A Small Corner of our giant national Kangaroo Court examined

As the ‘Independent (of whom?) Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’ sinks up to its axles,  I wish to return to one fascinating corner of the gigantic Kangaroo Court which this country has now become.

I have been deeply engaged in a small but important part of the battle between truth and innuendo, and between the presumption of guilt (now made by almost everyone) in abuse cases versus the presumption of innocence (which is the glory of our law and a foundation of our freedom).

This is the accusation, now more than a year old, against the late George Bell, long ago Bishop of Chichester. I admire Bishop Bell’s selfless actions against various sorts of oppression,  stupidity and mistaken acts of war, which made him unpopular in his lifetime (as any serious Christian must expect to be). These actions probably cost him the Archbishopric of Canterbury, a post he would have adorned. I think his example of genuine Christian courage is a rare and valuable thing, and that it should not lightly be thrown away.

This charge is too important to be left untested

I therefore require that,  if he is to be charged with the terrible crime of child abuse, that charge is properly examined proven beyond reasonable doubt before we accept its truth. For if it is true, the rest of his reputation crumbles to ashes and filth. For as the Bible tells us ‘Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ 

I do not say that he is not guilty. I do not say that he should be considered simultaneously an exemplar of Christian courage and a paedophile|(for me an impossible combination). I say that a charge as serious as this must be properly examined before it is accepted. And it hasn’t been. 

Like the late Lord Brittan and the late Sir Edward Heath, Bishop Bell is not here to defend himself against the charges levelled against him.

But unlike them, he faces accusations made 60 years after the alleged events (supposedly around 1948-52), and more than half a century after his death (1958). A full summary of the controversy can be found here:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/03/murder-in-the-cathedral-the-casual-wrecking-of-a-great-name.html

The George Bell Group’s forensic analysis of the case can be found here. The group includes, among others, a former senior judge with experience of abuse cases, and a retired senior police officer.

http://www.georgebellgroup.org/review/

This is the defence which might have been mounted had the accusations ever come to trial. But despite idle claims by the Church of England that there had been a civil process, no such hearing took place. Even that (though sort of the full protection of a criminal trial)  would have required an impartial judge sitting in open court, and lawyers representing the accused who could have cross-examined his accusers.

A Secret Hearing with No Defence

All that happened was a secret hearing at which no advocate defended his name. The anonymous committee concluded that there was ‘no reason to disbelieve’ the charges – but there is always a reason to disbelieve any charge. It is called ‘The Presumption of Innocence’. How can they not have known? How indeed? These people have inherited a great treasure, which sits on a  table before them, yet they do not known they own it, let alone how to use it.

The Church’s approach has been (let us be polite here) very confused. Here is its initial statement  https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/10/statement-on-the-rt-revd-george-bell-(1883-1958).aspx

A Slippery Document

 

This slippery document gave the strong impression that George Bell was guilty as charged, without at any stage unequivocally saying so. A mystery remains as to why, even so, three national newspapers, the BBC and two local newspapers all somehow formed the impression that it was a clear statement of guilt and published stories declaring the Bishop guilty from which only the BBC has since (to its credit) climbed down.

Coincidence theory (that there are lots of coincidences and that this is *much* more likely than that anyone has privately acted to achieve the apparently co-ordinated result we see, which would of course be a ‘conspiracy theory’ and therefore mad) is, as so often,  helpful here.

Arresting Dead People is a Waste of Time

The statement took pains to mention that the Sussex Police said they ‘would have arrested’ Bishop Bell, had he been alive. This statement, we now know,  was made at the request of the Church. The police in fact have almost no involvement in charges against dead people, because they cannot be tried and there is therefore no point in arresting or charging them, or in gathering evidence against them.  Their only involvement in such cases is to see if anyone still alive might eb affected. Given that the charges relate to alleged events almost 70 years ago, this is unlikely. And an arrest is not in any way evidence let alone proof of guilt. Alas, as hardly anyone in the upper reached of English society understands English law any more, this simple fact has been little noted.

 

A Prelate in two minds?

 

The Bishop of Durham then said that the Church had not actually said it thought Bishop Bell was guilty.

Then he, or someone acting on his behalf, announced that actually it had. See here:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/in-tywo-minds-the-strange-position-of-the-bishop-of-durham.html

Eventually, at the end of June, the distinguished historian Lord (Alistair) Lexden and others obtained a debate in the House of Lords about historic abuse, in which the George Bell case was a major topic.  You may read it here

https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2016-06-30/debates/16063032000573/HistoricalChildSexAbuse

Another of those Coincidences

By another of those coincidences, two days before this debate, the Church announced an ‘Independent review’ into the Bell matter. See here

https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2016/06/independent-review-into-handling-of-george-bell-case.aspx

As of today (Wednesday 16^th November 2016, almost five months after this announcement) *no further action has been taken on this review* . Can it really be so hard to find anyone independent enough to do it?  Have they tried New Zealand?

During the debate, the Bishop of Chelmsford, the Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell (probably new to the case) promised : ‘I need the House to be clear that we are not marking our own homework. The reviewer who will undertake this review is independent.’ 

 

A sharp intake of breath 

He also said (and if his hearing is good he will have heard my involuntary sharp intake of breath from the gallery where I was sitting when he said it ) that George Bell’s accuser had spoken to the press ‘because some in the George Bell Group ​had made hurtful comments about her.’

Now, I am familiar with all the members of the George Bell Group, to which I don’t formally belong but of which I am an open sympathiser. We have been united in the view that we feel every sympathy with the alleged victim. We have not criticised her. We have not criticised the award of compensation to her, or the sympathetic treatment of her by the Church. These are all perfectly reasonable actions in the circumstances . The allegation was made long after the alleged events (which she says took place when she was a child) but it is still a very serious one. 

They have to accept he might be innocent. We have to accept he might be guilty

Just as the Church has to accept that her accusation remains an allegation until proven beyond reasonable doubt, Bishop Bell’s defenders have to accept that it might one day be so proved.

 

How English Law works - a brief guide

This is how English law works. The court automatically tries the facts as they can be ascertained and proved. If you or I accuse someone of robbing or harming us, however plain it seems to you or me that the accused is guilty, the police and the courts will (quite rightly) insist on treating him or her as innocent until proven guilty, or until he or she admits the charge. It is not an insult to you or me to do so. It is simply justice. Nor is it hurtful for the accused person’s lawyer to cross examine you or me on our evidence. That too is justice. We would expect the same if we were the accused.

I wrote personally to the Bishop after he said this, asking him what ‘hurtful remarks’ he was referring to. The Church’s bureaucracy intervened at this point, but of course, as there had been no such remarks, they eventually had to admit that the words spoken in the Lords had been wrong. There was then a blood-out-of-a-stone series of exchanges which led us eventually to this on 4^th August : ‘…he [The Bishop] acknowledges that what he actually said was mistaken, hence the clarification explaining what he meant to have said but he stands by everything else in the speech. He is happy to be quoted on all of that.  When the new parliamentary term begins he promises to look into how a proper clarification can be produced.’

 

Blood out of a stone

This followed these words issued to me on 28^th July :’ I can clarify that when Bishop Stephen said in the House of Lords that ‘some in the Bell Group had made hurtful comments’  about ‘Carol’,  it would have been more precise to say that these were comments that she found hurtful. I know Bishop Stephen is happy to be quoted as such, and also happy to acknowledge that he did not intend to suggest that legitimate questions about this case could not be posed by all sides. I hope that was apparent by the tone and content of the rest of his speech where he endeavoured to take seriously and listen carefully to the concerns being raised. Of course in this process people get hurt, even if no hurt was ever intended.’

Well, of course what someone ‘finds hurtful’ is up to them. But it is very different to find something hurtful, as a result of a process of justice which requires the testing and proof of all allegations, and to be the object of deliberately hurtful remarks intended to be so.

 I am still  not sure what these ‘comments’ were, though I must assume they were the efforts of those in the George Bell Group to assert the ancient rules of justice and point out that a charge which was not proven must be treated as an allegation.

The new Parliamentary term in the Lords began a month ago (on 10^th October), but the Bishop has been on a rather long period of sabbatical leave, which apparently prevents him from addressing the matter. This ended last week, but despite several requests I have yet to hear anything, nor has he yet put the record straight in the Lords itself.  

My reason for pursuing this is that the Bishop’s allegation is, as it were  a protruding and vulnerable part of the whole absurd mistake they made from the start, in presuming George Bell’s guilt.

 

Today's Forecast: Spin and bluster

The rest of their error was made in private, or concealed behind vague and ambiguous spin and bluster of the sort described and quoted above.

But here is an actual public and demonstrable untruth, in urgent need of correction, resulting directly from, and clearly demonstrating the Church’s pitiful misunderstanding of the law.  It is the tiny tip of an enormous iceberg of error and misunderstanding. But it is that which projects above the dark waters where we can see it.

