Political Rant

Why am I supporting the Labour Party and why do I want Jeremy Corbyn to lead it?

I'll tell you: it's because at last there is someone giving a voice to those like me who really care about social justice, equality, fairness, and above all democracy; those left wandering in the wilderness for thirty or more years... 

After the Iraq war and the introduction of university tuition fees I swore I would never vote Labour again. Then the tone of politics began to change with Ed Miliband's call for increased democracy; greater openness; and a fairer, more just, society. Recognising the limitations of our political system, and its many democratic deficiencies, I decided to vote for Labour again: we at last had a small opportunity to bring about change - a chance to change things back once again to an approach focused on the life chances of all, not just the few.

When Jeremy Corbyn, a great advocate of peace, social justice and democracy - a very honest, soft spoken, polite politician and someone who definitely did not fiddle expenses - stood in the leadership competition, I joined the party to help him fight on behalf of the many forgotten, exploited, and oppressed people living in our very wealthy and prosperous country.  A country that had, in the past, benefitted me to the extent that 15 years ago I had felt it was time to give something back.

There are very many people like me: those who remember very well the hard fights for a better life for all working people, for equality of sex, gender, race, and opportunity, and for the disenfranchised in society.  Many who now clearly recognise that the abundant opportunities for social mobility available to us during our lifetime have now disappeared.  Such opportunities no longer exist for our children or our children's children because too many obstacles have been placed in their path. In my view this is all directly down to the neoliberal politics of Thatcher and their continuation under Blair and Brown.

Blair had won a massive first election on the back of a manifesto that promised much, including the renationalisation of railways, and of energy companies, and the building of more social housing.  He lied - he took our party of democratic socialists and turned it into a Tory lite neocon Party.  Yes, New Labour demonstrated that it had a much bigger heart than Thatcher's government, achieving many good things during the thirteen years it had power and indeed, righting some of the wrongs she had inflicted on us. But economically it developed into an extension of the Tory Party: adapting and adopting the small state, low tax, low pay neoliberal ideology that led us to the current state of gross inequalities, rising levels of poverty, and an increase in homelessness not seen since the showing of Loach's famous film 'Cathy Come Home'. 

Even Thatcher claimed that Blair was her greatest "creation". 

As he shifted direction further and further to the right on the New Labour journey Blair began to ooze labour supporters by the million, election after election their numbers were getting smaller.  He even got rid of many incumbent left wing MPs and shunted in his PPE SPADs - and other New Labour supporters - into areas where they had no knowledge or understanding of people's needs. Local incumbents were dumped: labour activists and councillors who had spent many years building up support for Labour, and often fighting issues caused by their own party's abandonment of industry in favour of a services key economy. The way Angela Eagle herself acquired her seat in Wallasey - a Yorkshire lass in a Lancastrian seat for God's sake - perfectly illustrates how politics was taking on the American flavour of money choosing who represented people in Parliament.  Power shifted away from local people, from local councils, to the centre.  The chances of local people getting a seat as a representative of their communities were taken away.  Which perhaps explains the current dearth of potential labour leaders in the party that led to Corbyn being elected in the first place: nepotism is rife: witness the names of those arguing against Corbyn's tenure: Stephen Kinnock, Hilary Benn.  Recently there was a plan to oust a long serving labour MP from another, even safer, Merseyside seat than Wallasey: the person being shunted in from the centre was Euan Blair.  You cannot tell me that they got their opportunities to enter Parliament purely on merit, or for fighting on behalf of  local people... Luckily Social media kicked into action and Baby Blair is still waiting on the sidelines, his chances of being a British politician have diminished greatly in recent days methinks. So, the power of local people to manage their lives was diminishing at great pace. And personal debt too was rising phenomenally.  

Blair and Brown's deregulation of the banks went further than even Thatcher's did: he allowed gambling to help pay for a crumbling infrastructure and charities to help the increasing number of the poor, forgotten underclass created by Thatcher in her sacking of the unions - a lost generation of workers still struggling to get by today.  This attack on unions continued under Blair as he carried on limiting our rights to withdraw our labour and negotiate collectively; the only real form of power working people have ever had over their masters. 

And then, to top it all, he jumped into bed with his American chum Bush and took us into a disastrous, probably illegal war, that has left the world reeling; teetering on the edge of another big war and he has not been brought to task for it: Justice is inseparable from democracy. If a prime minister can avoid indictment for waging aggressive war, the entire body politic is corrupted.  Indeed some are suggesting that we are on the brink of another World War, perhaps even another manufactured war.  I certainly hope they are wrong despite the words of Theresa May talking about threats of nuclear war are ringing through the press.  At the end of Blair's tenure the Labour Party had lost more than 6 million labour supporters, including many active Labour members, who began to form or join other, new left leaning, parties, disillusioned with the direction Labour was heading.  I was one of them.

