Tag Archives: Political Correctness

Don’t laugh; Labour are flying the English flag

Anglophobia has been around the Labour Party ever since Labour shifted focus from the white working class as their core support to the groups protected by political correctness – women, gays and most importantly ethnic minorities. This switch took place gradually in the 1980s.

At first the Anglophobia was muted, but as the party moved away from support for the unions,   embraced  the EU and gradually converted to the worship of the market and private enterprise  the anti-English bigotry grew. These changesl meant that support for the white working class became ever more implausible as anti-union laws were supported by Labour, the European single market effectively ended Britain’s immigration controls allowing hordes of foreign labour in to compete for jobs  and the acceptance of globalism laid waste much of Britain’s industry.  After Blair became Party leader in 1994 he completed the process of turning Labour into a Thatcherite party with political correctness grafted on.

All of this meant that Labour needed both a new creed to allow them to satisfy their natural instincts to control  lives of those they rule and to provide new electoral support to replace losses amongst the white working class.  To this end they embraced ever more fanatically  the totalitarian creed which became political correctness and pandered to the Celts, from whom a disproportionate proportion of their MPs came, with devolved powers and assemblies and  the continuation of huge English subsidies to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (currently around £15 billion pa  – seehttp://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/celtic-hands-deep-in-english-taxpayers%e2%80%99-pockets/ ) .    Having done this, they were forced to prevent the English having a devolved Parliament and devolved powers because they knew that  if they  existed it was improbable that Labour would ever hold power in England (it is historically rare for Labour to get a majority of English seats in the Commons) and  exceedingly difficult for a  Labour government to be able to  continue sending truckloads of English taxpayers money to the Celts if they could only form a UK government with large numbers of non-English seats.

As these things  will, the need to keep English dissent under wraps made Labour politicians ever more strident in their Anglophobia.  Here is Jack Straw when Home Secretary:

“The English are potentially very aggressive, very violent. We have used this propensity to violence to subjugate Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Then we used it in Europe and with our empire, so I think what you have within the UK is three small nations…who’ve been over the centuries under the cosh of the English. Those small nations have inevitably sought expression by a very explicit idea of nationhood. You have this very dominant other nation, England, 10 times bigger than the others, which is self-confident and therefore has not needed to be so explicit about its expression. I think as we move into this new century, people’s sense of Englishness will become more articulated and that’s partly because of the mirror that devolution provides us with and because we are becoming more European at the same” (BBC Radio Four’s Brits  10 January 2000 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/596703.stm )

Or take a Labour backbencher ,  the German Gisela Stuart

“Yet it has only been in the last five years or so that I have heard people in my constituency telling me, “I am not British – I am English”. That worries me. British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood. But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.  (15 11 2005 http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-opening/trust_3030.jsp)

Having  lost the last election Labour are in a quandary.   They do not know whether to stick or twist on England and the English.   Their choice is either  to continue the policy of the last 25 years and hope that the electoral pendulum will swing  back to them or seek renewed support for Labour  from the English.  The first option has its attractions especially if the referendum on AV goes through for then they could envisage a perpetual  coalition with the Lib Dems.  The problem with that scenario is that the Lib Dems, or at least a substantial part of the party, may decide to prefer a coalition with the Tories or the  Lib Dems may lose a great deal of electoral support even under AV  and  represent a much less attractive proposition. Moreover, it is difficult to see the AV Bill being passed unless it  (1) has the provisions to equalise constituency sizes (which would favour the Tories)  and (2) can become law in time for the new constituency boundaries to be in position for the next General Election. The worst outcome for Labour would be for the AV referendum to be lost but the equalisation of constituencies made law This would put the party  at a considerable disadvantage.

All of this uncertainty is bad enough, but even if there was to be no electoral change Labour would still have considerable cause for concern.  Labour were in power a long time and electors since 1945  have been  reluctant to toss out  any party after a single Parliament.  The fact that we have a coalition probably strengthens this tendency.  Add to that the widespread dislike of NuLabour policies and loathing of Blair, and the economic mess Brown  left and Labour can have little confidence that they will form the next government even as part of a coalition. That means that some in the party are seeing the need to appeal to the English in general and the white working class in particular.  That is what the article by Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford addresses (see extract below).