That, I suspect,  is why the Bishop finds it so difficult to own up and say, in the House of Lords or anywhere else, that the accusation of ‘hurtful remarks’ is not true, why my letters to him were answered by bureaucrats and why he has taken so long.  I suspect his fellow Bishops, especially those more involved in this case, are worried at the prospect.   To do so would be to accept, for the very first time, that they had wandered into error by presuming and assuming things that suited them.

Yet he must admit it, sooner or later. For that is what they did.

A Haunting Evening at Eton

Last week, thanks to several small acts of consideration and kindness,  I found myself at Windsor in the Provost’s Lodge at Eton College (not my natural habitat, though I long ago met the  current Provost, William Waldegrave, when he was a politician and I was a reporter covering political and foreign affairs). I was there to listen to some of the best ghost stories ever written. They were read, or rather spoken, as he knows them by heart,  by Robert Lloyd-Parry.

Mr Lloyd-Parry resembles the author. M.R. James (who was once provost of Eton himself, having also been Provost of the sister establishment, King’s College Cambridge) . You could easily see this on the Eton occasion as a large portrait of M.R. James hangs in the room next to where the readings took place.

His website is here

http://www.nunkie.co.uk/the-mr-james-project

the stories he read were ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ and ‘The Mezzotint’ , stories whose titles give little clue of the half-buried violence and fear they disinter and describe.

He likes to set his readings in places associated with Monty (as he was known) James. James used to tell his stories to friends, usually towards Christmas and generally in the winter (though sometimes round campfires too) His only props are candles, most of which he extinguishes as he progresses through the story, a small quantity of what looked like whisky, and an unlit pipe. He contrives a more or less Edwardian appearance, but nothing overdone. I was reminded of an expression of C.P. Snow in (I think) ‘The New Men’, in which a particular character, a rather frightening one in some ways, has a ‘creaky, vicarage voice’. Alas, I must be one of the last people living who can remember when such voices were common in the Church of England. But you might still know what I mean.

I know most of the stories more or less by heart myself, so can no longer be shocked or particularly disturbed by them. This wasn’t always true. ‘Count Magnus’, to my mind the most hopelessly terrifying of all, kept me awake for two nights in a row. Yet I know others who are wholly unmoved by it and cannot see the point. Ghost stories, to be successful, require reads who actively desire to be frightened. These days I read them for the comfortable pleasure they provide, and the easy exercise for the imagination. Though occasionally still stumble across some unnoticed detail, always one of the pleasures of re-reading.

James is to ghost stories what Conan Doyle is to detective stories. He has one or two rivals – ‘The Lost Stradivarius’ , a short novel by  J Meade Falkner – is comparable in power and the evocation of genuine fear, but nobody else has managed to hit the mark so many times  in such a small collection of work. The other James, Henry,  has a go at it with ‘The Turn of the Screw’ and it is made more disturbing because he says he heard the origins of the story from the Archbishop of Canterbury (a real one, E.W.Benson). But there is always a bit of a suggestion that poor governess is unhinged and is seeing things that are not there, am ambiguity M.R. James never  resorts to. The film of ‘the Turn of the Screw’ (‘The Innocents’)  is terrifying precisely because at one point the governess – and we, the audience – clearly see the sinister and dead Miss Jessel, her clothes blacker than night, her woebegone face whiter than a fish belly, wearing the expression of one on a short visit from Hell itself. She doesn’t do anything. She just stands there radiating unconquerable misery and menace. But it is quite enough. The book, as I recall, is nothing like as clear.

What is it about James’s stories? The settings are those sort I like, ancient cathedral towns populated by grumpy but very well-read clergymen; college libraries whose locked back rooms contain material no man ought to see; creaky old deserted seaside resorts in winter; country bicycle rides transformed into voyages into the past (and then desperate scrambles for safety) by a haunted pair of binoculars which allow the user to see through dead men’s eyes;  locked hotel rooms which are not as empty as they look, even in broad daylight when there is surely nothing to be afraid of; other hotel rooms which shrink in the night, to make room for who knows what next door; yet more hotel rooms where the empty second bed is not in fact empty at all; curtains which have the power to terrify;  hideous old carvings which come to life; an old 17^th century shorthand notebook recording (once deciphered) a murder trial at which the victim does not seem to be wholly dead; a locked tomb which begins to open and cannot be closed.

All these are encountered by comfortable, intelligent men, who know a thing or two – often by rather confident materialists and scoffers. Their only fault is just a bit too much curiosity. Sometimes, they can placate whatever it is they have unwisely conjured out of wherever it was. Sometimes they cannot, and there is no escape from them. It si never a dream. There is never a nice rational explanation.

James, a considerable scholar whose writing on the Apocryphal New Testament is still, I think, the standard work on the subject, knew his myths, his legends, and was familiar with cornery, dark old buildings, bleak seashores, musty libraries, vast, decaying churches and ruins all over Europe. I share some of his tastes, I think, and possibly also his delight at being slightly frightened, if only to rejoice afterwards at the feeling of recovered safety when the last page of the story comes and the horrors slip back obediently into the book, ready to be called upon again a few years hence. 

Combine this immense erudition with an imagination of great power and a clever, spare writing style which always begins in safe and comfortable circumstances, and you have the essence of his genius.

All kinds of stuff has been written , often of a Freudian sort, about how the stories are all evidence of repression, etc. Has anything decent ever been written by anyone who was not ‘repressed’, that is to say, given to keeping his or her inner feelings concealed and controlled, observing quietly. Indeed, would there be much in the way of civilisation if we were not ‘repressed’ enough to learn our trades and be patient when we wielded them?

I would like to read an account of these stories that wasn’t Freudian. Monty James, no doubt, had all the faults of an Edwardian bachelor brought up in rectories and boarding schools. But this is not the most interesting thing about him. The most interesting thing about him is his spare but evocative descriptive writing (this is why so many TV versions of his stories have been made, but alas they cannot actually replicate the colour, depth and detail of his prose); and then his enormous and very well-educated imagination. Where do these ideas come from? How much does he just throw away? Why, for instance, does the skeleton crawling across the lawn in ‘The Mezzotint’ wear a garment with a large white cross on its back? Was there a special anti-Cromwellian edition of the Book of Common Prayer? What was ‘The Black Pilgrimage’?  Is there really a legend concerning the Three Crowns of England? Is the song ‘Madam will you walk, will you talk with me’ still met with dislike in some parts of Devon? Was it ever? And so on. There is a whole world here, half-revealed an d utterly new to most of us.

. 

PETER HITCHENS: Think Trump is bad? Wait until you see what comes next...

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

I wish I thought our fashionably liberal ruling classes, throughout what remains of the free world, would learn from the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. But they won’t. They are incapable of learning anything, ever.

After years of taunting, spiting, ignoring and scorning the rest of us and our opinions, they have now created a monster. President Trump is entirely their fault. But they blame others.

I have politely warned the liberal elite for years that they were taking this risk. I have many times said and written to such people: ‘Please listen to me now. Or you will end up having to listen to someone much, much nastier in future.’

They paid no attention to my careful dissection of their wrong policies. With very few exceptions, they treated me as either mad or wicked, much as they treat your opinions and concerns.

On they ploughed with their mass immigration, their diversity and equality, their contempt for lifelong, stable marriage, their refusal to punish crime, their mad, idealistic foreign wars, their indulgence of drugs, their scorn for patriotism, their schools and universities, turning out graduates with certificates they can barely read.

And on they went with their destruction of real jobs, promising a new globalised prosperity that never came. Millions have just had too much of this.

Even now the liberals squawk and gibber in a state of disbelief. They hold daft placards saying ‘Love Trumps Hate’, as if they have not for years hated the secret, inarticulate people, living in parts of the country they never visit and barely know exist, who have finally let rip with a yell of resentment and rage.

This yahoo, this bully, this groper, a man who threatened his opponent with jail, he surely cannot be preparing to live in the White House? Yes, he is. Those pictures of Barack Obama treating him with polite respect, they cannot be true? Yes, they are.

These ridiculous people, who have never wondered how others have viewed their own side’s billionaire-financed election victories in the past, are actually holding demonstrations against the result. I loathe Mr Trump for his coarseness, his crudity, and his scorn for morals, tradition and law. I am as sorry that he has won as they are, and fear that Britain will have its own Trump before long. But I can at least say that I tried to prevent it. They brought it about. We must all now wonder if he is what he claims to be, or just another politician prepared to say anything to win office, just a bit more shameless than the rest.

Neither of these possibilities is good. If he is what he says he is, and keeps his promises, then he is bound to do grave damage to the peace and stability of the USA.

The simplest test of that will be whether he tries to put Hillary Clinton in prison, the promise he made that most pleased his supporters. If he does not, then he is like a medieval wizard who has conjured up the Devil and now does not know how to send him back where he came from.

Mr Trump has so stirred the mob that they cannot be relied on to go home if he fails them.

They want the change and the revenge they were promised.

