The hypercritical hell of modern Britain

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A culture of hypercriticism is bringing misery to schools -Melanie Reid

In her article in today's Times, Melanie Reid tells how the popular and apparently devoted head teacher of a small rural primary school was found dead in a remote area, in an apparent act of suicide. In the week preceding her death, two school inspectors came to visit for five days. At the end of their visit, the inspectors told her verbally of their criticisms. If it was suicide, she is not the first teacher to succumb to the modern culture of hypercriticism, but simply the most recent.

Melanie Reid goes on to extend this experience to the destructive negativism of modern life in Britain:
This savage ethos does not end with education. Profoundly, this is what lies behind so much misery in our overinspected, fault-finding, glass-half-empty way of life. A hypercritical approach, we now believe, is the only way to achieve. Hence the vicious cycle of impossible standards, false expectations and the communal sadism of beating up those who fail to reach them.

Read this article:
Are schools being inspected to death?

I was shocked to read in many of the comments that followed a complete dismissal of this important analysis of the lamentable state of Modern Britain. I therefore appended my own comment as follows:
It is depressing to read how much of the comment that follows this carefully reasoned article is hostile and sometimes vehemently so.

In this dictatorship by the self-righteous, of which Tony Blair was the pinnacle, we are told constantly what to do by anonymous holders of office, who have an absolute right to pass judgment on us. The poor mug who seeks to live a life and do a job counts for little. Critics and rubbishers are supreme.

The School Inspectorate is a typical example. Of course schools should be inspected. Inspectors are former teachers who have the advantage of comparing teaching practice over many schools but who have the disadvantage of only a fleeting visit and of assessments made through mountains of impenetrable paperwork. As a result their snapshot verdicts may be completely off target. In each case there should be a counter-report by the school and staff, granted equal authority.

And authority is the crux of the problem. No official should decree the education of our children. This should be determined by the free choice of the user. Some hope!


A Times reader who had fully appreciated Melanie Reid’s piece was Jeanne writing from Paris. She said:
The last time I visited England, I was appalled at the petty, officious bureaucratic nonsense that one had to navigate, the tendency to fault-find, and overall the acceptance of this state of affairs by the locals. How can the citizens accept it? This attitude when absorbed by children creates stupidity. When there are all these set standards and objectives, one doesn't have to think for oneself anymore.
Jeanne, Paris, France

Combating the tide of moral authoritarianism

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In his column in today’s “Times”March 25, 2008 David Aaronovitch discusses the way in which the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is stoking up indefensible views from certain church leaders.
See Wicked untruths from the church

Aaronovitch’s contribution is unusually frank and brave for an issue where religious loyalties and hence irrational passions are involved. He deals with the call by the Catholic hierarchy for there to be a free vote - a “conscience” vote - on the basis that, according to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor: “Catholics have got to act according to their Catholic convictions.” And Aaronovitch goes on to point out that this is not a conscience vote in the normal sense, with each person free to make up his or her mind according to freely operating individual judgement. “These are not personal convictions, they're matters of doctrine. Churches constantly change their collective minds about what God says, so what is being asked is that MPs put their Church - not their conscience - above everything else.”

A correspondent on the letters’ page also draws attention to the unacceptability of MPs obeying external rulings from authorities irrelevant to the majority of the people who elected them:

Sir, In suggesting that “Catholics in politics have to act according to their Catholic convictions” (report, March 24), Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor appears to have overlooked the fact that the primary responsibility of an elected MP is towards his or her constituents.

If personal faith or conviction is to be regarded in this way, it is essential that all those seeking a place in Parliament should declare their intentions in pre-election literature so that voters may make their own feelings clear.
Graeme Lutman

Aaronovitch notes in conclusion that every editorial in every newspaper has lined up, “almost languidly, behind the free-vote demand. But in some cases only because they assumed that the Bill will be passed. It is an easy concession to make to the religious lobby - over reproductive rights, homosexual rights, human rights - providing that you don't believe they'll win.”

This pragmatism when entering the minefield of religious controversy is understandable, but Aaronovitch ends with a warning:

“Like most of the Godless (or Godfree), I have no desire to proselytise for atheism or to persuade people out of religions that may offer them comfort and companionship. But there is a growing shrillness and unpleasantness - yes, an unscrupulousness - about the way that some of the top faithful increasingly choose to conduct their arguments. This needs to be combated because, for all their talk of conscience, what Dr Wright and Cardinal O'Brien really seem to want is to tell the rest of us how to live.”

Lord Owen analyses Tony Blair's psyche

In an article in today’s Sunday Times, 16th March 2008, Lord Owen, the doctor who was previously a Labour foreign secretary, examines Tony Blair’s psyche during his time as prime minister. He reaches some very disturbing conclusions. Lord Owen is particularly concerned about the former prime minister’s state of mind when he committed British troops to the invasion of Iraq five years ago this week.
Click on the following link to read it:

Lord Owen on Tony Blair

This is a very important analysis and far more profound than the normal knockabout of politics. To me it is a warning about the dangers of the cult of personality that was established when the overwhelming domination of the left-wing media silenced the normal democratic opposition during the Blair years.

