Thursday, June 27, 2013

SALUTATIONS TO A GREAT LADY

CYNTHIA BOWER, the former head of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has broken her silence to complain that she has been 'hung out to dry'. Ms Bower was forced to resign her £200,000 post last February, taking with her a £1.35 million pension pot. But before we mellow toward this lady, let us recount what the cover-up administered by the CQC entailed.
            
             Some 16 babies and two mothers died at the maternity unit at Barrow-in-Furness general hospital between 2001 and 2012 due to poor care; while another nine infants were born with brain damage  The CQC tried, according to a report published by consultants Grant Thornton,  to cover up the scandal. Instead of fulfilling their primary function of protecting the patients, the CQC tried to avoid adverse publicity about the NHS.
            
             Ms Bower has said she has been 'on the run' since her name had been released and was consulting Sue Grabit and Run about a possible further financial enhancement to her already lucrative pension, after all, the CQC did promise her anonymity.
            
             There is another women who is 'on the run'. Julie Bailey is the founder of the Cure the NHS campaign group, which exposed the Mid Staffordshire scandal where no less than 1,200 patients died needlessly through cruelty and neglect by staff.
            
              Ms Bailey has been threatened and her mother's grave desecrated. She has closed her cafĂ© in Stafford and is moving out of town and issued the following statement: “I am having to leave my home, my livelihood and my friends because a few misinformed local political activists have fuelled a hate campaign based on proven lies. The final straw for me was the desecration of my mum’s grave. It is a sad day today, but I have no alternative than to move out of Stafford.  The last few months have been a very distressing time for myself and Cure the NHS; our main aim has always been a safer NHS for all. Difficult as it is for people, everyone must finally realise that patient safety must be the priority. The main focus for every hospital must be the patient."
            
           This lady has no  million pound pension to live on. All she and her group were doing was what the CQC should have been doing. Those tormenting her in such a way are as fanatical about the NHS as Islamists are about the Koran. She has done society a great service; she is no enemy of the NHS, but a reformer.
            
            The NHS needs her kind to keep it honest. Quangos like the CQC  are there to divert the flack from politicians. Politicians create such entities while promising their extinction during an election campaign…but they never get round to it in office.

THE NHS IS SUFFERING FROM an acute case of idol worship which blinds the worshiper from any misgivings. The NHS has been the great totem of the welfare state; criticism amounts to blasphemy, as Ms Bailey has found to her cost. 
            
             Ms Bower, on the other hand, will be inundated with support from  NHS worshipers; usually, but not wholly, associated with the Labour Party and the Left generally. She will survive on a generous pension, paid for by the taxpayer, that equals, and may even surpass that of some City of London financiers, much loathed by the Left.
            
             The NHS is as fallible as any other man made institution. But it cannot continue on its present path without some kind of critical oversight. In the coming years, the NHS faces problems that cannot be overcome by censorship of the kind the CQC has attempted.
           
            I believe the NHS is on its last legs and some kind of private initiative is required which will be heavily contested and may never happen. If so the NHS will become a third rate service slowly dying and ill serving future generations. Modern medicine is becoming ever more expensive: the NHS had billions spent on it by the Blair government, only a third of which met patient needs.
            
            As far as the NHS is concerned, we are living in the twilight zone. This state created and administers it, this cannot continue unless the private sector is allowed a further presence in its delivery.
           
            Julie Bailey is the kind of human being who has to become involved when a scandal involving the deaths of hundreds of the NHS's patients take place. As for those now menacing this woman and driving her from her town; they are not only criminalizing themselves by their acts, but doing so against a woman who probably cares more about the NHS than they do…certainly more so than  the wretched Ms Bower.
            
            These cowards who say they care about the NHS, should have congratulated Ms Bailey for doing the CQC's job for them. The NHS is not a utopian construct; it is fallible, and those working in screw up (even criminally so), and when this happens we need the likes of Ms Bower to bring the public's attention to it…God  knows, the CQC were never up to the task.
           



            

Great expectations…great disappointment

I HAVE TO SAY THIS, as someone who has relied upon the NHS all his life…the NHS is not the best healthcare system in the world. The Left would like to believe it, and the Right are frightened to say anything different. The truth is that this great leviathan is facing, within the next few decades, the same fate as the dinosaur. Ever more expensive drugs and technology, coupled with an ageing population as well as the social impact of immigration[1], have all conspired to undermine the 'free at the point of need' philosophy so beloved by liberals.
           
