Getting our grammar right

Just when one thought it could not get any worse, the government has announced that it is considering re-introducing a form of grammar school: not, we must all understand, grammar schools like they were before. No. These grammar schools will have all the good bits of the old ones. What they did not say in the initial announcement is what will happen to those students who do not get into grammar schools.

What a contentious choice of subject to have opened with, Mrs May. The reaction was inevitable with instant condemnation from the Chief Inspector of Schools to the Tories' own former Education Minister, Nicky Morgan (who has at last said something useful).

The most pithy reaction was from Nick Clegg who described it on the Today programme as 'A new government foisting their evidence-free prejudices on the rest of the country. There is no evidence at all that that is the answer to many of the problems in our education system.'

In the aftermath of Brexit, I suppose evidence-free is the new orthodoxy, even if it was famously articulated by the derided has-been Michael Gove.

But where does one start in discussing the idea?

Selection in education is fine. We are familiar with selection at the age of 16 when some students go on to do A levels, others to follow more vocational course. These are familiar and sensible for maturing teenagers plotting their future lives. Many schools and colleges are more than comfortable with providing both types of course in one campus.

But how? This is a government that has singularly failed to produce an effective new SAT test. The English grammar test was recently described as 'being more suitable for a 14 year old than an 11 year old'. No doubt they will suggest the mindlessly dull IQ tests of the past. I am sure someone has copies from the 1950s. We could re-use those. Oh yes, plus all kinds of social-engineering indicators 'Do you vote for the Tory party?' 'Are you newly poor because of the EU?' ... and so on.

It is a government that  been in power for just over a year and is already re-organising its half-finished mess of a re-organisation of education. Have we voted on it? Is there a mandate for it?

Has anyone actually joined up the dots between the perceived problem and the proposed solution? I doubt it. It is all prejudice stuff. Provided I say it loud enough the principal sounds sensible. Logic can go hang.

And then there is the manner of the thing. Grammar schools were originally replaced after a series of detailed studies and very careful thought. Passing the Bill through Parliament involved hours of careful deliberation with Three Readings and Committee Stages. Amendments were made and details refined. It was signed off by the Commons and the Lords.

In comes a new PM (with no new mandate) who stamps her foot like the Red Queen and says 'Off with their Head': no studies, no evidence and in the teeth of advice from the experts.

She is supported, of course, by her cabinet, many of whom went to grammar or selective schools. If it worked for me - and look where I have got - it will work for others. Mummy used to read me a bedtime story and that inspired me with a love of reading. Why don't we make that compulsory too?

What a way to run a country.

An after-thought. I am not normally one for conspiracy theories but quite happy to believe anything of spin-doctors. What were the chances that the 'leak' of the policy was not quite accidental as it seemed.

On Monday David Davis gave an appalling performance in the House of Commons, reporting no discernible progress on his Brexit brief over the summer. The following day - surprise, surprise - a photographer 'happened' to catch sight of a briefing paper about grammar schools, three days before the PM made a major speech about it.

They would not have engineered the leak of a potentially controversial policy to draw attention away from Brexit would they? No, it cannot be true. Surely.

The Silly Season is over

The Silly Season is over. Or is it?

Our gallant PM called a meeting of her cabinet at Chequers to which Ministers were bidden to arrive with ideas on how to make the most of Brexit. This photo shows that Boris came well-prepared. He seems to have followed his usual practice of talking without any facts at his disposal.

She appeared on the Andrew Marr show today, her first major interview since the summer and prior to the G20 meeting in Tokyo. She warned that 'Brexit may bring some "difficult times" ahead'.

That's funny. When people warned that Brexit would lead to such problems during the campaign, they were shot down in flames: accused of lying and indulging in 'Project Fear'. It is OK now is it?

And I bet the 'difficult times' will hit the poorest and most-remote-from-Westminster hardest.

