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.