We need to talk about Tristram

I'm a member of the Labour Party. Being a member of any political party makes me a little bit weird - formal participation has been declining for many years. I'm even weird amongst my friends. Most of us are socialists, and we're not especially welcome in the Party. But I carry on because I'd like to have even a tiny say in the policy determinations of a party that has a strong chance of winning a general election. I admire my friends who spend their time arguing over the minutiae of leftwing ideology before standing in the rain selling three sectarian newspapers a week, but let's face it: that's more of a hobby than a plan for government. 

So I'm in the Labour party. I joined to vote for John McDonnell in the leadership election that led to Gordon Brown's elevation. What can I say? I unerringly support the losing side. I wanted Denis Kucinich to win the US Presidency. I've met both Milibands, and far preferred Ed. David struck me as an unreflective and cynical machine politician. Ed, for all the scrapes he gets into, seemed to be principled and genuinely interested in the people he met.

But my party doesn't make it easy for me to remain a member. There's the whole embrace of neoliberalism, for a start. Then the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture, the kidnapping, the deregulation etc. etc. ad infinitum. There's the latest wheeze, which is to punish young unemployed people for the bankruptcy of Britain (caused by the financial sector) by reducing their social security support. It's marketed as 'help to train' so I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the 'help' is significantly lower than the current rate of unemployment benefit.

But most of all, there's the Honourable Tristram Hunt MP.

Tristram is the privately-educated son of a Lord (not that I'm particularly bothered about that: Benn and Dalyell were both quite posh) who was unaccountably parachuted into the poor and socialist constituency for Stoke-on-Trent Central, apparently thanks to the machinations of his friend Peter Mandelson. Tristram is an historian, or as the newspapers put it, a 'distinguished' historian, i.e. one who can produce a decent narrative from interesting though not essential material without troubling the reader with tricky metaphysical questions.

Tristram is the Shadow Secretary of State for Education. That means his job is to oppose the work of Michael Gove, the man who thinks that education should be given to private corporations who'll reproduce the atmosphere of Mr Gradgrind's drone factory and make a profit along the way. Mr Gove wants you all to become junior Empire Loyalists who know that Muslims are Bad and the British have been, are and always will be White, Christian and Nice.

Tristram isn't up to the job. Worse than that: he agrees with everything Mr Gove does. He simply feels that Michael could be a little more efficient. For a very clever man, he seems incapable of thinking anything through beyond the question that obsesses all rightwing Labour politicians: 'what will the Mail say about this?'.

Not only is Tristram incompetent, deeply conservative and entirely lacking discernible Labour values, he actively works against his party's history, beliefs and members. A few months ago, this former academic went back to Queen Mary College to deliver a lecture (apparently he doesn't consider being an MP and shadow cabinet member constitutes full-time employment). To do so, he crossed a legal picket line of his own colleagues. The subject of that lecture? Socialism. The biographer of Friedrich Engels stirred the workers with his principled defence of the right of exploited workers to withdraw their labour:

"I support the right to strike for those who have balloted to picket. I have chosen not to join the strike." Mr Hunt, who is also the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, said his "personal commitment remained to the students" he was lecturing.

Funnily enough, that's the exact same claim deployed by my scab colleagues here at The Hegemon. It is, of course, transparent bullshit. I took strike action because I'm committed to my students: I want them to be taught by rested, decently-paid academics who have the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research, not by exhausted hourly-paid ones exploited by a management that cares for nothing beyond bums on seats, while the financial sector or whatever creams off potentially great thinkers.

I won't be going to my constituency party's summer party to be lectured on Labour values by a man who betrays his colleagues and his comrades. The continued presence of Tristram Hunt, while marginal compared with all the other failures of the political class, has become symbolic to me of a party leadership which can't throw off the mental shackles of the New Labour period, a clique which is more concerned with appeasing the right than developing the self-respect required to make a case for socialism and persuading the voters of our cause.

I know that my party's local and national representatives will write off my whinging as typical of a privileged élitist, but they're wrong. You don't have to be a raving Trotskyist to understand that you don't cross picket lines, especially when you're a massively rich person earning a second or third income by taking work done by former colleagues protesting about eight years of declining pay.

Tristram is the touchstone of the debate, a symptom of the cowardice and isolation of the upper reaches of the Labour Party. If you can't find anything to argue about with Michael Gove, you're in the wrong party and the wrong job.

The Tory Taliban Taking Over Our Schools

According to Michael Gove, you need a former anti-terrorism spook to sort out the mess in Birmingham's schools. Homophobia is rife. Children are segregated by sex. Respect for other cultures is sorely lacking. Misogyny is the order of the day. Little respect is shown to the lives and beliefs of others. Schools must inculcate 'British values'.

It seems unlikely that Gove is the standard-bearer for multicultural, progressive values. Like most of his Cabinet colleagues, Michael attended a fee-paying school, almost of all which were single-sex. He even complained that there were too many Old Etonians in the Cabinet! At least school drop-out John Major has a leg to stand on.

What did Mickey and his chums learn in their posh single-sex schools? Largely, I suspect, the homophobia, misogyny, chauvinism and social Darwinism they detect in these Birmingham schools. If he really is against segregation, he should be looking very closely at Eton and all the other private schools.

What are these 'British' values he intends to promote? Anyone with half a brain should assume that it's just an empty signifier for stuff the Daily Mail will like (not stuff the Mail will actually do, of course: its owner lives in Wiltshire mansion while claiming to be a French non-dom for tax purposes while the paper is itself owned through a series of Bermudan shell companies). While British right-wingers complacently mutter about 'fair play', decency etc., two-thirds of the world's nations were invaded by Britain at various points, up to the last decade. To them and many of us, Britishness means illegal wars, torture, invasion, occupation, exploitation, the invention of concentration camps (during the Boer War), the industrial murder of political activists, the crushing of native languages (Wales, Scotland, Ireland), the deportation of entire peoples (the Chagossians for a start), UKIP, Jean Charles de Menezes, stop-and-search, cops sleeping with environmentalists to spy on them, zero-hours contracts, a Prime Minister who thinks buying the products of slavery is a matter of consumer choice, slavish devotion to whatever the United States wants at any particular moment, the bullying possession of nuclear missiles, support and weapons for the most disgusting and oppressive governments – apartheid South Africa, Iraq, Pinochet, Saudi Arabia – conscious support for tax havens to stop developing (and developed) countries claiming their rightful share of taxes to fund public services, ATOS, privatisations galore and of course a comfortable bolt-hole for plutocratic dictators, oligarchs and other thieves to hide their billions in.