If they see that they will not get them, they will instead rally behind figures who will make Donald Trump look like John Major.

And this campaign has done so much damage to the USA, to its tolerance, to respect for the rule of law, to civility, that there is no telling where this may stop.

*******

Surely the most moving words written or spoken by anyone in the past year were Leonard Cohen’s message to his one-time lover Marianne Ihlen, when he learned that she was dying: ‘Know that I am so close behind you that, if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.’ And so he was, as we learned on Friday.

Set that beside the florid, bombastic attempts of politicians and preachers to move us, which fail. Note that almost every simple word has only one syllable.

What makes it so powerful is that he meant it.

 

*********

Yes, it's bitter - but Amy's new thriller is utterly brilliant

As long as you keep your eyes closed through the opening credits (which feature several rather large naked women doing performance art), by far the best film of the year is Nocturnal Animals, starring Amy Adams, left, and crammed with real suspense. 

As a bonus, the film is also a strong, if bitter, argument in favour of constancy and fidelity, things Hollywood hasn’t always been keen on lately.

Brace yourself for a cold, dark winter

This could be the winter when our crazed policy of closing coal-fired power stations and building windmills finally produces the power cuts that we richly deserve. In a way, I hope it is. It might make us wake up before things get much worse.

Green dogma is quite a bit dafter than the beliefs of the Mormons that fashionable people like to mock. That is why I call these fanatics ‘Warmons’. 

But it has taken over the minds of our politicians and civil servants to such an extent that – on this issue – our official policy is as crazy as anything in North Korea. 

Let me sum it up. On the basis of an unproven theory about global warming, we are shutting down perfectly sound, high-capacity, coal-fired power stations and instead peppering the country with windmills that tend not to work when it is cold. 

This is unhinged anyway. But since China builds a new coal-fired power station every few weeks, and we share the same atmosphere as China, this action does no good, even if you believe the theory. 

In any case, our ability to cope with big surges of demand in a cold winter gets less all the time. Our nuclear generators are near the end of their lives. 

France’s nuclear stations, which often fill the gap by sending French power under the Channel, are having problems of their own just now.

It could be that the only way to meet demand will be by activating reserve banks of diesel generators now on standby, perhaps the most polluting form of power there is.

The closure of coal-fired stations should stop now, and we should also immediately build new gas-fired plants in defiance of the Warmon fanatics. Our exit from the EU actually makes this much easier.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Walk me to the corner. Our steps will always rhyme. On Leonard Cohen

A year or so ago I felt a strong urge to listen again to the original ‘Songs of Leonard Cohen’, an LP, as we then called them,  that I ‘borrowed’ from my brother around the autumn of 1968, when he was studying at Oxford and I was living in the city. I never returned it, and suspect I lost it during one of my many moves in later life. I hadn’t heard it for decades. It was on an autumn evening in Magdalen Bridge that I felt this desire.

For some reason I associate the record, and that whole era, with Magdalen Bridge in Oxford, where the picturesque university part of the city ends at what was then a kind of frontier. East of the bridge was ( and still is) a sort of square called ‘The Plain’ from which roads led off towards the Cowley car factories (almost all gone), towards London and towards the University sports ground where Roger Bannister ran his four-minute mile. It was also the starting point of ‘East Oxford’, at that time a cheap and shabby quarter of rented houses (cheap no longer) and unlovely pubs – one, officially named The Crown but actually called ‘The Rat Hole’ and with a painted sign to match, served the College of Further Education where I and a wide selection of other school drop-outs sought ‘A’ levels, alongside hundreds of more serious students studying engineering and hairdressing.   

A lot of left-wing undergraduates lived just on the wrong side of the bridge, especially in a series of Victorian and Edwardian terraced streets (now hugely expensive, not then) leading down to the river Cherwell and a meadow which later became notorious as one of the scenes of the great Oxford sex abuse scandal. So the bridge, where five roads meet, was a common place for unexpected meetings.

It was at this College of Further Education, nothing to do with the university,  that the great hairdressing protest was incubated, leading to the lengthy and rather melodramatic picketing of a salon I shall call Suzette’s (in case anyone is still sensitive about this unproven charge) for alleged racial discrimination.  This attracted the stars of the University Left to parts of the Cowley Road they would never otherwise have reached, and was perhaps the first whisper of proper student protest in the city. I looked up the cuttings last year, the local paper and the university paper too. It all seemed as distant as the 1930s. We still said ‘racialism’, not ‘racism’.

There is still a city with the same name, and there are streets with the same names too, in the same locations, but what happens there now is so transformed, in thought, word and deed, that it is not the same place. Is it better, or worse? I cannot really tell. It is certainly different. If I could go back there for a day, as I am now, I think I should hurry away as quickly as possible and be glad the day was over. If I could go back there as I was then, I wouldn’t like it much more. We were between eras, drifting and vulnerable to novelty. We had stopped believing in what we once believed in, and had found nothing new to like instead.

Nowadays, when I cross Magdalen Bridge, as I do several times a week, I find it haunted . I expect at any time to see the faces of the many people I then knew in Oxford, which is of course absurd because many of them are now dead and others scattered who knows where. When I have, in recent years, met people remembered from that time, there has always been an awkwardness, at least. ‘There would be doubt, hesitation and pain’. We are not now what we were then. The bridge, too, has changed. In 1968, its old stone balustrades were crumbling rather picturesquely, it was much less burdened with motor traffic,  and it was still adorned with lovely old street lamps, glass globes on tall iron standards, now replaced by much more ordinary lights. It was as I thought of this that the recollection came to me of first hearing Leonard Cohen in (I think) a student house somewhere off the Cowley Road.

I was quickly embarrassed by how much I liked it, for in those days I cared a lot more about what people thought about my tastes than I do now.  It was not, I think , especially fashionable. People liked to jeer at it (‘music to slit your wrists to’ etc) perhaps because they too were unwilling to admit that they liked it as much as they did. So, having ‘borrowed’ it, and resisted attempts to get me to return it, by the usual methods,  I tended to listen to it privately. I was already losing interest in mainstream popular music, and I think I had by then begun to suspect that Bob Dylan was having us on, which I think he has been doing for a long time (‘I wouldn’t pay it any mind. It’s just a ragged clown behind, it’s just a shadow you’re seeing that he’s chasing’) . Leonard Cohen wasn’t having us on.

Several of his phrases lodged immovably in my mind, especially ‘walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme’, and ‘your hair upon the pillow, like a sleepy golden storm’ - words which I think must create a vivid, spreading picture in the imagination of anyone who was young and male in that time and probably at any time. He couldn’t sing, and didn’t care, and nor could I and nor did I, but this was as good a way I could find of listening to poetry.

For such it was. Curiously, when I did get hold of a CD of the ‘The Songs of Leonard Cohen’,  I found it oddly unsatisfactory, as if extra backing music had been added to what I remembered from decades past. Can it have been, or had I just pushed other sounds to the edge of my senses when I first heard the songs, uninterested in anything but the words? I preferred listening to it in my head from memory, as it turned out.  It was those original songs that did it for me. I had no idea until recently that ‘Hallelujah’ was by him and could easily manage without it.

And then came that letter to Marianne Ihlen, to whom he sang ‘So long’, so long ago. She was dying. He knew he was too, and so wrote to her. The passage ‘Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine’ reduced me to tears , as it does now. Note that almost every word in it has just one syllable. And it confirmed that Leonard Cohen really was a master of language, not some passing fancy or a mere pleasing crooner trapped in the age of the Beatles.

I am sorry he is dead, for all the proper reasons, but also sorry in that way that you must be when the figures of your youth, not much older than you, go across the bridge and off into the dark.  

A good view of my nostrils

Personally I think this interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjLmw4bgq0

sounds better without vision. I should have noticed the curious up-the-nostrils angle of the camera, which generally means the person employing it wants to make you look stupid. I doubt if it was intentional in this case, but even so, it's no fun to watch for any length of time.

 

 

Thoughts on Mr Trump's new dawn. Adrift on a sinister current

Today , for the second time in five months, a left-wing elite paid the price of ignoring, for many years, the warnings of civilised and tolerant conservatives. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been, when trying to debate politics with readers of the Guardian and the New York Times.  

To suggest to them that mass immigration is risky and destabilising; to urge that the married family needs to be supported, not dissolved; to say that education needs more rigour, discipline and selection; to advocate the deterrent punishment of crime rather than its indulgence; to suggest that pornography and swearing may damage civility; to object to attempts to abolish national borders and sovereignty;  to say that violent liberal intervention in foreign countries is dangerous and wrong… any or all of these things has earned me a patronising sneer, a lofty glance, a dismissal as if I am some sort of troglodyte who has got into the room by mistake.