             If this was not enough, we now have the reputation of the NHS put under a  microscope by events at Mid Staffordshire NHS trust, and today by the criminal attempt to cover up hospital negligence at Furness General Hospital in Morecombe by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
           
            This all comes on top of the Dr Foster hospital guide in 2010 which exposed abnormally high death rates in 19 NHS hospitals where, according to the Observer newspaper; 'The Dr Foster hospital guide also revealed that tens of thousands of patients were harmed in hospital when they developed avoidable blood clots, suffered obstetric tears during childbirth, accidental lacerations or puncture wounds, or post-surgery intestinal bleeding and blood poisoning'.      
            
            We have since had the spectacle of the NHS spending £14.7 million on gagging whistleblowers. The Chief Executive of the NHS (and one time member of the Communist Party), Sir David Nicholson faced down demands (after presiding over the Mid Staffordshire scandal that cost the lives of 1,200 patients) to resign immediately; which is of course not in the nature of politicians, quangocrats or civil servants, unless, that is there is a big taxpayer funded payoff and a generous pension.
            
            But all that is wrong with NHS cannot be put at the door of higher costs, an aging population, or immigration. The service itself has been, to use a phrase associated with broadcasting, 'dumbed down'.

WHEN BLAIR CAME TO POWER, he set about seeking to reform the NHS. He started by offering a multi billion pound carrot; investment in the NHS with the proviso that what he saw as modernisation took place. In the end, of the billions he poured into the system, only a third found its way into patient care. The rest went on staff at every level. His idea of modernisation was to elevate nursing to a level where it could no longer be regarded as nursing in the true meaning of the term.
            
             Nurses were now to be given a professional status with a better pay structure to match their new status. I experienced what this meant, as I have been treated by traditional, as well as post-Blair professional nurses. The Blair nurses no longer made beds, bed bathed the patients, or emptied bed pans and bottles of urine. Instead a new class of low paid healthcare worker was created to carry out these functions, leaving the nurses to do …what?
            
            When I was last in hospital, the nursing staff took my blood pressure (something I now do myself on a regular basis), my temperature, and delivered the drugs to my bed- side. A lower caste of healthcare worker now provides the services the newly professionalised nurses once use to do, but now squeeze their noses at ever reinstating.
           
            Nursing meant just that. Nursing the sick and the ill meant overseeing the patient's basic requirements, which they no longer do…at least in any hospital I have been in after the Blair revolution.

I HAVE ALWWAYS BEEN grateful to the NHS for extending my life. However, there remains another problem. A problem of incompetence, which relies upon the whistleblower to bring it to the public's attention; but throughout the NHS all such incompetence, if Sir David Nicholson had had is way, would never be made public.
            
             In Morecombe 14 babies and two mothers died, and the former chief executive of the CQC at the time, Cynthia Bower, was at the heart of the cover-up. When she resigned, she left with a £1.35 million pension; and during her four and a half years in charge was given a salary of £203,500.
            
            Two of her underlings, Dame Jo Williams, chairman, and Jill Finney, director of communications, were also given generous settlements along with six others.
            
            Every time a new government comes to power they promise to pare down to a minimum the number of countless quangos, such as the CQC. However these bodies come into their own as convenient scapegoats for politicians when a scandal such as Mid Staffs and Morecombe occur.
            
            We can no longer continue to look upon the NHS in the same way the Druids looked upon Stonehenge. Our sentimental veneration of this institution, has allowed the staff and management to become slipshod and negligent in too many cases now for the critics of the NHS to be dismissed so casually as in the past - a more critical eye must now pass over the NHS, and no option dismissed on ideological grounds for improving it before it is too late.
           
           
           



             







[1] The elephant in the room

The Siamese triplets

MAX HASTINGS HAS WRITTEN a very good piece in the Daily Mail, suggesting that democracy is dying, and fated to die, in part, through people's apathy  toward their professional politicians who are all conjoined at the hip, and seemingly beyond separation.
            Politicians act and think as a class; they are all occupying what they like to call the centre ground where they believe sits the British public. Party politics, which is the bedrock of any democracy, today comprises three main parties whose leaders cannot hold a contrary position on the two main issues of the day.
            Europe and immigration was never mentioned by Max Hastings in his article, but these two great issues are what the British people are most concerned about after the state of the economy; and because they see little difference between the party leaderships on these issues, they see no point in voting for any of them; which is why so many are turning to Ukip.
            As for the individual ministers and their equivalent office holders on the opposition front benches; they all come across to TV viewers as disseminating tricksters groomed, in many cases, by professional TV interviewers for a fee; a fee which they are all eager to pay. 
            Unable, or more likely, pathologically disinclined, to answer a question with a straight yes or no, leads the viewer to come to their own conclusions - the nature of which is often detestation. The people feel they are being conspired against by this detached, self-important covenant of the like-minded that occupy the Palace of Westminster.
            Of course the back benches are the exception, but not much of one; for they, like their party leaders crave power, and having won it seeks to cling on to it…a natural human constraint on rebellion of any kind. As for those reprobates on the backbenches who are beyond the leadership's grasp? Well, they are seen as 'swivelled-eyed extremists' whose opinions matter little their leaders.

