This student interviewer
http://mallarduk.com/peter-hitchens-hh0916/
....was so diffident that he hesitated for months before publishing his account of a conversation with me.
He needn't have been. The result is creditably honest. Some of you may enjoy it.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
It’s not every day that a Prime Minister steals a soundbite from me, and I’m pleased that she has done. What’s more, she is welcome to use it again, and I have plenty more where that came from.
She rightly swatted away narrow-minded enemies of grammar schools, saying: ‘We already have selection in our school system – and it is selection by house price, selection by wealth.’
I’ve been making this exact point for many years, as part of a lonely campaign to restore our lost grammar schools. When I started in the 1990s I was told it was a lost cause. Nobody’s saying that now. It’s winning because it’s right, just and wise.
If Chairman May has really decided to bulldoze aside the nasty, spiteful egalitarian garbage which blocks the road to good state schools, she can count on my total support against all who get in her way. I haven’t been keen on her before, and wasn’t even sure she cared, but her bold strike on Thursday night was impressive politics.
It is national madness to refuse to select children for the best schools on academic ability. We must have wasted oceans of talent thanks to the idiotic comprehensive system. We should not waste another drop.
I have this picture in my mind of the desolate faces of clever boys and girls trapped in howling, chaotic classrooms where academic excellence is actively despised, resigned to failure and disappointment, and going off into lost lives of needless mediocrity, from which their parents were powerless to rescue them.
If people ever wonder why we lack the talent, skills and competence that used to be normal in this country, it is because our state schools threw them in the bin in the name of ‘equality’. And even now the enemies of promise are still ganging up to hold back the talented but poor.
The BBC, to its lasting shame, is running what amounts to a campaign against grammars – which it is forbidden by its charter to do. Its reporters are allowed to intone at the end of reports that ‘many people’ doubt that grammars aid social mobility, weasel words which they can use to smuggle their own opinions into what is supposed to be impartial journalism.
Many people, I can assure them, think the opposite and have evidence to prove it. But they rarely get asked on.
The Corporation, ever the reliable voice of the smug, wealthy Left, has readily swallowed the anti-grammar propaganda which concentrates on the tiny number of untypical grammar schools which still survive in a few areas.
These schools are besieged, and no wonder, when seven years at their private equivalents would cost a minimum of £120,000 in post-tax income.
The top comprehensives, secretly selective in various clever ways, are actually more socially exclusive than these hopelessly oversubscribed grammars. If there were, once again, more than 1,000 such schools all over the country, this pressure would drop away. Lots of other things would happen. Standards would rise.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, chief inspector of English schools, bafflingly opposes grammar schools despite having gone to one (and would this son of a postman have risen so high otherwise?).
YET he admitted in a recent speech: ‘The fate of the most able pupils in non-selective [i.e. comprehensive] schools is particularly depressing. Some 60,000 youngsters who achieved the top levels at Key Stage 2 did not achieve an A or A* in English and maths five years later. Indeed, only a quarter achieved a B grade. According to the Sutton Trust, 7,000 children a year who were in the top ten per cent nationally at age 11 were not in the top 25 per cent at GCSE five years later. These youngsters are drawn disproportionately from the white working class.’
Why is this? Well, these facts may help. Grammar schools, where excellence is encouraged rather than bullied or ignored, get better results than comprehensive education.
In 2015, no less than 96.7 per cent of pupils in England’s grammar schools got five good GCSEs. Only 56.7 per cent of pupils at comprehensives (in fully comprehensive areas, not in any way ‘creamed off’ by grammars) did so, whatever their background.
And what about those supposedly dreadful secondary moderns which comprehensives are meant to have saved us from? Almost half (49.7 per cent) of pupils at non-selective schools in grammar school catchment areas won five good GCSEs.
So, after 50 years and billions of pounds, comprehensives have only a miserable seven per cent advantage over today’s equivalent of despised secondary moderns. But grammars still have a 40 per cent advantage over comprehensives.
Smashing up the grammars did not help a single child in a secondary modern. But it ruined the hopes of many who might otherwise have gone to grammars, but were dumped in bog-standard comprehensives.
Closing the grammars because the secondary moderns were bad was like cutting off a man’s left leg because his right leg is gangrenous. In short, it was mad. Let us welcome this long-awaited return to sanity, even if the privileged rulers of the BBC refuse to do so.
Theresa May needs the support of all of us to do this good thing, and to take it further.
The real menace on the roads
I have to try not to grind my teeth when I read about people who kill their innocent fellow creatures because they think it’s all right to text while driving.
How can we bring home to these homicidal, heedless cretins that their actions are at least as dangerous as letting off a gun in the street? Try speaking politely to them if you spot them (as I have).
