I was lucky enough to attend part of the Kidbrooke School celebrations in July, though mainly in order to have my children see my dad speak while he is in his prime. Now BBC Radio 4 has come up with what promises to be a brilliant history of the Comprehensive School. Highlights from the first, rivetting, show include the story of how London County Council officials were impressed by comprehensive schooling in the States (see, European leftists do learn things from the US), the story of Stewart Mason’s experiment in Tory Leicestershire (he had the sneaky idea of calling all the comprehensive schools Grammar Schools, though his reform had the undesirable side-effect of inventing the middle school) and an exemplary media performance by my esteemed former colleague David Crook. They get the history just about right, but more impressively the show really gives the texture of the debates and the experience of people whose lives were affected by the reforms. Radio at its best. Future episodes promise interviews with Kenneth Baker, Roy Hattersley, John O Farrell and one Tim Brighouse (wonder what he’ll say).
From the category archives:
UK Politics
Robin Cook, former Labour Foreign Secretary and prominent critic of the Blair government over Iraq, “has died suddenly at the age of 59”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4127654.stm . His “resignation speech”:http://www.robincook.org.uk/cook/rc_press.asp#article8 over the war will be remembered for a very long time. From that speech delivered on the eve of war:
bq. For four years as Foreign Secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment. Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam’s medium and long-range missiles programmes. Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term—namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.
Over on my other site, a further installment in the series “Everything I Know, I Learned in MBA School At Great Expense And My God Are You Lot Going To Suffer For It”. In this episode, I discuss what the theory of risk management and process control can tell us about the desirability or otherwise of shooting suspected suicide bombers.
I’m too young to remember the D’Oliveira affair in any detail, but old enough for it to have made a dent on my consciousness, and, of course, to have seen D’Oliveira in his later, post-test-playing years. I remember quite vividly the affection for him in my circles, an affection which, if I’m right, contained not a whiff of pride that England had treated him well, but an bemused pride that he had chosen England. I was aware, of course, that the South African government was composed of evil racists and that the English cricket establishment was suspected of collaboration. But what Peter Oborne’s book Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Controversy
I should make a confession here.
[click to continue…]
London and many other places will “observe two minutes of silence”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4679681.stm at noon GMT today for the victims of last week’s bombings. The debate has already begun (“see below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/battle-lines/) about the right political and legal response to the attacks. Besides policy and law, though, Britain and Ireland have suffered long enough from terrorism to have produced literature about it. Below the fold I reproduce a powerful poem from the late “James Simmons”:http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/20century/topic_4/simmons.htm. It commemorates one of the earliest, and worst, atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict, the IRA bombing of Claudy town in July of 1972. The circumstances of that event were different from last week’s attacks, but some things were the same. I don’t know of anything else that conveys them nearly as well.
Following the London bombings, the British “left” pro-war sites “are”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html “busy”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/14/kingdom_of_the_blind.php “drawing”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/14/the_problem_we_face_in_a_nutshell.php “battle lines”. The line they are concerned to draw is between themselves and the likes of Seumas Milne of the Guardian. David T at Harry’s Place goes so far as to call Milne a Quisling. (Given who Quisling was, I think this would make David T a Holocaust denier if the argument of “this”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/11/talking_down_th.html Eve Garrard post at normblog were correct. But since it isn’t, it doesn’t.)
“Dickhead” and “idiot” are two of the politer epithets I’m inclined to apply to the hapless and unpleasant Milne and those like him such as our regular commenter abb1, but since there are lines to be drawn, and it is important that we do so, I’d prefer not to draw them there. We now know, that there are Muslim extremists in the UK who are willing to kill us in large numbers. If we are to stop them we need a politics that isolates them from their co-religionists rather than providing them with an environment to swim in. That means talking to, and trying to include on “our” side, all kinds of figures from within that community. That means doing what the Metropolitan Police have done in inviting Tariq Ramadan to speak. That means engaging with a whole bunch of people who have repellent views on topics from Israel to homosexuality. We should say what we think of those views, but we should talk, we should include. Because an isolated and frightened Muslim community, unwilling to talk to the police, unwilling to engage with wider British society would provide a place for the real nutters to hide and recruit, whereas a Muslim community with whom bonds of trust exist provides our best means of fighting the crazies. Ken Livingstone has come in for a lot of flak for his meetings with Sheikh al-Qaradawi. Maybe some of it was justified. But Ken, with a political sureness of touch that eludes the bloggers I mentioned at least know both that we need to draw some lines and draws them in the right place: between those who are disposed to plant bombs on the tube and those who can help us to stop them.
