This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column What a pity that nurses are to stop wearing their scarlet Do Not Disturb waistcoats as they patrol hospital wards. These fetching items of clothing sum up modern Britain so perfectly that they should be much more widely available. The Prime Minister could wear one during meetings with constituents worried about crime, disorder, immigration, EU control of Britain, wasteful foreign aid or the dismantling of the Armed Forces – all subjects on which he doesn’t want to hear from us, thank you very much. The police could wear them as they stroll, chatting to each other, through the streets, while they ignore all the things they regard as too trivial to trouble them – public swearing, alfresco widdling, cyclists scattering old ladies, littering, canna¬bis smoking, car theft and burglary. You know the sort of thing. Teachers could wear them as they fail to teach yet another generation to read, stopping their ears to half a ton of research telling them that synthetic phonics works, because they think it is ‘authoritarian’. BBC complaints officers could wear them as they explain to licence-payers that their tastes, concerns and political views have no place on the airwaves, and they should be grateful to have the BBC at all. All these people – and plenty more known to us in our daily lives – no longer do the jobs they are paid to do. Isn’t it interesting that the work once done by the police is now handed to powerless Police Community Support Officers, that ‘graduate’ nurses are too grand to wield a bedpan and delegate such stuff to support workers. Teachers, apparently unable to teach much, have legions of ‘assistants’. Rubbish dressed up as TV ‘Culture’ When a nation goes rotten from the top down, it has some curious effects. One of them was on view last week when the BBC showed an expensive and slick drama, Page Eight. The camerawork, the production and the editing were of the best. The actors, especially, were superb. Bill Nighy played every Left-wing Oxbridge graduate’s fantasy of himself, haggardly handsome, effortlessly attractive to women, lived-in, witty, successful yet still rebellious. Michael Gambon was a wonderful old geezer. Rachel Weisz was the new Thinking Man’s Crumpet. Ralph Fiennes was more believable as Prime Minister than any of the past four real ones. He was also the only character in the entire drama who didn’t smoke roll-ups. I watched it with enjoyment, until I realised that it was rubbish. The plot didn’t make sense. Does a man on the run from a villainous state go to visit his ex-wife? Most of the scenes were wholly unbelievable, made bearable only by the quality of the acting. There were cliches as lumpy and wooden as tree stumps. This would have been for¬giveable in an episode of Spooks, which everyone knows is tosh. But this is supposed to be ‘Culture’ with a capital ‘C’, the work of the immensely grand liberal-elite playwright Sir David Hare. The Government did not like the scenes at Wootton Bassett as the dead came home, and wants to make sure that nothing of the kind ever grows up again in any other place. It wants to be free to conduct more stupid, unwanted wars, without being reminded of the true cost of them. From now on, the bodies of those soldiers killed in the Afghan conflict will be flown home to RAF Brize Norton, and will no longer pass through Wootton Bassett. There are acceptable reasons for that. But there is no acceptable reason for what happens next. They will no longer go through the centre of any town, being routed through suburbs and along fast main roads and bypasses where no crowds are likely to gather. They could go a different way. Brize Norton is on the edge of the town of Carterton, with a similar population to that of Wootton Bassett. There is also a perfectly good and rather beautiful route that would take the cortege to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford through the large and lovely village of Bampton. I have heard the various official explanations for this curious routing, including the shameful, pitiful claim that the roads of Carterton, 22ft wide, are ‘too narrow’. I think the time has come to say that these explanations are so much tripe, the sort of thing dictators and despots say. We are always told that the authorities have given up on cannabis so that they can be ‘freed up’ to pursue other drugs, allegedly worse, and the ‘evil dealers’ who sell them. Since cannabis can unpredictably send you mad for life, I can’t see why it is any less serious than heroin or cocaine. But if the authorities have been ‘freed up’, they haven’t taken much advantage of their freedom. Thanks to Tim Knox and Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies, and to Nicola Blackwood MP, we now know that of 2,530 people convicted and ¬sentenced for supply of ‘Class A’ drugs last year, 1,756 did not even go to prison and none received the maximum sentence (‘life’). There is no ‘War on Drugs’. It is a sham. * Can one of the many reporters in Libya stop gushing for a moment, and ask a few of the romantic rebels what they think of what happened in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and who they think was behind it? The answers might cool their ardour a bit.vine In one of his latest comments, Mr Charles writes : ‘PH entirely misses my point. I was not arguing for the rights or wrongs of Grammar Schools. I was asking him to tell us how he would sell their reintroduction to the voting public.’ But I dealt precisely, in detail and at length with that issue. I only mentioned the possibility that he really didn’t grasp that grammar schools were better, in case this was his problem. I do sometimes wonder if people such as Mr Charles make any serious effort to read what I write here. For likewise Mr Charles says : ‘ If PH really believes that those of us on the left believe we have had things “our way” for so long, he is monstrously deluded. Every Labour government since Attlee has betrayed its founding principles.’ But I didn’t say the left *believed* it has had things all its own way. I said (emphasis added by me) : ‘They *have* had things their way for many years now.’ The Left’s strange ability to believe that it is still an outsider rebel faction, far from power, long after it has taken over the establishment, is one of the principal features of the argument I have been making ever since I published ‘The Abolition of Britain’ (and ever since my critics started not reading it, while thinking that they had) in 1999. If The Left don’t like the anti-sovereignty, liberal intervention policy of the Blair and Cameron governments, then they haven’t understood the founding principles of their own movement. Or perhaps they just don’t like the look of the ‘abolition of national borders’ when they see it being done. Actually this has often been the problem for sensitive leftists. They will the end of a socialist, secularist, internationalised, egalitarian society – but they dislike the means necessary to bring about this Hell-on-Earth, when they find out in too much detail what they are. The charming Nikolai Bukharin was quite happy for all kinds of repression to be used against non-Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. But he was surprised and shocked when the same thing was done to him by Stalin a few years later, in the same cause. The problem with most Leftists is that they are in the grip of a dogmatic faith, and therefore cannot think. And so they must twist reality to suit the dogma, for they would be bereft if they had to accept that their dogma is wrong. That is why they all believe this self-serving fantasy that they are poor, sad excluded minority figures, when in fact their ideas dominate the country. Mr Gibson says ; ‘I went to a comprehensive. I achieved straight A grades at A level, went to get a 1st class honours degree, Master's with distinction and a PhD. Stop generalising!’ Two points. In a devalued education system these grades and qualifications do not necessarily mean what they would have meant in a system that was not dependent on comprehensive state secondary schools, and hadn’t needed to lower its standards to conceal the decline in quality, as we have done (see John Marks, ‘The Betrayed Generation’). Indeed, were Mr Gibson a regular reader here he might know ( see *index*!) that the devaluation of all examinations, all grades , including A levels and University degrees is often discussed. Thus his experience proves nothing. Second, while I have no doubt that comprehensives destroy the educational hopes of many who go to them, some people have such natural gifts, and such strong backing from home, (and attend one of the comprehensives that is less bad, less disorderly and less hostile to learning than the majority) and can therefore obtain a reasonable education in spite of being forced to attend a bad school. It is Mr Gibson who is generalising. If Mr Wooderson can direct me to research showing that secondary moderns were worse for social mobility than comprehensives, I will examine it and comment on it. I have not heard of it. In fact I am often struck by how little is written about these schools ( some of which, by 1985, were offering A level courses and getting pupils into University) . But I would point out that secondary moderns were not *designed* to achieve social mobility. That was the job of the grammar schools. It would seem to me that you would have to take both sorts of schools together, and compare their joint results with those of comprehensives. On the question of private tutors, etc, I have no doubt that some parents will always use private tutors. The financial incentive for a parent in a grammar school area is huge. Mr Anthony Blair, for instance, did so, even though his sons were at one of the best state schools in the country. I believe many other socialist politicians do the same, rather than admit that