They will threaten and swear at you. One said to me: ‘You know perfectly well the police don’t care. I can do what I like.’ He is, alas, quite right. He shouldn’t be.
Last week Christopher Gard (pictured, right) was jailed for killing Lee Martin, a cyclist. Gard, because he was not looking where he was going, drove into Mr Martin at 65mph. He then tried to conceal that he had been texting at the time. This was not a moment’s carelessness.
It was a deliberate risk. For the sake of a text about taking his dog for a walk, he deprived Mr Martin’s two daughters (12 and 15) of a father, and his wife of a husband.
Gard knew his actions were stupid and illegal. He had eight convictions for using his phone at the wheel and had promised magistrates to stop doing this six weeks before he destroyed a happy family.
There’s only one solution. A year’s loss of licence and a vicious fine on a first conviction, and prison on a second; and the police instructed to enforce the law with maximum rigour, as they once did with the breathalyser and seatbelts.
Police and magistrates who ignore this crime, or deal with it lightly, are risking the lives of others. Stop it.
Question time for our drug law MPs
The saga of Keith Vaz MP (before whose Home Affairs Committee I once appeared in a vain attempt to persuade them to stop weakening the drug laws) prompts this suggestion.
Any MP involved in influencing drug laws should be asked, on oath, when they last used any illegal drug, or observed others using such drugs including their children.
If we can demand details of financial interests, this is only reasonable.
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I see Chairman May has borrowed my soundbite on school selection. She responded to anti-grammar moaners complaining about the alleged unfairness of selection by ability, by pointing out that we already select by house price. She did so in a meeting with Conservative MPs at the 1922 Committee on Wednesday .
She is very welcome to this soundbite and may use it as much as she likes, but, like the Permanent Secretary at the Education Department, I am still unsure of what she really intends to do.
Much like the EU issue, the grammar school controversy allows people to take positions which appear to be more radical than they really are.
It’s necessary to recall that academic selection was largely destroyed in the late 1960s and 1970s, so making grammar schools pretty theoretical in most parts of the country. Only in Northern Ireland is there still a fully functional academically selective system.
In 1998 the Blair government actually banned new grammar schools by law, not that there had been any great effort to create any in the intervening 20 years. It was just that, from then on, any talk by the Tories about recreating them would need *at the very least* to involve the repeal of this ban as a manifesto measure.
Since then, the numbers of academically selective state schools in England has dwindled to a besieged and untypical rump, from whose problems and successes we can learn something *only* if we allow for this.
I have many times made these points, not least in an exchange with ‘Kent Mum’ which those adept at the internet can doubtless call up with ease. But here’s most of it : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/07/a-new-discussion-about-school-selection-.html
But now the Tories have plainly made a political decision to seem to embrace the grammar school policy (perhaps to outflank UKIP, perhaps to please the conservative media). So we need to go further
To *say* you wish to abolish the ban on new grammar schools, when this wasn’t in your manifesto, leaves you in a pretty safe position. You can put up a Bill which the Lords (heavily dominated now by the cultural Left) will chuck out. And, as you didn’t put it in the manifesto, the Westminster Convention cannot be invoked to require them to pass it out of respect for the people’s will. And it will die.
But if you win the next election, you will be reminded of this. So you will have had to put it in your manifesto before that election. And so, bit by bit, it will creep up the stairs of urgency until you have to legislate seriously.
And of course I’d be delighted if the 1998 ban were repealed. But then we’d only be back where we were in 1997, when there were hardly any grammars and no plans to create any new ones.
What we need, for this to matter, is a government determined to build and open hundreds of new grammars. Do we have such a government? No, the current Education Secretary, whose name I forget, is plainly not keen. Chairman May herself, despite borrowing my soundbite concealed for years her own attendance at a grammar school and cannot be said to be an actual enthusiast.
The Tories are most of all committed (as are many Blairites) to the stealthy nationalisation of education, through ‘academies’ , which allows them to hand over the running of state-financed schools to private companies, via an agency which is almost entirely opaque and unaccountable.
Grammars, which were often based upon local pride and in many cases built and founded by old-fashioned Labour town halls, are unlikely to emerge in any numbers from this system, which is selective in more subtle, less politically difficult , more unfair ways.
I think we may be being played for suckers here. I will need to see significant numbers of new grammars before I am persuaded that Chairman May is doing anything other than posing.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
Here's why the quarrel about grammar schools never ends: it is not really about schools, but about what sort of country this should be.
Grammar schools stood for adult authority, for discipline, for tradition, for hard work first and reward afterwards, and for self-improvement. They also tended to assume that boys and girls were different, and so educated them apart from each other. I like these things, but many don’t.
Old-fashioned Labour saw the point of this. They realised that it helped the poor become better-off and to have better lives and more power. They created a peaceful revolution that changed Britain for the better. Labour councils used to build new grammar schools and be proud of them.