In a post on the 10th October last year, I had questioned how a man of totally British background had been able to transform us into a country oppressed by the alien absolutes of political correctness and had humiliated the people he represented by subjecting us to a sense of overwhelming guilt stemming from a continental religious culture and judgment system. He was a Prime Minister who apologised for his country to the world and gave away his country to all- comers in a madness of uncontrolled mass immigration. To understand this mystery , I suggested that it would be necessary to look into the then Prime Minister’s personality. As I have not been successful in making a link, I am copying the following paragraphs from my own post.
(I have a great contempt for people who quote themselves!)

A recently published book might possibly give a clue to the mystery of how Blair, born a British subject, could be so detached from the nation that he ruled. In her recent autobiography, W Clarissa Dickson Wright , one of the star duo of the BBC comedy series, “Two Fat Ladies”, gives a description of the young Tony Blair, at the time when they were both studying law at university:

"He was regarded as a poor sad thing with his guitar and his rather girlish looks, and was also considered as something of a fantasist; his story about attempting to stow away on a plane to the Caribbean from Edinburgh was a great source of amusement as -there were no transatlantic flights from Scotland back then."

The picture of Blair as an empty soul lacking a sense of direction, presents the possibility that he was captivated later by a person from a different background who gave him a total sense of conviction, while separating him from his roots. Perhaps Tony Blair developed his formidable talents before he met and married Cherie Booth. His later ideas, however, would seem to derive, to a large extent, from his forceful and opinionated wife. The instincts which guided the ten years of Blair rule can be more easily linked to his wife's mindset created by a forceful republican education in a Liverpool faith school, and the passions of a father, filled with the left-wing political allegiances of the acting profession.

The concentration of power that fell to Tony Blair in 1997 allowed him to rule in the style of an absolute Jacobite monarch. Historians of the future will, however, perhaps examine the thesis that the unhappy reign from 1997 until 2007, marked the Regency of the ruler’s wife, Cherie Booth. This idea has much more than academic importance. In the coming year, the European Constitution could be forced upon this country. This will enshrine an authoritarian alien mindset in the British institutions. The British sampled this during the Blair years and found it unbearable

Being serious about border security

THE REFUSAL OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT TO DEFEND ITS BORDERS

A report in today’s Daily Mail tells how nine Afghan illegal immigrants, handed over to the police at the weekend were given travel tickets, put on a train and told to make their own way to a Detention Centre in Croydon. All the nine have now disappeared and melted into the uncounted, unrecorded mass of the immigrant population living in this country. Read about the farce of this incident by clicking the following link:

Illegal immigrants vanish when told to make their own way into detention.

THE POTENTIAL HORRIFIC SECURITY IMPLICATIONS

Although laughter has reverberated wherever in the world this story has been told, the laxity of national security, which the incident typifies is deadly serious. Only yesterday a reporter on a national broadsheet was confidently telling the readers that the heavy loss of life caused by three suicide bombers in Baghdad negated the effects of the army surge of General Petraeus. Hence, by this admittedly defeatist analysis, three terrorists can have the military impact of several US armies. It would be incredible if Al Qaeda had not noticed the strategic importance of the ease of lorry jumping in Britain.

THE POLICE ARE NOT BLAME

During the autocratic rule of the Blairs, when all lived under the diktat that immigration must not be mentioned, police officers learned to accept the widespread flouting of our immigration laws. If an immigrant was arrested for some offence, officers had to notify the immigration officials. At the weekend the police usually found no immigration officers on duty, as the government would not pay the staff overtime. At other times the few immigration officers available were impossibly stretched by the massive increase in their work. As a result the practice was established for the police to write the address of the nearest immigration office on a piece of paper and to tell the offender to attend there on the earliest date of opening. Both police and immigration knew that the person in question would disappear, but this was the age of Blairite spin and of the imperative to live the politically correct constructs.

THE IIMMIGRATION OFFICIALS ARE NOT TO BLAME.
As we have seen above, staffing levels in the Immigration Service were not raised sufficiently to deal with the pressure of mass immigration. The service is under-funded and under-resourced

THE GOVERNMENT IS TO BLAME
The government is to blame for the failings of the Immigration Service for the reasons given. .The government does not give sufficient priority to the all-important task that immigration officers perform. As an example – among the main facilitators of people smuggling are the lorry drivers, who can make a good living from the bribes on offer. The government does not make sufficient effort in tracking down the lorries involved and investigating the trucking firms. There have been woefully few prosecutions and the penalties may not be adequate to constitute a deterrent.

The government has made a tactical decision which is glaringly wrong by trying to stem illegal immigration with officers stationed in the interior of the country. Once immigrants have their feet firmly on British soil, the elaborate provisions of the welfare services swing into action to fix them here and extravagantly funded legal services can guarantee lengthy procedures to fight the cases of those who chose to come without legal rights.