Brown fared no better. Then Miliband arrived in the scene, was viciously attacked by the right of the party and corporate media for being too left wing. Sadly, despite being a centrist, he was not trusted by the general public either, so he had little chance of influencing anything.  Then, despite his good intentions, he totally lost us the Labour heartland, Scotland: the birthplace of the labour movement. By standing side by side with the Tories during the Scottish referendum he proved to many people that Labour had become a Tory lite Party, if not quite yet a puppet of the Tories. 

Now, over the last few weeks, the New Labour members of the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party, as opposed to the CLP, which refers to the Constituency Labour Parties - of whom more than 80% of a large number surveyed support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership) have overtly demonstrated tendencies towards the use of the Tories'  nastier, elements such as engaging with the right wing press, to undermine Corbyn's mandated leadership, and more recently by carrying out a coup, long in the making, against Corbyn by resigning en masse from the shadow cabinet; hoping to force him to resign.  They are acting directly against the expressed wishes of a vast majority of CLPs, of Labour Party members, and of union affiliates and supporters in a coup attempting to oust Jeremy Corbyn: the man with a very large majority mandate from members. Only 9 months after he was elected to the position, although many claim it began the day after the leadership election was won. It is not just an attack on Corbyn: it is a direct attack on the membership of the Labour Party and a direct attack on our Democratic processes, which it has tried to subvert at every turn: overtly during the coup and more subtly before and since.

The establishment has always been afraid of the famous "Tyranny of the Majority", regarded by elites as mob rule. We were, when suffrage was initially granted, a large group of predominantly uneducated people. That is obviously no longer the case. Yet, the establishment still fight, and are fighting, tooth, nail and backstabbing thrust, to keep us like mushrooms: kept in the dark, shat on from time to time, and then sold to the highest bidder. 

It is time, now that we have the opportunity, to bring about a PEACEFUL revolution in democratic politics.  That is why I decided to get involved; decided I needed to know why the hopes we had for a much better, more peaceful world in the seventies had come to nothing.  

Our politics has obviously shown itself in a bad light.  We need change and Corbyn is driving US to do that. US, not him. He expects us to get involved and help sort out the mess we allowed to happen by sitting on our backsides and allowing others: to rule over us; to dictate the kind of life we should live; to get our young people into vast amounts of debt from a very young age, and also,deny them any real firm of social security - even the basic minimum wage is not fully paid to workers under 25.  This, so that they will have no choice but to work hard for very little pay, or starve as many are forced to on our so called apprenticeship schemes where wages paid just about cover the costs of getting to work.  Many are exploited more than the old trade apprentices were in the 1960s - at least they left with a real skill worth something.

The evidence for this is obvious: there have been massive increases in the levels of ABSOLUTE POVERTY among WORKING people and their children, now reliant on charities and good will to survive. The differences between relative and absolute poverty are diminishing, which allows the Tories to claim a reduction in terms of relative poverty. And most of the PLP voting against Corbyn voted with the Tories in cuts to welfare, on going to war - their voting records speak for themselves - they do not reflect true labour values of equal opportunity, fairness and increasing equality: quite the contrary.

It is time, now that we have the opportunity, to bring about a PEACEFUL revolution in democratic politics.  I urge people to join the Labour Party; to start learning about how politics works - and doesn't work in our favour - in this country and elsewhere. For, in a world of global multinational corporates, it will take many more workers coming together than just those of any single state alone to bring about the necessary changes. We should all be more involved, use our brains, our voices, and our votes to bring about the changes necessary to return our politics to focus less on economic growth at any cost and more on creating a society that works for the greater good of all.  

We want our Party back - the People's Party: the Labour Party that our fathers, and their fathers before them, fought and died to create. And Corbyn is the man who will help us do that. 

March 2016 - Education White Paper

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/508447/Educational_Excellence_Everywhere.pdf


On a first skim read of the paper, the following paragraph leapt out at me:


"Accrediting new teachers: we will replace the current ‘Qualified Teacher Status’ (QTS) with a stronger, more challenging accreditation based on a teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom, as judged by great schools. This new accreditation will raise the quality and status of the teaching profession, better recognising advanced subject knowledge and pedagogy that is rooted in up-to-date evidence. The new process will put the best headteachers in charge of accrediting new entrants to the profession, and give schools more scope to bring in experts from other fields – for example, a talented musician or coder – and put them on a pathway to full accreditation, where their skills can be recognised." (Page 33)


Note: pedagogy = teaching skills and theory in essence.


