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Great was the lamentation among the staff of the General Teaching Council when Michael Gove, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Education, decided to abolish it. Less great was the lamentation from pretty much anyone else. Teachers did not seem bothered.
In case you were wondering the GTC is…
Don’t go away! Sex! Nazis! Nazi sex! Oh, all right, no Nazi sex. But there are evil Australians, so keep reading.
… the GTC is an official body that regulates teachers. When talking to teachers it described itself as in some sense belonging to them; the equivalent of the British Medial Association or the Law Society. (Alas for teachers’ bank balances, it was not nearly as good at conspiring against the public as these two bodies are.) When talking to government it downplayed that aspect and up-played its aspect as a government-appointed regulator.
Anyway Mr Gove has said he will abolish it. A bloke called Martin Dean, co-chair of the Public and Commercial Services Union at the GTC, defended it in this Guardian article.
I was particularly struck by one of the arguments he used to bolster his claim that the GTC was a worthwhile body. He writes,
Gove should have been aware that the GTC has identified over 10,000 people who were teaching but not qualified, and has taken action to facilitate their removal from classrooms. We are still called upon by employers to clarify overseas-trained teachers’ professional qualifications, and we contact headteachers to inform them if one of their staff is not suitably qualified.
In other words the GTC tracked down ten thousand teachers against whom no complaint had been made and forced their schools to sack them, caring nothing for the disruption that caused to the education of the children they were teaching. Ten thousand people who were peacefully doing their jobs had their jobs taken away from them because they did not have the right pieces of paper. In most cases it was not even that these were unqualified teachers (not that I would care, but some people do); in fact most of them were qualified teachers, just not qualified in Britain. What the GTC has heroically put a stop to is the tradition, beneficial to school and teacher alike, of young teachers from Australia and New Zealand doing a few years in Britain before going home.
Consider again that these words were put forward by a member of the GTC in an effort to make people like it more.
Well done, Mr Gove. Now if you could just drop your own magical thinking and credentialism (he has proposed to “increase the status of teachers” by forbidding the profession to those with only a Third class degree*), you might turn out to be quite a useful education minister, in so far as such a thing can exist.
*CORRECTION: Commenter rosscoe says “I don’t think he’s said that people with a third can’t be teachers just that the tax payer won’t pay for their training.”
Tim Worstall writes, “You know the Bolivarian Revolution is toast when…”. His criteria for Bolivarian toastiness is “when even the Guardian is running reports on how socialism makes the food supply go tits up.” He links to a Guardian article about the “economic war” launched by Chavez in Venezuela which does indeed make it sound as if Chavez has defied reality once too often.
Trouble is, as The Remittance Man says in the comments, we saw the same and worse from Mugabe – and he is still in power, sort of. Indeed we saw the same and much worse in the Soviet Union and that lasted seventy years.
How do these regimes hold on for so long? Shopkeepers in Venezuela are being ordered on pain of imprisonment to sell at a loss. One would think they would just walk away. Why does it take so long for Atlas to shrug? Perhaps most of his economic war is just bluster and shopkeepers know this. Perhaps there is some mechanism of benign corruption operating that means that the shopkeepers do continue to make money regardless. Perhaps Chavez is right and they do have a lot of money stashed away and can afford to run at a loss for a time, and also have some reason to believe that this episode will be sufficiently brief that it is worth their while to do so.
Or perhaps the toast is about to burn.
Read Squander Two on Bloody Sunday.
… of course hiding amongst non-combatants gives you a huge advantage. Such tactics would give anyone — the British, the Israelis, the Americans — the same advantages, yet they don’t use them. There’s a reason why civilised people disallow such behaviour, and that is that every single time you step into battle disguised as just another member of the public, you make Bloody Sunday more likely.
I would add that one defining characteristic of a terrorist organisation is that it wants to make Bloody Sunday more likely.
“There’s a very attractive girl in the second row. Dark and dusky … We’ll maybe put a wee word out for her. She’s very attractive, very nice, very slim. The heat’s getting to me. She’s got that Filipino look – the kind you’d see in a Gauguin painting. There’s a wee bit of culture.”
Thus spake Frank McAveety, Labour member of the Scottish Parliament … unaware the microphone was on. Mr McAveety thus ended his tenure as chairman of the petitions committee and the Labour spokesman for sport at Holyrood, and began his career as YouTube star.