Instead, the government’s priority should be to adequately police the national borders, to prevent immigrants from setting foot in the country. No person or vehicle should be permitted to pass that strip of border which is deemed not to be British territory if the documentation is unsatisfactory and if they raise problems with the security detectors.
Those failing should be immediately re-directed to their foreign port of embarkation as is permitted under international law.

During the last year the government has permitted us to learn of the high level of criminal immigration that has occurred with absence of border controls. It should not be complacent about the opportunities for terrorist immigration, past, present and future.

The suspension of teaching caused by Exclusions Policy

In Conservative Home on 9th March 2008 a young female teacher described an incident in her school, when a Turkish pupil refused to turn off his mobile phone and verbally abused her. Eventually the school's exclusion mechanism had to be set in motion.

The writer of the blog, Graeme Archer, describes the incident and then reviews its educational consequences.

After Mr. Archer goes on to discuss the solutions proposed by the Conservatives, to meet the problems of such schools

Finally the readers' comments that follow express a range of reactions, mainly from Conservatives.

I have posted this as it provides a fuller picture of the thinking of ordinary Conservatives on educational matters beyond the usual sloganising about Grammar Schools.
To read the article click the following link:

The restoration of school discipline

All parents have the right to choose the right school community

We want schools with kids like ours

In the Times Janice Turner points out that some sections of the population - Catholics, Muslims, Jews - have the right to demand the school community in which their children will learn. Middle class parents are denied the same right by bureaucrats, going to extreme lengths to frustrate them. Is this discrimination fair or acceptable?

Read her article with the following link:

Schools with kids like ours

Unafraid to repeat myself, I made the following comment:

The nonsense of school lotteries is pure Stalinism. We have the ruthless central direction, the total denial of consumer choice and the characteristic arbitrary application, with other sections of the population, who count for more in the eyes of the administrators spared their impositions. All this tells us that the gratuitous interference of local authorities in education must end.

The future lies in smaller community schools, offering freedom of choice. With bureaucrats banished they will be developed by parental and local involvement. They will not be privileged, because the specialist area of the curriculum will be organised over a partnership grouping of a number of schools, with equal access gained by ability and commitment.

These are not new ideas but we need self confidence and commitment to achieve them, freed from the dinosaurs of the past.

The failure of socialism in Sweden

Sweden's mad quarter of a century of socialism

On 26th February 2008, Mr. Fredrik Reinfeldt, Prime Minister of Sweden, gave a talk at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The subject that he presented was: "The New Swedish Model: A Reform Agenda for Growth and the Environment"

The speech can be read in full from the Swedish Embassy:

The New Swedish Model

The passage that interested me the most was the following:


At the beginning of the 1970s Sweden also had the fourth highest GDP per capita measured in purchasing power parity. Sweden was blooming. Then came Sweden's mad quarter of a century.

Growth fell off. Unemployment rose. The quality of welfare declined. What, then, were the factors that made the Swedish model stop working?

The economic downturn that followed the two oil crises in the 1970s of course had a negative impact on Sweden. Also, the financial crises and macroeconomic shocks of the early 1990s had substantial consequences for the Swedish economy. But these shocks also affected other industrial countries. And it is difficult to argue that Sweden was particularly vulnerable to the international business cycle.

This alone cannot explain why Sweden fell from fourth place in the OECD's ranking of member countries by GDP per capita around 1970, to eighteenth place in 1997.

Instead, I would argue that the explanation lies in other factors. The vital balance between the institutions in the model disappeared and socialism swept over Swedish society.

We saw budget deficits and high inflation undermine macroeconomic stability. In many respects this was the result of irresponsible and short-sighted political actions.
We saw a sharp rise in taxes, especially on labour, together with an expansion of benefit systems that undermined the work-first principle and made it less worthwhile to work.

The education system was distorted and Swedish schools focused less on knowledge.
Changes in international competition were met with subsidies rather than reforms. Free enterprise was not encouraged; instead it was questioned.

We saw a rise in unemployment and the percentage of working-age people supported by various social benefits and subsidies rose from 10 per cent in 1970 to about 20 per cent in the present decade.

What took a hundred years to build was nearly dismantled in twenty five years.

My personal interest arises from the number of times from the 1970’s onwards, my left-wing colleagues told me with absolute dogmatic certainty that, although Socialism had run into difficulties in most Western European countries, Sweden was a shining example of a Socialist country, with a thriving economy and with social policies the rest of the world would do well to emulate.

Similarly,I was told with equal force that the Communist East German economy was the most prosperous and most stable in the world, immune from the buffeting of market forces in the Western world. The fall of the Berlin Wall, whose existence caused these same colleagues no problem, showed East Germany to be an economic basket case.

It is consoling that time writes its own history, plain for all to see. It is sad that so many prefer not to read it.