Arch-Brexiteer, Crispin Blunt supported the line that migration was the one issue that needed sorting. So it was not about 'taking back control'; not about kicking Westminster in the teeth; not about the disparity of investment in different parts of the country; not about providing another £350m a week to the NHS ... no, it was all about migration from Europe (the smaller part of migration into the UK). As banners at the March for Europe said this weekend 'Fixit not Brexit!'

At the G20, Obama and Tokyo's Prime Minister have both repeated their view that Brexit is the wrong answer for the UK.

It will be interesting to see how the Hinckley Point decision changes once the Chinese have 'had useful conversations with' (aka 'done over') our Prime Minister (who was advised by her spooks to undress under the bedclothes to avoid spy cameras). It is so good to think that we are making the big change to cut ourselves off from our nearest neighbours to be able to do business with such luminaries of human rights as China, Russia and Brazil.

Then President May said that an Australian points-based system was not a silver bullet, overturning yet another of the Brexiteers' favourite policies.

Leaving the EU is the wrong answer to all the Brexiteers' questions. When will someone put a stop to the nonsense?

The only light relief is the New Statesman's schedule to assist the Brexit spin doctors on reasons why the milk and honey is not yet flowing.

Talk to the claw ...

Talk to the claw as the feathers ain't listening

The spectacle of the revered Brian Cox 'debating' with a climate change denier is uncannily similar to a conversation with a Brexiteer.

With the weight of scientific opinion - what he calls 'consensus' - behind him, Brian is unable to make a dent on the fixed conviction of his opponent who is so convinced of his own correctness that his ears are closed.

'NASA is falsifying the figures in an attempt to achieve a world domination'. Well, I suppose it is one-up on 'Europe/Germany is intent on creating a European super-state'.

Debate is such an old-fashioned and blunt weapon for such discussions. Malcolm Roberts uses the well-known domination-technique of the playground bully: 'if this [insert assertion plucked from the blue] is true then ...' Unless Brian has read the report/article in advance, he unable to respond coherently and is left looking as though he is generalising.

A proper 'debate' would involve the sharing of the cases for the prosecution and defence in advance so that individual points could be discussed more intelligently. It would not make as good television though.

The real tragedy is that Malcolm Roberts will go away from that meeting and continue to promote his ill-informed views and attempt to turn these into policy. 

On one point he is right: that policy should be based on facts. You just have to have ears open to hear the facts and trust the experts. Oh, no, I forgot. we are all bored with experts aren't we.

Note: Richard Feynman was an American physicist of the C20 revered even more than Brian is today. To compare Brian disparagingly to Feynman is another of Malcolm Roberts' cheap shots.  

Cornwall's self-inflicted blow

Cornwall was widely derided for voting Leave in the referendum, against its natural interests given that it was in receipt of large sums of EU money. It compounded the damage and was further accused of naivety when Cornwall Council immediately wrote to the Chancellor asking that the 'promise' by the Brexiteers would be honoured.

(It is a fair question to ask why it was mocked for asking for the promise in writing. Were the accusations of naivety because no one in their right mind could have believed the Brexiteers in the first place?)

The new Chancellor chose the Olympic 'Super Saturday', right in the middle of the silly season, to release a statement about guaranteeing funding for scientists and farmers. (No, we are not in the slightest bit cynical.)

Cornwall Council has now issued this statement:

'Following the Chancellor’s statement on European funding, I estimate that Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly could lose out on £350m of funding that would have helped our residents and local businesses.

'The limited guarantee for some schemes leaves Cornwall hundreds of millions of pounds short of what we were promised we would receive by MPs who backed the Brexit campaign. Major funding streams such as contracts for EU structural funds and European Maritime Fisheries projects beginning after the Autumn Statement have no guarantee of continuation at all. This simply isn’t good enough.

'Cornwall Council is supporting the Local Government Association’s campaign for all EU funds to be honoured. With the continuing reduction in our funding from the Government, EU funding, or its replacement, is vital to support economic regeneration, helping individuals to gain new skills and businesses to create well paid jobs.

'Unlike UK funding streams, EU funding has been allocated according to need. This is a really important point for Government to remember and Cornwall Council will keep advocating for resource which is focussed on closing the economic and skills gap between Cornwall and the rest of the UK.