But the modern liberal Left don’t like any of these ideas. They would rather teach children how to have sex than teach them to believe in God. Especially they don’t think parents or teachers should have any authority over the young. The State should be trusted to tell them what to think. They should look to the State for any improvement in their lives.
They don’t like the idea that there are fixed things that you just have to learn – which is why the teaching of languages and sciences is shrivelling in our schools. The people who smashed up more than a thousand of the best state secondary schools in the world didn’t do it to make education better. They knew it would make it worse for bright children.
In one case, that of Sir Graham Savage, they openly admitted this. They did it to make the country more ‘democratic’, more like the USA. They have made it like the worst bits, but very unlike the best bits.
How odd it is to recall that in my childhood there was a thing called the ‘brain drain’, which meant British scientists being lured away to the USA because they weren’t educating enough of them. And in those days a set of English A-levels was said to be equal to an American university degree. It isn’t so now. The enemies of grammars really should stop lying about the subject to get their way.
They moan about those who don’t get into grammars. But what about the huge numbers who can’t get into good comprehensives, and are dumped in vast bog-standard comps which are, in reality, worse than the old secondary moderns.
Of course selection for any school has losers as well as winners. But we have selection in our supposedly comprehensive schools. It is mainly done through the secret privileges (fake religious belief, close knowledge of feeder schools etc) exercised by sharp-elbowed, well-off parents. How is this better than selection by ability?
A 2010 survey by the Sutton Trust found that comprehensive schools in England are highly socially segregated. In fact, the country’s leading comprehensives are more socially exclusive than the remaining grammar schools.
Both the 164 (then remaining) grammars and the 164 most socially selective comprehensives drew pupils from areas where about 20 per cent of children were from poor homes. But the supposed comprehensives were more socially selective, taking only 9.2 per cent of their pupils from poor homes, while the grammars took 13.5 per cent. Who’s democratic now?
In fact, most of the remaining grammars are so besieged by middle-class commuters hiring tutors that their entry figures are utterly distorted. If we still had a national grammar system they would be far fairer than the top comprehensives are.
I wish I thought Theresa May really wanted to restore grammars. This has been successfully done in the former East Germany. But I fear that this is just a token move to try to hold on the support of the many voters who want to see this change. Even so, it is a good deal better than nothing, and a sign that this dreadful national error may one day be reversed.
A modest victory for decency
Islam’s real challenge to Western society is not terrorism. With a bit of resolve and common sense we can always defeat this filthy thing, and most Muslims would (in my view) be as happy as us if we did.
No, the challenge comes from Islam’s near-total monopoly on things we used to value quite a bit and then totally gave up – female modesty being one of them. And yes, I know that plenty of other things, much more controversial, come with the package.
Pictures of Egypt’s veiled and covered Doaa Elghobashy, right, competing against bikini-clad Western opponents in the Olympic beach volleyball, are very thought-provoking.
You don’t have to go more than 100 years back to find Western women who would have had much more in common – in attitudes and dress – with Ms Elghobashy than they did with her near-naked rivals.
I often wonder if our society will sicken and tire of its seemingly endless relaxation of rules. Such things have happened before. If it does, the Muslim religion may be very well-positioned to lead the counter-revolution. I don’t want this to happen. I just think it might.
*****
Shouldn’t we have a formal ceremony, with parchment documents, trumpets and heralds, to declare that the ‘war on drugs’ is over? Then at least Sir Richard Branson would stop claiming tediously and inaccurately that we groan under a cruel regime of prohibition.
If the Government still seriously disapproves of illegal drugs, explain this: EU enthusiast and hereditary Labour politician Will Straw (son of Jack) has been awarded a CBE, a heavyweight mid-ranking honour one down from a knighthood, aged 36, despite being caught (aged 17) trying to sell cannabis to a newspaper reporter. Indeed, for many people this event is the most memorable thing about him.
He went on to boast that he had carried on smoking the drug for the next nine years.
There was a bit of a fuss about the award – but it wasn’t about the illegal drugs.
Stop pretending we are actually trying to do anything about this.
*****
Of course judges should not swear in court, especially at defendants. Justice is not emotional revenge, but a cold, rational process where we all try to keep our feelings out of it.
Judges hold the keys to the prisons. They can change a convicted person’s life utterly. To wield such power, they have to be cool and self-controlled.
In fact the person Judge Patricia Lynch swore at is pathetic, fat and lonely – a dismal life probably made worse by taking State-approved ‘antidepressant’ drugs, the failed panacea of our age. Stupid four-letter words are all that is left to such people.
Her Majesty’s judges shouldn’t stoop to such sad things. Only two kinds of people use this language in public. The powerful, who employ it to bully, and the inadequate, who have no other way of expressing themselves.