What a cynical view. Of course, there's another Britain - that of the NHS, the National Trust, poets and Chartists and Tony Benn, the Guardian and allotments, trades unions, political party members, Swampy, cricket, trainspotters, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, Tolpuddle, striking miners, the Poll Tax rebels, eccentrics, Ivor Cutler, Stereolab, Pulp, John Cowper Powys and Mervyn Peake, Peter Tatchell, Shami Chakrabarti, Mary Beard, Gareth Peirce, Edward Carpenter, Dennis Skinner, the Mitfords (well, Jessica anyway) and a whole panoply of square pegs in round holes. The country that sheltered Karl Marx. That's our Britain, in a sense. The difference between them is power. 'Their' Britain is the captured state, used for pursuing the narrow ends of a small elite group. They're an unwieldy coalition, most clearly captured by John Major's evocation of a Britain of:

A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.

 This is the Britain he and Gove claim to want: ruralist, monocultural, gentle, conservative with a small c. Sadly the cricket ground is now a car park, the beer is Carling, the suburbs vote UKIP and the old maids (very patronising) get hit by lorries.

The problem is that everything they do subverts the Britain they claim to want. Gove talks about freedom but is now personally in charge of thousands of schools once democratically overseen by elected councillors. He's handed them over to his corporate friends (I genuinely don't understand why parents aren't rioting over their kids' schools being handed over to carpet-makers and creationists hedge funds) and they're being milked dry. Take Sir Greg Martin, of the Durand Academy. As head, he earns £230,000, about £20,000 more than the VC of my university and much, much more than the Prime Minister. This is all taxpayers' money, of course. But that's not all. Clever Sir Greg has another job on the side: he owns GMG Ltd. What do they do? They run the school on a day-by-day basis. That's another £256,000 for paying the rent and doing the typing. No doubt it's a complete coincidence that the headmaster's company got the job and it was all done at arms length: they were subcontracted by London Horizons, a company that, completely coincidentally trades from Durand Academy. Then there's PLMR Ltd, which handles the school's PR needs (I know, I know: a school 'needing' PR): entirely coincidentally, it's owned by one of the governors.

So we have taxpayers' money, handed over by us for the provision of public services, diverted to the profit margins of various sharp spivs, and it's happening all over the country. Whatever these 'British values' are, the actual practice is the commodification of education in a profit-making system. I'm pretty sure some of these Birmingham schools have overstepped the line (I'm an atheist who only ever went to hardline Catholic schools, so I'd ban all religious involvement), but as far as I can see, the only fundamentalist who matters is the extreme right-winger running Britain's schools from his desk. The central tension is the enduring one in the Conservative party: how to persuade small-c conservatives who care about woodland, badgers, jam, church, litter, politeness, public services etc. to vote for a party whose elite wants to sell off forests, schools, the NHS, social work, and literally everything else to multinational corporations. I don't know how they manage it, but they do.



I also think there's a massive stench of racism about this persecution of a small group of schools attended mostly by Muslims. There's no equivalent inquiry into the segregationist, exclusive teachings in creationist Christian schools, the few Jewish schools, the Sikh Free School near me, or the market-fundamentalist Academies. This is dog-whistle politics of the very lowest sort. It tells UKIP and BNP voters that they can come back to the Tories because the party understands that Islam isn't compatible with Britishness, that all radicals have brown skin, that the country's problems are caused by a few bearded terrorists in urban slums who need rooting out. The Enemy Within isn't the Catholics or the miners anymore, but there's always another group ready to fill that role.

It's hard to distinguish between the current government's crew of spivs, thieves, liars and crooks (Andrea Leadsom's finances stink to high heaven) but I think I only really hate Gove and Hunt. The others depress me, but those two just press all my buttons. They don't even pretend to be acting in the public interest any more. They're simply the front men for a great big auction. Gove in particular reminds me of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. In the original graphic novel, the Conservative Party has morphed into a fascist one, named Norsefire, which trades explicitly on Anglo-Saxon Protestant values. It's lead by Adam Sutler. Its logo is a cross, religious and ethnic minorities are crushed, and its slogans include 'England Prevails' and 'Strength Through Purity, Purity Through Faith'.

As Gove continues his crusade against liberals, teachers, Birmingham and brown people, the only difference I can see between him and Sutler is that Gove's capitalist fantasies are much more deep-rooted than this racist culture war. I think he's even more cynical than the genuine fascists: he's prepared to court their votes and throw them some red meat as long as he can continue giving away the state to his elite corporate friends.

Gove, Actually

I wish I could hibernate… until 2015. After a decent Christmas spent reading books about the 1930s depression – one largely devoid of political leaders of any colour abusing the poor – I emerged into 2014 only to be confronted by the worst aspects of British political and cultural life.

Item 1. Amateur Secretary of State for Education and professional troll Michael Gove whipping up the Daily Mail crowd by pointing out particular eminent historians and shaming them in public as leftwing propagandists laughing at the British dead of World War One. I couldn't help seeing Gove as Kim Jong-un and Richard Evans as his luckless uncle being dragged out of a meeting to be executed. Not only do Gove and Jong-un share rather smug expressions and believe themselves infallible, both men believe that history is a commodity to be deployed at one's own convenience, for political advantage.

Even without being a historian, Gove's Mail article is an obvious farrago of lies. It's titled 'Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes?'. This is, of course, in the grand Mail tradition of using rhetorical questions as headlines, particularly ones which make untruthful assertions. What is 'the Left'? I'm leftwing, but would happily consign quite a few other soi-disant leftists to re-education camps for being capitalist running dogs. I'm damn sure there's no such thing as a singular Left. Then there's the 'insist'? As the kids say: 'citation needed'. Despite it not being my area, I read a fair amount of revisionist, post-modern and leftwing history (they aren't the same thing), and have never come across anyone mocking the war dead. My great-uncle Thomas spent Easter 1916 killing British soldiers and even he never mocked his enemies, let alone those on his own side. Anything else wrong with this headline? Well, millions of the dead weren't British, of course: quite a lot were German, French, Belgian, Irish, Australian, Indian, Chinese (yes), New Zealanders, Russian… the list goes on. 