So they want to ensure "stronger, more challenging accreditation" eh? Strange that they'd look to American research and theory to discover it... And, given the current performance of this government we need to examine if this really is the case? 

Currently, or rather until this Tory government took control of Education, no teacher could even begin to teach, unsupervised, without having first proved academically that they have 
the basic skills deemed necessary to enable them to teach. This is achieved via first 
obtaining a Bachelor degree in a specialised subject they expect to teach in, or a broader Education degree.  After which one has to successfully complete a postgraduate certificate course specialising in Education; or undertake "on the job" PostGraduate Training, which is overseen by an accredited university in a school that is good enough to be accepted as a training school.  Following successful completion of these criteria, they then have to successfully complete a probationary year actively teaching in the classroom before being awarded full QTS.

Now, let's look at the paragraph from the White Paper, which seems to skuggest that this rigorous process is not good enough:


"give schools more scope to bring in experts from other fields – for example, a talented musician or coder – and put them on a pathway to full accreditation..."

Instead we have here the possibility of in school training, where the implication seems to be that "teachers" can be employed in the classroom, in charge of developing and educating young minds, without having first proven that they have even the basic skills and/or knowledge necessary to educate those young minds in any subject, or having been introduced to the basics of current and developed education theories and practices that have informed the training of teachers up until now.


The decision will then be taken to award the QTS by the headteacher...? Based purely on their effectiveness in the classroom? Without any academic scrutiny at all? Sounds more like the training Jane Eyre got as a "pupil teacher" at Lowood School to me.

"Give scope to head teachers to bring in people" who actually failed to achieve a university degree, but can program computers?  My extensive experience with IT developers tells me that they would not necessarily make the best teachers, no matter how brilliant they were at "coding".  And the same can be said about musicians: being a brilliant musician is neither necessary nor sufficient to be an excellent music teacher, although they make great peripatetic teachers and we already have those available to schools don't we?  A talented writer, perhaps, should teach English? Again, there is no evidence to suggest that being a great writer would automatically make one a great teacher, or even that they have the necessary knowledge of how language actually works in order to teach it to the current expected standard.  A linguist is not necessarily a talented writer either. 


Teaching, in my view, is a profession of its own: one that requires you to prove yourself, daily, as a teacher.  The implications of this paper overall, and this passage in particular undermines that very important profession.  It claims elsewhere that the new accreditation is similar to the requirement of working as an intern in the legal profession before becoming a lawyer.  But they forget that in order to become a lawyer one first needs an extensive and rigorous academic training, which seems to be missing from the proposed requirements to teach in this white paper.  Nowhere could I find any minimum expected standards akin to those we currently expect: a Batchelor's degree - in Education, or in the specialised subject you will teach - and a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, followed by a probationary year in the classroom actively teaching (and the kids themselves generally ensure the worst teachers fail at this stage, no matter how brilliant their academic qualifications).


If this is not the minimum expectation of this proposed experiment, and it is yet another experiment on the lives of a generation of people, we should dismiss it immediately. Is it merely, as I cynically suspect, an underhand way of getting 
cheaper "teachers" into the classroom and thus directly undermining the current professional standing of teachers? In my view Headteachers, no matter how good they are as school leaders, are definitely not qualified to judge academic prowess, or assess the level of in depth subject knowledge of specialist subjects apart from their own.  That requirement should obviously remain where more objective decisions can be made: by universities; i.e. where cost is absolutely
not the first consideration.   


We should also not be accepting this American Research at face value (in my view much of it emanating from neoliberal state shrinking ideology) and then merely "trying it out" on our kids!  We really need to consider just how successful the American system currently isn't before adopting the ideas they've put forward over the last 20 years. In my view it is in a total mess. Finland would be a much better model to consider - if we must change it at all! 

With current advances in technology and in Artificial Intelligence in particular, this is not a time to be downgrading our expectations of the capabilities of our teaching profession.  Indeed to the contrary, we should be ensuring only the best minds have access to the development and education of young British minds: they are our future. Moreover, we can, with the political will to do it, attract those exceptional minds, very easily, in the exact same way we attract people into the most important business jobs: by paying a very competitive salary, instead of as little as we can get away with. If we want British skills and creativity to be the best, we need the best people teaching in schools, helping young people develop critical thinking skills. And yet, at the moment, we are losing far too many of them because of this government's continual experimentation.  It was extremely telling that there appears to be very little said in this paper about dealing with the current issues surrounding teacher retention - at a time when teachers are leaving the profession in droves. I wonder why?