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I am extremely grateful to Geoffrey Warner, a distinguished contributor to this blog, for a recent comment which i think deserves much wider circulation.
It concerns the claim, often made, that independent school pupils do not do as well as state school pupils at University.
Geoffrey Warner wrote : 'There is more than a little confusion about the assertion that state school pupils perform better at university than those from independent schools. In the summer of 2015 Hefce (Higher Education Funding Council for England) published figures which stated that 82% of state school students obtained first- or upper second-class degrees, compared to 73% from independent schools.
It turned out, however, that Hefce had got the proportions the wrong way round! Even then, it persisted in its error, a spokeswoman saying that it did not affect their main conclusion that “FOR ALL BUT THOSE WITH THE VERY HIGHEST A-LEVEL GRADES [my emphasis], state school graduates tend to have higher degree outcomes than independent school graduates with the same prior educational attainment”.
The waters are further muddied by research published in Vol. 5 of the Oxford Review of Education for 2015, where the authors write “students pursuing a degree in a Russell Group university were less likely to achieve a first-class outcome than those in a non-Russell Group university in each subject area considered…” Independently educated pupils are twice as likely to go to Russell Group universities as those from state schools. Throw in the question of grade inflation and we really don’t know where we are.
This link gives more detail of HEFCE's behaviour
This point is also interesting:
@Johanna (17 July 2016 at 07:59) finds it ‘disgusting’ that Mr Hitchens should suggest that working-class children get a rough deal in our present educational system. What does she think, then, of the head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, who recently complained: “The fate of the most able pupils in non-selective schools is particularly depressing. Some 60,000 youngsters who achieved the top levels at Key Stage 2 did not achieve an A or A* in English and maths 5 years later. Indeed, only a quarter achieved a B grade. According to the Sutton Trust, 7,000 children a year who were in the top 10% nationally at age 11 were not in the top 25% at GCSE 5 years later. THESE YOUNGSTERS ARE DRAWN DISPROPORTIONATELY FROM THE WHITE WORKING CLASS.” This is fault of the schools and possibly the parents, not Mr Hitchens.
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column
I still struggle to persuade many Tory loyalists that their party has now actually become a rather Left-wing version of New Labour. If only they’d listen, it might help them come round to recognising one of the most important facts about modern Britain.
Here’s some evidence. The Cabinet Office Minister, Matthew Hancock, has announced plans to grill job applicants to find out if they have been to independent schools.
He explains this inquisition by saying: ‘Social justice is at the heart of everything this one nation Government is trying to achieve.
'Our goal is simple: to make sure everyone has the opportunity to succeed and make the most of their talents, whatever the circumstances of their birth.’
Social justice? This is, of course, top-grade tripe. What Mr Hancock wants is to destroy quality, in the name of equality.
There is a simple and proven way to make the best use of the nation’s talents: restore the 1,000 fine state grammar schools in England and Wales madly destroyed in an idiotic frenzy between 1965 and 1990, and their equivalents in Scotland.
Then build more of them. And reopen the best independent schools to the children of poor homes by reintroducing the direct grant system, which gave a free, first-class education to thousands of talented children from state primaries, the late Alan Rickman being a good example.
Every time I hear politicians drivelling that the independent schools should do more to help the state sector, I long to shout in their ears: ‘But they did! And it worked! And you abolished it in 1975, and are so pig-ignorant you don’t even know about it!’
Even now those supposed towers of snobbish privilege which are the independent schools do what they can (often through the generosity of parents already paying stiff fees) to take in as many boys and girls from less well-off homes as they possibly can, free of charge.
Meanwhile, huge numbers of children at these alleged Snob Academies come from families where the fees are a giant strain on the family budget, willingly accepted. Many have tried the supposedly improved state education system and found it gravely wanting. They just think education is more important than holidays or new cars or restaurant meals.
They tend not to be rich enough to live in the catchment areas of the exclusive fake comprehensives where wealthy Leftists send their young, pretending to be apostles of equality when to all intents and purposes they have paid for their children to be privileged.
Mr Hancock’s scheme would waft these pampered Leftists into the best jobs, as they are already wafted into the top universities, which are ceaselessly pestered to make them discriminate against independent schools. And it would slam the door of opportunity in the faces of many who would make the most of it. Crazily, it would do this in the name of progress.
How insane this all is. None of these people knows what he is doing. The Left has not only taken over all the parties, but now proceeds to spit on the very people – the poor – it claims to be helping.
I will quote here what that great teacher, headmaster and university Vice Chancellor, Lord James of Rusholme, told the House of Lords in 1976 as he protested against the destruction of all these schools: ‘If I were a High Tory instead of a Fabian Socialist – a Tory of a type that now scarcely exists even in cartoons, one who really believes in privilege and keeping the lower orders down – one of the first things I should do would be to get rid of grammar schools and, above all, I should applaud what we are doing this afternoon, getting rid of the direct grant schools.’
