Tag: UK politics

“Not infinite”

From The Guardian:

British nurses are planning to debate whether GPs should start charging patients for appointments.

The Royal College of Nursing’s (RCN) annual conference in Liverpool will discuss whether the union backs the idea of charging people a fee to see their family doctors.

Traditionally the RCN has stood behind the belief that the NHS should be free at the point of delivery. But nurses have put forward the motion, saying that NHS finances are “not infinite”.

“Not infinite” sounds like a sensible observation. Neither are the funds available to the police infinite, which is why we charge people a fee to report a burglary, with extra hourly charges for the investigation. And schools. And that’s why when the smoke alarm klaxons you out of bed, the first thing you need to do is grab enough cash to pay the firefighters who show up. Because their finances are not infinite.

Obviously, the RCN is just trying to make the point that healthcare workers are having their salaries squeezed up against the free-at-the-point-of-delivery. But this argument is made often, and it’s ridiculous. If you want to advocate patient fees, as opposed to all the other ways that the nation could increase funding of the NHS, it can only be because you think that the service that is now free is being overused, and you want to encourage ill people to do something else, besides visiting their GPs. In any case, the cost of administering the £10 fee would probably be more than the fee would bring in.

Here’s what charging for fire and rescue services looks like.

Poor parents

Fining parents is the latest fashion in UK education policy. The government has this started fining — and threatening with criminal prosecution — parents who take their children out of school, other than for illness, for any reason short of a funeral. Education Secretary Michael Gove has recently announced his intention to impose fines on parents if their children misbehave in school.

Now we have the UK chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, wanting to go beyond the school walls, suggesting fines for parents who don’t read to their children enough (or, presumably, the right books full of “British values“). In an interview reported on the front page of today’s Times he said

It’s up to head teachers to say quite clearly, “You’re a poor parent”… I think head teachers should have the power to fine them. It’s sending the message that you are responsible for your children no matter how poor you are.

To be fair, the context makes clear that the first use of the word poor is meant to be metaphorical, but I think there’s no denying that the word choice there simply reveals more than is intended. The government’s attitude is that families with children in state schools must be indifferent to education, because if they weren’t, they would have sent their children to private schools, wouldn’t they?

If you’re poor and a parent, you must certainly be a poor parent, and you need to be chivied into allowing your children to be trained to the appropriate mediocre level that will spare the City drones of the future from ever having to do an honest day’s work. If you think that education is a collaborative project between families and schools, and that children need to be engaged rather than bullied, you’re just making “an excuse for not teaching poor children how to add up.”

In other words, if we don’t make schools like prisons now, those children will end up in real prisons later on.

What is unclear to me is whether this reflects reflexive  an intentional policy to drive families who could afford private education out of the state sector, whether purely in the interest of cutting costs or to curtail social mixing.

Trojan hobby horses

Don’t forget: Troy was in Turkey — a Muslim country!

A scandal has been rumbling on in the UK primary and secondary education establishment. A few months ago the UK press splashed around the text of The Protocols of the Elders of Islam the “Trojan Horse” letter, purporting to be a missive from one group of Islamists to another, describing the progress of their nefarious plan to take over and islamise the Birmingham schools, and recommending methods for expanding the process to other cities. The quotes read like uncensored excerpts from Nigel Farage’s fever dream:

We have caused a great amount of organised disruption in Birmingham and as a result now have our own academies and are on the way to getting rid of more headteachers and taking over their schools. Whilst sometimes the practices we use may not seem the correct way to do things you must remember that this is say ‘jihad’ and as such using all measures possible to win the war is acceptable.

One needs to imagine an Osama bin Laden lookalike twirling the ends of his beard and laughing maniacally as he reads this aloud. Continue reading “Trojan hobby horses”

Weird Ed

Thursday were elections — local council elections and European parliament. The European results are being held back until Sunday, when other countries will be voting, but the local results show what look like solid improvement for Labour, big losses for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and substantial increases for the anti-immigrant UKIP. (Substantial because they held only two council seats before, and now they have over 100.) So the main topics of the news coverage were, of course,

  1. Labour is floundering.
  2. UKIP expected to do very well, perhaps get the most votes, in the European elections.

The best I can understand, the opposition is expected to gain a protest vote against the government currently in power in non-national elections*, so the fact that much of the protest vote was soaked up by UKIP makes them look like losers, because their gains were less than expected (if you ignored UKIP). Except, that reasoning is odd: Labour didn’t do badly in an absolute sense; they didn’t do badly in a prognostic sense — the protest vote is fleeting anyway, and their ability to hold it against a clown parade like UKIP says little about their performance in a general election.

But really, this was just an occasion, however inappropriate, for some anonymous Labour grandees to gripe about Ed Miliband. In particular, The Times quoted one as saying Miliband

looks weird, sounds weird, is weird.