Finally, what's a 'here' and what's a 'true hero'? Not every soldier is a hero. Surely some of them were cowardly, lazy or simply did their job without heroism? Unless we say that anyone conscripted and sent to the trenches was a hero. I'd agree with that – but that would require empathy for the German forces too, something to which I don't think Mr Gove could quite stretch.

Gove's main gripe is this:

Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage.

I actually agree with him…for the first eight words. Anyone's understanding of any event is overlaid with perspectives. You'll view the war differently if your great-grandparents were cannon-fodder or as Viz magazine's Kitchener parody memorably put it 'sitting in a fucking great castle' on one side of a family dispute. Where Gove goes wrong is to assume that there is only one legitimate interpretation of World War One or any historical event. This is bonkers. But it's not just bonkers, it's sinister. I am genuinely frightened that a man who hopes to be Prime Minister thinks that an 'ambiguous attitude to this country' is a bad thing. For a start, what the hell does he mean by 'this country'? Does he mean Shakespeare/Cotswolds/Big Ben/shortbread/cathedrals/green and pleasant land, or does he mean the Britain of nuclear weapons, food banks, crashed banks, demonising immigrants, racist politicians, underfunded schools and illegal wars? Because I have to say, I'm pretty damn ambiguous about it myself. And so was the veteran poet who called Gove's clichés 'The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum set / pro patria moro'.

Or perhaps he means that you're an Leftist Enemy if you're ambiguous about World War One itself. If so, he's on shaky ground. I've got four degrees and spend a lot of time reading, and I'm damned if I could give a snappy answer to the question of why the UK fought that war, with those allies, in that way. What linked the nationalist murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo to a German invasion of France opposed by Imperial Russia and non-democratic Britain? I have no idea beyond a vague concept of webs of mutual aid agreements. Could anyone, with even an inkling of what the trenches were like, or the average life-expectancy, unambiguously recommend a chap sign up? If so, you're an inhuman monster.

But just for a moment, let's indulge Mickey. He likes 'patriotism, honour and courage'. Excellent. So let's hear him say a kind word for those other conscripts, in the other trenches. After all, if they were fighting for any other reason than compulsion, then surely 'patriotism, honour and courage' were what motivated them too.

Gove goes on to make a series of non-sequiturs which would have me reaching for the red pen, were I marking this excrescence. Firstly, there's this:

The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are Left-wing academics all too happy to feed those myths.

He starts with an unsourced assertion ('for many') and cites three texts, only one of which will be at all familiar to a contemporary audience. He's certainly wrong about Oh! What A Lovely War which actually present the political leadership on all sides as desperate to avoid war. He's also wrong about the 'Left-wing academics': it was the ferociously rightwing Tory MP and amateur historian Alan Clarke who wrote a book called The Donkeys, referencing the belief that the ordinary soldiers were lions led by the aforesaid beasts. Evans also lists a number of very conservative historians who think Britain should never have engaged in the war, and attack the way in which it was conducted. As to the idea that Richard Curtis and Ben Elton are lefty subversives: has he seen Love, Actually or anything either of them have done since 1985 or whatever?

And then we get on to the really Orwellian bit: a Government Minister smearing a historian:

Professor Sir Richard Evans, the Cambridge historian and Guardian writer, has criticised those who fought, arguing, ‘the men who enlisted in 1914 may have thought they were fighting for civilisation, for a better world, a war to end all wars, a war to defend freedom: they were wrong’.

Even Gove's choice of quotes subvert his attack. Evans doesn't criticise the men at all. He speculates about their possible motivations and points out that their hopes were not realised and their political visions incorrect. Not once does he question their bravery, their sense of duty, their sacrifice. If anything, his point should make us feel even more deeply for them. Those men were used by two imperialist powers to fight a war which failed to benefit any of the survivors, and murdered millions. It didn't end war. It didn't enfranchise those who served or their civilian counterparts, it didn't defend freedom. As Evans points out elsewhere, Germany was rather more democratic than Britain or Russia.

And then there's this:

And he has attacked the very idea of honouring their sacrifice as an exercise in ‘narrow tub-thumping jingoism’. These arguments are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate.

Apart from the hypocrisy of a man using the Daily Mail for an ad hominem attack on an academic while calling Evans a showman, it's a lie. Evans just plain did not attack 'the very idea of honouring their sacrifice': he attacked Michael Gove's plans for history education

I said his proposals for the National Curriculum were narrow tub-thumping jingoism

which isn't the same thing at all. Far from it, and Michael Gove is a dishonest liar to say so. Evans actually commended Conservative Culture Secretary Maria Miller for planning a commemoration far removed from Gove's asinine 'Engerland' approach. As for the  'sober' 'proper historical debate': we eagerly await Mr Gove's peer-reviewed original research.

Gove then moves on to the war as a whole:

The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.

Plainly. Why?

The ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order all made resistance more than justified.

As far as I can see, the British élite was little different: perhaps simply more successful. I don't know how comprehensive (excuse the pun) Mr Gove's expensive private education was, but I'd hope he's seen a globe with the British Empire filled in. Here it is in the 1920s:

And here's a map of the German Empire:

Who was 'aggressively expansionist'? Or is it Mr Gove's contention that the British Empire was a matter of turning up with crumpets and offering a consultancy service (or as Blackadder puts it, an Empire snatched from an enemy armed with sharpened mangos)? If so, perhaps he'd like to explain Ireland in 1916, the Kenyan and Malayan massacres, and a host of other murderous events. Perhaps, though, he's just an old-fashioned racist and doesn't really mind 'aggressive expansionism' as long as it's only against brown people (and the Irish). Perhaps where the Germans went wrong was to occupy nice European places? But despite Mr Gove, I strongly suspect that absolutely no Africans, Asians or anyone else sat around in 1914 thinking 'could be worse: at least it's not the Germans'. Though they'd be right to think that of the Belgians – allied to the British of course.

Then we reach this unhinged series of assertions:

And the war was also seen by participants as a noble cause. Historians have skilfully demonstrated how those who fought were not dupes but conscious believers in king and country, committed to defending the western liberal order.

For feck's sake. Just because a person thinks they're fighting for a noble cause doesn't make it one. It might be. It might not be. Dying for something doesn't prove it right. As to the 'western liberal order': well maybe it looked like that from a bloody great mansion in the countryside, but for the working class I don't think it mattered a damn who was in charge. They still starved.

