ASJ),  a work  also
written in Old English.  (There are nine  surviving versions written at
different  places,  eight of which are in Old English with the odd  man
out being in  Old English with a Latin translation).   The journal   is
a  history/myth  of  Britain and a narrative  of   the  settlement   of
Anglo-Saxons  within it  until the time of Alfred and then  a  putative
record of and commentary on the great events  of English life from  the
time  of  Alfred until the middle of the 12th century  (like  all  such
medieval works the veracity of the ASJ is questionable, but at worst it
gives a flavour of the mentality of those living at the time). The work
is  unique  in  medieval Europe for  its scope  and  longevity  and  is
particularly  noteworthy  for  the  fact that it  was  written  in  the
vernacular throughout the three centuries or so of its existence,  this
at  a time when the normal language for  writing in Western Europe  was
Latin. 

The    Norman   Conquest   subordinated   the   English    politically,
linguistically  and socially  for the better part of three   centuries,
but  it  did  not kill English  intellectual  endeavour.   Those  three
centuries  of oppression saw the emergence of  many of the ideas  which
were later to produce the modern world.  John of Salisbury   produced a
work  on politics (Policraticus 1159)  which was “the first attempt  in
the  Middle Ages at an extended and systematic treatment  of  political
philosophy”  (G  H Sabine A History of Political Theory p246)  and  one
which  argued  for  a form of limited monarchy  and  the  overthrow  of
tyrants,  views  given  practical English  expression  in  Magna  Carta
(1215). The period was also noteworthy for the strong showing of annals
and histories,  most notably those of Eadmer (Historia Novorum  or  The
History of Recent Events – it covered the  period 950-1109),  Henry  of
Huntingdon (Historia Anglorum or  History of the English 5BC-1129)  and
Matthew  Paris (Chronica Majora).   In addition,   the Common  Law  was
formed,   English  became  once  more  a  literary  language  (Chaucer,
Langland),   John  Wycliffe  laid  the  intellectual  roots   of    the
Reformation and,  perhaps  most impressively, ideas which were later to
provide the basis for a true  science emerged.    England was the mother of the modern world.

To have produced Shakespeare,  Newton and  Darwin alone would have been
a  great  thing for any nation,  but  for England they are  merely  the
cherries  on the top of a very substantial intellectual  cake.  Beneath
them  sit dozens of others of serious human consequence:  the likes  of
Ockham,  Chaucer,  Wycliffe, Francis Bacon, Marlowe,   Halley,  Hobbes,
Locke, Gibbon, Priestly, Cavendish, Newcomen, Faraday, Austen, Dickens,
Keynes, Turing… ‘Nuff said.

England and the rejection of violence

Why was England so different from other countries in its political, social and economic  development?  How was it that only in England did parliamentary government evolve and the one and only bootstrapped industrial revolution arise?  Perhaps much of the  answer  lies  in the fact that the English, in comparison with any other large nation, have long been wonderfully  adept  in dealing  with the central  problem  of human  life –  how  to live together  peaceably.  A  Canadian  academic, Elliott Leyton,  has  made  a study of English  murder through  the centuries in his book Men of Blood. Leyton finds that the rate of English  (as  opposed  to  British murder) is phenomenally  low  for a country of her size  and industrial development,  both now  and for centuries past.  This strikes Elliott  as  so singular that he said  in  a recent interview “The English  have  an antipathy to murder  which borders  on eccentricity; it is one  of the great  cultural oddities of the modern age.” (Sunday Telegraph  4 12 1994).

 This  restraint  extends to warfare and social disorder. That is not to say England has been  without violence,  but rather that  at any point in her history the level of  violence  was  substantially lower than in any other comparable society. For example,  the  English Civil War  in the  17th  Century  was, apart from the odd inhumane blemish,  startlingly free of the gross  violence common on the continent of  the  time  during the 30 Years War,  where the sacking and pillage of towns and cities  was  the norm. A particularly notable thing,  for civil wars are notorious for their brutality. 

The  way  that  England  responded  to the  Reformation  is instructive. She  did not suffer the savage  wars of religion which  traumatised  the  continent  and  brought  human calamities  such as the  St Bartholomew Day’s  Massacre  in  France  in 1572,  when thousands of French  protestants  were   massacred at the instigation of the French king. 