comprehensives are inferior to selective schools. This is only one of many hypocritical actions they undertake, to conceal this truth from themselves and others (a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The House I Grew Up In ‘, featuring Toby Young’s recollections of his education, under the influence of his egalitarian anti-grammar school father Michael, provides an example of this which is both poignant and infuriating). But if in every area of the country there were grammar places available to between 30 and 40 per cent of children, obtained not by a single exam but by (as I advocate, see *index* !) the German system of mutual agreement between parents and teachers, with second chances at 13 and even 15, I doubt if it would happen very much. I don’t think it does in Germany. Perhaps any Northern Irish readers might wish to comment on whether such tutoring is common there. I have no idea. But my guess is that, while it happens, it is not remotely comparable to what goes on in Kent and Buckinghamshire. I’ll get to the revelation in a moment. But I am sometimes amazed at the points which critics make here, which they for some reason imagine to be devastating. As I don’t share this view, I don’t respond to them. They then come back and make them again, sometimes with the implication that I’m avoiding a tough question – when in fact I’ve ignored something I thought unimportant and far from challenging. One such is Mr Charles, who has (I think) more than once asked how I think a return to selective state secondary education could be got past the electorate, which he imagines to be mainly hostile to such a thing. Actually, I suspect that those without school-age children are largely indifferent. This is a pity, but it’s the case. He also seems to think that it is axiomatic that the majority of voters want bad education for their children, or would deny a good education to the children of others, even though it didn’t make the education of their own children any better. I suppose such dog-in-the-manger attitudes do exist, but I doubt if there are many votes in them. If it’s just that he’s not persuaded that grammar schools offer a better education that comprehensives, a matter many times addressed here and fully indexed, I don’t know what to say. There just isn’t any doubt about it. Comprehensive campaigners don’t want to abolish selection to provide a better education. They do it to make our society more ‘equal’. The only serious complaint against selection in practice , from the pro-comprehensive people, is that it deprives comprehensives of what would otherwise be their best pupils. This complaint shows rather well how their minds work. Like so many socialists, they see the state from the point of view of the producer, not that of the consumer. In fact, in every education authority that obeyed Anthony Crosland’s circular 10/65, and Margaret Thatcher’s continuing implementation of it after 1970, all children in the state system were denied the opportunity of benefiting from a grammar education. Everyone would go to secondary moderns, though in rich areas the secondary moderns would be better than the ones in poor areas. So the idea that in some way Labour (which nearly lost the 1964 election anyway) abolished grammar schools on a wave of popularity is false. They had to pretend, to get a majority at all, that grammar school education would still be available. There’s a further point. Two, in fact. Voters who care about education tend to be those who most expect their children to benefit from it. They would certainly be in favour of schools which aided the talented children of poor homes. But why would selection make education or anything else any worse for the parents of those who would not qualify for grammar schools? Had the money wasted on comprehensive schemes and ludicrous academic-education-for-all policies been used to create technical and apprenticeship schools, millions would by now have benefited and we might still be a major manufacturing country. Comprehensive schools don’t in any way benefit the non-academic. On the contrary, they imprison them in pointless classes gaining so-called ‘qualifications’, pseudo-academic nonsenses without practical use or educational value. Now to the revelation. I have for a long time complained about the difficulties of obtaining information on what really happens to those convicted of drug possession. I did manage (in the course of wiping the floor with the over-rated Professor Nutt, see Index) to obtain detailed figures about the ‘criminal sanctions’ (ie, in most cases, two parts of nothing at all, in the form of an unrecorded ‘warning’ ) visited on the tiny minority of dope users who are actually arrested for possession of cannabis. But similar figures on the ‘hard drugs’ were harder to get. This was irritating, as we are always told that the abandonment of any effort to control cannabis will ‘free up’ police resources to deal with ‘hard