Week 27 2012 3rd July 2012

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘Education, Education, Education’

            The above three words were an indication of the important priorities of one of Tony Blair’s governments.  I remember that, on an official visit to Moscow, he even managed to introduce this slogan into a Russian tv programme.  However the educational standard of a great many school leavers of recent years suggest that not many people took those three words very seriously.

            A regular blog reader who is founder and managing director of a small but flourishing business (the kind of business man that David Cameron, George Osborne and their colleagues hold up to us as a shining example) is unimpressed with the educational ‘progress’ of the past forty years.   Commenting on my recent blog about the Education Secretary’s suggestions for the future direction of primary education, and his more recent proposal that the GCSE school leaving exams should be abolished and the more-demanding ‘O’ Level GCE exams restored, he says that although he isn’t an admirer of Mr Gove, the Education Secretary, he does think that it would be a good thing if all the ‘advances in education’ that have been made since the 1960s (when he was at school!) could be reversed.

            He had recently seen an ‘O’ level examination maths exam paper from the 1960s and had had an opportunity to compare it with a GCSE paper set last year.  The 1960s questions were as challenging (simultaneous equations and the like) as he remembered them but those set last year were trivial in the extreme.   Here are a couple of them ‘Write this number in words – 1,234’ and ‘A worker was paid £5.20 per hour, he did four hours work. What should he be paid?’

            And that was for an exam at the end of five years of secondary education.  One would really expect an intelligent eleven year old to answer them correctly!  If I had found those maths questions on my maths school leaving examination in 1937 I’d have been quite sure that they were ‘trick questions’ and would have wasted valuable exam time trying to work out the catch!

            No wonder, says my correspondent, that a 40 percent pass rate has risen to 60 percent (I’m only surprised that it isn’t even higher!) and that bright children regularly get as many as ten Grade 1 passes and make a mockery of the whole system!

            Nor, he says, is it only in maths that children are unchallenged. He is an IT consultant and creator and supplier of specialised software. He says, ‘I have had enormous pressure to include a spell checker in our database system. This is because young people today make no effort to spell correctly.  They just type any old thing and expect to see red lines under the errors!  We have also been asked to ‘convert’ automatically names and addresses entered to capitalised first letters because staff aren’t used to doing that any more (well, you wouldn’t when you text, would you?). I notice that whenever they enter a new address they do it all in lower case!

            Nowadays, so my correspondent claims, it is possible to get right through University without ever even learning to speak properly!  Such young people are at a huge disadvantage in the world of business and are left totally without self-confidence in any professional or representational situation.

Hitting the Target

          When I was a little boy of eight or nine I joined what we then called ‘the Wolf Cubs’.   They were the junior branch of the Scout Movement and are nowadays, I think, called Cub Scouts.  The ‘Wolf Cubs’ were based on Kipling’s Jungle Book, passages from which were often read at our Meetings.  Each group was called ‘a pack’ (I was in the 11^th Ipswich, St. Thomas’ Church pack) and it was led by Akela, in our case a very earnest and enthusiastic lady called Miss Eva Hack, in her early thirties, wearing a scout uniform with a khaki skirt.  Ladies didn’t wear slacks, and were even less likely to wear shorts, in those days.

            At the beginning of each meeting Akela would call out ‘Pack! Pack! Pack! To which we would shout ‘Pack!’ and gather in a circle, with her in the middle, for a ‘grand howl’.   We would then, as I remember it, recite the Cub Promise:  ‘I promise to do my best; to do my duty to God and the King, and to try to do someone a good turn every day’. Akela would then solemnly say ‘Dyb, Dyb, Dyb’. We would reply ‘We’ll Dob, Dob, Dob, Akela!’ and leap into the air.  The grand howl was over and the meeting could begin!

            Akela’s thrice repeated Dyb was an acronym of Do Your Best and our, also thrice repeated, reply was assuring her that we would Do Our Best!

Ernest Hall the Wolf Cub. Circa  1929/’30  

It really was good advice and it is advice that, throughout my life, I have tried hard to follow.  I haven’t always succeeded and my best hasn’t always been a very good best but, on the whole, if I have thought that something was worth doing, then I’ve really put my heart and soul into it.  This blog, for instance, I usually complete several days before publication on the web.  Then I read it through again and again, altering a word here and a phrase there until I feel that the grammar and syntax are as good as I can get them.

            Similarly when I was Tendring Council’s PRO or, earlier, Clacton’s Housing Manager I really put everything I had into the job.  I rarely took my full holiday entitlement, and certainly never watched the clock or took the odd day off with an imaginary malady.

            Joy and satisfaction in one’s job isn’t required these days.  It’s no good getting too interested in it and attached to it anyway.  We’re constantly being told that there’s no such thing as a ‘job for life’.  The work force has to be flexible.  You may be made redundant tomorrow and have to train for some quite different occupation to meet the demands of ‘the Market’.