It  was not that the English did not care deeply about  their  religion,  rather that they have been, when left to their own  devices,  generally loth to fight their  fellow  countrymen  over  anything.  English  civil  wars  have  always  been essentially  political affairs  in which the ordinary  person has little say, for the struggles  were either dynastic or  a clash  between Parliamentary  ambition and  the  monarch.  Even the  persecution of  the  Lollards  in  the late fourteenth  and fifteenth centuries and the persecution  of Protestants  under Mary I had a highly political aspect.  The former  was a vastly disturbing challenge to the  established social  order  with men being told,  in so many  words,  that   they could find their own way to salvation and the latter  an  attempt  to  re-establish not merely  the Catholic  order  in  England,  which had been overturned since the time  of  Henry  VIII’s  breach  with Rome,  but also what amounted to  a  new  royal dynasty with Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain.

Even the prohibitions on Catholics and non-Conformists  after the  Reformation had a fundamental political basis  to  them, namely, they were predicated on the question of whether  such people be trusted to give their first loyalty to the crown.

The treatment of foreigners

Compared with  other  peoples,  the  English  have been noticeably restrained  in their treatment of other  peoples residing  within their country.  A few massacres of  Jews  occurred before their expulsion from England in 1290,  but from that  time  there has not  been  great slaughter of a minority living within  England. Since  1290  there  have been occasional outbreaks of anti-foreigner violence. During the Peasants’  Revolt  London-based Flemings  were  murdered.  In later times an anti-Spanish “No Popery”  mob was  frequently  got up in London and he influx of Jews and Huguenots in  the 17th and 18th centuries caused riots,  one so serious in 1753 that  it  caused the repeal of a law naturalising  Jews  and Huguenots.  But  these riots did not result in great  numbers of dead, let alone in systematic genocidal  persecutions of any  particular group.  Most notably,  the English  fonts  of authority,  whether  the crown, church  or  parliament,  have   not incited let alone ordered the persecution of a particular  racial or ethnic group since the expulsion of the Jews.  They  have persecuted Christian groups, but that was a matter  of  religion  not  ethnicity, the  Christians  persecuted  being  English  in the main. The only discrimination  the  English  elite  have formally sanctioned against an ethnic group for  more than half a millennium was the inclusion of Jews within  the  general  prohibitions passed in the half century  or  so after  the Restoration in 1660 which banned  those  who  were  not members  of the Church of England from holding  a  crown  appointment such as an MP or election to public offices  such  as that of MP.

This comparative  lack of  violence  can plausibly be seen as the ground for England’s maintenance and unique development of a Parliament and  the development of the rule of law a  consequence  of England’s political  arrangements. From that sprung the gradual erosion of monarchical authority. Put those three developments together and there is arguably the ground upon which first a great commercial edeifice was built followed by industrialisation.  

But even if that is the immediate cause of English development it does not explain why  the English become  exceptionally peaceable within their own territory.  One could argue that being an island helped, not least because England has not been subject to a forced foreign conquest  from the continent  for the better part of a millennium. However,  England has suffered a good deal of inter-nation warfare within the British Isles, especially with Scotland. She has also fought many a campaign around the world, both as England and later under the banner of Great Britain. It is not that the English are or have been naturally timid.  

Perhaps the fundamental answer to English peaceableness  lies in the fact  that the English enjoyed a level  of  racial and cultural  homogeneity  from very early on.  Long  before  the English kingdom existed Bede wrote of the English as a single people.  The  English have never killed one another  in  any great  quantity  simply  because one part of  the population  thought  another  part was in some way not English.  That is the best possible starting point  for  the establishment of a coherent community. 

The  favoured  liberal  view of England is  that  it  is  the mongrel nation par excellence.  In fact,  this is the  exact opposite of the truth.  The general facts of immigration into England are these. The English and England were of  course created  by  the  immigration of Germanic  peoples.  The British  monk, Gildas,  writing  in  the  sixth  century, attributed  the  bulk  of  the  Saxon  settlement  to the practice  of  British leaders employing  Saxons  to protect   the Britons from Barbarian attacks after Rome withdrew around   410  A.D.  The English monk Bede (who was born in  A.D.  673)   attributed  the origins of the English to the Angles,  Saxons   and  Jutes who came to England in the century  following  the   withdrawal  of  the  Romans at the  request of  British  war leaders.

Archaeological  evidence suggests that  substantial  Germanic settlement in England had a longer history and  dated  from  the  Roman  centuries, perhaps from as early  as  the  third  century.  What is certain is that in her formative  centuries  following  the  exit  of  Rome, the  various invaders  and  settlers  were drawn from peoples with much in  common.