As the party they represent has in the past 13 years done everything it could to enrage the English by the denial of  an English parliament, continuing subsidies to the Celts , the ruthless suppression of any display of English national feeling, the public insult of the English,  the export of English  jobs and industry and massive immigration to Britain which has overwhelming come to England, it might be thought that they have a hopeless task, at least in the short run.  However, this may be a false interpretation of present British politics.  The policy may succeed by default because no other British mainstream party  will take up the English baton and run with it. (Sadly, the Anglophobic  line has also become part of the NuTory  philosophy. Here is Willam Hague when Tory leader : “English nationalism is the most dangerous of all forms of nationalism that can arise within the United Kingdom, because England is five-sixths of the population of the UK.” ” (BBC Radio Four’s Brits  10 January 2000 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/596703.stm ).  That may drive the English to Labour out of desperation,  even though you can be sure that the version of Englishness and English interests will be one heavily tainted with political correctness.

Selling England by the pound

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Labour has come close to being destroyed as a national force in England. Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford believe it has lost the language and culture it grew out of

In Dover the port is up for sale and the people are campaigning to buy it and create a community asset. They don’t want a foreign-owned port, they want a people’s port that is ‘forever England’. Football supporters are building community-based organisations by share purchase – in Liverpool, for example – to save our clubs from foreign corporate power. In the Forest of Dean, thousands are rallying in protest at the plans by the government to sell England’s forests which are England’s ‘green beating heart’. In London, porters at Billingsgate fish market campaigned to stop the City of London abolishing their ancient English role and making them redundant. Where is Labour in the fight for an England which belongs to the English just as they belong to the land?

Labour is no longer sure who it represents. It champions humanity in general but no-one in particular. It favours multiculturalism but suspects the symbols and iconography of Englishness. For all the good Labour did in government, it presided over the leaching away of the common meanings that bind the English in society. It did not build a common good which is the basis of an ethical life. It chose liberal market freedoms for the price of our liberty and our sense of belonging.

The open economy is England’s historic legacy. Trade is in our national DNA. But the economy has become an engine of inequality, division and dispossession. A financialised model of capitalism has redistributed wealth on a massive scale from the country to the City, from the people to the financial elite, and from the common ownership of the public sector to private business. We do not own our utilities, nor do we have control of our vital energy market. The overseas supply chains of business located here are the chief beneficiaries of our economic upswings. A flexible employment market has stripped workers of rights and security. Our soft-touch approach on corporate tax has encouraged tax evasion and transfer pricing as business relocates its profits to tax havens. It is as if we do not live in a country so much as an economic system that is owned elsewhere and over which we have no control.

Labour lost England in the 2010 May election and the cause is about more than just ‘Southern Discomfort’. Labour shares a political crisis of social democracy with its sister parties across Europe. But in England something more fundamental has been lost, and that is a Labour language and culture which belongs to the society it grew out of and which enables its immersion in the ordinary everyday life of the people. It has lost the ability to renew its political hegemony within the class which gave birth to it. It was its apparent indifference to ‘what really matters’ that incited such rage and contempt amongst constituencies which had been traditional bastions of support.

Read more at http://www.progressonline.org.uk/articles/article.asp?a=7451

The English Year Zero

The French Revolution  attempted to sweep  away  many of the everyday cultural anchors that attach a people to a way of life: the currency, the calendar and the systems  of weights and measures.  The new  calendar did not last but the currency and metric system did. The French lost forever an important part of their shared experience.   It was perhaps the first attempt at a Year Zero obliteration of the past not by an invader but by the elite of a people.

Britain has never experienced a cultural  upheaval as starkly dramatic as the French Revolution,  but  revolution can come in subtler ways.  In the past forty years she has seen her counties butchered; lost her historic currency and suffered  a creeping undermining of her traditional  weights and measures.  Like the French revolutionary experience, this damage  been inflicted from within.