'We will work hard with our MPs and partners to try and secure the funding that will otherwise be lost to the residents and businesses of Cornwall. Cornwall Council will also be working closely with government to ensure that as many projects as possible are contracted before the Autumn Statement deadline.'

Don't you just love the simplicity of 'This simply isn't good enough'? Who says the British have lost the art of understatement?

A good place to start work would be the 5 Cornish MPs who supported the Leave campaign. They 'presumably' had some idea of what was going to happen next. And no, I don't mean vague promises and waffle, Mr Eustace.

Between a rock ...

A wonderful venn diagram has been doing the rounds. 'Sexed up' with beautiful graphics and coloured pens, it sets out, in a nutshell the dilemma faced by decision-makers.

As the immediate dust of the referendum settles and we all sit on our beaches (or walk up Alps) enjoying a quiet summer, there is time for reflection on the self-inflicted hurt that the British people have wished on the country.

As the incomparable Professor Michael Dougan said at the Treasury Select Committee on 5 July, the Brexiteers were ideologues and, like all ideologues, they ignored what they did not want to hear and concentrated on their own interpretation of the world.

We may also be ideologues, believing that the UK cannot be so stupid to ditch membership of the very organisation that has helped the UK to weather the storms of the last forty years, has helped bring peace and understanding to the European continent and has been a force for good not only in so many areas of legislation but throughout the world.

But listen to Michael Dougan (around 11.58) for an explanation of the complexities of developing trade agreements and the lack of realistic options available.

The venn diagram has the words 'Won't crash the UK economy' at the top. That is the thing that the Brexiteers seem never to have considered. They simply did not want to think that leaving the EU might damage the UK economy in both the short and long term and that, in doing so, the UK would not have the money to spend on all the things they had promised, certainly not the £350m per week.

Laura Kuenssberg's piece for the BBC underlined just how inept the Remain campaign had been and showed how Cameron and Osborne had concentrated on economic messages as people had traditionally voted with their wallets. The message failed as people. Instead, people voted with their hearts and the stoked-up fear that the enemy was at the gates. The Remain campaign failed.

An article by Ben Chu, the Economics Editor of the Independent, is headlined Brexiteers are becoming ever more incoherent – could it be they don’t know their own minds? He then launches into a catalogue of the gang of three's naiveties, ending with the immortal line: What goes on in the minds of leading Brexiteers? Who honestly knows. But it’s terribly confusing for the rest of us. You can say that again.

The great question will be whether 'politics' - in the grubby sense of backroom deal-making, posturing and kowtowing to whips - will triumph, or whether we have a Prime Minister who will take into account the advice of the much-derided experts and think about the economy.

If she doesn't then I have no doubt she will go down in history as the joint-worst Prime Minister this decade.

Knowing what you know now ...

Knowing what you know now about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq ...
... would you vote for an invasion?
Or might you argue that the 'arguments' were all a pack of lies?

Knowing what you know now, about:

• The £350m per week that is not going to be available to fund the NHS
• That there is no chance that Turkey would be joining the EU in the immediate future
• That it is unlikely that we will be able to control migration from Europe if we want access to the European Single Market
• That the UK economy actually benefits financially from migration, not the reverse (London School of Economics) 
• That we elect our Members of the European Parliament and they vote on EU laws - ie the laws are not passed by faceless bureaucrats
• That the EU can only make laws on areas that the UK government agrees it can make laws 
• That the UK needs EU trade more than vice versa
• That the likely economic impact of Brexit is that there will be a drop of around 2% in incomes with the poor and pensions hit hardest (London School of Economics)
• ... and that the 'experts' might just have got some of their predictions right ... 

... would you vote to leave the EU?

Or might you argue that the so-called 'arguments' were all a pack of lies?

Let's hope Chilcot has not put the top back on his pen.

Where are we going?

One of the unanswered questions of the recent change of government, for it is hard to think of it as anything but that, is the question 'Where are we actually going?'