drugs’ (as if cannabis weren’t hard as nails when it comes into contact with the human brain). Why ‘free up’, by the way? This is like the railway expression ‘arriving into’. We might get lightning-flashes of truth ,as in the Injustice System’s pathetically indulgent treatment of the ‘singer’ Pete Doherty, let off after actually being found in possession of heroin while in a criminal courtroom on another charge. But I would be told that this was ‘anecdotal’ or perhaps ‘cherry-picking’ (this is the practice of quoting evidence which supports your arguments as described by druggie lobbyists, whose own patrading of surveys claiming that all is well is somehow not 'cherry-picking'). Now, thanks to Tim Knox of the CPS, the superb Kathy Gyngell and the Tory MP Nicola Blackwood (my profuse thanks to all of them ) , the written answer to a Parliamentary question has revealed a great deal more of the truth. (The Hansard source is HC Deb, 15 June 2011, c839W. The Minister answering is Crispin Blunt) It contains comparative tables for what happened to those convicted of drug offences, 2007-2010. They don’t vary all that much, year to year, so I’ll extract some facts from the most recent table, that for 2010. So, for ‘Class ‘A’, drugs supposedly the most serious, we had 12,175 sentenced for simple possession in 2010. Of these ,779 were sent to prison. There is no information in the answer on which I can base even a guess as to why these were selected for imprisonment and the rest not, though one might suspect that a long previous record, a combination of this offence with other crimes, or a very large quantity possessed, might make a difference. Of these, just two , repeat two, received the maximum sentence of seven years (three years six months, in practice). The others, 11,396, received ‘other sentences’. I am now trying to find out what these were. I suspect most were, in effect, let off provided they agreed to undergo some ‘rehab’ programme or other. The figures don’t say anything about how many offences had been committed previously, either. By the way, even for *supply* of Class ‘A’ drugs (supposedly so serious that the maximum sentence is ’life’ in prison, which of course doesn’t mean anything of the kind), 774 out of 2, 530 convicted offenders did not go to prison at all, let alone for life. For the similar offence of ‘Possession with Intent to supply, the figures are higher but the proportions are similar, 3687 sentenced, 908 imprisoned, one for life). In the past four years, only two life sentences have been handed out for simple supply, both in 2008. And, if the relaxation of cannabis law enforcement has ‘freed up’ police and courts for pursuing the ‘evil dealers’, why have convictions for supply of Class ‘A’ drugs remained more or less unchanged for the past four years ( 2,633 in 2007, 2,968 in 2008, 2,804 in 2009 and 2,530 in 2010) ?
Why just stop at nurses? We could give those tabards to our police, politicians, immigration staff, teachers...
On Missing The Point
31 August 2011 1:51 PM
Some responses and a revelation
Sunday, 4 September 2011
Like the undisturbed nurses, they could all hand out pills – ‘antidepressants’, Ritalin, or semi-legal cannabis to zonk us all into believing that things are just great.
And our immigration officers, as they wave through the next batch of EU citizens anxious to do the jobs we don’t fancy, could all be emblazoned with the words Do Not Disturb: Country Committing Suicide.
Like Alan Bennett and Stephen Fry, other Leftist Corporation favourites, Sir David can do no wrong. And so the best broadcasting skills in the country are recruited to make it look good. But it isn’t.
The bodies of heroes hidden in a cloud of lies
In a free country, the Government should suffer for its lies.
Proof the ‘War on Drugs’ is a pathetic sham
I recall particularly making fun of the fact that the horrible Fidel Castro regime in Cuba, one of the most repressive state apparatuses on earth, has an official radio station called ‘Radio Rebelde’ (Rebel Radio) . This seems to me to be a good metaphor for the Left’s difficulty in taking responsibility for, and taking satisfaction from, its accession to power. A few years ago the editor of the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme paid me the great compliment of delaying the 8.30 news Bulletin, so that I could continue my debate with Lindsey German, of the ‘Socialist Workers’ Party’, in which I tried (yet failed) to explain to Ms German that she and her comrades had much to be pleased about in modern Britain.
The fact that the Secretary of State for Defence (himself a not-very-apologetic ex-member of the pro-Soviet Communist party) had just quoted Antonio Gramsci in an interview (and only I, of those in the studio, had realised this) seemed to me to be a good example of how it takes an ex-Bolshevik to grasp what’s going on. Things have surely changed a bit, if Britain can have an ex-Communist, Gramsci-quoting Defence Secretary.