Silly old fool. I bet his wife had words when he got home. He must be wondering whether the voters of Shettleston will punish him come the next election. That, and the YouTube, should be punishment enough. He should not have had to resign. Yes, the girl was fifteen (not seventeen as in earlier reports) – but he did not know that. He did not refer to her in explicit sexual terms. He just said she was attractive. I do not believe for a moment that his “put a wee word out for her” was a plan to arrange an assignation. The poor old boy just wanted to give her a tour of Holyrood and bask for a few moments in her proximity, as tubby middle aged men have tried to bask in the proximity of slim young women since the stone age. This is Benny Hill, for goodness sake, not Lavrenti Beria picking out rape victims from the lines of female gymnasts who performed before the politburo.
Yet according to the Guardian a Scottish National Party MSP, Sandra White, described the comments as “sexist, sleazy and racist” (er, why racist?) and said Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray’s failure to act as soon as the incident came to light showed an “appalling lack of judgment”. Oh, and we have spokesmen from Disclosure Scotland (er, why? Just why?) and the Scottish Parliament burbling on about the “The Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003″ as if the mere mention of that was not damn close to libel.
How did we get here? You know the world has got weird when you find yourself defending a Labour politician. You know the world has got weirder when his being Labour is not enough to protect him from the press. How on earth did we arrive at a place where someone as old-fashioned as me thinks this all has got a little bit crazy? I used to be fond of observing that puritanism had moved out of the bedroom and into the recycling bin, but now it’s back everywhere. It’s in the air we breathe, so that every wistful little fantasy, every bumptious little burst of bravado, is potential career disaster – at least for males. Females who do this sort of thing are demonstrating the rich, raunchy sexuality of the mature woman. Just so’s you know, boys.
Added later: A comment from CountingCats sparked a further thought: how come Frank McAveety’s mere words were enough to make him resign from a chairmanship but Chris Huhne’s actual adultery has not made him resign from anything? I speculate that sex comes under the old progressive rules whereas speech comes under the new progressive rules, which are much stricter. Also, he said “dusky.”
I can think about football, but not for very long. So, when I observed the generally convivial, if noisy, multi-racial crowd in South Africa, it did not take long for me to forget about the ball game and start to think about Boudicca’s massacre of the Romans in Verulamium and of Suetonius’ slaughter of her and her army that followed it. This is known as being cultured.
My line of thought was this: although many whites have left Africa, there are also many who are committed to making a future for themselves and their families there. Presumably they are not troubled by the thought that their descendants will eventually intermarry with the black majority around them. Their not so distant ancestors who settled Africa were so troubled yet went to Africa anyway.
Vast amounts have been written about why it is wrong for people of one race to oppress those of another race. Much has been written about why it is wrong for people of of one race to be prevented from marrying those of another. What has been written about much less is why the whites in Africa thought they could succeed in ruling over the blacks and keeping separate from them forever. Because, simplifying massively, that must have been what those early white settlers thought. Racial mixing was not acceptable to them, being ruled by people of another race was not acceptable to them, yet they took the irrevocable step of taking their families to another continent where their race would be vastly outnumbered.
And they did this with the example of Boudicca and Suetonius known to them. Bloody rebellion followed by equally bloody reconquest, and the empire still goes down in the end. By the time whites were leaving Britain to settle in Africa no one knew which of them had Roman ancestors. Did they not wonder whether their descendants would eventually merge with the natives in the same way? Or if not that historical example for the Dutch, French, Germans, Portuguese or Belgians, any one of a thousand others would teach the same moral: that ruling castes do not stay ruling or castes forever.
On the other hand, that word “castes” reminds me that the caste system in India has lasted thousands of years. And the Jews have been “a race apart” for almost as long.
How did the early white settlers envisage the future of whites in Africa? Did they hope to become the majority as had happened, or looked set to happen, in America? Or is this whole business of imagining the far future a purely modern pastime, given that Christians of olden days thought of the time between creation and Last Judgement as lasting thousands rather than millions of years?
(Please, not too much modern politics in the comments. Isn’t there a football match you could watch instead?)