I would like to point this out to Mr Matthew Parris, former Tory MP, BBC favourite and frequent apologist for David Cameron, who wrote last week: ‘The present public mood of sneering at public school toffs is healthy.
'The brand must be trashed. People must be made to feel sheepish about going to Eton or Harrow. It was welcome news yesterday that the Cabinet Office Minister, Matt Hancock, is drawing up a list of questions that employers may ask job applicants about their socio-economic background.’
He added that he meant this to sound aggressive. Well, I mean my response to sound rude. Mr Parris and Mr Hancock have adopted opinions which are stupid, ill-informed and utterly wrong.
Finally...the great housewife myth is turning to dust
The nastiest and most dishonest slogan of the ultra-feminists was that women who stayed at home to raise their children were ‘chained to the kitchen sink’.
This unpleasant expression scared many women away from doing the most important and responsible (and rewarding) task which most of us will ever have – raising the next generation to be worthy inheritors of a great free country, hand-reared individuals rather than battery children, the conformist products of TV and mass culture.
And it gulled them into undergoing a real enslavement: wage-slavery. How many really wanted to do this, and how many were cajoled and propagandised into it?
Well, last week Professor Maggie Andrews, of the University of Worcester, told the Hay Festival that the old assumption was that feminism was about escaping the domestic, getting out of the home, getting a job and being financially independent.
But ‘people are more sceptical about that now - they see a much more complex picture. They see the domestic space as one area of women’s power.
Certain elements of the domestic have become much sexier, much more popular, an escape from the horrors of society’.
Well, that’s one way of putting it. I just think many women have discovered that wage-slavery was a false liberation, and that, if there are any chains in their lives, they are the chains of money that keep them from their children.
********
A sorry war with nothing but baddies
News from the supposed liberal democratic paradise of Ukraine, so much nicer than Mr Putin’s nasty Russia.
According to the United Nations, Ukrainian forces are rounding up and torturing suspected rebel sympathisers.
One victim had his hand smashed with a hammer and was waterboarded while being kicked and punched in the genitals.
The UN had to abandon an anti-torture inspection after being denied access to five secret detention centres. The Russian rebels are just as bad, but you knew that. So sorry, but there are no good guys in this conflict.
*******
If the true culprits of the Birmingham pub bombings were arrested, tried and convicted, how long would it be before they were released in the cause of the ‘peace process’? My guess is two years maximum – less than you can get for some driving offences.
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I think this would be more of a controversy if it weren’t for the political Verdun that is the EU debate. This column by Matthew Parris (here seen in ‘The Australian’) is about Britain
(I suppose it has some relevance in the antipodes, as Australia and New Zealand both have plentiful private schools, modelled on the British original).
Two passages are especially striking
‘Class advantage in Britain is a disgrace, and that isn’t just a social thing, it’s a life-chances thing. Private education is key to its maintenance. Because we’ve become inured to the disgrace does not lessen the unfairness or the waste of talent. We should step back and recognise it.
Look, I know these stats are forever being trotted out, but don’t be numbed, be angry. Taking into account that only 7 per cent — one in 14 — of our population is privately educated, get this: according to the Sutton Trust, almost three-quarters of top military officers, three-quarters of senior judges, half of leading print journalists, three-fifths of the top ranks of the medical profession, four-fifths of leading newspaper editors, two-fifths of BAFTA winners, a fifth of British music awards winners, nearly a third of MPs and half the cabinet were educated at independent schools. Even Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour shadow cabinet has twice as big a proportion as the population as a whole.
‘National ability and potential cannot possibly be so concentrated in the ranks of the privately educated.’
And then:
So what to do?’ Here’s the good news. State schools have improved a lot under both parties, and are still improving. From Kenneth Baker in the 1990s to Andrew Adonis to Michael Gove, politicians have led a real rise in standards. Across much of Britain the academic (as opposed to the social) case for choosing an independent school has never been weaker. The state now puts up stiff competition.’
The first ( apart from the claim that private education, rather than disastrous comprehensive state schooling, is the key to maintaining the class gap) is a simple statement of fact. The second is top-quality, fresh-from-the-cow, four-letter tripe. The alleged improvement in the state schools is, if it exists at all, from such a low level that in most cases they do not begin to approach the standards of the private schools or of the remaining academically selective grammar schools. Where they do,it is because they are selective in other ways, through tiny catchment areas mostly restricted to the wealthy, or by religious selection which cannot prevent people from faking their faith. Often there is a combination of the two.