Our kids have only one chance at life, and the success of their lives is dependent largely on what happens during their formative years: in primary and in senior school. Stop allowing our Governments to keep experimenting with their young minds and let our teachers get on with teaching for God's sake. Other countries seem to manage it, let's not follow the failed ideology of American libertarians. 



Open University - the last bastion of those failed by the system

Begun in the the 1960s as an idea of the Leader of the Labour Party Harold Wilson to create a 'university of the air', making use of the new television technology to deliver a form of higher education accessible to the masses. He appointed a wonderful lady called Jennie Lee to take his idea forward and so the first version of the Open University was announced and the first batch of students applied.

But, shortly before the letters of acceptance were to be sent out to the students, Labour lost the general election, Ted Heath's government took up office and the minister in charge of Education was... Margaret Thatcher.

The Tories had totally opposed the formation of this new fangled university and were all ready to pull the plug on the whole idea, but to do so would have been politically risky. The THE tells the story here:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=156304

Amazing eh? Margaret Thatcher - the saviour of the OU...

UK Education: Faith schools, Free schools and academies

My blood is boiling. I came into education because I felt there were problems and they we should all be doing something to make our children's education a better experience.  And, for a while,  things seemed to be improving. 

There was a massive shortage of teachers in 2002 because of the way we undervalued what they did and the farcical pay that such professionals were paid. At the time, I thought even I would be better than none. Thankfully, by the time I had obtained my qualifications, the teacher shortage had largely been sorted: they were being treated more like the professionals they are and salaries had started to reflect their value to society. I know my limitations and at my age, going back to 60-70 hour working weeks would have been extremely hard, even if it could be achieved. I recognised that I would be retired long before I could reach the high standard of many of the experts I had met.  I love working with young people but had to decide to leave the teaching to professionals and to those with the time to develop such expertise. As a cover supervisor I facilitate learning that 'real teachers' have arranged for me to deliver and try to make it as enjoyable and as much fun as possible, whilst still making use of the skills I developed studying psychology and gained experience in as a learning mentor.

Then, the conservatives conned their way into power, with the help of the liberals and a lot of lies about their plans: Michael Gove took over Education and chaos commenced.

I had already written to my MP about my concerns regarding faith schools being funded by the tax payer, I felt that they should be funded by the religions that wanted to inculcate young people with their religious values and beliefs and I strongly oppose it. We should instead be taking that money and putting it into struglling secular schools.  And now, here is Gove not only considering granting creationists access to young minds, and taxpayer's money, but also granting the running of the schools to blatant amateurs in the form of so called 'free schools', people like creationists and others who undoubtedly have their own agendas.  Whether it is to eventually make a profit (albeit by the back door!) or to inculcate young minds with their own inferior and questionable values, it is a travesty and moreover it is a blatant attempt on the part of the conservatives to privatise the UK education system and they need to take education away from local authority control, first.  I don't argue that LA's have had their issues - but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water - it is not easy running public services, as has been evidenced recently the numerous messes caused by private companies making an attempt at doing so.

What makes me feel really angry is the apathy of the vast majority of us who don't seem to notice, or even think about what is happening: we have been brainwashed with materialism and the need to own things we don't really want, never mind need.  Status symbols.  Moreover, we can all plead guilty to treating others, even so called friends and family as means, and not as ends in themselves; when we befriend people who can help our careers and then ditch them when their usefulness has expired is one example.  Kant would be spinning in his grave.

I'm at a loss, for once in my life,  I really don't know what to do, yet.  I keep making use of the system, as is my right.  But I apparently can't seem to persuade those around me to take what is happening seriously enough - I am perceived as 'too intense', 'too political', 'too depressing'.  And it worries me because we are heading for even more cuts, and it seems that people won't notice what is happening until it smacks them directly in the face - by which time things may have got to a point from which we can never return -with all the power in the hands of the wrong people.  Perhaps I'll become a conspiracy theorist :-D

Eighteen months on

And what have we done!  Not happy with making us pay a third more - we now have to find the whole cost of undergraduate courses.  Students from this year will have to pay up to £9000 a year - that's £27,000 for a Bachelor degree.  Yes, they don't pay for it until they leave university but how many people will want to do that.