Addendum:
Norman Geras and Eve Garrard, in the course of treating us to “a lecture on drawing battle lines against Milne et al”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html , also attempt a lesson on blame and moral responsibility. Since I agree with them that the terrorists who planted the bombs are responsible for those bombs and that Blair is not, I am reluctant to quibble overmuch. But as a general rule it seems to me wrong to rule out a priori that those who create the conditions under which bad things are done share responsibility for those bad things. One of their examples concerns rape. Of course rapists are responsible for what they do, but suppose a university campus with bad lighting has a history of attacks on women and the university authorities can, at minimal cost, greatly improve the night-time illumination but choose not to do so for penny-pinching reasons. Suppose the pattern of assaults continues in the darkened area: do Geras and Garrard really want to say that the university penny-pinchers should not be blamed for what happens subsquently? At all? I think not.
Over at “Urbandriftuk”:http://urbandriftuk.blogspot.com/2005/06/soz-been-away-for-while.html , Mizmillie has been pondering the recent explosion in commercial operations by the British public sector, so, for example, the “North Wales police have been running a massive driving school for profit”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4563161.stm . She writes that “insidious blurring of the public and private is likely to be one of the current [British] government’s enduring legacies” .
She asks:
bq. Are there any principled moral reasons against public bodies carrying out private business?
bq. Or are they mainly consequential concerns, e.g. leads to two-tierism?
bq. If they trade should they be treated as private businesses and have their profits taxed in the same way? Or should they be exempt from tax since the monies get ploughed back into public coffers?
Part of my reaction to this is to look at things in historical perspective. After all, there have been many commercial operations, such as docks and airports, that have, up until recently, been run by local authorities in Britain. But on the matter of tax, I guess there has to be an question of equity. After all if the police are allowed to open an driving school next door to mine but can do so on more favourable terms, I’m going to go out of business pretty quick.
The arrival of Andrew Adonis in government has so far gone uncommented upon here, so I feel entitled to say something, however belatedly. Adonis’s presence at #10 made the Education portfolio a poisoned chalice for at least the whole of the second term. Because Number 10 was always interfering in policymaking, no Education Secretary (even Charles Clarke) could pursue his or her own agenda with confidence. Not only were they constantly being second-guessed and scrutinized, but even when they put forward their own initiatives no-one affected could be sure whose they were, or whether, if they truly belonged to the Secretary, they would reach fruition. It seemed to me that Estelle Morris (who was Secretary of State most of the time I lived in the UK) was always in an untenable position. The portion of the Queens Speech on Education has Adonis’s name written all over it.
Ruth Kelly should be delighted, therefore, to have Adonis in her team.
Tony Banks is to become a peer. And Chris Smith. It’s a long way from the GLC. Check out the list here.
Estelle Morris too, presumably forgiven for setting the appalling precedent of taking responsibility for errors committed under her watch. And Gillian Shephard, the only Education Secretary in the past ten years I’ve heard nice things about from all sides.
The AUT boycott was put before our local association today (for the motion I co-sponsored see “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/09/questions-and-answers-re-the-aut-boycott/ — and scroll down). The debate was passionate but respectful. Everyone on both sides agreed that the AUT had botched things procedurally. The pro-boycott lobby didn’t address the details of the Haifa or Bar-Ilan cases at all but made a generic anti-Israel case centred around an analogy with apartheid. In the end the vote was decisive, a pro-boycott amendment was defeated by 41 votes to 18 and my anti-boycott motion passed by 40 votes to 16. Somewhat disappointingly, a number of people then left and a vote was taken that effectively commits the Bristol delegation to splitting their vote to reflect the proportions of opinion (rather than swinging all our votes at Council against the boycott). This adds Bristol to the list of associations that opposed the boycott.