In the United States one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has ever seen – people gathering in their millions to lobby unwittingly for a smaller share of the nation’s wealth
The Guardian’s George Monbiot is talking about the US Tea Party Movement.
Which is it, do you think? Has nobody ever told him about the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy, or does he just enjoy winding people like me up?
Some days ago I went via Instapundit to an article about how the surge of Pentecostalism in Africa may help America in the War on Terror, and from there to this Pew Forum article on the global rise of Christianity, especially in Africa. Very much especially in Africa.
It may even be beating Islam.
I would guess I am a lot happier about Africa’s emerging Age of Faith (in its Christian variety at least; I fear Islam) than most of you reading this post. Yet I cannot repress a sense of disquiet when I remember that there are more people in Africa who think the freeing of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga a bad thing than think it a good thing. If there is a similar case next year the margin will probably be larger; and eventually that will change what happens. Western pressure will no longer work. Indeed, the boot may be on the other foot: the Pew article also says that there are already something like 2,000 Christian missionaries from Asia and Africa at work in Great Britain. Hard work at the moment, but that could change. Most people in the West assume that religion must inevitably decline as the world becomes richer and better educated. I tend to assume, gloomily, that its decline proceeds as the world embraces state welfare. But even the tide on Dover beach turns some day.
I do rejoice for my African brothers and sisters and my political fears may not come to pass. A fervent Christianity can be and has been a force for political freedom. Vile, cruel and hypocritical as the history of the United States is, it is slightly less vile, cruel and hypocritical than that of most nations – they never quite forgot that the Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower were Puritans fleeing persecution rather than instituting it.
Even the teetering balance between Christianity and Islam might do for Africa what the teetering balance between Protestantism and Catholicism did for Europe: let secularism sneak in as the second best option for all sides.
Or we might do a great deal worse. The other rising tide in the world is that of the global progressive elite, the Tranzis. For the first time in human history there is no technological obstacle to a world government. That I have long feared but now a new fear joins it. Barefoot religion meets the bureaucratic, unitary state, how does that work?
Perhaps, led by Africa, we are moving towards something like the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.
“The process is the punishment”, and Dale McAlpine has been processed.
Charges have been dropped against a Christian preacher who told a police officer homosexuality was “a sin”.
Of course they have. So long as someone pushes back, the police will retreat. They know that they would lose in court – they also know they do not have to win in court in order to intimidate. Being arrested is not nice, is it? The mere arrest is quite enough to spread the idea around that saying homosexuality is a sin is illegal.
Dale Mcalpine, 42, was accused of a public order offence after speaking to a community support officer (PCSO) in Workington, Cumbria, in April.
…
Mr Mcalpine was preaching to shoppers in the west Cumbrian town on 20 April when he said he was approached by the PCSO, who told him he was a liaison officer for the local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
“He told me he was homosexual,” Mr Mcalpine said.
“I said ‘the Bible says homosexuality is a sin’. He said ‘I’m offended by that and I’m also the LGBT liaison officer within the police’.
“I said ‘it is still a sin’.”
He said three uniformed police officers then appeared and accused him of using homophobic language.
“I’m not homophobic, I don’t hate gays,” Mr Mcalpine said. “Then they said it is against the law to say homosexuality is a sin. I was arrested.”
Kudos to gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who “condemned the arrest and urged the home secretary to issue new guidelines to the police” – although it is a pity that Mr Tatchell does not follow through the logic of his argument to the case of property rights.
Once freedom goes it becomes a matter of elite fashion just who the police harass. In 2010 it was Baptist street preachers. Twenty years earlier it was homosexuals. Twenty years later it may be homosexuals again. Get yer multiculturalism right and it could be both.
Brown is on the ball yet again
Gordon Brown’s continuing success as Chancellor is a journalistic frustration. His economic forecasts prove more accurate than those of his self-righteous and near permanently wrong critics. It is boring that brick by tedious brick he is laying the foundations of an economy and society that copies Scandinavia’s successes as much as those of the US. And it is infuriating that the predictions that his sums will end in a terrifying black hole never come true.
– Will Hutton, writing in the Guardian, December 2004
“Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid to tell you there’s no money left”
– Gordon Brown’s departing Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne, writing to his successor, May 2010.
Ian Cowie at the Telegraph has an instructive little piece about that now-abandoned scheme of the recently departed government, the Home Information Pack.