Oh sod it. I was going to mention Channel 4's demonisation of the poor in Benefits Street and all the other vile, cynical, dishonest attacks on this country's population perpetrated by the government just this week, but life's too short and I've got to go home and price up a dead man's CD collection. Toodle-pip.

A blogger yearns to care about banal junk once more

Hi everybody, new readers and old. It's been a weird few days. I'm snowed under by work, but kept getting distracted by the antics of Michael Gove and the popular response to the piece I wrote about him yesterday. I normally get around 200 readers daily: yesterday that one piece attracted nearly 4000 of you, for which you have my thanks and apologies. The driver of all this traffic was Twitter, particularly the Re-Tweets of two of my favourite people, Graham Linehan (the TV writer) and Cory Doctorow, hero of the Utopian Techno-age.

I'm heartened to learn that a) a lot of people feel the same way as I do and b) that my jokes occasionally hit the target: the people I interact with in meatspace usually respond to my humorous forays with groans, grimaces and occasionally sharp objects delivered at considerable velocity. Perhaps Blogger is the new Reader's Digest funnies page. I also want to thank those of you who commented. I really care about blogging as a way of extending a conversation: I link as much as possible and I take comments seriously, learning a lot from support and criticism alike. Apologies too for the length of the post: I kept thinking about more stuff to put in - I'd be an editor's nightmare. Another joy of blogging: no editors.

Against my higher instincts, it was also fascinating and gratifying to sit watching the readership increase, minute by minute. Despite cherishing you all for your unique characteristics and abilities, there's something ego-fuelling about watching numbers tick upwards on a screen. I know really that these figures are arbitrary and in isolation meaningless, but I now also fully understand why they call it 'stat porn'.

However, it's back to normality today. My 15 minutes are over and despite the gratification, I'm also relieved. My regular readers will know how inconsequential my writing usually is, and you new folks will soon pick it up (or leave). That said, I gather that my piece about the university's uncritical promotion of entrepreneurial discourse, and its links to frankly unimpressive salesmen, has attracted a complaint to my superiors. I will of course, keep you posted. I see this as a matter of free speech and academic freedom. I made justifiable intellectual points: the disciplinary process is not the appropriate forum to explore them. That's what the comments box is for!

And so to today's duties. You know when I said I'd be an editor's nightmare? Well I've just submitted a grossly extended review of RS Thomas: Uncollected Poems and RS Thomas's Poems to Elsi to Poetry Wales. In my defence, they approached me to do it, and they're paying me, so I reckon they're getting value for money, at least in terms of volume: my work comes out at 2p per word. Let's not talk about quality: I've told the editors to be as blunt as they need.

Poetry's Marvin the Paranoid Android greets the day with his customary good cheer

I won't repeat my review here, but I'll say this: buy the books unless you've never read any of his work, in which case you should started with the Collected Poems. They're great works of scholarship and they deepened my understanding of RS Thomas's work and method. Thomas was a fierce Welsh nationalist, a campaigner for the language who learned Welsh late and wrote poetry only in English. He was an agnostic vicar and a hater of technology who remained fascinated by quantum physics, through which he detected a space for the God he hoped existed. He was cold, rude, searching, misanthropic and also (I think) loving and very funny. One of things I say in the review is that lines like 'the incorrigibly human / with their dogs and their fags and children… the smut and the crap re-begin' ('Thoughts by the Sea') and 'Went to the sea; stared / at the birds. Did they / stare back?' (Excursion) surely deliberately play up grumpy Thomas's reputation to comic effect.

Anyway, if you want to read more, you'll have to buy Poetry Wales. It's a great and beautifully-designed magazine, so buy it anyway.

So it's back to marking and the quiet life. Lots of dissertations and essays to read, but some fun stuff too. I'm going to a recording of Radio 4's Any Questions tonight. Not as brutally unintelligent as Question Time, but still potentially infuriating. I lead a sedentary existence, so cold fury is the only cardio-vascular exercise I get. After that, I'm off to see the Star Trek film – I've never warmed to Star Wars, and on Sunday, I've been put on the guest list for Athlete, which should be a lot of fun.

It's not all work work work. See you next week, if I haven't been sacked.

The educational fish rots from the head

I've got two book reviews to write today, so I need to get my brain working and my typing finger warmed up. What better way than to have a pop at Michael Gove?

(This is going to get text-heavy and ranty. If you fancy the funny, beautifully-pitched graphic version, Paul Bernal's got it right here). 

If you think I need a reason, let's start with this. Yesterday, I excoriated my own university for its uncritical acceptance of entrepreneurial discourse, and the way it falls over itself to pay shysters for their snake-oil. 

A little later yesterday I chanced upon a Freedom of Information request by one Janet Downs, to whom a statue should be erected by public subscription, preferably outside the Department for Education. Intrigued by Mr Gove's assertion (in the Mail on Sunday, naturally) that:

"Survey after survey has revealed disturbing historical ignorance,with one teenager in five believing Winston Churchill was a fictional character while 58 per cent think Sherlock Holmes was real."

I should be grateful if you could give me details of these surveys: who ran them, what questions were asked, when the surveys took place, and size and make-up of samples. 

she pressed the DFE for details. After all, the Government's education minister must be drawing on the talents and research skills of the very best academics and civil servants in the land, right? These surveys will be rigorous, extensive, statistically-significant and representative. Won't they? After all, Mr Gove is continually telling us that standards must be raised. 

Back came the reply, revealing that Mr Gove's commitment to 'outsourcing' and small government reaches the parts other ministers cannot reach:

Dear Ms Downs 

Thank you for your email of 26 March, requesting details of a survey about teenagers’ lack of historical knowledge.
Unfortunately, I am not able to provide you with the details of the survey as it was commissioned and conducted by UKTV Gold.  I would advise thatyou contact UKTV Gold direct, as they should be able to assist you on this matter.
Yours sincerely
Emma Seymour, Curriculum Policy Division

That's right. The Secretary of State for Education, the scourge of lazy thinking, relies on surveys conducted for promotional purposes by a TV repeats channel. What's on today? Multiple episodes of Last of the Summer Wine, Only Fools and Horses and (curiously for a channel seemingly shocked by historical inaccuracy), Goodnight Sweetheart, whose central device is a time machine used by a chap to conduct romances both in the present and in 1940s Britain (and about which I've often been tempted to write an academic paper or two).  