The BBC radio news this morning has been dominated by hours of whining about “the takeover of Manchester United by a Michael Moore lookalike”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4542913.stm . Meanwhile the disappearance of hundreds (and possibly thousands) of African children from London schools is relegated to mere mention status. (Some of the children have been killed, many more are probably in some kind of slavery.) The relative importance the BBC assigns to these stories is also reflected on its main news page.
I went to bed at 12.30 with things looking increasingly grim for Labour, and I’m surprised that when I got up just before 6 they’d improved considerably. The short version: Labour will win an unprecedented third term, but with a reduced majority of 60-something; the Liberal Democrats have made big gains in votes, but less so in seats (and have hurt Labour); and the Tories’ negative campaign has won them some seats but no increased popularity. Oh, and George Galloway ousted Oona King. But you could get all this just by “reading the BBC”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/default.stm .
I see that “George” in the comments to Daniel’s post immediately below is contending, in a manner similar to that of various pro-war British bloggers, that Blair’s decision to go to war with Iraq was overdetermined. The claim is that, although WMD provided a sufficient reason to go to war, there were other “planks” to the case, also sufficient reasons, that were advanced at the time and which provided an independent case for the decision. We need to be careful here. There’s no doubt that the blogospheric supporters of the decision to go to war believed then and believe still that the nature of Saddam’s regime was such that it should have been removed. There are certainly Parliamentarians, such as Anne Clwyd, who took such a line. Indeed, there’s some merit in such a view though it needs to be balanced against a realistic assessment of the costs and risks of war. But it was not Blair’s view at the time. Blair stated clearly that the horrible nature of the Baathist regime would not be sufficient to justify the war and that Saddam’s regime could continue if he satisfied the UN on the WMD question. The money quotes:
bq. I detest his regime. But even now he can save it by complying with the UN’s demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully.
and
bq. it takes no time at all for Saddam to co-operate. It just takes a fundamental change of heart and mind. Today the path to peace is clear. Saddam can co-operate fully with the inspectors. He can voluntarily disarm. He can even leave the country peacefully. But he cannot avoid disarmament. One further point. The purpose in our acting is disarmament. But the nature of Saddam’s regime is relevant in two ways. First, WMD in the hands of a regime of this brutality is especially dangerous because Saddam has shown he will use them. Secondly, I know the innocent as well as the guilty die in a war. But do not let us forget the 4 million Iraqi exiles, the thousands of children who die needlessly every year due to Saddam’s impoverishment of his country – a country which in 1978 was wealthier than Portugal or Malaysia but now is in ruins, 60 per cent of its people on food aid. Let us not forget the tens of thousands imprisoned, tortured or executed by his barbarity every year. The innocent die every day in Iraq victims of Saddam, and their plight too should be heard. [Emphases added]
Clearly, in the passage above, Blair is offering the ghastly nature of the Saddam regime not as an independent justification for war but as a reason to given additional weight and urgency to the WMD case. People should not retrospectively pretend otherwise.
There are many good reasons not to vote Labour in the forthcoming UK general election. Giving Tony Blair a bloody nose over Iraq, punishing the government for its pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment, withdrawing support over ID cards or the government’s handling of terrorists suspects: all are worth mentioning. Some will want to add the PFI and university tuition fees to the bill of indictment. I could go on. But I don’t find the fact that Liberal Democrat policies “are more in accord with my own views”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=984 than Labour’s are provides me with much of a reason for switching. After all, nobody, including the Liberal Democrats — currently 150/1 at bluesq.com — expects them to form the next government. And because of that, the Lib Dems can offer the voters they wish to seduce (Labour’s base) a portfolio of policies that are straight out of Guardian-reader central. In the circumstances it is a surprise that they aren’t offering philosophy lecturers in their 40s free beer on the NHS, but I suppose principle has to kick in somewhere. I’ll probably vote Labour (currently 20/1 on), but may vote Lib Dem for the aforementioned bloody-nose reasons. I certainly won’t be favouring the Lib Dems because they have better policies: talk is cheap.
The British Conservatives have been covering the country with horrible posters asking questions like “How would you feel if a bloke on day-release [from prison] attacked your daughter?” Some enterprising character has now produced a design-your-own-Tory-poster website. Here’s my own feeble effort:
(via Nick Barlow)