DEMOCRACY IS DYING, just as Western culture (in Europe, at least,) is dying. Max Hastings, however, needs to go further than he has done in his article. Not only is democracy in its death throes, but so is English culture; that wonderful pragmatic force that led us to become the world's oldest democracy. A 2,000 year history, during which time our laws were fermented by conflict and civil war into our modern democracy. All of which our leaders stand prepared to give away in order to follow their infatuation with the anti-democratic nightmare of United States of Europe.
            It is not the people's indifference toward the political class that undermines our democracy, but the reason for such apathy. The political class have set their minds toward turning this country into a mere canton within Europe and eviscerating our country's history. This, more than the people's apathy, should concern Max Hastings.
            As for immigration from the rest of Europe, which we have to accept having signed up to the various treaties that our politicians told us were mere technical adjustments not requiring a referendum. We are about to fall victim in January of next year to the latest influx from Romania and Bulgaria.
            This of course comes after Tony Blair refused the seven year cooling off period authorized under the Shengen Agreement, before allowing such a migration. Bair allowed the Portuguese and Poles into this country immediately. Blair has been given some kind of award by the Polish government  for his good work at the time which he parades like a Victoria Cross.
            At his time we were promised that only 15,000 Poles and Portuguese would want to come and live among us; and we believed what our politicians were telling us. Or at least those millions among us that were not members of the BNP.
THE BLAIR GOVERNMENT used out-of-the-hat statistics to mollify a fearful public who wished not to be associated with the BNP; but nevertheless had their concerns. The Blair government used such an association to help him in his task, as a Europhile, to bring members of other European cultures to our shores seven years before they needed to have arrived.
            Whenever we in this country speak of the failures of social housing, the NHS, welfare, or education; the elephant in the room is always  immigration. 'Immigration is good'; and any attempt to question  what is regarded as a politically correct axiom, will lead to a hate crime.
            Max Hastings's article is only half right; the apathy of  today's electorate is due to the fact that no single party stands out, except Ukip, in meeting the requirements of the people - not only of the Conservative voter, but also Labour voters who  have turned to Ukip.
            The old party structure once had genuine ideological differences upon which our democracy could truly be described as such.  But today, with the historical death of socialism as a system of government, all the three main parties are now social democratic in nature. The Tories are no such thing any longer, and apart from the short interregnum of the Thatcher years, have been social democratic since One Nation Conservatism took root after the war.
            The death of democracy is upon us and it is irretrievable without conviction politics reasserting itself and taking risks; with genuine ideological differences giving the electorate a real choice between genuinely different parties - we can only hope.

           

           
           




Bits and Pieces

AS A ONE TIME MARXIST in the late 1960s to the late 1970s; the numerous Marxist groups on the menu of 'edgy' politics (to use the modern comedic vernacular) were many indeed. They comprised Trotskyites, Leninists, Maoists, Stalinists. They were small in number but felt themselves big in ideas, and each idea at variance with each other's…yet while Marxism was their maxim, any kind of accommodation between them was impossible; which is why there were so many Marxists fringe groups operating at the time. There were the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), International Marxist Group (IMG), Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (RSWP), the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)… as you will gather, the Left do worship the acronym.
            
             One would have thought that these ancient  Left wing acronyms, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, would have had held little more interest to the modern world, except, maybe, for some obscure romantic Lefty recently out of University after studying politics and intent upon resurrecting the political flatulence that erupted in the 1960s -1970s, when the sons and daughters of the middle class made a fool of themselves on behalf of the 'proletariat'.
             
             But what happened to the leadership of such Marxist groups, who in many cases became public figures at the time, and are still known today? Pau Foot, the author and journalist who wrote for the  Socialist Worker, and Private Eye.
            
            Vanessa Redgrave needs little introduction; but she has been a life-long Marxist who has served the RSWP financially, no doubt, even to this day. But there is another name familiar to many, particularly within the media.
             