But at least we can rely on the accuracy and rigour of UKTV Gold's research, can't we? Er… apparently not. Grahame Whitfield kindly pointed me towards the Local Schools Network's analysis. Oh dear. Oh dearie, dearie me. They unearthed the actual poll, which dates back to 2008, and found a few teensy, weeny problems. Firstly, it didn't test 'teenagers' specifically, but 3000 'people'. Which might lead one to think that Mr Gove is rather disingenuous. Or lazy. One could further assume that many of those adults were educated during his own party's 18 years in office from 1979-1997. 

And that's not all. Poor UKTV Gold seems to be labouring under some historical misapprehensions of its own. As the LSN points out, 

the survey listed Lady Godiva as fictional and said 12% believed she was real. But the 12% were right – Lady Godiva endowed monasteries at Stow and Coventry. And the 47% who thought “fictional” Eleanor Rigby was real were no doubt thinking of Paul McCartney’s anecdote that he found the name on a gravestone.

Looking at the company's PR-driven report, it becomes clear that they really don't know very much about history, or indeed historiography. 

most people believe that fictional figures such as King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby really existed. 

King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood top the list of fictional characters that Brits are most likely to confuse with fact 

Now it's true that there's no archaeological evidence for Robin Hood and King Arthur, but there's no shortage of cultural artefacts, such as the 6th century Welsh poem Y Gododdin. No doubt the 'real' Arthur and Robin (there were several possible Robin models) are nothing like the representations purveyed by UKTV Gold, but they aren't exactly fictional. For a bracingly sceptical Arthur survey, I recommend Guy Halsall's Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages (OUP 2013). For Robin, start with Stephen Knight's Robin Hood: a Mythic Biography. 

Let's look at UKTV's Top Ten:

Top ten fictional characters that the British public thinks are real

• 1) King Arthur – 65%

• 2) Sherlock Holmes – 58%

• 3) Robin Hood – 51%

• 4) Eleanor Rigby – 47%

• 5) Mona Lisa -35%

• 6) Dick Turpin – 34%

• 7) Biggles – 33%

• 8) The Three Musketeers – 17%

• 9) Lady Godiva – 12%

• 10) Robinson Crusoe – 5%

So: Arthur (dubious); Holmes (fictional); Robin (dubious, and yet UKTV Gold has shown Robin TV series, contributing to our ignorance); Eleanor Rigby (definitely real); Mona Lisa (a portrait with several strong candidates); Dick Turpin (real), Biggles (fictional) the Musketeers (a real military formation, with whom d'Artagnan really fought in the 17th century), Lady Godiva (real) and Robinson Crusoe who, though fictional, was closely based on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk.

The whole thing is rather incoherent:

Nearly half of us (47%) have no idea who Richard the Lionheart was; even though the historical figure has featured in numerous films throughout the 21st Century. 

Perhaps, UKTV Gold, people don't watch these films much. When was the last film about Richard? Are you subtly suggesting both that a) fictionalised films are reliable history and that b) we're thick because we watch too much TV? Better switch off UKTV Gold then!

And one more thing. In your Top Ten Real People Britons Think Are Mythical:

10) Charles Dickins - 3%

Suddenly UKTV Gold is looking thicker than its survey participants. 


But Ms Downs was not satisfied by the DfE's reply (one curiously unashamed that its positions are unsupported by substantive research). She went back for more:

Thank you for your reply saying that one survey about teenagers'lack of historical knowledge was done by UKGold.
I should be grateful if you could let me know when the survey was undertaken.
Michael Gove referred to "survey after survey". This indicates that there was more than just one. But you have given me the name of only one.
Would it be fair to say that there was actually only one survey and not several as Mr Gove said?

And we're very grateful for her tenacity, because the DfE reply moved from UKTV Gold to purest Comedy Gold:

As advised previously, you would need to contact UKTV Gold to find out details of their survey, including when it was undertaken.
The other survey’s the Secretary of State referred to include:
·        a survey of 2000 11 to 16 year olds by Premier Inn;
·        a study commissioned by Lord Ashcroft of 1000 children aged 11 to 18 to mark the unveiling of the Bomber Command Memorial in London;
·        a report by Professor Robert Tombs for think-tank Politeia;
·        an article by London Mums Magazine[1] http://londonmumsmagazine.com/2013/with-...
·        research carried out by the Sea Cadets to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/edu...

Let us pass over the apostrophe abuse lightly: there are bigger fish to fry. For lo! Mr Gove's instinctive fear that the kids are being thickened rests on more than a TV company's PR stunt. Why, a budget hotel chain ran a survey. Sadly, they won't tell us who did the research, how they selected their participants, what the question were or anything else: their Facebook page links only to the Independent's space-filling summary, an article clearly written by PI's PR team, and which uses the (new to me) word 'cruelness', which makes the adults look more stupid than the kids. What Premier Inn's motivation is, beyond cheap publicity, is beyond me – but I hope they're proud to contribute to official government policy. 

What of the other 'research'? Well, Lord Ashcroft is the very strange, tax-evading billionaire who ran his survey as a publicity stunt for his memorial to the men who flattened Dresden and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. His memorial is notable for a) its terrible architecture and b) the prominence of its donors' names, not a notable feature of previous war memorials: also engraved on the wall is the name of Bee Gee Robin Gibb, someone else who has translated childhood war games into adult triumphalism. At least the actual data is available, though again, it hasn't been contextualised in any way and he uses it to promote Gove's 1950s Greyfriars fantasy. 

Moving on. Robert Tombs (Prof in French Political History) and Politeia. Well, let's just say that Politeia is a political think-tank which exists solely to justify any given Conservative policy initiative. Its work is not peer-reviewed or published in academic journals, and is therefore not reliably rigorous. The good Professor's co-authors are interesting: one teaches history in private boarding school (qualifications unknown) and the other has a PhD in the history of history teaching but appears not to have any further public presence or job. The report insists that 'British history' must be taught from Hadrian onwards, as though 'British' is a meaningful term that far back.  It happily cites 'newspaper reports' as evidence for serious accusations about the integrity of the exam system, and claims that because other countries have a narrowly nationalist curriculum, the UK should too! 

The report is certainly dubious, but it makes some points which Mr Gove could usefully digest:

emphasize the academic values rooted in each subject. These can only be properly understood by those versed in the subject: the teachers, who should be allowed to teach in accord with their judgement, and the academic subject specialists, whose lifetime of study qualifies them to propose the curricula and set the examinations 

Especially given that several reports suggest that Mr Gove wrote the entire proposed history curriculum himself (that's according to the distinguished historian Richard Evans who, though Gove praises him, describes the new curriculum as a 'pub quiz'), having discarded the suggestions his own Tory friends gave him. Certainly not my idea of academic freedom. But this paragraph implies that Prof Tombs and Co should rather disapprove of a Minister who bases his assumptions on cheap TV channel PR stunts. 