Edward Heath’s  re-drawing of  county boundaries through the Local Government Act  1972 (active from 1974) saw Cumberland and Westmoreland lost as they were merged into Cumbria; Herefordshire, Worcestershire and England’s smallest country, Rutland,  obliterated; Lancashire,  Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Somerset, Gloucester , Northumberland, Durham and  Warwickshire shorn of much of their historic territory and population  through the creation of the metropolitan “counties”  of Greater Manchester, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, West Midlands and West Yorkshire and the meaningless  new counties of Avon, Cleveland, Cumbria, Hereford and Worcester, and Humberside created. 

Of all the things which give a human being a sense  of belonging and permanence it is the land in which they live.  People form  an emotional attachment to  things. They buy products because of their branding. They give names to their cars.   Sailors have an intense relationship with their ships.   How much more potent is the relationship with the place where they live. Unsurprisingly, human attachment to land is the most emotional attachment  after family. Territory is what men have fought for more than anything else because a secure place to live is the source of all security.    Humans need continuity, not incessant and dramatic change.

Few if any things are more disorienting than the re-naming of the place where you live. It seems to strike at reality. That is why when politicians try to make such changes, the old names commonly  live on for generations, sometimes centuries; why Petrograd became St Petersburg again so readily after the Soviet Union fell.   

Why did Heath do it? Ostensibly on the grounds of administrative convenience. He might as well have suggested the Church of England would have been better served by  demolishing its great mediaeval cathedrals and building new modernist ones.  It was the act of a man who at best lived beyond the touch of history and at worst was a willing destroyer of  English culture in his desire to translate Britain into a province of a United States of Europe.

Decimalisation was primarily promoted on the tawdry, false and utterly soulless  grounds that it would substantially  increase business efficiency, a claim as improbable as Nye Bevan’s belief that the cost of the NHS would soon drop as the population’s health improved due to better healthcare . Even if the claim of business efficiency  had been true, it would have been  a criminally trivial reason for  ditching a currency with a 1,300 year history dating back to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the 7th century with their silver  peningas (pennies).     It removed  from circulation those reminders of the past, the many old coins in circulation. Before decimalisation every handful of change reminded one of England’s history.  You looked at coins and saw the heads of  different monarchs,  ran you hands over the coins and felt the centuries which they represented.  It was common to find coins dating to Victoria’s reign and there were a fair number older than that. Occasionally something really old would appear (the oldest coin I ever received in change dated from the reign of Charles II).   It was a form of informal education. With decimal coinage all this was  swept away if not  exactly at a stroke – florins, shillings and sixpences limped on for a few years –  but most of the history was  lost immediately because pennies and halfpennies became obsolete overnight.

Metrication replaces measures which grew organically over the centuries from the natural usage of  the people – a hand was the breadth of a hand, a foot the length of a foot, a yard is the distance of a man’s arm – with an alien and contrived system.  Imperial measurements are man-related. Metric measurements are simply arbitrary measures derived from such things as the diameter of the earth. They are the imposition of a foreign and arbitrary system on the English. No one forced the English to use imperial measurements.  They  grew out of Man’s natural behaviour.  It is natural to use an arm, hand or foot to act as a measure. Even today we  use our feet  place close one after another or paces to measure a distance.     The yard arose from need and inclination: the metre was an artificial construct.  Imperial and metric are a pair akin to English and Esperanto.

Choosing units which grew naturally out of men’s needs means that they are the units with which people are most comfortable.  For many everyday purposes metric units tend to either be too large or too small because they have been based not on experience but on an intellectual construct of the Age of Reason.  A pound feels naturally right, a kilo too heavy.   A centimetre is too small for many measurements and a metre too large.  Imperial measurements offers an intermediate measurement the  foot.  So it is with other measures.  We have the pint, quart and gallon; metric gives us merely the millilitre and the litre. Of course, Imperial standard measurements are the result of an Act of Parliament, but they were based on the usage which grew from  human beings developing what they needed. That made Imperial measurements  comfortable to use.  