            Tariq Ali was the chairman, leader, or 'great leader' to use North Korean parlance, of the IMG. It was he whose revolutionary countenance symbolised and helped lead the Grosvenor Square protests outside the American Embassy in 1968 against the war in Vietnam. These were heady days for Lefties and Tariq Ali in particular. They focused upon him then, as they do today on any ABC classed celebrity. I recall a picture of three empty bottles of Moet champagne left like empty milk bottles on Ali's doorstep; the image was meant to tell us as much about Tariq Ali's background and lifestyle as his contradictory politics.

TOADY TARIQ is a leading supporter of something called the People's Charter for Change (PCC); which is an attempt to reprise those heady days when the revolution was just a protest away.
            The Left are excited by this new organisation, which, according to James Tweedie of the Morning Star; "…calls for an end to the privatisation agenda, democratic public ownership of the banks, building societies, insurers, utilities and transport, protection of jobs and increased wages, an end to home repossessions and a massive council home-building programme, increases in benefits for the elderly and vulnerable, peace and a secure and sustainable future for the world".
            
           The 2008 economic crises lifted the spirits of the Left after those depressing years after the fall of the Berlin Wall when Marxism was discredited by history - which of course was Marx's very own weapon of choice: but despair has now turned to opportunism and there is a spring in the step of our aging, champagne swilling revolutionaries. The PCC is the new Clause IV, it seeks to unite the Left once again for one last heave. But I am willing to bet that fall-outs will follow as Leftist egos, will lead to break-away acronyms before too long.
            
           When even Cuba is beginning to smell the coffee and seek to introduce economic reforms; those old timers on the British Left still hanker after (in Tariq Ali's case at least) their youth. They still believe that human nature can be moulded by them to suit their convictions; as did Lenin, Stalin Trotsky…but above all, Marx himself.
*          *          *          *
THERE ARE DIRTY practices afoot in the constituency of Falkirk, where its sitting Labour MP, Eric Joyce soiled his bib by bar-room brawling in one of the subsidised drinking holes at the Palace of Westminster.
            
            The process to replace him as Labour candidate has reignited the corrupt practices that were always been part and parcel of Labour Party's internal politics over the generations.
            
            One of those whistleblowers which are currently in vogue has informed the  Mail on Sunday that, at the eleventh hour in the selection process, the UNITE union sent filled in bogus application forms for membership to the Falkirk Constituency Labour Party. Those union member's names used by UNITE knew nothing about what their names were being used for. They were being used to promote the selection of Karie Murphy, their choice to fight the seat.
            
            The other prospective Labour candidate was Gregor Poynton, a pro-Tony Blair UK political director of US-run communications firm, Blue State Digital; which has helped president Obama and gives there services to Ed Milliband.
            
            The accusation is that Blue State Digital had pressure put upon it by the Labour Party, under threat of losing their contract with them unless the company persuaded Gregor Poynton to step aside and allow the UNITE's preferred candidate Karie Murphy to represent the Falkirk constituency in the forthcoming by-election.
            
            This stinks of course; but Ms Murphy will now represent the Labour Party in Falkirk, but at least the country now knows on what part of the Left-Right spectrum Ed Milliband sits.
*          *          *          *         
IN JUNE OF LAST YEAR an extraordinary brave solider, Lance Corporal Duane Ashworth, earned a posthumous Victoria Cross for bravery while serving in Afghanistan. L/Cpl Ashworth was forced to crawl within a few feet of an enemy sniper armed with a grenade. He had to do so because launching a grenade from a safer distance would have destroyed the buildings, the snipers were picking of British soldiers from.
            
            His life mattered less than the buildings (made of mud) protecting enemy snipers. It all had to do with public relations and the politician's conscience, which never seems to extend to those they send into battle. L/Cpl Ashworth served, not his country, which he signed up to do, but the consciences of politicians, which never ever play any part in a recruitment drive.
            
            I hope that  L/Cpl Ashworth's family sues the MoD for all they can get.  The British public will be on their side if they choose to do so. I hope they take the MoD for all it is worth.




             








            

Julian and Ed . . . modern heroes?

EDWARD SNOWDEN AND Julian Assange are not heroes to anyone with the exception of the West's enemies. They believe themselves to have served the interests of free speech and of the right to know. By being in a position to wash the West's dirty linen in public, they did so with alacrity. Their minds (or should I say egos?), became quickly focused on themselves, and their place in history, as defenders of liberty - they possibly hoped that future generations would look as adoringly upon them as they rightly do Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela today.
            