As to the rest: a magazine article and a newspaper report? No disrespect to London Mums, the Sea Cadets and the Telegraph (amusingly, the first comment attacks American ignorance while spelling 'Runnymede' incorrectly), but really. The London Mums article claims that 63% of children can't spell 'achievement', and lists several other howlers. Their source? A commercial exam revision website which just might have an interest in persuading parents to part with extra cash by making stark claims about their kids' ignorance. Sadly, they don't provide any details about their survey: questions, sample size and collection: nothing reliable at all. It's a pub quiz dressed up as research. Ironically, the London Mums article critiquing kids' illiteracy is replete with stylistic and grammatical errors, sweeping unjustified assertions (the dates 'everyone' used to know, for example). Worst of all, the author thinks that 'mumpreneur' is a word. For which she deserves a painful and public punishment. 

I teach at a rather good, though unfashionable, university. If my students submitted work which turned out to be based on this kind of rubbish, we'd fail them. I have a big sign on my wall which reads:

THE PLURAL OF ANECDOTE IS NOT DATA

We spend a lot of time explaining to them the difference between serious research and 'stuff you can Google'. This is a whole other level. We're talking government policy which will affect the lives and opportunities of millions of children. Anecdotes based on PR stunts cannot form the basis for policy. MUST. DO. BETTER. 

What really annoys me is this. Michael Gove is an intelligent man. He knows this behaviour is wrong. That gives him a moral responsibility to behave better. But for reasons of pure cynicism, he actively chooses to distort, cheat and mislead. This isn't accidental: it's a strategy.

No wonder my university thinks it's OK to hire charlatans when this is the example set by Whitehall. 

Update: Gove has turned his attention to English, invoking the spirit of FR Leavis to attack 'narrow' curricula by calling for a return to the 'transcendent' 'Canon' of 'Great' literature, by which he means dead white British authors, which seems pretty narrow to me: if Gove had been alive in the 19th-century, he'd have moaned about junk like Dickens and advocated a return to Plato and Empedocles, in Greek of course, and to the use of the Mr Men to explore Hitler's rise and fall in history classes. 

You good people have read quite enough of my ranting, so I'll be brief on this bit. Reading doesn't always have to be 'educational'. People discover texts at different times in their lives. I was forced to read Dickens too young, and it took 15 years before I realised for myself that he had a lot of charm and profundity (still not reconciled to the supposedly comic stuff). FR Leavis, the eminence grise of Gove's worldview didn't include Dickens in his original canon, because canons are just indicators of the current hegemony's concerns, and not guides to Eternal Truths About Life, the Universe and Everything. People read for entertainment. For enlightenment about their own cultural context, not just history. People read for comfort and above all to discover themselves and others. People might start with Twilight and discover books that you and I consider better. Others might read Twilight AND 'the greats'. 

For instance, as an undergraduate, I was taught by one of the world's greatest Arthurian literary scholars, Professor PJC Field. He was, we thought, a snob. Then I met him in WHSmith's. He was buying a pile of Dick Francis novels. Spotting me sniggering in a superior fashion, he announced that 'Man cannot live by Arthurian literature alone' and departed. For a long time, because I was an insecure and uptight teenager who couldn't relax with matters cultural in case someone caught me out, I thought I'd won that exchange. It was only later, when I'd read some critical theory, got something approximating a life and matured considerably, that I realise he'd won. He wasn't ashamed or insecure of his cultural choices, and I was. I learned a lot from that. So should Mr Gove. 

The idea that literature is 'transcendent' is just embarrassing nonsense. 'Transcendent' isn't a critical term: it's an anti-critical term. If I asked my students why Shakespeare is great and they replied 'because he transcends time and cultures', that would be the end of the conversation. Whereas replying 'Shakespeare is great because he took all the concerns of his period and cultural position and made ambiguous, complex drama out of them which can be read in the following ways…' is the start of a fantastic, life-long conversation. 'Transcendent' is the product of one quite recent critical position. It's not a historical one either: Shakespeare wasn't particularly popular for a long time after his death, and the Victorians joyously tacked happy endings onto the tragedies to suit their needs (they didn't like the lack of cosmic justice involved in Cordelia's death, for instance). 

Canons are repressive concepts. They tell you what an élite thinks you should know, rather than what everybody read: Dickens was outsold by several people whose works you never hear about now. I've no problem with making value judgements - but I do object to people who disguise their value judgements as universal truths. It's dishonest and oppressive. 

What he doesn't mention – and you'll have seen this coming – is that the Mr Men example isn't some widespread, pernicious dereliction of duty committed by the Marxist Enemies of Promise he frequently evokes. It's mentioned on a lesson plan. A lesson plan made available on a commercial website. For the iGCSE, Gove's beloved semi-O-Level used by a lot of snobby private schools. 

Yet again, he's smearing all teachers by resorting to selective quotation and nonexistent attribution. 

'I am just going outside and may be some time'

Good morning everybody. I trust the snow is 'deep and crisp and even' where you are. I'm off to the annual conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English, held at this time at Gregynog, the beautiful stately home in Mid-Wales owned by the University of Wales. Coincidentally, exactly where the heaviest snow is forecast.

Being a spring conference, the weather has always been, well, variable: I've been there in heavy snow and in hot sunshine before. Last time, it was all daffodils, bluebells and cute little baa-lambs. I shall take my camera today for a compare-and-contrast set.

Anyway, it's great to get away for a few days. No mobile phone reception. No marking (the pile glares at me from the top of the filing cabinet). Just people I like talking seriously and interestingly about the things I like. I'll go for a walk around the estate, drink fine ale in the cellar bar and catch up on all the academic gossip. Or alternatively, hide in the corner trying not to catch anybody's eye. There's also the launch of the new Uncollected Poems of RS Thomas edited by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, and a new edition of Tony Brown's short biography of the poet. Tony supervised my MA so I'm biased, but here's my review: 2 thumbs up – a classic!