Continue reading “Weird Ed”

Ironic headlines: Espionage edition

From a recent front page of the Guardian:

MPs condemn oversight of spy agencies

In fact, the article says that some MPs have recently been criticising the laxity of oversight of spy agencies. But even post-Snowden I think most of them are more inclined to condemn the very notion that mere mortals should have the effrontery to meddle with the security services. I mean, it’s not as though they couldn’t have been asking questions before Snowden had to sacrifice all comforts in his life by forcing this into everyone’s face.

Those people

It seems like it’s a pretty solid PR principle that if your political party is bragging about what you’ve done for “them”, it’s going to seem more like pandering than like identifying with “their” core interests. Thus the Conservatives and “hardworking people” (as opposed to just “working people” who, we know, are hardly working, and usually on the dole). After presenting their hyper-pandering budget with tiny cuts to taxes on beer and Bingo, they went and boasted in a pretty crude advent that blew right across the narrow line between self-promotion and self-satire: Beer and Bingo“The things they enjoy”? It’s this sort of thing that puts hardworking political satirists out of work. Who can top this? Even if you support the goal of cutting taxes on lower earners without judging what they’re using the money for, this is a really odd framing. Could it really be a Conservative priority to encourage people to drink and gamble more? And, of course, this just confirms the way everyone just assumes the Conservatives talk about the sub-Etonian classes when they’re strategising in their country homes.

4p per household

According to today’s Times, the NHS has decided to link all the country’s medical data and then sell them off to vaguely specified third parties, including pharmaceutical companies, is being delayed for six months. Not because anything is wrong with the plan, mind you, but because of a failure to “build public confidence”. Most striking in this context was the report on confidence-building measures taken so far, consisting of £1 million spent to send a leaflet “to all households in the UK”. Since there are 26 million households in the UK, that would amount to less than 4p per household to print and deliver the leaflet. Thus I am not surprised that a survey found that most people said they had not seen the information. (I certainly didn’t.)

King Camerute, holding back the waves

“Prime minister seeks to assert his authority over natural disaster”

Canute: “But it’s not a blank cheque…”

This was a sub-headline in The Guardian. He has pledged unlimited funds to the flood control effort:

My message to the country today is this. Money is no object in this relief effort, whatever money is needed for it will be spent. We will take whatever steps are necessary

However, before he can control the storms, the PM needs to assert his authority over his cabinet, since today the transport secretary said “I don’t think it’s a blank cheque.”

Of course not. Philosopher King Camerute was simply asserting the Buberian I-Thou relationship of the government to money. Money is not an object, it is a subject, and we must respect its concerns. The people whose homes are under water may feel that certain steps are necessary, but the money may have different feelings, and not wish to be instrumentalised in that way.

The Tory idea of education

David Cameron and his Bullingdon circle have education policies borrowed from the Wizard of Oz: Like the Scarecrow, the British public doesn’t need brains, it needs diplomas (see below). And why not? No one they know learned anything they needed to know at university except how to run away from trouble. The value of three years in Oxford for them was that they spent three years in Oxford, and that they were there together with other similarly situated scions of privileges. This is why they see nothing but prejudice in top universities’ reticence to admit the products of second-rate British comprehensive schools. They seem genuinely mystified by the notion that there could be any objective preparation that these children are lacking, preventing the top universities from admitting them to the charmed circle to which all good things flow.

Anyway, their new education initiative is to get more children learning about computer programming, dubbed the Year of Code. The director of the programme, one Lottie Dexter, explained in a recent interview, “You can pick up [learning to code] in a day.” Alas, her busy job didn’t leave her a day free to do it herself, so she knows nothing about programming, and she says she’s planning to space out this day of learning over a full year — minus the month that’s already gone. It’s not just that she lacks anything so crass as expertise in either programming or teaching; or that she couldn’t answer a question about what “code” is; or that her main qualification seems to be her excellent connections to the Conservative Party elite. Even for a non-expert her idea of what’s involved in teaching people this complicated skill are laughably vague: All about “getting people thinking about it now” and “by September they’ll be really excited”, and by the end she’s babbling about computer code as an international language fostering understanding between peoples.

Lottie Dexter explaining how to code reminded me of Monty Python explaining how to rid the world of disease.

 

 

“Rivers of Blood”: An insult (except when we say it)!

Conservative MP Nigel Mills has attacked Liberal deputy leader Vince Cable for criticising Tory anti-immigration panic with a comparison to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, calling on the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills to resign:

It would be very hard for him to sit around the cabinet table having effectively compared his Conservative colleagues to Enoch Powell, which is an utterly ridiculous thing to have done.

The thing is, my understanding was that Powell was always a member in good standing of the Conservative party, until he left of his own accord. And given that he left in protest over Britain’s entry into the EEC — a move that Mills and his faction would like to reverse — it’s not clear what the objection is. Thatcher’s government offered him a life peerage, which he refused. If the Conservatives ever officially repudiated him, I never heard of it. Certainly they never objected when he was bringing in votes from the extreme right in the early 1970s.

It seems like typical family dynamics — “Rivers of Blood” is fine within the Tory family, but it’s an insult when outsiders say it.