So, farewell then, Home Information Packs (HIPs). You were about as much use to homebuyers and sellers as a chocolate teapot. You were even worse value for people who spent time and money training to become HIP inspectors.
Home Information Packs, for the benefit of our overseas readers were… sorry, my brains are going to flee at speed through my nostrils if forced to spend more than a gonzosecond contemplating a thing engendered by John Prescott and Yvette Cooper. HIPs were a very boring thing to do with selling your house where you had to pay the government to send around a fluffy tailed squirrel to tick a box saying you had double glazing. The original idea was not obviously stupid. It was going to stop gazumping by – by – John Prescott! Yvette Cooper! Alert! Alert! Imminent overload! – anyway, there is some similar scheme in Denmark where they have nice painted furniture and socialism works. Alas, they did some research and found that gazumping is only a factor in 2% of UK house sales. Time for the chop, then? No, Minister. Not after they had thought of the name and everything. Won’t somebody think of the publicity? “Minister in a hip new idea!” “Hip, hip hooray for HIPs!”
So HIPs were reinvented as being all about the Home Condition Report, these being something like quickie house surveys except the seller rather than the buyer has to arrange them and pay for them.
Do you see the problem with that?
Full marks. Not very many marks, though, because so did practically everybody else. That, dear readers, is the particular aspect I wish to highlight as being typical of the modern state. The modern state is like the stupid driver at 5 minutes 30 seconds in the Demented Cartoon Movie.
Sure, everyone hates surveyors and has heard a horror story about them, but you did not have to be a genius to figure out that buyers were still likely to want a professional they could sue carrying out the survey rather than a government squirrel. All the home condition report would mean was that in practice the sellers and the buyers would both have to pay. Everybody, even the government, seemed to know it was not going to work but somehow it lumbered on.
Adverts appeared in the jobs freesheets for squirrel-training. It seemed a nice government-backed job for people who were somewhat educated but not very good at getting jobs. Thousands of well-spoken but slightly desperate people took out loans for this training.
Eventually the government got cold feet about the slowdown in the housing market and said that it would remove the requirement that Home Condition Reports were compulsory. So there was no point left in HIPs and they might as well be dispensed with altogether? No, no, HIPs were still totally vital because they were all about the … the … the Energy Performance Certificate. How could a prospective purchaser live without knowing whether his potential dream house was a nice A (short green stripe) or the blood red and scarily long stripe that denoted a wasteful G?
Fine, it turned out. Purchasers were already able to figure out that Ye Olde Cottage with the leaded windows was a G with a Stripe of Shame as long as your lower intestine and if they wanted Ye Olde Cottage they did not care, and if they did not want Ye Olde Cottage but Ye Modern Boxe they could already see the double glazing. After two re-brandings HIPs had became a national moan. Still the Stupid Driver faced with the demand from the on-board computer to steer moaned, “But I’m bad at that.”
With the election and change of government the HIP finally died, unmourned. Even the Association of Sadder and Poorer Little Squirrels accepted the game was up.
Except that in the graveyard something stirs… the Energy Performance Certificate is required by the European Union.
(((:~(>
This is my entry to “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”. It is scarcely original, and the less original the better, I guess.
I take no pleasure from violating other people’s taboos. It is not polite and I wish to be polite. In ordinary circumstances if I want to do something that will annoy others I am willing to put up with moderate inconvenience in order to do it out of their sight. These are not ordinary circumstances. People are being threatened, harassed and sometimes murdered by fanatical Muslims for exercising free speech. The media and academia, fearless defenders of free speech so long as there was nothing to fear, have by and large caved in. So maybe it is time for ordinary people to step up. Lots of them. Spread the risk.
Incidentally, it was good of the Pakistani authorities to help so much with the publicity.
When a party loses power after an election it is traditional for departing ministers to leave personal notes to their successors, usually consisting of advice on how to do the job. In a rare and beautiful display of political honesty, the departing Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, wrote the following to David Laws, the Liberal Democrat who is taking over:
“Dear chief secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam.”
This almost reached the sublime level of the parting message of Reginald Maudling to the new Chancellor James Callaghan in 1964: “Good luck, old cock … Sorry to leave it in such a mess.”
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