            Nowadays it is assumed that nobody works for job satisfaction – money is everybody’s principal, if not sole, motivation.   To spur us on and make sure that we keep our noses to the grindstone we are given, usually by ‘human resources management’ experts, ‘targets’ that we are expected to meet. Salesmen have a fixed target of successful sales.  A receptionist at a busy office might be expected to deal efficiently with a certain number of visitors per hour; Casualties brought into a hospital accident and emergencies department shouldn’t have to wait more than, say an hour, for attention and should be discharged or passed on to another hospital department within three hours.  Social Workers are expected to deal with a fixed number of cases every week.  Schools are expected to get a given number of good GCSE passes.

            The target can be used as a threat.  ‘The government is making it easier to sack unprofitable workers and if you can’t reach the target I’ll have to look for others who can’.  It can also discourage staff from working beyond the target.  ‘If we do that they’ll simply raise the target – and then we’ll be in dead trouble when we’re really busy’.

            At the other end of the income scale, managers regularly reach and pass targets that they themselves may have set, thereby ‘earning’ enormous bonuses on top of their already inflated salaries;  bribes to persuade them to ‘do their best’, something that was once taken for granted.

            Hit that target!   That’s today’s message – and never mind how many corners you have to cut, how many dodgy deals you may need to strike and how much human tragedy you may cause (that’s just ‘collateral damage’) on the way.

            I reckon that if there were wolfcub packs today as there were in the 1930s Akela would no longer urge her flock to DYB! DYB! DYB! and expect to be answered, ‘We’ll DOB! DOB! DOB!’ but RYT! RYT! RYT! (reach your target, reach your target, reach your target) and be answered,  ‘We’ll ROT, ROT, ROT’ ( We’ll Reach our target, Reach our target, Reach our target).

            How very appropriate!

 Integrity in 'the City'? - Don't Bank on it!

          Last week I commented on the revelation of incompetence that inconvenienced – at the very least – thousands of bank customers.

           

This week there have been much more serious revelations;  of banking dishonesty, directly affecting Barclays (I reckon that the bank’s 17^th century Quaker founders must be turning in their graves!) but suspected of involving other national banks as well.   There are demands for a public enquiry on the lines of the Leveson Enquiry into press misconduct, and demands for criminal prosecution.  The response, so far, of Barclays Chief Executive that he won’t be accepting his usual few-million pounds bonus demonstrates how little he understands the scale of public anger*.

            What we are seeing is evidence of widespread dishonesty and corruption in  ‘the City’, a field of commercial activity that has been regarded, by politicians at least, with awe and respect.  This is where self-made billionaires are engaged in activities that ordinary mortals can’t hope to understand but upon which, so we have been told, the UK’s prosperity depends.  Its most favoured denizens aren’t just ‘millionaires’ in the sense that their assets are worth in excess of a million pounds. Their annual incomes are in excess of a million – and, of course, that’s before they collect their annual million-pounds-plus bonuses!

  Because ‘it might harm the city’ David Cameron has distanced us from our mainland European partners and vetoed legislation that might narrow the gap between rich and poor.  The denizens of ‘the City’ were among the principal beneficiaries of George Osborne’s ill-fated Budget.  One provision in that Budget that has remained unscathed is the iniquitous reduction in the upper rate of income tax, affecting only those with an income in excess of £150,000 pounds a year!

One thinks of the Conservative Party as being the natural champions of ‘The City’ and, of course, its finances are as reliant on ‘City’ donations as the Labour Party is dependent on those of Trade Unions.  However, as Conservative spokesmen have not been slow to point out, New Labour was no less blind to the machinations of high finance.  A New Labour Government helped to free the Financial Sector from some of the tiresome regulations that were hampering its activities.

I have remarked before in this blog that, just as Ramsey MacDonald betrayed Labour’s principles because he allowed himself to become dazzled by Duchesses Tony Blair and his colleagues were blinded by billionaires!

Not everyone was blind though.  The supporters of the Occupy Movement who protested on the steps of St Paul’s (remember the Mail’s scathing comments about them) – and in Wall Street, New York; the Red Square, Moscow and a score of other world-wide venues, may not have known quite what it was that they wanted. They did know exactly what they didn’t want though – an immoral and unfair economic system manipulated by a handful of self-serving greedy and powerful people, which penalises the poor, the disadvantaged and the disabled, and pours wealth into the laps of the already wealthy.  May the Occupy Movement’s cause prosper!

*Late News (2nd July 2012)  Yesterday Bob Diamond, Barclays Chief Executive, informed his colleagues that he would be leading the Bank's reconstruction, made necessary by the current scandal.    Today - under pressure - he has resigned his post.  Those worried in case he'll become another of those 'benefit scroungers' the rest of us have to support, can be reassured.  I have just heard on Radio 4 that he'll probably get a golden handshake of between £20 and £30 million!  That'll be a relief to Daily Mail readers.