I said (as I recorded here a few weeks ago) to such people that they should listen to me while they could. I was content if they would only listen to me and moderate their policies. I did not even seek to wrest power from them, if they would only moderate their dogmatic revolutionary drive.  I believed (and still believe) that they had made a mistake even on their own terms, that they could not possibly want the consequences of what they were doing.  In the end, this was the Weimar Republic and they were courting a grave risk that they would eventually drive people too far. The response was sometimes personal abused, sometimes total, frozen indifference, very, very occasionally a brief, fairly uncomprehending attempt to see my point which came to nothing.

Well, now we have what I warned of. I don’t like these deep and increasingly spiteful divisions. I don’t like the crumbling of old constitutional conventions and the increasing treatment of opponents as enemies. I fear where this might lead. I have no desire to fight my fellow countrymen.

But all I can say is that I told you so.  I cannot see what I can actually do, except try not to make things worse. Actually, my willingness to listen sympathetically to some of the worries of the Remainers has met with total indifference too. I doubt if one in a thousand of them even knows that I disapprove of the Referendum and that I think they had a case at the High Court. Even now they are so self-righteous they cannot imagine any opponent giving them the consideration they would never give in return. People who think their own opinions make them virtuous have the most closed minds of all. But I’ll carry on trying.

Sick as I am of this behaviour, it has not sent me over the edge of rage and into unreason. I refused to be beguiled into supporting Donald Trump, a yahoo and braggart whose views possibly coincide with mine on two or three things. It seemed absurd to be expected to support Mr Trump because I also did not support Hillary Clinton,  a woman lost in a sea of money and liberal delusions, who has somehow persuaded herself that war is good. The same process works backwards. Neither will do.  I have said it before, but it bears saying again. I don’t buy goods I don’t want, just because the shop involved has nothing I do want.

Voting is not a duty in such circumstances. If only people had the sense to see it an  d act accordingly, not voting is a much higher duty. If neither of these terrible candidates had achieved more than 15% of the vote, how could they claim any serious mandate for the things they want to do. Yet, without resistance, the two halves of America agreed on one thing, That it was better to vote for disaster than not to vote at all.

Disaster? Hillary’s war policy in Syria would certainly have been one. Mr Trump’s economic policy, such as it is, which we don’t really know, and his general lack of respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers, threaten a different sort of catastrophe. I cannot see this ending happily. His other promises may also prove hard to keep.  Those old stories about wicked necromancers raising demons, and then not being able to send them back where they came from, seem to me to be metaphors for modern-day political alchemists who raise huge hopes which they know they cannot satisfy,  so summoning into being crowds which can all too easily become mobs, and will not go home when asked. What then?

Catastrophes happen in real life. I have seen them in Russia and elsewhere.  Jobs gone, homes gone, savings wiped out between supper and breakfast, shortages of everything from milk to electricity.  People survive.  But it’s not very nice. Just because your entire life hitherto has been lived in peace,  stability and security, doesn’t mean this is guaranteed to last forever. It could be you, ten years’ hence, selling your worldly possessions at the roadside (as in the opening scenes of ‘The Third Man’) to stay alive.

Someone has cut the ropes, and we are adrift on a strange, sinister, powerful current  towards an unknown destination which it might be better never to reach at all.  The liberal democracies have exhausted their form of government, which is increasingly using democracy to reject liberalism, but in an angry and impatient way. This, no doubt, is due to the policies pursued by our existing rulers for 50 years.  But I do not think that will make the experience any more comfortable.  Anger  and contempt for your opponents are poor foundations for civilised government.

There is little we can now do to change this fate. It would be like paddling with your hands to fight the force of the Gulf Stream. Maybe Mr Trump will turn out to have been kidding us. Maybe he will surround himself with advisers of brilliance and subtlety, who will prove to have mastered the problems of reintroducing protection in a world governed by open borders and increasingly dominated by China.  Maybe all that stuff about jailing his opponent was just talk. Maybe, despite all those years of, er, locker-room behaviour Mr Trump will turn out after all to be a Christian gentleman in office upholding the ancient virtues. I do hope so. But forgive me if I decline to be optimistic.

Can anyone be impartial or independent about grammar schools? Thoughts on the EPI report

Who and what are the Education Policy Institute? What do they say about Grammar Schools?

 

An influential document

One of the most cited documents in the current grammar school debate is a report by the ‘Education Policy Institute’ http://epi.org.uk/report/grammar-schools-social-mobility/

Full report here http://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Grammar-schools-and-social-mobility_.pdf

A little later in the post I will examine parts of the report (not all - one particular section of it requires consulting hard-to-find books and will take longer, but I hope to get round to it).

 

Independent? Impartial?  Evidence-based?

The report itself asserts in its text that the EPI ‘is an independent, impartial and evidence-based research institute that aims to promote high quality education outcomes, regardless of social background.’

Yet even the slightest investigation shows that it started life as a Liberal Democrat think tank, ‘CentreForum’ (itself the inheritor of an earlier Liberal Party think tank) and that many of its leading figures are Liberal Democrats such as David Laws, EPI’s Executive Chairman,  and Cameroon Tories – such as Lord (David) Willetts, a member of EPI’s advisory board - plus one full-power Blairite, Baroness (Sally) Morgan of Huyton, a Trustee of EPI. I see no sign of any guiding figure outside the Blairite-Cameroon consensus on education, which now of course focuses on ‘academisation’ and is dismissive of academic selection.

Its luminaries also include persons closely linked to ‘Academy’ schools and trusts notably Sir Paul Marshall, Chairman of ARK Schools and also Chairman of EPI, and Sir Theodore Agnew, a Trustee of EPI and also chairman and sponsor of a multi-academy trust based in Norfolk. Academies have long seemed to me to be the most dogged opponents of a revival of academic selection, alongside the similar  but much rarer ‘Free Schools’ pioneered by Toby Young.

(All these details of affiliations are in fact clearly displayed on the EPI website and can be found there without much effort, which makes the claim of independence even odder.)

I really do not see, especially when grammar schools are concerned, how such a body can describe itself as either independent or impartial. The Lib Dems, plainly the political origin of the EPI,  have for years been against academic selection, as have Blairites such as Sally Morgan and Blairite Tories such as David Willetts and Michael Gove ( as discussed in detail here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/more-details-of-michael-goves-attitude-towards-grammar-schools.html0

 

Academies may be the main foes of Grammar Schools now

The ‘Academies’ which in my view badly need a thorough examination by a truly impartial research body, generally assert that they do not select (always questionable in fact) and generally do not select academically. Their political progenitors and supporters, especially Lord Adonis and Michael Gove, do not approve of academic selection. I am aware of the many anomalous existing grammar schools which have converted to ‘Academy’ status, presumably because this provided them with access to more generous funding, and more control over their own governance, than they had under local authorities. But they are anomalous. New ‘Academies’ do not select academically, and LEA comprehensives which convert to ‘Academy’ status do not select academically either.

My most virulent opponent at the Kent grammar schools debate (about which I wrote here recently) was the head of a local ‘Academy’ school, itself part of one of the many Academy Trusts which now perform the same role in our education system as train operating companies do in the privatised , yet state-subsidised railway system. The taxpayer pays the piper but does not call the tune. She gave the impression that she regarded academic selection with a particular dislike and said she believed that every school could be good, with every appearance of sincerity. When debating the academic selection issue I often have my attention drawn to the ARK school in North London, as a supposed example of success without selection. I have indeed paid it some attention, and will at some point write about it,  but this is not the place for that.

 

Perhaps not as damaging to the grammar school cause as some think 

Now to the report itself

It seems to me that it has turned up several pieces of evidence which favour the opening of new grammars, but in all cases it discounts this evidence. Is it right to do so? Is it is critical of evidence which points in the anti-grammar direction? Let us see.

But first some points that I think need to be made, absolutely, before we go any further into this. I strongly believe, and think the evidence shows, that grammar schools lifted an unknown but significant number of bright boys and girls from poor homes out of the narrow worlds in which they might otherwise have stagnated, and into a wider universe where their talents could flourish. Few became famous, but some did  - Joan Bakewell (‘lower middle class’ by her own description) , Alan Bennett (son of a butcher), Alan Rickman (son of a painter and decorator) and Raymond Briggs (son of a milkman) spring to mind.

Thousands more (this was before the weird age when millions went to alleged ‘universities’ often in truth nothing of the kind)  went on to happy and satisfying careers in the police, the professions and education who otherwise, I suspect, would not have done. The key thing is that these people contributed, to the full, the abilities which they had been given. The whole nation and in my view the world benefited from the resulting talent, competence, responsibility, knowledge and reasoning which they learned in schools. So they were much more use to others, and more fully able to be themselves,  in those scores of areas where a truly free society’s fate is decided.

As they go into retirement, and are replaced by the new generation, I personally feel the loss all the time. I simply don’t believe, for instance, that a grammar-educated elite could have messed up our power generation as badly as it has now been messed up.

Thousands of anecdotes, but no actual research, support this impression. The research shows only a  steadily growing number of children from grammars and their close allies, the Direct Grant schools (which could not exist without academic selection and died soon after it was abolished) , getting into Oxford, outclassing the ‘Public’ boarding schools as year succeeded year. This stopped around 1970, and the process could only be restarted through what amount to quotas. 