They  were  the  same  physical type, there  was  a  considerable similarity of general culture, their languages  flowed from a common linguistic well. When the Norsemen came they too brought a Teutonic  mentality and origin. Even the Normans were Vikings at one remove who, if  frenchified,  were not  physically  different  from  the English  nor  one imagines utterly without  vestiges  of  the  Norse mentality.  Moreover, the number of Normans who settled  in England immediately after the Conquest was small, perhaps as few as 5000.

After  the Conquest,  the only significant  immigration  into England for many centuries were the Jews.  They were expelled  from England in 1290. There was then no really large  scale  and  sudden immigration from outside the British Isles  until  the flight of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict  of Nantes (which granted limited toleration to the  Huguenots within France) in 1684 by Louis X1V.

There was other immigration in the period 1066-1650, but it was  small and highly selective. Craftsmen of  talent  were  encouraged particularly in the Tudor period. Italian families  with  trading and banking expertise (such as it was in  those days) appeared  after the expulsion of  the  Jews.  Foreign  merchants  were  permitted,  but for much of  the  period  on sufferance  and  subject  to  restrictions  such  as forced  residence within specially designated  foreign quarters. 

The  upshot of all this is that for six centuries  after the Conquest  England was an unusually homogeneous country,  both racially  and culturally. This is reflected in the  absence since  the  Norman Conquest of  any serious regional separatist  movement within the  heart of English  territory. There  has been meaningful resistance  at  the periphery  – Cornwall,  the Welsh marches and the  far north,  but  even that  has  been  effectively dead since the sixteenth century. Englishmen have fought but not to create separate nations.

The unusual restraint of the English  is also shown in their dealings with foreigners  abroad. England did not routinely go in for sack and pillage as was common on the continent and occasional massacres  often occurred in special circumstances,  for example,  Cromwell’s in Ireland happened in   aftermath of a  massacre of Protestants in Ulster in 1641 and the fear that Ireland would be used as a springboard for a Royalist invasion of England.

Nowhere was the restraint seen more emphatically than in the Empire. If  a people were forced to become part of an empire, the British Empire was indubitably the one to join. There were of course outrages committed in the Empire’s name,  but there was no general policy of  cruelty and, for the final century of the Empire’s existence, official British policy towards the colonies was that the interests of the natives should come first.  

If  the  theory that a homogeneous population long occupying a territory without suffering foreign conquest results in greater social restraint  is correct,  this may have  a profound implication.  Assuming that personality is substantially innate, natural selection will act upon the type of personality which is best suited to the environment. It could be that the native English are, on average,  genetically better suited to live in a society in which politics are decided by peaceful transfer of power and business and personal disputes are mediated through the law.   On top of any genetic propensity is added the culture of restraint which has developed from the genetic propensity over the centuries.

Should it be true that the English have a unique genetic national shape and  a culture which uniquely plays to that genetic national shape, then mass immigration will weaken both by introducing both different genetic types an competing cultures.

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.

The great anti-patriot

The news that the singer-songwriter (I use the term with extreme laity) Billy Bragg has been the subject of  mail which has the temerity to point out the disjunction between his ostensible political views and his manner of life. Headed “The Village Idiot”  the letter ran:  

 ‘ Billy “BIGHEAD” Bragg can orate as long as he likes about his “England” but the message that comes from this bilious Marxist singer is that he has shunned the poor   embattled English he was raised amongst  to bask in celebrity style in Burton Bradstock overlooking the English Channel.    

 In his own words the only ‘person of colour’  in the area is the Asian who runs the local garage/store but Bragg is always harping onto people not to vote BNP.             

“ Billy ‘socialist leftist marxist’ moved out of multicultural London years ago to live in a mansion in Dorset which is just about the whitest part of England.

I would say that the man is a “hypocrite” to put it mildly. 

Racial attacks on white people in England (by mostly males) are now reaching something like epidemic proportions , and Billy “BIGHEAD”  wants this for Dorset.

He is a sad, sad apology for an Englishman. He even wants to pull down the Union Jack.

Bragg is useless as a singer and as a man, you traitor.’ (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1344406/Musician-Billy-Bragg-victim-malicious-hate-mail-attack-Dorset-village.html)

Not the most fluent or elegant piece of writing, but it does make its point which is an increasingly potent one, namely, that those who incessantly bang on about the joys of diversity invariably show a remarkable aversion to being one of its beneficiaries in their own lives.  