The same people who constantly attempt to debunk any claim to uniqueness or distinctiveness about England and its people will doubtless point out in their pathologically self-hating way that miles are derived  from the Latin miles and pennies  the Latin denarii. That is irrelevant. What matters is that a people takes and moulds words  to their own wishes.  It is like a man who takes clay and melds it into one pot rather than another. The clay is the same, the pot is not.  

The argument that the change to a decimal currency and metric measurements is justified because of its greater ease of use holds no water.  As one who grew up using Imperial measurements  and a currency denominated in pounds, shillings and pence, I can vouch for the fact that this caused no great difficulty in everyday life.  It was what came naturally.  It is also debatable whether  in pure arithmetical terms a base of ten rather than twelve  has more utility. The duodecimal system can be factored more fluently, for example,  10 is factored by just  5 and 2, 12 is factored by 2, 3, 4 and 6.. Nor is a base of ten natural. Commonly amongst primitive peoples the counting system is something along these lines: one, two,  plenty.  No automatic use of ten because we have ten digits on the hands and feet.

The creeping metrication has produced a disturbing result.  Those who are  older  still think entirely in Imperial  and are confused by metric. The young , who have been taught only metric* in schools,   often have no firm grasp of the system  because  a system of weights and measures  formally taught  is no more likely to be remembered by most  than is algebra.  Consequently  they are confused by both Imperial and metric  measurements.   (A good way of testing whether someone understands metric is to ask them their height in metres or the waist measurement in centimetres. If you get five in a hundred to give the correct answer I would be surprised. )

The upshot of this change to metric  is not an increase in efficiency of  ease of calculation by the population as a whole but a widespread  abrogation of individual judgement on the value of things by measurement  simply because people do not understand the measure being used.  This ignorance  also has effects on work in those jobs where precision of measurement is necessary.  If someone mixing paint does not  know the difference between a millilitre and a litre trouble is assured.  The general effect is for large numbers of people to have lost any sense of proportion in measurement. It is akin to the number blindness of those who cannot do arithmetic without a calculator and consequently have no idea of whether the result they get from the input is correct.

There is also the political dimension.  Since 1896 Britons have not been  forced to  use Imperial measurements . (They were  at liberty to use either imperial or metric  in trade after  Parliament passed the Weights and Measures (Metric System) Act  in that year).  Britain’s membership of the EU has removed that freedom with  metric  measurements now being the legally required system when used for goods and services sold by quantity. Dual labelling  – metric and Imperial – was allowed  by the EU but this was meant to be phased out  by 31 December 2009. However, that demand has been dropped and what the EU calls ‘supplementary indications”  (Imperial measures) are continuing without any definite end. Nonetheless, the metric  system is the dominant legal system and any trader refusing to use  a metric measure is liable for prosecution as the “Metric Martyrs”  (most famously Steve Thoburn)  discovered.  If you want to sell a pound of potatoes you have to weigh it on metric scales and price it according to the metric price. 

It might seem  strange that the people who continuously tell us that the preservation of cultures is the most important thing in the world are also the people who  pushed through decimalisation  and are in the process of  forcing metrication on us at all costs. Sadly, there is no mystery.  It is cultural cleansing arranged by our elite in who are Quislings in the service of liberal internationalism in general and of the EU in particular.   The upshot is that English  children have been and are being denied what has been part of being English for many centuries.

I have entitled this piece the English Year Zero. Why not the British Year Zero? Because counties, our  currency and the Imperial system of weights and measures have their origins in England. Their  antiquity and origins  make them more valuable to the English than to the Celts.  A native of Yorkshire calls himself a Yorshireman  but a  Scot does not refer to himself as Midlothian or a native of Lanarshire a  Lanarkshireman. Rather, a Scot will refer to themselves as a highlander, by their clan, their religious affiliation (Protestant or Catholic)  or derive their status from a city such as  Glasgow.   The Welsh and Northern Irish have similar cultural reference points. Similarly, the Celts  have in the back of their mind that the pound sterling and  Imperial weights and measures are English imposed devices which makes them value them less at best or even be actively glad to see them destroyed or under threat.   