           

           

              

  

Week 15 2012 12.4.2012

Tendring Topics .......on line

 ‘The New Levellers’?

            The overwhelming victory of the RESPECT Party in the Bradford by-election must have come as a shock to the leaders of all three of Britain’s main political parties.  Labour, of course, will have been  particularly dismayed because they had regarded Bradford as a safe seat and had been looking forward to humiliating the Conservative and Liberal Parties after an unpopular millionaire-friendly coalition government budget and the scandal of cash-for-cosy-dinner-parties at 10 Downing Street! 

            In the event the result reflected nation-wide disillusion with both the government and the opposition.   For some time I have feared that this disillusion, which I certainly share, would lead to the emergence of a charismatic ultra-nationalist, ultra right-wing leader (probably with support from the ‘tea party’ fanatics in the USA) who would promise to restore Britain’s ‘greatness’ and lead us instead – as Hitler led the Germans – to utter disaster.  Fortunately, there is no sign of the emergence of such a leader in the ranks of either the BNP or UKIP, the parties whose members would be most likely to give him or, of course her, their support.

             I can’t feel any enthusiasm for George Galloway and his RESPECT Party who had such a remarkable victory in Bradford.  I may be misjudging them but they seem to me to be remarkably like the reverse side of the British National Party coin!  I would feel even less enthusiasm for a RESPECT government than I do for our present government of millionaires for millionaires.

            Surely now though, in this time of disillusion, there could be  potential success for a new Political Party that would be neither  ‘left’ nor ‘right’; one that would serve the interests of the whole community, ensuring that in good times or bad, we were truly ‘all in it together’.  The principles of such a Party have, as I pointed out in this blog a fortnight ago, been endorsed by the leaders of all three of the existing main political parties, but have been quickly forgotten when they had the opportunity to put them into practice.

             I am, of course, referring to the principles and objectives of The Equality Trust (www.equalitytrust.org.uk); principles and objectives that I realize I have supported and promoted for many years.  I would though have had difficulty in explaining exactly why I did so until I read The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, first published by Allen Lane in 2009 but now, in paperback and with additional material, by Penguin books.   Richard and Kate, both University Professors, have established from existing national statistics that among the developed nations, those with the smallest gap between the incomes of the wealthiest and the poorest members of their communities are better off in every respect (life expectancy, infant mortality, criminality, education, marriage breakdown, teenage pregnancy, anti-social behaviour) than those with the larger and the largest gap.

            It is not only the poorest members of society who benefit from greater equality.   The benefits are noted throughout the social strata, by rich and poor alike.  We would all feel the benefit of living in a society in which there were no abjectly poor and no super-rich.  This applies not only to sovereign nations but, in federal societies like the USA, to individual States.

             

It was equality of this kind that the members of the world-wide ‘Occupy’ movement, who camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral and demonstrated (until brutally broken up!) in Wall Street, New York and in Moscow’s Red Square, were seeking.  I believe that attempting to achieve equality by influencing the politicians of existing parties is doomed to failure.  They are all receptive of the idea, until the opportunity arises for them put words into action. They then all find themselves blinded by billionaires!

            The time is surely ripe for the formation of a new political Party with the over-riding objective of levelling incomes.  It could expect to recruit disillusioned supporters from all the main political parties.  It certainly wouldn’t be short of idealism and intellectual weight and it could, I hope, to draw on the courage and determination of supporters of the Occupy movement.  It might perhaps be called The New Levellers or the NLP, a tribute to the original Levellers of the 17^th century, and a promise that its policies, practices and funding would be ‘on the level’, dependent on the contributions of its members and supporters, and subservient neither to millionaire donors nor to the Unions.

Oh dear, daydreaming about a possible political party that doesn’t, and probably never will, exist is surely an indication of advanced senility!  I had even found myself wishing that I were half a century younger so that I could be an active member of that exciting (but sadly imaginary) new Political Party!

Who owns our water?

          I am writing these words on 5^th April, the day on which a hosepipe ban came into force for almost the whole of southern and eastern England – except for the Tendring District, England’s driest area!

            Needless to say the hosepipe ban and the maximum penalty of £1,000 for flouting it has been the subject of much public debate on radio and tv today.  Much of the argument related to whether or not one should report an errant neighbour who was ignoring the ban and using a hose to water his lawn or flower beds.  There was discussion too about the fate of garden centres and their suppliers and of professional gardeners in a drought-stricken southern and eastern England.

            Several viewers and listeners  suggested that before the water companies imposed restrictions on householders and forced those dependent on water for their work out of  business, they should do a lot more to stem the thousands of gallons of water that flow away to waste every day from leaky mains supply pipes and from delays in dealing with burst pipes.