            Assange and Snowden are peculiar individuals. Snowden dropped out of university (which should have told the CIA something), and had been working in intelligence gathering for only a matter of months on $200,000 a year… and was living with a pole dancer?
            
           Assange, on the other hand, is wanted by the Swedish authorities concerning charges of a sexual nature. He is currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and makes periodic visits to the embassy's balcony, where he stands like some South American dictator blessing his Guardianistas who venerate the merest nod in their direction as he brings them up to date with his current thinking.
            
           It is not the poor that will inherit the earth but the naive (especially in the West); after which they will have helped destroy it by their callow forthrightness, guilelessness and gullibility. Snowden today sits at an airport in Russia, probably preening himself because of  the embarrassment he has caused to America and, less so, the UK.
            
           But President Putin, as a onetime member of the KGB (a body which Mr Snowden probably knows little of), is only too glad to have a simpleton on his hands. At the very least Snowden's presence embarrasses Obama- as it should.

JOURNALISTS ARE FULL of guesses regarding Snowden' s ultimate destination. Some say Russia, while others say Ecuador. But a late entry is Venezuela who have offered him citizenship in this land of socialist milk and honey…but with one proviso - bring your own toilet rolls.
            
            Cuba is an outside possibility, and may turn out to be more than a mere dropping off point to  Ecuador. But Cuba is a long shot, even for a short stay over. Cuba is in no position to further antagonise America. The country knows that the Marxist game is up, for they have been kept frozen in the 1950s, ever since the 1959 Communist revolution.
           
            Snowden will be passed like a parcel between those nations which have a varying degree of hostility to America to keep the embarrassment flowing. Snowden, no doubt, (remember he worked in intelligence) has chosen his travel plans accordingly.
           
THE WEST NEEDS AN EFFECTIVE intelligence service; and to be effective it needs access to people's lives. The cold war may be over; a war won by the West. But it will turn out to be a pyrrhic victory if communism is replaced by Islamists intent upon jihad against the West.
            
             The awful events that took place in New York on 9/11 were (like Pearl Harbour[1]) a declaration of war, not only on America, but also (after the London Bombings in July 2005) on Western world.
            
             We are told that hundreds of young British born Jihadists have taken themselves of to all four corners of the Muslim world to train as terrorists whose aim is a caliphate  that would cover Europe. To such idealists Syria is their Spanish Civil War; and one day they will return back to this country moulded by war and indoctrinated by Islamists like the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
            
             The intelligence services are worried; for these returnees will have a population of  2.7 million Muslims to hide among if they wish this country ill. They have to be, indeed must be, watched, as secretly and as unscrupulously as the law allows, and if it does not permit any particular activity that MI5may wish to undertake, then the law must change to accommodate it.

ASSANGE AND SNOWDEN know not what they do. They have, of course, the hero worship of much of the liberal press and media generally to encourage them. Is it little wonder they used the Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post, when they sought to release, what they consider to be a devastating indictment of the West?
            
            There is however a third individual who made Assange what he is today, just as, no doubt, Assange has made Snowden what he hopes to become today. This individual, physically speaking, is among the most unlikely of recruits the American armed services have drawn to its breast.
            
            Bradley Manning set the ball rolling. It was Private First Class Manning who released intelligence emails  to Assange's  WikiLeaks, to the embarrassment (among others) of the diplomatic American community. Some of it was tittle-tattle that diplomats engage in among each other, but also contained title-tattle about what the West's leaders thought of each other. Hundreds of thousands of documents fell into the hands of WikiLeaks via Private (first class) Manning, who now awaits trial for treason which could result, unless a deal is struck, in the death penalty.
            
           On the other hand, neither Snowden or Assange will ever meet such an end. If the liberal classes seek a hero, then surely, from their point of view it should be no less a figure than Private Manning; a figure it seems, of only momentarily interest to the liberal community: and it will not be the first time in history that a useful idiot has served such a purpose only to be forgotten by history - a fate which both Snowden and Assange have little intention of emulating.

           
           
           
             
           

           
           



[1] In fact 9/11 came at a higher price in human lives than did Pearl Harbour.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Gi'mme that old time religion…

IN MY DAY IT WAS CALLED streaming ; schools had four different streams A, B, C, and C+. Now such a practice is called putting pupils into sets, and only occurs in subjects such as English and Maths. In the old system streaming began at Junior school from the age of seven, and carried us through to the 11 plus, where the wheat was separated from the chaff.
                