I can, by the way, think of few British governments of modern times which have fulfilled their manifesto commitments more fully than did the Attlee Cabinet of 1945-51. For better or worse (and often for worse) they did what they said they would do, and did it so thoroughly that Churchill himself didn’t dare reverse it in 1951. Similarly, the 1964-70 Wilson government conducted a moral and social revolution of vast dimensions. And the Blair-Brown government likewise hugely expanded taxation and the public sector, shrivelled our national independence, adopted liberal interventionism on a large scale and blanketed the country in political correctness. If, after these three eras of profound change, a leftist person thinks himself betrayed or ignored, then I can only imagine he doesn’t understand politics, economics or diplomacy has no interest in culture or morals, or is simply half asleep. But as we see here, there are such people.
One of the many things to be said for my brother Christopher is that at least he is prepared to look the consequences of his beliefs in the face, and acknowledge them as essential to what he desires.
And so he thinks (though he still hesitates over several points).
Tutoring was not unknown in the days of the eleven-plus, and it will not die out entirely if we reinstate a national grammar school system covering the whole of England and Wales. But the current situation where heavily oversubscribed grammar schools, within commuting distance of the capital, are overwhelmed by demand, is a result of the *abolition* of selection in neighbouring areas, not of its existence where it survives. It gives no indication of the operation of a national selective system. This too has been discussed many times before (see *index* !).
They look at the education system as theirs, not for the pupils but for the employees, a thing for creating organisationally successful versions of the sort of school that they want. No doubt, if you take bright pupils out of comprehensive schools, their results, discipline and general state will be worse than if you don’t.
But a) the purpose of education is not to create a smooth organisation for teachers and bureaucrats; it is to educate the children well. And b) comprehensive schools are a flawed idea in the first place, based upon political and social egalitarianism rather than on a desire to provide a good education. So who cares if good grammar schools make bad comprehensives worse? Provided that we then have enough sense to admit that comprehensive schools – as a concept – are pitiful, tear-stained failures, and get rid of them, then what harm will a bit more evidence of their failure do?
It is only damaging if we persist with the failed idea in the belief that, if we force enough clever people to go to them, they will eventually be any good (See Einstein’s definition of insanity). Or if we do it on the grounds that our dogma is so sacred that all must submit to it, even if the outcome is awful.
Even if all other schools in the country were abolished and everyone forced by law to attend comprehensives, they would still give those who went to them a worse education than selective schools.
The Labour manifesto of 1964 did not by any means assume that people hated grammar school education. It lied, in a slippery and misleading fashion: ‘Labour will get rid of the segregation of children into separate schools caused by 11-plus selection: secondary education will be reorganised on comprehensive lines. Within the new system, grammar school education will be extended: in future no child will he denied the opportunity of benefiting from it through arbitrary selection at the age of 11.’
Note that ‘within the new system, grammar school education will be extended…no child will be denied the opportunity of benefiting from it’. This either a flat lie, or a statement of incredible arrogant stupidity. You may choose. But it was told because Labour assumed that voters thought (indeed knew) that grammar education was good.
Also, parties stand on general manifestoes, covering many issues. In general, people vote for them on balance, with some items being enough to win a vote , and some to lose it, but most only influencing it.
Say my putative party existed and stood for ( as I would wish) :
An end to mass immigration
The reintroduction of punishment, including capital punishment, into the criminal justice system
The return of the police to preventive foot patrol
Departure from the EU
The restoration of selection in secondary education
Reforms of the welfare system to discriminate between deserving and undeserving recipients
Severe reductions in foreign aid
The rebuilding of the armed forces
The abandonment of liberal foreign adventures
The repeal of the Human Rights Act and British departure from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court,
Mr Charles and like-minded Guardian readers would have several reasons not to vote for such a party. I would hope so. I neither want nor expect their votes. They have had things their way for many years now, and it is time we cleaned house.
But millions of others would have many reason to vote for it. And I doubt very much if they would regard selective education as what I believe is known as a ‘dealbreaker’, if they could get the other things - even if (as I very much doubt) comprehensives are popular among the masses. Or anywhere else. After all, even, or perhaps especially the politicians who claim to support them, all avoid them in practice.
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