The suggestion, of flooding the private schools with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of assisted places is thoughtless idiocy. They aren’t big enough, and wouldn’t be so good if they were. These schools currently educate 517,000 pupils in 1,200 schools (an average of about 430 per school) . They could not physically survive an influx of pupils on such scale.
The conclusion, that it’s OK to sneer at public school products, is cheap and rather nasty playing to the gallery. Plenty of public school boys and girls may well be recipients of unappreciated privilege, though this is less so than ever at the good ones, which have long selected by examination, though obviously mostly from among those who can pay. Thousands of others benefit from bursaries which in some cases pay all their fees, financed by contributions from richer parents. But this is obviously limited. What else are they supposed to do?
Until 1975, when (without noticeable Tory opposition) Labour’s Fred Mulley abolished the Direct Grant, scores of first-rate private day schools took in huge numbers of state-school pupils thanks to a wise government subsidy. It was done entirely on merit. They had generally passed the eleven- plus at a high level. Their pupils stormed Oxford and Cambridge, elbowing aside the public school hoorays. But the4 scheme relied on the continued existence of state grammar schools and of academic selection as a whole. And by 1975, Tony Crosland and Margaret Thatcher together, ably succeeded by Mr Mulley and soon afterwards to be succeeded by Shirley Williams, were well on the way to destroying the grammar schools.
It is that destruction which has led to the class advantages which Mr Parris mentions, which also apply (though he does not mention it ) to the elite state comprehensives which select by wealth, and which a New Labour Tory, Matthew Hancock, now proposes to challenge by encouraging employers to probe the class backgrounds of job applicants.
This measure, trumpeted on the BBC but little-noticed by print media, will no doubt please Alan Milburn, the former(?) revolutionary who now runs an egalitarian quango for the government (and won’t say where his own children went to school, as I know because I have asked him) . Lord (William) Waldegrave and Charles Moore http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/29/young-matt-hancock-the-privately-educated-minister-fighting-a-ch/ do not like it.
Mr Parris, perhaps, does.
Well, I think it odd that Classism of this kind should be encouraged when all other imaginable forms of discrimination are so frowned on. I am reminded of the behaviour of the new ‘People’s Democracies’ such as Communist Czechoslovakia, which actively discriminated against the middle class in their early years, for reasons I think it is pretty easy to work out.
Once, I suppose, it would have been worth pointing out that this is the policy of a nominally Conservative government. But do I have any readers left who do not understand that the Tory party is now New Labour in arms, wholly dedicated to the Blairite Eurocommunist agenda – equality of outcome for everyone except the political and business elite?
Of course a serious conservative, and a responsible democratic socialist alike, would agree that the best way to tackle this problem would be the immediate re-establishment of academic selection, grammar schools and the Direct Grant. But such people are rare in politics.
Matthew Parris should know a lot better. Does he really think that ‘The present public mood of sneering at public-school toffs is healthy. The brand must be trashed.’? Is he genuinely unaware of a far better ,more effective alternative – the restoration of academic selection in state schools, and of the Direct Grant? Perhaps he is. I hope he now considers it. His voice, on the side of this much-needed reform, would be very valuable.
In the endless debate about how comprehensive education has failed (which it certainly has in Britain) I am often told about the supposed success of that sort of schooling in the rich (high GDP per capita) and tiny city state which is Finland.
Well, one point is precisely that. Finland is not blighted by the industrial and agrarian revolution which gave Britain so many harshly-divided big cities, nor by recent mass immigration on an unprecedented scale, Finland does not (I believe) have a snobbish class system comparable to ours. It would never have wasted so many of its bright children in the first place. A fully comprehensive school system (if such a thing can exist) would not be half as damaging there as it is here.
But leaving all that aside, the Economist (which I often deride for its bumptious liberal certainties on foreign and domestic policy) has done one of the things that it *is* good at, namely dispassionate coverage of a country which is barely reported in the British press.
A brief registration process will allow you to read the article to which I refer
Which shows that the great Finnish comprehensive triumph is not quite so triumphant after all. The PISA study( dubious but all we have) suggests declining results and a widening gap between rich and poor .
And, wouldn’t you know ‘well-off parents are renting flats near good schools and entering pupils for competitive music classes to game the system.’
You mean that, despite being so brilliantly comprehensive, Finland has ‘good schools’ and not-so-good ones? Well, I never. I wonder if they could possibly be found in areas where better-off people live?
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
As an extremist, I am very worried about the planned Extremism Bill, which our Prime Minister is about to ram through Parliament.
So should you be. You are probably extremists, too, or will soon become extremists.
You may well remember when many opinions now viewed as despicable and more or less criminal were freely expressed – often by the same people and media who now condemn them.
I certainly do. Much of the conservative patriotic Christianity which my parents’ generation saw as normal has now been driven underground, and those who express it – especially in the public sector – face discipline or the sack, and are sometimes prosecuted.