This argument about opportunity is important as a counter to the absurd claim that comprehensives have in some way benefited the poor.

 

Grammar Schools were never supposed to be Fairy Godmothers

But it is not in fact the main or central argument for the restoration of grammar schools.  The part of the population which is always bound to benefit most from academically selective schools is the lower middle class and the skilled working class. Why shouldn’t they? It is this class which holds the country together and repeatedly saves the sum of things when the upper crust has run away or failed or shirked its responsibilities. Everyone in the armed services knows this very well.

This group (to which I do not belong but which certainly describes my father and grandfather) cannot afford private schooling now, never will and never could. The current sharp rise in the cost of private schooling now means that much of the middle and upper middle classes are also unable to afford school fees for their own children, even though their (nominally less affluent) parents could afford to pay fees for *them*, a fact which will prove politically important in the years to come. 

Yet, partly because of heredity and partly because of nurture, it is bound to contain a significant number of boys and girls who will benefit from an academic education, and won’t get one without academic selection. The seriously and very poor classes will also contain a number ( I would guess a smaller proportion, but here we trespass on areas of nature versus nurture about which there is much dispute) of such children, whose hopes may be dashed very early on by poor home circumstances or inadequate primary schools. An academically selective system, *may* help them. It will certainly help them more than a comprehensive system. But it will often not do so alone, or without  other interventions – individual teachers or other non-family benefactors spotting a talent and nurturing it, special help in primary school, even being entered for exams at all, which is currently only universal in Buckinghamshire.

The point  I am making here is that the real purpose of academic selection is not social engineering, or the alleviation of class distinction, good as these things are in this case. It is the discovery and nurture of talent for the good of the nation and of the world (and I would add, for the glory of God, whose grief over the waste of talent is so well expressed in Christ’s Parable of the Talents).

The argument about the undoubted benefits to many bright children from poor homes is mainly important as a counter to the lazy and unproven claim that comprehensives somehow helped the poor to get better schooling. I have yet to find research which can show, one way or the other, how much or how little academic selection, between 1944 and 1965, helped children from families who could never afford private schools to rise above their backgrounds.

If I did find such research, I would not solely be concerned with the children of the very poor.  What about the children of what might be described as the ‘NCO Classes’ – the children of police officers, non-commissioned officers in the services, state-school teachers, laboratory assistants, junior clerical workers in businesses and town halls, local newspaper journalists, owners of small businesses, managers of small shops, draughtsmen, engineers – people who could never conceivably afford a private education but whose children might well possess talents valuable to the nation which would be undiscovered, neglected or wasted in bog-standard comprehensive schools? Actually, in modern Britain, good private education is rapidly becoming unaffordable to all but the very rich indeed, one of the reasons why this issue is not going away.

Do people who attack Secondary Moderns realise, by the way, that many ‘comprehensive’ schools in poor areas do not have sixth forms or the capacity to teach at ‘A’ level? Knowsley, on Merseyside, has no state school sixth forms. 

 

Disproving a claim that was never made

So let us not try to prove a claim that supporters of grammar schools never made,  that they were fairy godmothers capable of transforming the lives of all poor children. They were not. They could not have been. No school system could be.

Even so I think there is good evidence that they were a lot better at finding and encouraging talent than the great bulk of the comprehensive system, which has since 1965 ceded most of the best jobs and careers to privately-educated pupils.

 

Why GCSEs are a bad measure of a Good School - telescoped results.

Then there is the question of ‘What is a good school’. I have discussed here before the strange collapse of the old GCE ‘O’ level, an exam which lay like a long shadow over my own early teens.  I had spent several years at a private prep school preparing for the ‘Common Entrance’ in those days (the early and middle 1960s) a very severe examination taken at 13, requiring the ability to translate from English in Latin and French with huge accuracy and grammatical correctness, large vocabularies in both these languages, a considerable knowledge of arithmetic, geometry and algebra, a detailed knowledge of large parts of English history and of global geography, and an ability to express oneself coherently in writing at length. 

 

Some personal memories of exams as they were before 1967

Your marks in this exam determined what sort of Public (i.e. private) secondary school you would attend, and our teachers left us in no doubt that there was a great and strict hierarchy, in which some schools were far better than others. I was under great pressure to do well, and ended up taking and passing a scholarship exam, so saving my parents a good deal of money on the fees of the rather odd public school where I unexpectedly ended up.

This school had some fine qualities, and others less admirable, mainly stemming from the fact that it was a boarding school - for which I was (especially at that age) temperamentally unfitted.  I simply was not prepared to endure so much interference in my private life. So many things which ought to have been voluntary were made compulsory. There was so little privacy.  You might have thought we were at war, or being punished for some terrible crime.

Yet I especially recall the very determined and persuasive mathematics teacher who got me through elementary Maths ‘O’ level , a real struggle of sweat and headache and revision; and also the dry, witty man, physically resembling George Orwell,  who taught us English literature and Latin. But goodness it was hard work, even more rigorous than the Common Entrance had been. You had to know things and remember them, and write literately and at length about them. And I ended up, despite my scholarship, with (I think) three grade ones (then the top) a grade two, a grade three and a shameful grade six (a bare pass) in my best and favourite subject, History.  The last, which would have been a grade one had I been allowed to take it early, as I wanted to, was a symptom of my (by then) rapidly souring relations with the school. But the point is that nobody expected me to get a full set of grade ones, even though I was a scholarship holder in the top stream. A scattering of grades was perfectly normal, and my miserable history score would not have attracted much attention if I hadn’t won my scholarship by a good performance in that subject.

The exam, its shape and general form, would have been quite recognisable to a schoolboy of the Edwardian era or in the 1930s, though I suspect it was less severe than it would have been in either of those eras. 

But it would baffle and overpower most modern schoolchildren of that age, and probably leave many of them with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. No doubt modern exams require a lot of *work*. I would be driven crazy by a GCSE course (Yes, I have seen the papers and coursework) because of this mismatch between work done and knowledge gained.  But they are wholly different things.

 

Why they had to get rid of O levels

 

And within a few short years of the destruction of grammar schools, almost all state secondary schools began to struggle badly with the ‘O’ level.  At first it was watered down and regraded, to make it easier both to pass and to score well. But this was not enough, and in 1988 the O level was finally put out of its misery (by Sir Keith Joseph, of all people)  and the GCSE introduced. The EPI report notes on 12 that ‘The introduction of GCSE qualifications with the 1988 Education Reform Act also had significant implications for the selective system. The previous dichotomy in curricula between grammar schools (in which students tended to take O-level exams) and secondary moderns (whose pupils generally took CSEs) was substantially weakened by the replacement of the two qualifications by GCSEs.’

Another way of saying  this is to state that all schools now had much lower targets to meet, in which grammar schools were no longer able to show how much better they were than non-grammars ( and also how much better they were than many independent schools, who, being selective, can waltz through these exams by discipline and slog as they could not with the old O levels).

 

So the current measure of the academic goodness of a school, its performance in obtaining good grades in certain GCSEs, is telescoped. We simply cannot tell from it how much better grammar schools are than the socially-selective comps which appear to rival them in performance. But if we really did restore the old pre-1965 'O' levels, as we should, we should pretty quickly find out. I think the difference would be huge. 

It is also a target of no real national importance. It makes no difference to the country how many *schools* meet this arbitrary and not very-indicative score. What matters is how many boys and girls are educated to the full limits of their ability, which is simply not happening now. This is why I am so unimpressed with complaints that grammar schools ‘cream’ the best pupils away from other schools.

 

What's so bad about 'Creaming'? 

Of course they do. That is the point of them.

Bright children are not a resource for boosting a school’s OFSTED rating.  They are a national resource, and they are also valuable individuals whose talents should be nurtured to the full for their own benefit.  If they do better in academically selective schools than in non-academically selective schools, that is where they should be, and to blazes with the league tables.

So, with that in mind, to the report itself (see above for link)

Beginning on page 6, after a foreword by the impartial and independent Liberal Democrat opponent of academic selection,  David Laws,  its executive summary notes that pupils travel much further to attend grammar schools than they do to attend comprehensives.

‘Pupils travel, on average, twice as far to attend a selective school as a non-selective

school and a quarter of pupils in grammar schools cross local authority boundaries to attend

(compared to 9 per cent in non-selective schools.) Whilst grammar schools are only found in

36 of 152 local authorities, over 40 per cent of pupils are within a reasonable travel distance

of at least one grammar school.’

 

Well now, haven’t I always said that the few remaining grammars were subject to a much-increased pressure on places, which is why arguments that they have too few poor pupils tell us nothing about an evenly-spread national system, such as I advocate? One to me, I think.