 Those unfamiliar with Bragg need a few facts about him to understand what the writer of the anonymous note is getting at.  Bragg has made his living and reputation as a political anima through his songs and ordinary political campaigning. He promotes both the idea of an England of allcomers – a subject he deals with in his book The Progressive Patriot (2006) – and traditional socialist values wrapped in what he fondly but mistakenly imagines are the roots of English socialism, namely, the Levellers who arose during the English civil. (He is mistaken because the Levellers were fighting not for economic but political change, for the right of most but not all men to vote with women completely  left out of the enfranchisement equation. The Levellers far from wanting socialist measures, developed ideas  which foreshadowed much of the political thinking of Locke, the arch political and economic individualist. )

Bragg’s socialism came before his  “ progressive patriotism” . He backed the miners’ strike of 1984 and became part of Red Wedge, a group of musicians who campaigned against Thatcher in the 1987 general election.  His interest in   what it is to be an English patriot is a relative latecomer with  his first serious public foray being his  2002 album England, Half-English.  Bragg’s  idea of what constitutes both patriotism and Englishness is distinctly rum, for what he calls his patriotism is a recipe for dissolving Englishness which in turn would render the idea of patriotism in an English context  an absurdity.

What does Bragg mean by Englishness?  Essentially whatever it evolves into.  He religiously promotes the idea of England as being a land of immigrants, even  citing the expression “Anglo-Saxon” as evidence of mixed roots.   Of course if you go back far enough all nations  are the creation of migrants., but that misses the point of nations, namely,  they are the tribe writ large. A nation only exists when  all those enclosed within it see themselves as  belonging to it and are accepted by the others in the nation as belonging.  What Bragg advocates is the inclusion within Englishness of any migrant from any background  regardless of whether or not they can realistically be accepted as English or think of themselves as English.  The  logical end of Bragg’s mentality is that it would not matter if not a single person who would now be considered unequivocally English existed provided there was a land called England filled by whomsoever.  This stands to patriotism as anti-matter stands to matter.

 In his “anti-racist” crusade Bragg advocates  the “re-claiming” of symbols of English patriotism such as the cross of St George from what he fondly imagines is “the extreme  Right”.  As polls relating to immigration and multiculturalism invariably show large majorities opposed at some level to both,  to say that those expressing concern about the way this is changing England represent “the extreme  Right” is clearly nonsense.  All Bragg is encountering is the entirely natural human resistance to the invasion of territory by those who do not belong to the nation.

Back to the complaints made by the anonymous writer. It is very odd indeed that someone who professes such a love of diversity should choose to live in a Dorset village which is probably as  white and English a place you could find these days.  If diversity  is such a wonderful thing why is Bragg not choosing to live amongst it? Tellingly, he has not moved to a village in the county of birth and upbringing, Essex.  Parts of Essex  are rural, so he could have found similar physical surroundings to where he now lives.   The difference with Dorset  of course is that  Essex is rapidly being filled with immigrants.  Writing in the Telegraph (12 4 2010) Ed West got to the heart of Bragg’s unspoken situation:

‘Laban Tall has an interesting take on it, pointing out that Bragg now echoes the revised Labour policy. The official line used to be “multiculturalism is great for everyone”; these days it’s “we realise now that mass immigration is actually pretty terrible for the poor, but we’ve gone this far, so you’ll have to put it up with it; or vote for a party founded by a man who used to spend his weekends dressing up in brown shirt uniforms.”

‘Many people considering that party are not, I suspect, very keen on “sending back” their ethnic friends, but on stopping the Government importing any more people. And they know Labour are not going to stop now – they’re too much in thrall to the race relations industry and too many MPs rely on ethnic minority votes. They’ve invested too much in mass immigration. To admit mistakes would be like a cult member entertaining the possibility that the guy who says we’re all going to be beamed up to heaven in a spaceship is not, after all, the reincarnation of Jesus, but a mental case.’ (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100033896/billy-bragg-battles-the-bnp-over-englands-soul-%E2%80%93-but-does-it-have-one-any-more/)

Bragg is doubly a hypocrite. Not only does he shun the joy of diversity, but he lives the life of a rich man. His house in Dorset is large with a fair sized garden. The Daily Telegraph value it at £1.5 million. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/8241614/Hate-mail-urges-villagers-to-drive-out-Billy-Bragg.html)  . It is more than a little difficult to see how someone living the life of a rich man can really understand what it is to be poor, especially poor, white and English in areas of heavy  immigrant settlement. He has a further problem. Someone who proclaims themselves to  be a socialist is faced with the moral question of why should I have so much when so many have so little? How does that fit into the socialist dictum of  “ to each according to his need”?  Frankly, it cannot. Moreover, Bragg makes a great thing of personal freedom.  As my old history teacher never ceased saying “Money is power”.  That being so, equality of material circumstances ought to be his aim.