Many of the current establishment’s attacks on Labour aren’t disagreements among free people in a free society. They are demands for abject recantations expressed by people who clearly think such views should not be allowed.
And the expression ‘extremism’ doesn’t mean anything objective or measurable. It just means a view that is out of favour with the current government and establishment.
What’s more, new and startling evidence from France (barely noticed here) suggests strongly that all these ‘anti-extremist’ strategies are wholly useless anyway for their main stated purpose.
It’s not the robed and bearded Islamist zealots we need to fear at all. An undercover French journalist, who infiltrated a jihadi cell in Paris, described those he found there as ‘fast-food Islamists’ who knew nothing of their supposed religion.
‘I never saw any Islam in this affair,’ the reporter told Canal+ TV. The cell members had ‘no will to improve the world’ but were ‘lost, frustrated, suicidal, easily manipulated youths’.
This is what I have been pointing out for many months. Track the backgrounds of the perpetrators of these crimes, here and abroad, and you do not find fanatical Wahhabi hard men, trained in the arts of death.
You find, almost invariably, low-life drifters in a haze of dope, on the borders of mental illness (and sometimes beyond it), capable of murder because they have fried their brains for so long that they no longer know right from wrong, or fantasy from reality. Some of these commit crimes which they then justify with a political purpose; many just commit crimes.
This is where we should be looking – and what we should be discouraging by enforcing our criminal laws properly.
Yet, instead, we waste our time and destroy our freedom by futile attempts to control what people think.
Poor Maxine’s not shocking anyone
Someone should tell the BBC that nobody is actually shocked any more by lesbian kisses. They’re so common now, verging on the compulsory, that I’m surprised
when they don’t feature in the weather forecast. I absolutely decline to be shocked.
So poor old Maxine Peake, who has to perform one of these osculations as Titania, left, in a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is wasting her time.
The desire to shock us has taken over drama. So, apart from the same-sex snogging, Richard III (or Julius Caesar, or Henry V, or Coriolanus) dresses in Nazi uniform, Hamlet’s a girl (Maxine Peake again), War And Peace has incest in it, Sherlock Holmes is a bad copy of Doctor Who, and it can’t be long before someone stages a version of Peter Pan played entirely by pensioners, or A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge is the hero and Christmas never happens.
Is it possible that the people who do these things haven’t understood that the books and plays they spoil were perfectly good and interesting before they meddled with them? It is. They’re taking a free ride on top of someone else’s talent and genius.
The really shocking thing these days is a production of anything which sticks to the text.
Butchering our lovely language
I had a proper old-fashioned education, and I have forgotten almost all of it, apart from the times tables and poems learned by heart, which I still use every day, the passable French vocabulary, which sometimes comes in handy, and a bit of geography.
My mother taught me to read, using what I now know was synthetic phonics. The Latin has almost all gone. The history was a good starting point, but I loved it anyway and have carried on learning it ever since. I must be one of the last people alive who had to sit for hours doing parsing and analysis of English sentences. It has never been any use to me at all, and I make my living by writing.
But until last week, I had no idea what a digraph is. Having found out, I have now deliberately forgotten. English is not Latin, and its beautiful, flexible, living architecture is best learned by being read to, and then by reading.
Yet many children never learn to read properly and are never read to. This is what the schools should be doing, not pestering the poor things with wearisome fronted adverbials and dreary trigraphs. You might as well try to explain the beauty of a goldfinch by killing it, pickling it and cutting it up on a slab – when all you need to do is to see the lovely bird in flight, full of grace and truth.
As I write this, news has just been brought to me that the Conservatives have retained control of Basingstoke, which fails to thrill. But the word ‘control’ is important. A small number of votes can decide whether someone keeps or loses enormous amounts of power over money, lawmaking, people, war and peace.
So our voting system should surely be absolutely fair and beyond reproach. I think it used to be. But apart from recent sordid scandals over postal voting, which never got the attention they should have done, we now have major new worries.
One is the very serious accusation that the Tory Party broke legal spending limits by bussing supporters into target seats. If big money is to be allowed to decide elections, then we are absolutely lost. And the other is the Third World chaos on Thursday at polling stations in one part of Greater London, with properly registered voters turned away by officials. I foresee worse problems in the EU referendum, especially as so many people have yet to realise they are not on the new voting roll, thanks to a major change in the registration rules, which has been poorly advertised. If this happens, and there is a close result, will the losers respect it? And then what?
A broken voting system can poison the whole country. Severe reforms are needed, and fast.
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This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
I’m sorry to break this to you but it looks as if we’ll have to endure not one but two EU referendum campaigns.
The second one, by the way, will definitely end in a vote to stay in.