* school pupils are taught “rough metric equivalents of imperial units still in daily use”, but are not taught how to manipulate Imperial units –  Mathematics – The National Curriculum for England Key stages 1–4, Joint publication by Department for Education and Employment and Qualifications and Curriculum Authority 1999.

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.

The Archers: An everyday story of simple politically correct folk

The longest running soap-opera in the world, The Archers*, has just jettisoned one of its longest serving (30 years) and most popular characters, the stately home owner Nigel Pargetter, who hurtled to his fictional death from the roof of  his house on the programme’s 60th anniversary . The official BBC   explanation for killing off  the character was the need for drama on such an anniversary, but it has been widely remarked by many regular listeners that Pargetter was one of the very few upper-class characters in the soap and the suspicion is that the editor of the Archers is pursuing a policy of social cleansing, with toffs and members of the middle class who do not resemble Outraged of Islington in increasing peril. Well, stranger things have happened in the fictional village of Ambridge in which the Archers is set.  

Ambridge is supposed to be a small English village (with a population of a couple of hundred at best) set in farming country in the English midlands y, the sort of place where the inhabitants have only just taught themselves not to point at aeroplanes, at least not when strangers are present. Into this environment the BBC has introduced in the past ten years, a homosexual couple running one of the village pubs, an Asian solicitor (whose circle of Asian relatives and friends is currently being assiduously introduced into the cast), a female vicar, a working-class male vicar whose deceased wife was black and whose teenage daughter is in modish socialworkspeak of “dual heritage”. This daughter immediately became “best friends” with the youngest and very middle-class daughter of the richest farmer in the village, Brian Aldridge. The grandmother of the vicar’s daughter, a particularly irritating caricature of a god-fearing black Jamaican, has been shoehorned into a story of drug abuse in the village, the drug abuse involving (natch) a white addict being supplied by supplied by white dealers.

One of the daughters (Kate) of Brian Aldridge, has married a black South African and has another “dual heritage” child. The stepson of the same farmer, Adam Macy, has returned and “come out” and has begun an affair with the new Grey Gables chef, a homosexual Ulsterman with a bizarre persona – think of a young and mincing Ian Paisley.

White characters introduced into the serial in the past decade or so have shown a new trend. A surprising number of them are not English. The homosexual Ulster chef is one example., the loutish Scotchman Jazza McCreadie another. Then there was the now dead beautiful Irish siren who seduced Brian Aldridge. Their love-child Ruairi (pronounced Rory) has lived for several years in England since he came to England aged four yet still speaks with a broad Irish accent. As many listeners and reviewers have pointed out, in real life  he would long ago have lost his Irish accent. However, that would not fit in with the determination of those in charge of the serial to promote their multicultural fantasy.  

To these particular PC character developments may be added certain general PC rules of the series. Except in very special circumstances where they can act as useful idiots in the PC cause by moving temporarily out of character, all men are either bastards or wimps, in either case possessing the emotional IQ of a brick wall; all women are heroically struggling to tolerate their men; any ethnic character is a model of rectitude, vastly able and, if young, beautiful or handsome. No male character may criticise any female character unless a female character is available to correct them. No white character other than Roy Tucker (more about him later) has ever been known to criticise a black or Asian character and under all normal circumstances no mention will be made of the fact that they are not white.  Kate Aldridge’s black South African husband managed to appear for weeks in the serial without anyone commenting on the fact he is black, ditto the “dual heritage” children of the marriage and the daughter of the current vicar.

There are also class and age rules. Increasingly, the higher the social status, the worse the characters behave. In any conflict of views with someone of a lower social status, the higher status person will be made to seem inept at best or wrong-headed at worst. Where the class of the characters in a scene is the same, the female dominance rule applies if the company is mixed-sex.