Meanwhile, did you see Question Time last night? This one called for an extra-large bag of the horse tranquillisers I now require to get through an edition of the show. It really was a barrel-scraping shocker, quite the worst episode in an already depressing series. The panel nowadays consists solely of predictable trolls picked (successfully) to cause outrage rather than to shine a light on pressing issues, while the audiences are getting more and more racist and reactionary. I strongly suspect local political parties have found some way to game the ticketing procedure. Last night featured Michael Gove, one of the most astoundingly arrogant and patronising politicians of recent years, Mark Littlewood (a think-tank lobbyist who combines the economics of Pinochet with the human warmth of a hungry Komodo dragon), Anthony Horowitz the writer who turned out to be an ideal potential press officer for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, Emily Thornberry of the Labour Party who struggled valiantly to get a word in edgeways, and Natalie Bennett of the Green Party who barely got to speak.

The lowlight of the show was Gove responding to a question about whether he ever listens to advice by interrupting Thornberry extremely rudely with the words 'yada yada' (from 47.45). He also repeatedly lied, particularly on job creation. He claimed (as the government always does) that 1 million new private sector jobs have been created. To my certain knowledge, over 180,000 of those are not 'new': they're FE academics who've been reclassified as private sector, despite still working for and being paid by state-run institutions. He also claimed that the recession was caused by state spending and not banks being over-leveraged in pursuit of unsustainable and frankly stupid financial instruments, leading to us having to bail them out, and a number of other direct lies.  He said we were 'living beyond our means'. This is the same Michael Gove who 'flipped' his tax-payer funded home and charged us £7000 for a television.

And while I'm on the subject, this former Murdoch employee married to a current Murdoch employee managed to give a sterling and principled defence of press freedom without once referring to his former colleagues' use of press freedom: to hack the phone of a murdered teenage girl; to hack the phones of celebrities, their secretaries, their families and their friends in pursuit not of wrongdoing in the corridors of power, but to find out whether they were pregnant, or dating, or putting on weight, or losing weight; to set private detectives on hacking victims' lawyers and on Crimewatch presenters; to build up dossiers on political opponents and on and on ad infinitum. Did the Murdoch press uncover the parliamentary expenses scandal? No. Catch Jonathan Aitken or Jeffrey Archer? No. Expose Jimmy Savile? No. They bugged and burgled (to steal a phrase) across the world to monster the innocent and harvest ridiculous, pointless gossip. As far as I'm concerned, Michael Gove is merely on secondment from Murdoch. Or perhaps Alpha Centauri. We're just the mugs paying for him.

As an anecdote, here's a clip from The Brains Trust, a BBC Radio and then TV show from the 1940s onwards:



And to unite the two rants of the day's blogging, here's Anthony Hopkins playing Gwyn Thomas appearing on The Brains Trust in the dramatisation of his autobiography A Few Selected Exits: I wrote my PhD on Thomas.

Education for Dummies (i.e. the Minister for Education)

Amongst the many idiocies perpetrated by Michael Gove, that state-funded troll, is his decision to focus on

"the great works of the literary canon"

in the English GCSE. The what now? Other than 'the' and 'of', pretty much every other word in that phrase is objectionable.

What determines whether something is 'great'? Is it fame? That depends on marketing and distribution. Is it age? There's plenty of very old dross about. It's less than 100 years since English Literature itself was considered worth studying: before that only Latin and Greek texts were considered sufficiently 'great'. Are there no 'great' works in other languages? Or is English the only vehicle for literary greatness. Are 'great' works only novels, plays and poems?

What of non-fiction, or comics, or radio dramas or TV? Song lyrics? What, in fact, qualifies as a 'work', and why do we employ such a grinding term.

What's a literary canon? Big-sellers? Who determines what it is? We used to know the answer to this one. Matthew Arnold in 1869 airily defined culture as 'the best that is thought and known in the world'. Thomas Babington MacAulay announced that 'a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'. This from a man who lived in India as a colonial administrator but never learned any of the native languages. F. R. Leavis actually produced a list of canonical texts in The Great Tradition. It starts like this:

"The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad."

The list expands, but not by very much. Few non-aristocrats, foreigners, working-class types, northerners, homosexuals or ethnic minority writers. And certainly no non-realists. I happen to like all these writers, but there's a whole world out there. Canon-building is by definition exclusionary and dubious. I teach English literature. I have to choose what my students read - I am a canon-builder. But what are my criteria? I try to represent as many walks of life as possible (something Gove would object to) but I (usually) want to engage the students by giving them texts I think are 'good' and 'relevant': both very subjective terms. It's a fraught experience. There's a limited amount of time. Who do we heave overboard when something new comes along? Should we leave a text for a decade or two after publication to see whether it's still 'important'? What if some of the readers find it offensive?

What I suspect Gove means by a canon is texts which appear not to have any subversive political or social content. No lesbians or uppity minorities. No lefty authors or chippy proletarians. He'd be a fool though: Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad are profoundly critical of their own societies, more or less openly. Away from Gove's office, we hold that meaning is created in the space between text and reader: Gove might restrict the texts students read, but he can't limit the ways in which they read them.

What's on the list now? Shakespeare will stay, despite virtually every play examining the abuse of power (shh, don't tell Michael). Of Mice and Men will have to go: Lenny will never pass the CRB check and its author was a notorious lefty. Mister Pip and Purple Hibiscus are about Johnny Foreigner and To Kill A Mockingbird is soft on crime and promotes multiculturalism. The Modern Prose section will have to go: too many of its authors are a) alive b) keep moaning about libraries and c) don't promote boarding schools and corporal punishment. Some of them may even be Guardian readers. Dylan Thomas is too Welsh and would have objected to minimum unit of alcohol pricing. Duffy is way too lesbian, JB Priestley is the kind of do-gooding liberal hand-wringer we can do without, Lord of the Flies appeals to the Hoody Fraternity whom we are no longer hugging. Arthur Miller's The Crucible is clearly unsuitable for an interventionist government which does believe in persecuting minorities, the mentally ill and women in the cause of 'mainstream society'. Out with them all!

In with? Obviously Andy McNab. Don't you know there's a war on? For the girls, obviously some Louise Mensch, some PD James and some Jilly Cooper. Biggles of course, and liberal (ho ho) amounts of Enid Blyton's boarding school novels (note: no Rowling. Subversive lefty rubbish with girls in er yah boo sucks to you). Commando comic for the dyslexic boys. Some Jeffrey Archer ('a real page-turner, you know: none of that arty-farty stuff'). And eventually, Michael Gove's memoirs, perhaps packaged as a Little Red Book to be distributed to every 5 year old on their Micro-chip-Fitting Day.