The ‘exit’ campaign was last week cunningly taken over by Tories who don’t want to leave the Superstate and will use a vote to leave (if it happens) as the basis for yet another round of negotiations with Brussels.
Boris Johnson and Michael Howard are ancient liberal Europhiles, who have learned how to seduce the Tory Party with speeches that sound Right-wing but aren’t really. It is painful to see this cynical seduction technique at work, and watch the old ladies fall for it.
Neither is what he seems. Lord Howard led a Left-liberal putsch against the genuine EU opponent Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. Mr Johnson is an act, not a politician. He is a keen Europhile, and to conceal it from his fans he will do so many U-turns between now and referendum day that they will look like a series of S-bends.
Both men’s weird declarations of support for Brexit were cunningly hedged.
And the London Mayor was careful to state: ‘I will be advocating vote “leave”... because I want a better deal for the people of this country to save them money and to take back control.’
Read this carefully (as you always should) and you will realise there’s no clear declaration that he wants our national independence back. But there is a desire for a ‘deal’. Likewise his supposed reversal last Saturday wasn’t really as clear as it looked. Be assured. If there is a majority to leave there will be a second poll and a search for a new deal.
What sort of deal? Lord Howard was more specific. In an article which was lazily reported as a ‘blow for David Cameron’, he explicitly said that he saw a vote to leave as a way of restarting negotiations on how to stay in: ‘There is only one thing that just might shake Europe’s leaders out of their complacency: the shock of a vote by the British people to leave.’
He added: ‘We would be sorely missed. If the UK voted to leave, there would be a significant chance that they would ask us to think again. When Ireland and Denmark voted to reject EU proposals, the EU offered them more concessions and, second time round, got the result they wanted.’
Lord Howard went on to explain how happy he would be for Britain to be a semi-detached part of a two-tier EU – something very much on the cards as the EU moves into its next phase of integration, two or three years hence. ‘We – and others – could say to the integrationists, “We don’t want to stop you doing what you want to do as long as you don’t make us do what we don’t want to do.” ’
You read it first here. The EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out. But you can never leave.
This referendum, which was never supposed to happen at all, is a sham for which I refuse to fall.
What sort of hero condemns women to death?
The BBC’s new thriller The Night Manager must be one of the strangest things ever broadcast. Its apparent hero, played by Tom Hiddleston, is portrayed as a tower of moral purity. Yet the first thing he does is to betray a living, breathing woman (who trusted him with her life because of his honest British appearance) in pursuit of an abstract ideal. Apparently, he hates arms traders so much, this is the sort of thing he does.
Predictably, the woman, played by Aure Atika, is barbarously murdered (in the book, I’m sorry to say, her dog is murdered too, a detail the BBC spared us). The arms dealer, equally predictably, gets away with it.
This skewed moral system in which people claim to be virtuous by having severe, righteous views about foreign countries, seems horribly common among our cultural elite. Is this why our foreign policy keeps getting its head stuck up its own fundament?
Again and again, in pursuit of some supposedly noble goal, we plunge entire countries into lakes of fire and blood, and then stand about looking puzzled and claiming it wasn’t our fault.
Inscribed in stone, above the doors of all government buildings, should be William Blake’s bitterly true maxim: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.’
Country dwellers are often mystified by the appearance of strange little dumps of used fertiliser pellets, which appear now all over the place by night. I can explain. These are left by the owners of urban cannabis farms (Britain’s most successful and profitable agricultural sector) who dare not use their own bins for fear that even the British police – among the most relaxed in the world on the dope question – might notice and take action against them.
Education that doesn't add up
The reports flood in, as they do almost weekly. The standards of mathematics teaching have plunged disastrously. The professions are dominated by private school products, two years ahead of their state school contemporaries.
Yet nobody ever reaches the obvious conclusion – that we should return to selection by ability in the state system and reopen the great private schools to the taxpayer-funded Direct Grant system which lifted so many poor children to success.
Why are our elite so prejudiced against this obvious remedy? Even on their own terms, their position makes no sense.
Every week I hear more alarming things about our prisons, especially the almost universal availability of mindbending drugs, whose users often become violent. These are now flown into cells, through broken windows, by drones. The authorities seem powerless to stop this.
No surprise there. As we make no effort to stop drugtaking outside prison, it is hardly surprising prisons themselves are even more lawless. Alongside these cases are alarming numbers of mentally ill people, cast out into the non-existent ‘community’ by the wicked decision to close most mental hospitals.
Older, experienced staff are quietly disappearing and turnover among new staff is unsurprisingly high. Huge jails are often left overnight in the charge of tiny numbers of officers.
I predict a major catastrophe soon. And it will be the direct result of decades of liberal penal policy, which uses prison only as a last resort and so ensures that a large number of inmates are hardened criminals, incapable of reform, before they ever get there.
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