Material success brings a change in mentality and experience. Bragg has gone from being one of the have-nots to the haves. His position is now essentially that of patron/leftist celebrity not  the grass roots “I’m defending myself and my class” red radical he appears to still imagine himself to be.

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.

English education: the roots of its politicisation

When I left school in the mid-sixties the Empire was effectively finished – the final nail in the coffin of imperial feeling was banged in by our entry into the EU in 1972,  which alienated the  white dominions – and a new spirit of anti-Establishment feeling was beginning to erode school discipline. But progressive ideals had not yet taken hold the  educational establishment and the comprehensive disaster was only in its infancy. The school leaving exams, the O and A Levels, were a real test of competence in both their subjects and of  the literacy and numeracy of candidates. To take but one example of the difference between then and now: even O Level science exams had, for 16-year-olds, demanding practicals as well as written papers. 

By the mid seventies the grammar schools had been reduced to a rump of a few hundred. Ironically, most of those which had converted to  comprehensive schools or which had chosen to become private schools to preserve their status,  had been forced to change by a supposedly conservative government, that of Ted Heath, whose education minister was  Margaret  Thatcher.  The  failure  of  Heath  to  stop comprehensivisation  was a harbinger of what was to happen under the future Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major.

Comprehensivisation

The comprehensive ideal  is not innately wrong.  Children of very widely differing abilities can be successfully taught  together. Traditionally, the greatest public schools  in England have been  comprehensives of a sort.  They took boys who varied from the exceptionally bright to the stonewall stupid and managed largely  to successfully educate both groups and all those in between.  The very bright won scholarships to Oxbridge, while the stonewall stupid  at least left school functionally literate.

But these schools were hopeless models for a  state comprehensive system. They drew almost all of their pupils from the middle and upper classes  and the resources available to the schools from fees and endowments vastly outstripped any that could ever be available to state funded schools. The social class of the pupils meant that the pupils had expectations of being in the higher reaches of society when they entered adult life and parents who actively wanted and expected their children to be educated. To these advantages were added  greatly  superior financial resources which permitted the recruitment of first rate staff, small classes and personal tuition.

A general comprehensive system lacks the advantages of a great public school.  Most of the schools will be dominated by the children of the working class simply because they are by far the most numerous.  That would be true even if all private schools were abolished and “bussing” of middle and upper class children was enforced to ensure that schools were socially mixed.

Inevitably the adult expectations of working class children tend to be lower than those of the middle and upper classes. Their parents are generally less supportive of the idea of education. A significant minority are actively hostile to their children becoming better educated than they are because it divorces the children from their workingclass roots.  Few will be able to provide active academic  assistance to their children.  Those facts alone make mixed ability teaching difficult. Add in the much smaller financial resources available to state schools – which expresses itself in larger classes, a narrower curriculum and, on average,  less able and  less  well motivated staff  – and you have a recipe for low educational attainment. In such schools the bright and academically interested  pupils often become isolated, under-challenged intellectually  and frequently bullied, while the duller,  non-academic majority  are allowed to plough an educational furrow,  which stretches from  academic inadequacy to an outright failure of education. 

In practice comprehensivisation was much worse than that.  Bussing was not enforced.  The better off continued to send their children to fee-paying  schools – today approximately 7 per cent  of  our schoolchildren are privately educated, a higher proportion than in the 1960s when many middleclass parents were happy to send their children to state grammar schools. (It is a grand irony that comprehensivisation rescued the public schools,  many of which were  struggling to maintain numbers by 1965).

Social segregation by the use of fee-paying schools was amplified both by the natural segregation of social classes into geographical areas – in the absence of enforced “bussing” a middle class suburb will have a local school which is largely filled with middleclass children – and by the widespread practice of middle class parents moving to areas where good state schools were available. The consequence has been a state school system which is heavily segregated by class, with the schools dominated by the working class tending to be the lowest achieving.