 

It's not just grammar schools that select, dear

 

 

But, apparently not noticing this or not caring to reflect in its meaning the EPI immediately goes on to labour this point: ‘Pupils who are eligible for free school meals are notably under-represented in grammar schools, with only 2.5 per cent of grammar school pupils entitled to these free meals, compared with 13.2 per cent in all state funded secondary schools, and 8.9 per cent in the areas that they are situated in.’

 

 

If you close grammars in poor areas, they won't have many poor pupils. Obvs.

Interesting here to observe that the areas in which grammars are situated have a *much* lower rate of FSM take-up than the country as a whole. What do we learn from this? That spiteful Labour councils in the 1960s and 1970s destroyed almost all the grammars in areas where poor families are concentrated. You cannot blame the grammars for that. Indeed we know from here http://www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/non-grammars-socially-selective-state-schools/

that elite non-grammars are more socially selective than grammars, and from here http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Worlds_apart.pdf

that the Free School Meals problem is just as great, if not more so,  in socially selective comps as it is in the remaining grammars.

Now, there’s another interesting matter here that will re-emerge later. There is, as Sir Michael Wilshaw pointed out in his January 2016 speech much cited here

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ambitions-for-education-sir-michael-wilshaw....a special problem with the children of the ‘White working class’ (his phrase). They are the ones whose performance falls off most sharply between 11 and 15, victims of what you might called ‘subtracted value’ in non-selective secondary schools, where poor discipline and mixed ability teaching cause them to fall behind.

The report notes without comment that ‘Some ethnic groups such as Indian and Chinese pupils are over represented in grammar schools.’

Indeed. And the issue of such communities placing a higher value on education than our own indigenous working class culture, and so helping schools achieve better results,  is one of the great unexplored issues of our education system. The secondary-school performance of poor children is *hugely* better in London, increasingly a city of recent migrants,  than in the rest  of the country. There’s a similar phenomenon, not quite so great but noticeable, in Slough, also an area very heavily populated by young families of recent migrants.

 

The Great Mystery of the London Effect

This supposed ‘London effect’ is often attributed to various bureaucratic initiatives of the education establishment, such as academisation. But it appears to have predated them. I think we need research, but there is an increasingly good case for suggesting that this is actually caused by the much higher value given to education in these communities, than in traditional British poor areas, where the culture is, to put it mildly, not especially keen on education. Whenever any education statistics are given which involve London, or indeed national averages in which London is included, I think it wise to at least suspect that this influence may be operating.

I discovered this after Alan Milburn, the ‘Equality Tsar’,  compared achievement rates among poor children in academically selective Kent with the national average and with comprehensive London. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/07/grammar-schools-expansion-disaster-social-mobility-tsar-alan-milburn

In fact Kent’s figures were not significantly worse than those of any other comparable county, and were almost identical to those in comprehensive Wiltshire and Portsmouth. Had London been excluded from the national average, the figures he cited would not have been anything like so striking. Much of Kent, despite its ‘Garden of England’ image , is quite poor and deprived and working class - abandoned coalmines, shutdown naval dockyards and declining Channel ports and seaside resorts - and it suffers from that class’s decline as much as anywhere in the country.

 

Of course we can agree on this

The EPI report then (rightly) in my view, attributes much of the performance of Grammar Schools to their selection, in the first place, of those best able to take advantage of a good education.

It wrongly (in my view) then spends a lot of time saying that good comps do just as well . as I argue at length above, this is only because of the severely telescoped possibilities of our exam system.

A clue to what might happen if a less-telescoped standard were applied was given in the fascinating revelations, ten years ago, about which state schools were supplying the great majority of Oxbridge state-school entrants.  The report from the Sunday Times  is behind a pay wall but is referred to in detail here : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/07/a-new-discussion-about-school-selection-.html

Grammars surpassed even the very best ‘comprehensives’. Oxbridge colleges are still able to select much more rigorously than any other institutions of higher education, thanks to their use of interviews, essays and other means of probing beyond the exam results. Despite being no more socially selective than the top comps, the grammars still do better than them at getting their pupils into Oxbridge. And this is an entirely level contest, as both sorts of school count as state schools for quota purposes.

The EPI seem unaware of, or uninterested in,  these facts. They have instead (p.9) invented a different category of so called ‘high quality non-selective schools.’  These are said to be ‘be in the top 25 per cent based on value-added progress measures, and represent good quality schools operating at large scale.’

 

That London Effect again?

 

 

I don’t know how many of this group are also highly socially selective. But I did ask the EPI how many of them are in London. They replied : ‘around 198 schools (in London) out of a total of 653 "high quality non selective schools" in England.’ That means almost a third of these are possibly undergoing the so-called ‘London effect’ which I discussed above and which may have nothing to do with the quality of the schools and much more to do with the culture of the pupils. Given that London is so untypical, and so over-represented in these numbers (London’s population is roughly 8.7 million, that of England , 53 million, much fewer than one third). I think we need to be careful with making too much of these figures. In saying this, I am only adopting the approach of the EPI whenever anything comes up which suggests that grammars may actually be a good thing.

Take this interesting passage on page 7 :

‘At a national level, and adjusting for pupil characteristics, there appears to be no overall impact of selective schooling, either positive or negative. Taking selective areas as a whole, this conclusion applies on average both to children from low and high income backgrounds. This conclusion is likely to disappoint both the advocates of more grammar schools and the critics of selective schools expansion (for example, the present Leader of the Labour Party has claimed that “Grammar schools depress overall educational achievement”1 ). This result suggests that additional grammar schools are not a good intervention for raising average standards across a schools system.

‘However, we do find positive attainment effects for pupils attending grammar schools (adjusting for pupil characteristics). Pupils attending grammar schools achieve, on average, an estimated one third of a GCSE grade higher in each of eight GCSE subjects, compared with similar pupils in non-selective schools in comprehensive areas.’ (My emphasis)

And then, on the same page ‘  This positive attainment effect varies by socio-economic background. For children entitled to free school meals and attending grammar schools the estimated effect is larger than for non-FSM children – at around half a grade higher in each of eight GCSEs. (My emphasis).’

But this of course has immediately to be explained away thus:

‘However, it is important to note that this is based on just 500 grammar school pupils out of almost 90,000 FSM pupils in any one year group. And the characteristics of typical FSM pupils who gain admittance to grammar schools are extremely different from FSM children who do not gain admittance to grammar schools. It is therefore probable that this positive effect is an overestimate and that the real effect of grammar schools on FSM pupils is smaller.’

Perhaps, but this looks a bit like a fact (perhaps unwelcome) being explained away by  a guess

Then we get : ‘The gap between all children on free school meals (attaining five A*-C GCSEs, including English and Maths) and all other children is wider in wholly-selective areas than in nonselective areas - at around 34.1 per cent compared with 27.8 per cent., but coupled with the absolutely correct qualification that ‘ This is not surprising because grammar schools attract a larger number of high-attaining, non-FSM pupils from other areas and so, in selective areas, we have a disproportionately large number of high-attaining, non-disadvantaged children, who we then compare to disadvantaged children from across the attainment distribution.’

On page 8 we get : ‘It appears to be more difficult for poor children to access grammar schools, even when prior attainment is taken into account. Pupils eligible for free school meals make up 6.9% of those with high prior attainment near selective schools, but only 2.4% actually attend selective schools.’

Compare this with the Sutton Trust’s 2010 measure (on a different measure of deprivation) that ‘the country’s top 164 comprehensive schools took only 9.2% of children from income deprived homes although they drew pupils from areas where about 20% were income deprived. The 164 remaining grammar schools, also drawing their pupils from areas where 20% were income deprived, were found to be more inclusive, admitting 13.5% of children from poor homes.”

I could go on, and shall return to this report when I have researched its interesting claim that ‘In the late 1950s and early 1960s, new research which highlighted the barriers faced by working class children in accessing grammar schools combined with scepticism regarding the reliability of selection tests meant that the selective school system started to be side-lined to make room for a new, comprehensive system.’

I am seeking this ‘new research which highlighted the barriers faced by working class children in accessing grammar schools’.

PETER HITCHENS: Forget the EU vote - all Britain really needs is patriotic leaders

 
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

This is what happens when you call in the cowboys to do an important job. It goes wrong and you can't afford to fix it. You thought you could trust the Tory Party. You thought you could ignore our rather good constitution and bypass it with a referendum. I did warn you.

In May 2013, I pointed out the dangers of a referendum, asking: 'Has Parliament been abolished? Has a constitution been quietly introduced, which demands that such issues are decided by plebiscite, and makes the result of such plebiscites binding on Parliament?
'I've heard no such proposal, and can't see how it could be so, given the cowardly, ignorant or plain stupid attitudes of most MPs to this question.

'It's certainly understood, by constitutional lawyers, that such an obligation is important for any serious plebiscite, and its presence or absence in any legislation will be crucial. I suspect it will be absent.' And so it was.

Now you find out you were wrong, who are you going to call? For years I explained that the only way out of the EU was to replace the Tories with a genuinely patriotic conservative party that could win an Election. The referendum proves that the votes were there.