Just over a year ago we had a general election and the Tories, to their own slight surprise, found themselves in power with a thin majority. That majority was won on the basis of a manifesto. By tradition, the Lords do not challenge matters of policy contained in a manifesto which seems fair enough.

Being human, we may have voted Tory in the expectation that David Cameron would be the leader and that many familiar faces would be on the front bench with him. That is the nearest we common people come to being able to choose our Prime Minister.

Now, we have a Prime Minister we did not expect. No harm in that. It has happened before, John Major and Gordon Brown being the most recent examples.

The big surprise was the almost clean sweep of the existing front bench that followed. Not that one regretted seeing the back of some of them of course. Out went the 'Notting Hill set' and in came a collection of new faces, many of them women (which was good to see).

So where does that leave the manifesto and does the Brexit vote somehow trump the manifesto or add to it. In short, where are we actually going?

The new chancellor has instantly over-turned George Osborne's target of balancing the budget, a major plank of the original manifesto. The 100,000 cap on migrant numbers - which was a farce anyway - has been formally dropped. Now we seem to be having eleventh hour second thoughts about Chinese investment in Hinckley Point power station which is hardly going to do much for our credibility in future trade negotiations with a country that we are going to need really really badly if/when we leave the EU.

As many commentators have pointed out, we have not even had the benefit of a hustings to see what our Prime Minister's policies might be. All we have is her speech at the door to No 10 which made all the right noises about the common person but, and forgive a slightly cynical note, that sort of thing has been said before and ignored the following day.

The only thing we do know is that 'Brexit means Brexit'. It is unclear whether this should be translated as 'I intend to take us out of Europe' or 'the dictionary definition of Brexit is "a British exit from Europe"'.

The track record of some of the participants is not encouraging.

Our Prime Minister actually voted to Remain and yet seems happy to change her spots to achieve the top job. As Home Office Minister, she managed to miss the spurious and unachievable target of keeping migrant numbers under 100,000. She has no Foreign Affairs or Trade Department experience and is faced with the biggest change in our foreign and trade relations in 40 years.

Our Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling, was described by one journalist as a person who 'had yet to find a ministerial job that he could not do badly or slowly'. He it was who wanted to ban access to books for prisoners and introduced the ludicrous magistrate's charge: two policies overturned (eventually) by his successor. He will be in charge of little matters like airport expansion and HS2.

Our new Lord Chancellor, Liz Truss, was described by one journalist as being 'indissolubly wedded to a set of theories about how the world should be, that are impervious to argument, facts or experience ... She seems determined to dismantle the protections that secure our quality of life: the rules and agencies defending the places and wildlife we love.'

And Andrea Leadsom ... has anyone got anything positive to say?

It is impossible to know where to start with the idea of Boris Johnson being in charge of the smooth, diplomatic Foreign Office and of our spies given his track record of naked ambition, gossip, lying, bumbling and various other misdemeanours. The reaction from other countries said it all as the UK became a laughing-stock.

Liam Fox and David Davies, his Brexit henchmen each carry baggage which is best forgotten.

There are many others. It does not make a happy story. I wonder what they will cook up over the summer and whether, at some point, we will be given the equivalent of a new manifesto or plan for the coming four years. Somehow, I doubt it.

All we can assume is that the government has lurched to the right and so the result is unlikely to be pleasant.

There are two common definitions of politics. The first, more honourable one, is along the lines of the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power. The second is the manoevring and back-stabbing between people which achieves power.

As one correspondent wrote: 'Politics makes such good drama because it is about the lust for power, driving ambition, the balance between cynicism and belief. It is about when to strike - brutal and quick - and when to stay the hand. But it is also about personality, about an inner life and inner doubts that haunt us all. It is about self-confidence and the need for love. Never more so than in this drama.' A damming indictment indeed. If there is a coat then let us turn it.

Elsewhere, we were reminded of the thought that 'values are at the heart of politics. Without values, politics are nothing'. This clearly referred to the first definition of the activity: certainly not the second.