The subversion of the social mixing part of the comprehensive ideal was further  complicated by mass immigration. This introduced not only racial and ethnic conflict into schools, a toxic enough disruptive element in itself, but also created grave practical problems  because so many of the immigrant children did not have a competence in English.  The  official promotion of multiculturalism and  its concomitant  idea  that any member of an  ethnic  minority  is  automatically a victim of white society  complicated the position further, not least in the area of discipline. Ethnic minorities soon realised  that in the context of an  official  sponsorship  of “victimhood”  they could get away with more and more. Native English  children seeing this, naturally enough, also became more inclined to  misbehave. 

Because immigrants settled almost entirely in large towns and cities, these problems were and are confined almost exclusively to schools where the white pupils were workingclass, who found  their already inferior opportunities for education further reduced. Worse,  immigration was the final lever which allowed progressive education to not only gain absolute ascendency in the English state  educational system, but to transform the progressive ideal into an overt political ideology, the ideology we know today as political correctness.

English education in saner times

I was born in 1947. Never, perhaps, has England (and Britain) been more of a coherent community.  The dramatic recent experience of the Second World War  filled the minds of everyone  and that  shared experience  bound together even more tightly  a very racially and culturally homogenous country.  It was rare to see a black or brown face even in London, and any suggestion that someone from a racial or cultural minority should do anything but  their best to assimilate into English culture would have been generally thought to touch the confines of lunacy. It was a very English, very British world. 

It was a time when Britain made most of the manufactured goods that it consumed, including its own cars, aircraft, ships, and it would have been thought extraordinary for a British Government to fail to protect British industry.  Great industrial names such as Austin (cars) and  Fry’s (chocolate) were not only English-owned and English made but leaders in the English market.  The shops which people used were generally owned by the English and more often than not family enterprises.  Every day an inhabitant of England  was reminded that  they were members of an advanced technological society which could make or grow what it wanted and that most of what they consumed was made in England (or at least Britain) or came from the Empire. 

The idea of Empire was still important – just. The fifties were the very last moment when an English boy could grow up with an  imperial consciousness as part of everyday life. There was no assumption that the Empire would collapse. India might have gone in 1947, but the assumption amongst both the general population and the political elite was that Britain would have to bear “the white man’s burden”  for many  a long year yet.  That will seem extraordinary to the point of fantasy now, but  it is true. In the forties and fifties  the Foreign and Colonial Office continued to  recruit and train young men for careers  as imperial servants such as District Officers and white  emigration from Britain to places such as Kenya and Rhodesia was officially encouraged. 

Against this background English schools taught as a matter of course a curriculum that extolled English and British values, history and culture.  History for the English child was British and imperial history first with  European history a poor second. Geography was concerned primarily with the physical and demographic demography of Britain.  English literature concentrated on the classic English texts from Chaucer through to Trollope.

But it was not simply English history and culture which was imparted. Whole class teaching was the norm with the teacher firmly in charge. Children were expected to acquire the factual knowledge of a subject as well as its process. Because discipline was not generally a problem, schools were primarily institutions to teach people rather than being the child-minding depots we all too often see today.  There is a good case for saying that the general standard of English education was never higher than in the quarter century between 1945 and 1970. This was not only because of the good overall educational standard, but because  all pupils, unlike the pre-war system, now got a secondary education as of right.

That is not to say everything in the post-war educational garden was lovely.  Before comprehensive education began under the first  Wilson Government,  English state education was divided between grammar schools, secondary moderns and a small number of technical schools – the last were intended as training grounds for artisans, to use an old fashioned word.  The consequence was to lower, irrevocably in most instances,  the social horizons and aspirations of those who did not  pass the 11-plus and go to grammar schools, because it was very difficult to move to a grammar school after the age of 11.  It also created a sense of inferiority and resentment amongst many 11-plus failures.

Despite these shortcomings,  the system was unreservedly to be preferred to what we have today. The grammar schools not only produced a  genuinely educated class, but provided  an escape  route  to something better for clever children from even the poorest backgrounds.  That opportunity grew with the significant expansion of university and polytechnic places in the fifties and sixties. In 1950 approximately  2 per cent of English school-leavers went on to higher education: by 1970, following the implementation of the Robbins Report (1963), the figure was approximately  7 per cent (and this was the age of the post-war baby-boomer generation, so there were more pupils in the age group in 1970 than 1950).  Most tellingly, in the 1960s, before the destruction of the grammar schools,  workingclass children in higher education  formed a greater proportion of the whole student body than it does now – there are more workingclass students now, but that is simply a consequence of the vast increase in those in higher education to more than 40 per cent.