In October 2011, I said: 'Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it… it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a General Election to be won by a party committed to secession.'

We would then have had an actual government determined to do what the people wanted, without any need to hurry to prove itself, and with a good idea of how it would use our new-found independence once we regained it. Instead we had a cynical campaign led by people who still cannot escape the suspicion that they never intended to win and were shocked and dismayed when they did.

And we have a pantomime horse – a policy being ineptly and half-heartedly implemented by people who don't support it. And we have a constitutional crisis, as I said we would on June 12 when I also correctly predicted that 'Leave' would win.

So I can't join in the bizarre and rather lawless squawking of rage at the High Court's ruling that Parliament must vote on Article 50. It is a perfectly reasonable judgment, based on my favourite bit of the Constitution, the 1689 Bill of Rights which guarantees our freedom far more surely than any human rights rubbish.

Actually this doesn't mean that Parliament will block our formal exit from the EU. Only a small coven of kamikaze MPs would dare to do that. The elite have other, cleverer plans.

But it does mean that Chairman May will now have the excuse she needs to fudge our exit. Parliament, and the Civil Service, will 'take back control' of the process. And what we will get will almost certainly be the Norway option – continued access to the Single Market and very little control over our borders.

We will move from being halfway into the EU to being halfway out of it. The referendum's simple requirement, that we leave the EU, will be fulfilled, beyond question.

But of course that wasn't all that millions of people voted for. If we want the rest of it, especially border control, we simply cannot rely on the existing parties or the establishment to get it.

A monster created by 007

This is why it matters when films and TV series make things up and tell lies for effect – like the ghastly King's Speech and the new Netflix series that claims to portray the private life of the Queen.

Reality nowadays copies what is on the screen. Poor Mexico City must now endure annual macabre, pagan Day Of The Dead parades, because the James Bond film Spectre showed such an event taking place there.

It didn't until now. But the Mexico City government thought it would bring in the tourists, so now they have to have it. I'd travel a long way to avoid this creepy, ugly event, but, as I know well, I'm out of touch.

Even weirder than the effect of movies and TV on truth is their effect on fiction. My favourite example of this is Inspector Morse who, in the original books, drove a Lancia but acquired a Jaguar in the later ones to fit in with the screen version.

How long before all the classics are rewritten and crammed with panting sex and incest, so as to make them conform with Andrew Davies's ghastly adaptations?

**********

Sheer bleeding nerve department. One of the noisiest campaigners against new grammar schools is a body called the Education Policy Institute. It declares that it is 'independent, impartial and evidence-based'.

Oh, yeah? Here's some evidence-based research on it. It started life as a Liberal Party think-tank called the Centre for Reform and its main benefactors are often Liberal Democrats.

Among its leading figures are the former Lib Dem Minister David Laws, and the Blairite factotum Sally Morgan (neither known for their support of grammar schools).

Two of its major figures (one a donor to the Tories in the Cameron anti-grammar years) are also connected with 'Academy' schools, which tend to see grammars as rivals. Impartial? Independent?

Last chance for useless cops  

The jailing of a Polish lorry driver for slaughtering a family while looking at his stupid phone is only partly just. Millions of British people have come close to doing something similar and have only been saved from it by the grace of God.

Using your phone while driving is about as sane and sensible as throwing knives at your children while blindfolded. The trouble is that people are so selfish and complacent that they do not find this out until they kill or maim someone.

And they don't believe they will. Nor are they in the least impressed by calls for 'tougher sentences' for this crime. Because they know –as one driver I upbraided recently told me – that the police don't care and will do nothing about it.

Indeed they won't. I continue to be amazed that anyone still defends our police against the charge of uselessness which I ceaselessly level at them.

What is it that they do, apart from monitoring Twitter, festooning the place with tape and racing to crimes after they have happened and it is too late? When did you last see an actual traffic patrol? I'd guess 1987.

The solution may well be to sack the police and start again. But let's give them one last chance. Get out there now and arrest everyone you see using a phone at the wheel. The CPS can join in by actually charging them.

Only when everyone knows someone who's in jail for this moronic offence will it cease. That's how drunk driving was stamped out and how seat-belts became standard. Enforcement.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down.

That Constitutional Crisis I predicted in June has now arrived. Enjoy

Leave aside whether you or I are annoyed by the High Court’s judgement on Article 50, or think it perverse according to law. Are you really surprised by it?

I am not.

Below are links to various more-or-less prophetic articles (wrong in some respects, especially my belief , later revised a fortnight before the vote, that the anti-EU cause was most unlikely to win the referendum; strikingly right in others) in which I explained to impatient and tetchy readers why I did not want a referendum, and was not convinced that such a vote could get us out of the EU:  

 http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/05/why-i-place-no-hope-in-a-referendum-on-britains-eu-membership.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/no-we-have-not-escaped-from-the-eu-and-we-may-not-ever-do-so-.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/the-eu-is-our-own-hotel-california-we-can-check-out-but-well-never-leave.html

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/05/the-referendum-mirage.html

The oldest, here, from October 2011, a trifle more than five years ago  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/10/referendum-no-thanks.html

is perhaps the most telling.

I wrote : ‘Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it – near impossible without at least one major party calling for a vote to withdraw -  it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a general election to be won by a party committed to secession.  And with the Tory party in the way, bed-blocking the position that ought to be occupied by such a party,  that will never happen.’ 

In May 2013, I wrote: ‘Why is there such a fuss about a referendum on British, sorry, I mean Ukay, membership of the European Union? Has Parliament been abolished? Has a constitution been quietly introduced, which demands that such issues are decided by plebiscite, and makes the result of such plebiscites binding on Parliament?

‘I’ve heard no such proposal, and can’t see how it could be so, given the cowardly, ignorant or plain stupid attitudes of most MPs to this question.

‘It’s certainly understood, by constitutional lawyers, that such an obligation is important for any serious plebiscite, and its presence or absence in any legislation will be crucial. I suspect it will be absent.’

It was absent, as I several times said at the time.

This is why,  when I correctly predicted that ‘Leave’ would win the referendum (on 12^th June)  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/the-british-people-have-risen-at-last-and-were-about-to-unleash-chaos.html

I also prophesied the constitutional crisis which is now developing. I said:  

‘I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.

‘If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?’

The other point I made *after* the result was that the EU itself, and its supporters in this country (no shortage of them in positions of influence in politics, law, diplomacy and media)  would act tough to begin with eventually offer us a compromise under which we will, in effect, stay inside the EU.

This isn’t exactly wishful thinking, of the sort which guides many of the reactions to the High Court ruling on Article 50. I have been committed to national independence for many years. But I have infuriated and failed to persuade most of my readers by repeatedly saying that the destruction of the Tory party, and its replacement by a genuinely patriotic and conservative formation,  were the essential preliminaries to achieving this.

Well, instead of working hard and saving up to buy my well-crafted, effective if antique device, with its polished brass hinges, well-oiled mechanisms and chased silver decorative bits, they went down to the industrial estate on the edge of town,  and maxed out their credit card to purchase a cheapo, bodge-it-yourself instant exit kit – the referendum. Then they hired a plausible man with a grubby white van to install it. It seemed to work to start with. Now it’s giving out alarming knocking and whistling noises, and shuddering in a worrying way. But where’s the man who installed it? His mobile phone seems to have gone dead.

Well, this is what happens when you get the cowboys in. I really did tell you so. We’ll end up in the European Economic Area before this is over, you mark my words – halfway out of the EU instead of where we were, which was halfway in.  

Sens and Sensibility: A Few Days on Another Planet

 

Some time ago I mentioned a long-unfulfilled urge to visit the cathedral at Sens, in France, whose striking tower…

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/2e/ea/94/2eea94c627c2d0a94c9580de3ec0f122.jpg

…glimpsed in the middle-distance catching the last of the setting sun, marks the true beginning of the rail journey south out of Paris, a sign that one has slipped past the gravitational pull of the French capital and into the deeper more ancient France that lies outside it. I’ll come to that. But why does it haunt me so?  I think it is a symbol of sort of adventurous travel that you can’t find in Europe any more. I took this journey on late summer evenings (often just beginning my supper as we passed this point) many times in the days before TGVs, when continental rail travel was slower, more exciting, smellier, and much, much more foreign than it has since become. I recall an evening train heading for the Alps, with Chamonix as my destination (and E.L.Voynich’s novel ‘The Gadfly’ in my pocket – could I read that now?) many autumns ago, the great matt grey-green coaches far higher up and broader than British ones, swaying and clanging to a different rhythm, bounding down the track southwards, through vast yards of electric trains and cables, evidence of France’s huge investment in infrastructure, embarrassingly far ahead of our own.