I have gone for the postgraduate option in my latest foray int gaining knowledge - because that is cheaper, not necessarily because it's the best thing for me to do, but because in order to study in a structured way and get feedback on my skills/knowledge it's more achievable.  I don't want to argue too loudly or someone may notice and put up post grad courses as well.  Deterring people from studying at a time when we need to update skills annually is detrimental to the UK economy - surely someone in power must see this and understand it!

My rant in the middle of a higher education debate

Gordon Freeman writes:

"The taxes of every fast food employee who may never walk on a campus are supporting students who go to colleges and universities around the world. In that sense, the debate [about higher education] is not “academic” or an intellectual plaything, it is profoundly serious. As a result, I believe universities have not only a responsibility to help envision a sustainable future but they have a duty to do so."

I wrote...

As universities are the “manufacturer” of minds running the economy and politics of this country, I agree that university faculties have an obligation to change. Unlike at school, where there is a large focus on citizenship, although arguably not taken as seriously by many schools as it should be, universities have no focus on the wider sense of community and duty other than to create a network of “friends” that can help one get on in their chosen career through their alumni. This sort of self interested networking: developing relationships with those that can help in your career and dismissing any other kind of friendship as irrelevant, then carries on into professional life. The political system is one area where evidence of this can be seen, as is the media - like minded people gathering together to inculcate their views onto other minds.

Universities need to focus more on turning out minds that understand the importance of community and the wider world outside their own particular spheres and disciplines. The focus on self service and regarding oneself as superior to others simply because they have been granted a privileged access to higher education needs to be halted. I would recommend measuring the value (superiority) of a person in society in ways other than the number of qualifications gained in an education system that has apparently produced such self serving, greedy, uncaring leaders that seem to dominate press coverage.

As an aside, the current focus on qualifications as the means to improve the British economy is in some ways farcical. Forcing people who do want to attend college to stay on in the “prison” of education or to “prove” they can do the job they have been doing very well for many years with silly paper qualifications is a joke. Cleaners at my place of work were recently forced to undertake an NVQ in “cleaning” - in their own time, not in work time that is. A waste of their time and our money that made them feel that their many years of experience counted for naught. Someone who has been carrying out a job for years and doing it well should not have to prove themselves in a nonsense qualification that taxpayers and those sitting such silly "tests" have to pay a useless Quango for.

As a later years graduate, who CHOSE to study for a degree, to prove to myself that I was as intelligent as many of the graduates who had dismissed my contributions when they discovered I had not attended a university, I believe that people should be allowed to study if they choose to do so and would certainly reccommend it as a means of learning how to structure one's thoughts. But we must recognise that for some people it is not the way - hands on learning, taught by someone who knows what needs to happen can in some ways be more valuable than theoretical knowledge that is often forgotten and put aside when work actually begins.

The current state of affairs in the country and indeed in the world, highlights the fact that we need more than book learning and worthless paper awards to develop a new future in which everyone should be rewarded for what they do POST EDUCATION - not what they know. I fear that the current focus on getting qualifications, particularly for those who neither want them or need them is taking funds away from those who want to improve their knowledge - as in the EQL debacle.

We know that if we all focused only on our self interests the human race would quickly die out, yet we fail to take account of this in our daily lives these days. And sadly those that spent their formative years in higher education institutions, those now in power, seem to be much more professional self servers than many other members of society who lack a university education.

The ELQ debate

(my contribution to the discussion on the government halting the partial funding for those people who want to study at undergraduate level, although they already have a first degree...)

As someone working with young people I believe it is necessary to have a wider spectrum of skills and knowledge rather than specialist knowledge in one area. I chose to specialise in English at degree level because that was what was needed to achieve my goal to become an English teacher - there was a shortage of these at the time I was studying. But I also discovered I was interested in: social psychology, biopsychology, philosophy, economics and sociology as well as my specialist curriculum subject area. I have been learning about these subjects in a number of ways, one of which is studying university courses at undergraduate level; sadly these part time courses now cost at least a third more than they did before the funding was withdrawn which is making me think twice about signing up for them.

Now, many people would say that it is time for me to move on to postgraduate education and stop wasting my time on undergraduate studies. But as a societal need, I believe we need some people to be educated across a much broader knowledge base. This can only be achieved through access to certificate/diploma/degree courses at the undergraduate level. Specialisms are all well and good but the breakthroughs and new innovations generally come from the bringing together of different disciplines - denying graduates and even PhDs the funding to bring a new focus to their work can only deter some from doing it - and who knows what we might lose.

We need to change minds somehow…