As for age, the older cast members are normally used to express non-PC views, for example, the matriarch of the Archer family, Peggy Woolley,refused to accept the female vicar and the erstwhile  landlord of The Bull, Sid Perks, evinced a dislike of homosexuals. Very occasionally a younger cast member is allowed to express non-PC views, as was the case with Roy Tucker, who had a brief flirtation with the local racists. But old or young, the non-PC character is invariably nullified by large numbers of characters with PC views and frequently contradicted directly. The non-PC character is simply there to act as a theatrical device to amplify the PC message.

There is always  great joy over the non-PC sinner who repenteth, which they almost invariably do in remarkably abrupt and unconvincing fashion. Roy Tucker went from support for National Front-style politics  to being the shiniest of “new men” in a trice. More recently Tony Archer has gone  from a distraught father hating the fact his daughter Helen has become pregnant through artificial insemination to an OTT doting grandfather  the instant the  child is born replete with Maoist confessions of fault. That set a trend as all recent new fathers in the serial have had the same fate thrust upon them.

If there is an Archers’group more at risk than toffs, it is men. .Nigel Pargetter joins Greg Turner(blew his brains out with a shotgun), Sid Perks (dies suddenly at a relatively young age),  John Archer (crushed to death by a tractor) and  George Barford (natural causes) who have all died before their time in recent years.   

When they are not dying, the Ambridge men are going in for armed robbery (Clive Horribin), becoming down-and-outsand  taking class A drugs (Ed Grundy), suffering brain damage through taking ketamine (Jazza McCready), having affairs and fathering a bastard (Brian Aldridge), engaging in racist acid attacks (Roy Tucker), committing adultery with your brother’;s wife (Ed Grundy),  engaging in violent assault (Will Grundy), committing rape (the rape of Cathy Perks), vandalising property (Jamie Perks), becoming addicted to gambling (Alastair Hebbden-Lloyd), engaging in massive fraud ( Matt Crawford and Stephen Chalkman) or simply going senile (Jack Woolley). 

Female characters are treated completely differently, with characters dying much less frequently and showing absolutely no propensity for crime bar one exception, the harbouring of Clive Horribin by his sister Susan after he had gone on the run from the police. That, of course, was presented as being the wicked man (Clive) forcing  his sister to break the law. It is also interesting that while there have been four male gay characters, the Archers has yet to see any “girl-on-girl”action.

Hilarious as all this is to those of us with a weakness for agitprop – we just cannot resist the clankingly crude propaganda lines masquerading as fact and reality – I cannot help feeling that it may not be quite what The Archers’ audience generally favour. Indeed, they may be so unprogressive as to think that a small English village set in farming country might look rather different from the current very PC world of The Archers. Their idea of the village could well be one where the inhabitants are uniformly white and English. Where support for country pursuits is perilously close to 100 percent. Where homosexual rights are not an issue because there are no overt homosexuals in the community. Where sexual equality is thought to be “damn nonsense”. Where a female vicar would be thought unworthy of the name of priest. Where the sight of strangers would be cause for frank and extended comment. Where the sight of a black or brown face would arouse the same sort of amazement as the aeroplanes going overhead.

Such a village would be a House of Horrors for The Archers’ producer and writers, a creation made all the more terrifying because somewhere in the remote recesses of their minds they will dimly know it represented reality, or at least came much closer to reality than their nightly bill of politically correct multicultural fare. That The Archers is simply a vehicle for the more extreme PC propagandists within the BBC is self-evident. The question is should we lament its existence? I suggest the answer is no, because it performs the vital function of demonstrating beyond any shadow of doubt the institutionalised political bias within the [British Broadcasting] Corporation. That bias cannot be explained away for, unlike news and current affairs programmes where apologists for the corporation can fudge the issue of bias by pointing to such things as pressure of time or news priorities, The Archers shows the view of the world the BBC wishes to put before its audience. It is their articulated political dream, created at leisure and unmarked by any dissenting voice.

*The Archers is the longest running radio soap in the world, having been on air continuously since 1951 (BBC Radio 4)

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.