            During the discussion it emerged that less water is wasted from Germany’s water mains than from those of any other country in Europe*.   This, it was claimed, is at least partly because water supply in Germany is a local authority responsibility, as it once was in Britain.  Immediately on spotting a leak householders phone the Mayor or their local councillor to inform him or her in no uncertain terms that if that leak isn’t dealt with promptly they needn’t count on a vote from this taxpayer at the next local election!  Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has been compared with Margaret Thatcher.  She may be equally bossy – but, unlike her British counterpart, she clearly has had enough common sense to realize that vital public services like water supply need to be under local democratic control.

            Our water supplies are no longer, as they once were, under such control but are the responsibility of private companies whose first responsibility is not to the public but to the shareholders.  It simply isn’t cost effective to deal with every leak the moment it is reported, and cost-effectiveness, together with productivity and profitability form Mammon’s Unholy Trinity. In an unfettered market economy, Mammon Rules – OK!

*The European country that wastes most water through leaky mains is Bulgaria.  So, while our record is awful compared with that of Germany, it’s quite good compared with Bulgaria.  That, I am sure, is something of which David Cameron and co are proud!

The Preston Passion

            Did you watch The Preston Passion on BBC1 on Good Friday?  It was transmitted from 12 noon till 1.00 pm, hardly the best time to transmit a programme that demanded the whole of every viewer’s attention.   I recorded it and watched it in the evening. I expect that many others did the same.

            There was colourful dance routine in which scores of ordinary Preston citizens took part, the enthusiastic singing of well-known and well-loved Easter hymns and three pre-recorded playlets illustrating aspects of Christ’s Passion in a Preston setting and taking place in the mid-nineteenth century, during World War I and in the present day.

            During a strike at a Preston cotton mill in the 1840s an innocent man was brought before the Mayor, as Chief Magistrate, for summary punishment and as an example to others.  The Mayor, like Pontius Pilate, hesitated and then gave way – washing his hands as did Pilate after he had condemned Jesus to crucifixion.

            The overwhelming grief of the mother of Jesus and of his other women disciples was portrayed by Preston women waiting at the railway station for their sons to return from the horrors of the trenches in World War I – and learning that they would never come home again. An example of willing self-sacrifice was demonstrated by a pre-teens Preston girl who sacrificed herself, and her meagre savings, to support her sick mother and to make sure that her siblings didn’t go hungry.

            It was all very moving and very worthwhile.  Perhaps it was right that the viewing public should be spared a depiction of the full horror of a 1^st Century Roman crucifixion; the stripping and flogging, the mockery and deliberate humiliation, and the long, slow and agonising death of the victim, nailed to the cross.  Goodness knows there have, even in recent years, been torture chambers in which untold horrors have been inflicted on our fellow men and women. If there are any today they are kept secret. I was about to write that there is – happily – no present day equivalent of public torture and execution providing an entertainment for some and a warning to others.

            It wouldn’t be quite true though.  The public stoning to death of women accused of adultery (I haven’t heard of male adulterers facing the same fate, but perhaps they do) is surely comparable with crucifixion.  The victim is buried to the waist and stones hurled at her until one merciful stone ends her tortured life.  This was the practice in Afghanistan under Taliban rule and is still the practice in some other parts of the world today.  Like crucifixion itself though, it is something that we prefer not to think about and not to see on our tv screens.

            God sees it though – and weeps, both for the suffering of his human children and for their wanton cruelty to each other.  ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done them unto me’, said Jesus Christ.

A Question of Priorities

          Have you been watching any of the many tv programmes inspired by the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912?  I have found Len Goodman’s commentary particularly gripping.  He, it appears, had been a welder in Harland and Wolff’s Belfast dockyard before embarking on his career as a dancer.

            A feature of the Titanic story that I found fascinating was the imaginative and single-minded way in which  the White Star Line had served the interests of its shareholders and done its best, in the face of disaster, to save the company.  It would surely have brought joy to the hearts of our present Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

          Having spared no expense to ensure that 1st Class passengers would have every luxury to which they could possibly have become accustomed,  how wise it must have seemed  to save money by  having less than half the number of lifeboats that would have been required to accommodate all the passengers and crew. They would never be required.  The Titanic had been declared to be ‘unsinkable’ but having a few lifeboats visible to all on board would surely reassure even the most nervous passenger.

            Then there was the ground-breaking decision to sack all surviving crew members with effect from the moment when the Titanic disappeared beneath the waves.  It would really have been absurd to continue to pay members of a crew whose sole raison d’être lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean!  It was no concern of the White Star Line that surviving crew members would find themselves unemployed and penniless in New York. There were surely charities to deal with that sort of thing. It makes our present government’s actions to make it easier for an employer to sack employees seem positively philanthropic.