                 I have often wondered how pupils freshly arriving from infant school, were divided up once they arrived at Junior level. How were seven-year-old's allotted their stream? My only conclusion was that it was based upon what we would call today a post code lottery.
                
                While the methodology was then unfair, the system of streaming is not. Its replacement  in the mid-1960s was the Comprehensives system which favoured mixed ability teaching with exceptions in subjects seen as challenging, and vital to our country's future prosperity - thus was the system of sets introduced, it allowed the brightest to flourish.
                
                But in the 1970s and 80s our 'progressive' educationalists believed that any form of separation from mixed ability teaching was deemed unfair, and would  label children as winners and losers.
                
                Now we have the Chief Inspector of Schools, Michael Wilshaw finally saying that mixed ability teaching is unfair to the ablest pupils because it drags them down, they under-perform because they have to wait for the less academically gifted pupils to catch up; or, are hindered by other pupils who play up and have no intention to learn - not even the alphabet. We have teachers who cannot control them, and fear the repercussions that would flow from the merest tap on the wrist.

THE SYSTEM OF GRAMMAR SCHOOLS once provided a way out for 25% of the brightest and most gifted pupils from all backgrounds including working class ones. But in the mid 1960's, the Labour Party had other ideas - 'levelling down'.
                
               Of course such a phrase would be anathema to someone like Shirley Williams, who, as Education Secretary, set the comprehensive ball rolling; but this in effect was what happened. The gifted may have been put into that politically correct euphemism for streaming, 'sets', under the comprehensive system. But the grammar schools, like the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII had their Henry in Shirley; and sadly it continued with Margaret Thatcher.
                
              Today teachers moan, with good reason , about the constant ideologically driven changes politicians make to the education system. But until that hated word 'selection' once more plays the major role in state education, instead of the bit part given it by the politicians through  'sets' at the expense of the grammar schools; then we will continue to decline as a country.

AS HUMAN BEINGS we posses different abilities. There are those more academically inclined who should be encouraged on the academic path, via the grammar school, into university, and beyond that  into the far reaches of ambition that requires, god forbid, an elitist approach.
                
                When I was at school, the chaff were never ignored, because they were never written off. There were technical colleges, colleges of further education, and polytechnics (soon, would you believe, to become universities). Those who failed the 11 plus were never written off. There were hundreds of different well paid skills that could be taught to the practically minded.
                
                 If, for instance, with the growth, in the 1960's, of the North Sea gas and oil excavation, many skills, in my part of the world, such as welding were in demand, such a skill paid far better wages than that of, for instance, an academic.
                
                 Today plumbers, electricians, plasterers, can earn wages in excess of many of those teaching in our schools who went through university. Unless a university degree encompasses a scientific or maths related subject; the skilled worker will, in financial terms out- earn the following: the historian (unless he or she has a contract with a television channel), poet, writer of prose, art historian, or any other arty-farty academic who seeks personnel aggrandisement through academia.

WE MUST RETURN to the past in education; to a period before the well intentioned 'progressive' liberal middle class politicians, sought to eviscerate their guilt[1] and bring equality to every nook and corner of our culture, which, in terms of education, meant a 'bog standard 'comprehensive system.
                
                 Mixed ability teaching has been a failure for thousands of pupils in the state sector. While the lack of discipline has encouraged classroom disruption, and in many cases, the bullying of teachers impotent to act. Those wishing to learn within such an environment find it almost impossible to do so; and because of what the educationalists regard as 'hurt feelings' among those academically less gifted, mixed ability classrooms are tolerated.
                
                This sham must end for the sake of all the pupils. Streaming must return to the classroom and Grammar schools must no longer be the scapegoats of socialist politicians, or the easy option for cuts in education by the Tories, as happened under Margaret Thatcher, only to be enthusiastically pursued under Labour once more.
                
                All over the world our competitors are not ashamed  to separate the academically gifted from those talented and able pupils, who can go on to get well paid jobs by learning a vocation requiring skills that the academically gifted would find a strain. By dummying down the curriculum (as happened under New Labour), and turning what were vocational polytechnics into universities to make the participants within such institutions feel equal to the academically inclined, is both patronising and a retrograde step as far as this nation's prosperity is concerned.
                
               Germany does not play such silly games with the futures of their young, and are reaping the benefits; and we must, like them, do what is natural and not ideological. Until we do, teachers will forever be droning on about political interference.

               
               
               

               



[1] Remember, many, if not all of Labour's elite during the 1960s-70s were themselves middle class, and  suffered liberal guilt