Waking at midnight in Bourg-en-Bresse, miles from Paris but still only halfway to our destination,  waking again for dawn by the lake at Annecy, a sight I never even knew existed, then, at the end of the main line,  up on a little red rack-and-pinion train into the mountains themselves. Another time, on the single grey Italian coach waiting at Dover which was grandly called the ‘Rome Express’, shunted through the sepulchral tunnels of Paris’s now abandoned ‘Petite Ceinture’, a circular track which linked all the main stations, then at the Gare de Lyon slammed on to the back of the real express, and all the way to Rome without once changing. How much more foreign it all was. You were in the unknown. Nobody spoke English.  You immediately lost contact with home. A telephone call was a carefully-planned exercise involving a specially obtained token, a cubicle in a café under the grumpy eye of the proprietor,  and the operator, English newspapers rare and usually days old, the consumer goods (and the advertisements for them)  all specifically French as ours were specifically English, needing to be learned and discovered with care. Once, a sort of extravaganza, travelling by the now forgotten Trans Europ Expresses, a late 1950s vision of Euro-luxury (one, the Mistral, which had a copper bar, ran down the Rhone past all the great vineyards of the region. I encountered it again, a sagging but still-comfortable relic, on the Havana to Santiago line in Cuba).

That world vanished some time in the 1980s when my attention was distracted by things further East. The old clangorous carriages, the lovely blue dining cars which were the best restaurants in the world  because of the sense of motion and the view, disappeared. So did the dark and basic station hotels with their iron bedsteads and brown lino, and the incredibly cheap brasseries where we eked out our Francs and wondered, as we stared at the Thomas Cook Continental Timetable, how far and how deep we could get into France that night. Pretty far, and pretty deep, as it turns out and to places no longer reachable by train , for France has had its own Beechings and Marples.

But after a particularly satisfying visit to the Cathedral city of Chartres I suspected that a pilgrimage to Sens might be rewarding, though obviously not as astonishing as Chartres. Happening to be in Paris, I found the new Gare de Bercy (once the depot through which wine arrived by rail in the city) and, remembering to stamp my ticket on the platform ( failure to do this can be very costly and embarrassing) I swung aboard the morning train to Sens. Despite the fog, it was perfection. It awoke dozens of memories, not least as we rattled (in reasonably old-fashioned rolling stock) through the forest of Fontainebleau. It was a proper express journey, with Sens the first stop.

Here,  alas was the imescapable modern world, plenty of people with piercings and tattoos, much as you would find at an English small-town station on an autumn morning, a small crowd of sub-Saharan Africans searching for who knows what. But the old world persisted. I’d chosen the quietest day of the week, and the many closed shops and absence of traffic emphasised the decay of the pretty old town, which has grown up round an island in the middle of the river Yonne, packed with swans (who owns them in France?  Obviously not the Queen. Can you eat them there? I’ve never been offered swan),  sometimes traversed by enormous barges bound for the sea via Paris and the Seine.  It underlined the feeling I often get in France of public affluence and private decay. My walk to the Paris station had reminded me , as I slogged past an immense concrete ministry the size of a small town, just how Soviet France can be, bureaucratic, obsessed with gigantic projects, worshipping the state and forgetful and neglectful of the small and private.

Yet, shabby as much of it was, the town was also often handsome, with plenty of half-timbering and serene stone – it sits just at the northern limit of Burgundy, and you can feel the influence in details like the patterned roof tiles on the old Bishops’ Palace. It also possesses one of the most wildly architecturally extravagant town halls I have ever seen. This view does not really do it justice. 

  http://ekladata.com/ZjSt7JV3ho645ZUNcDSZD1KHjUc.jpg

Seen from just beneath the spire, it is even wilder:

But it was the Cathedral I had come to see. Why *are* French cathedrals so different from their English cousins? They even smell different.  The buildings are not that dissimilar and are clearly of the same family. The towns and cities in which they stand have much in common. My guess is that we were lucky with our Reformation, severe as it was a mild thing compared with the furious ‘deChristianisation’ visited on the churches of France by the Jacobins during the revolution. This was a systematic desecration not just directed against graven images, but designed to drive the very spirit of belief out of the buildings. Sometimes prostitutes were hoisted on to the high altar (in scenes rather reminiscent of the climactic riot in Simon Raven’s novel ‘Places Where they Sing’, discussed here some time ago).Perhaps it succeeded. Loudspeakers inside the Sens cathedral played fine church music. But it only served to emphasise the fact that here was no choir school, no choir practice, no regular daily matins and evensong. This was a museum where a bit of worship was permitted, not a living church.

There is some beautiful glass including a window dedicated to the greatest of English martyrs, Thomas a Becket of Canterbury ( Or ‘Canterbory’, as the French spelling was in the days when we both had our own names for the famous cities of other countries. (There’s an elaborate running joke on Dorothy Sayers’s great detective story, perhaps her greatest,  ‘The Nine Tailors’ about the French referring to Lincoln as ‘Laincolonne’ . Did they really?

 Becket (there’s also a statue supposed to be him) was in exile here for two years, a memory they treasure. Other glass , as in Chartres and just as beautiful, tells the stories of Saints, or recounts parables – there is a  ‘Prodigal Son’ almost as good as the one at Chartres. I wished I’d had binoculars, and an account of the rather horrible story of St Eustace, now generally thought to be untrue, in which he ends up being roasted to death inside a pagan idol, along with his family.

There were not that many visitors. Perhaps if I’d waited long enough I could have found myself, like M.R. James’s character Dennistoun in the deserted cathedral of St Bertrand of Comminges, listening out for the strange and alarming noises that great old buildings produce to scare us on darkening winter afternoons.

One, an enjoyably single-minded Swede, had come entirely to visit the very odd and unexpected tomb of the father of Louis XVI, a Dauphin (heir to the French throne, (He was the son of Louis XV and also the father of the post-revolutionary restored monarchs Louis XVIII and Charles X)) who died before he became King and who might, by his personal goodness, have changed the course of French history had he ascended the throne. The Swede thought so, and he had obviously gone into the matter a great deal. It is an extraordinary allegorical sculpture, in the high style of the late 18^th century , depicting religion,, immortality, science and the arts. Westminster Abbey has lots of this sort of thing, though not often as stylish or exuberant. But in France it was all smashed, with this one exception, hidden at the crucial moment and brought out again in safer times.

The melancholy crypt of the Basilica of St Denis in Paris is a monument to the desecration of the graves of the French monarchy. From then on France’s glory was to be secular, a thing I notice more and more about France. The astonishing gloomy Pantheon, near which I stayed for a few days in Paris recently, started life as a hilltop church dedicated to Genevieve, Patron saint of Paris. But the revolution converted it into a windowless stone box full of the corpses of the great, whose macabre and rational tombs one may visit. I cannot work out how it still happens to have a cross on top of its dome.  I prefer Paris’s other great atheistical burial place, the great military hospital of the Invalides, where Bonaparte is entombed as if he were a god fallen to earth, (as if? I am not so sure it is that modest) with the lesser sarcophagi of his brothers nearby. At least it has plenty of windows, and for added interest there is the tomb of Marshal Foch, a rather fine affair, topped with a sculpture of the great soldier’s recumbent body borne on the shoulders of bronze soldiers (and adorned with English Poppy wreaths) , and the weird modernist box in which the very interesting Marshal Lyautey is entombed.    It has an Arabic inscription on it . Can anyone tell me what it means?

http://i.skyrock.net/2130/26452130/pics/2577122503_small_2.jpg

These are useful reminders for silly people that France is a martial nation and could easily have bested us in combat if things had turned out very slightly differently.

The St Denis basilica, now surrounded by one of the most Islamic districts of Paris, is  one of the most beautifully desolate things I have ever seen. It reminds of how unsuccessful were the attempts to revive both religion and monarchy in 19th century France, of the utter, irrevocable loss of a world that may well not have been as wicked and cruel as we like to think, or as wicked and cruel as what succeeded it.

But in Sens,  somehow,  a remnant of that lost world has survived. So has one of the loveliest pieces of sculpture I have ever seen, a 16^th century altarpiece, now in austere white stone but once, I think, richly painted, of Christ’s passion, stuck behind an iron grille in a locked side chapel (dedicated to Saint Martial, whoever he was)  and so hard to see, but full of grace and truth. One of its panels, showing three men (their faces full of fury and contempt) forcing the Crown of Thorns on to Christ’s head, is by itself worth the journey. Rodin (whose works are wonderfully displayed in Paris in a museum largely made up of gardens) could not have done it better, superb as he is at portraying pain and grief.

There is no real purpose in what I have written here, except that, as it interested me, I thought it might interest you. It is why I travel, really. I love many things about France (including a restaurant devoted almost entirely to the cooking and eating of ducks, but not swans, which I visited last week, and which also provides the best apple pie with Armagnac that I have ever eaten) . But above all I enjoy the feeling  of being in a parallel world, or even planet, similar to but yet utterly different from the one I inhabit.

It  demonstrates, among other things,  that ideas and beliefs have huge material consequences, and so that thought and argument are worthwhile.