I'd love to know how this canon will be chosen. Will he just consult his old school exercise books (you just know he's got them preserved with every gold star lovingly uncreased on the page)? Or will he outsource the work to his Special Advisors on Books What Are Good For Learning You Morals And Stuff? Perhaps they could helpfully provide a list of Non-Canonical Texts. We could call it the Index Prohibitorum. Or just substitute the pensioners' Winter Fuel Allowance with a delivery of verboten books for efficient disposal. The libraries are being closed down anyway…

Finally, canons don't preserve 'the best that is thought and known'. They pickle them. They wrap them up in cotton wool. They stick books on pedestals and pretend that the books – and the societies that conserve them – are static and eternal. This is an unhealthy form of cultural onanism. Tell a kid that a book is Important and s/he will be bored by it. Put a book in its cultural context and it will appeal. Imagine giving a 15 year old a Henry James novel… ridiculous. They'll never go back to that great author again. The easiest way to kill off a book is to tell people it's Improving. And what of the texts not on the canon? Is a great work by a modern author going to be considered rubbish because Michael Gove's Panel (and you can bet it will consist of Spads, Tory Donors and Celebrity TV Talking Head From Central Casting) hasn't read it or doesn't understand it?

Edumacation edumacation edumacation

Here's a British Government educational film about education, from 1944 or so, the year when universal education was instituted following the Butler Act. I like to think that this child grew up to be Michael Gove, and eventually got hit by a car.



Obviously there are ideological and pedagogical elements I'd disagree with, but my favourite line (pay attention, Uppal), is '…and no fees either'.

While we're at it, here's one for Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbuck and my brother the tax lawyer:

Democracy's finest hour?

Well, my little rant about the Police Commissioner Elections yesterday hardly encouraged the burghers of the Black Country to vote in droves: the Dark Place's turnout was 12.87%, and the West Midlands average was even lower: 12.35%. You can guarantee that most of those voters were golf-club fascists voting UKIP, birch-wielding Tories and of course police officers. So even if a single candidate gets 50% of the vote by some miracle, the most they'll command is 6.15% of the region's 5 million+ people.

We shall have to bear this in mind when the next Tory MP claims a strike is illegitimate if fewer than 50% of the members voted. But in the meantime, let's ponder this. When elected mayors were proposed, people got to vote in a referendum on the concept itself. Some places voted yes, others voted no. Hartlepool voted yes, and yesterday decided to abolish the post. So if the Tories are so keen on local democracy, why no referendum?

The answer is, of course, that the like the appearance of democracy rather than the thing itself. That's why they like police commissioners. They've watched a lot of Westerns and really believe that a lone hero can clean up this town. Not coincidentally, that's the argument the Daily Mail and other Tories made about certain other law-and-order types: Mosley, Mussolini and Hitler. Democracy is not served by concentrating power in the hands of a lowest-common-denominator demagogue.

Which brings me to my next example, Mr Michael Gove.

You may think he's a harmless Pob lookalike, but one of his favourite concepts is the Academy school. It's a really simple idea. You take a school run by the elected local council and you give it to a 'sponsor', who could be, say, a Tory Party donor and Christian fundamentalist, or a university not entirely unadjacent to The Hegemon. You then exempt it from Freedom of Information laws. You sack the governors and replace them with an unelected advisory board. Parent and staff governors are not replaced. You exempt the school from requirements that teachers actually have qualifications, from minimum food standards and from measures banning vending machines and the like.

To whom is the school answerable? Not the parents. Not the staff. Not the students. Nor the local authority, who you might think would have a keen sense of the areas educational needs and plenty of expertise in logistics, supplies, legal advice, pay, and all the other complicated things a school requires. A council that can be sacked if the local voters decide it's doing a bad job. No, the school is answerable only to one Michael Gove and to whichever dubious corporation decided that running (but not funding) a school would be a good bit of PR.

And that, children, is 'democracy' in action. See also: the privatisation and restructuring of the NHS.

Diamond's defence

Poor old Bob Diamond. He's telling a parliamentary select committee that he felt 'physically sick' when he discovered his traders manipulating the LIBOR rate. He's done nothing wrong, but 'the culture' is to blame. Oh, and he's using that tired old trick of using every questioner's forename, often. It's meant to establish rapport and restrict hostility. It actually comes across as smarmy and calculated.

Show some backbone, Bob. Here's one particularly bumptious young man's defence:

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Yes, Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. He'd be a corporate PR adviser these days.

While we're here, have a bit of Alan Plater on 'changing the culture': this one's for Michael Gove and friends.

The education of our children is a sacred responsibility. It cannot be entrusted to time-serving politicians. Especially those whose social judgement and emotional development have been permanently warped by the public school system. 

Big Al, in The Beiderbecke Connection.

3 A* Stars in Being Lovely, Punting and Jack Wills Studies

The latest wheeze designed by Pob Michael Gove, whose post as Secretary of State for Education must be some kind of public school jape, is to hand control over the A-level system to the Russell Group of élite universities. You know the ones: they're the institutions which largely cater for profitable overseas students and those from fee-paying schools. Oxford and Cambridge, for example, give over 50% of places to the rich kids whose parents have bought them high A-level grades through tiny class sizes and endless resources. Then the universities look good because these advantaged kids do well (interestingly, less well at degree-level than state school children).

Now I could make some cheap shots about the kind of A-level questions such places will pose. So I will (go here for a serious analysis by someone else).  'How long must Tarquin punt before landing a role in Peter's Friends?'. 'Why would one pursue Media Studies when an Oxbridge place leads inexorably to a Radio 4 sketch show?'. 'What should be the legal penalty for passing the port to the right'?

But jokes aside, I don't see why the A-level system is so broken that one particular bunch of universities should be handed control. There certainly are problems with the educational system: a lot of my bright and eager students aren't capable of reading analytically, critiquing a text or writing an essay. It's not their fault. The Tory educational system (damaged too by New Labour's reductive obsession with league tables) means that students are spoon-fed by terrified teachers. I've been told that some novels aren't read - instead, they concentrate on 'key chapters', and students are sometimes given 'essay skeletons' telling them what goes in each paragraph. That's not education - it's a coping strategy.

It's also the case that A-levels aren't just a university entrance qualification - they're good for all sorts of jobs. Handing them over to universities will narrow their focus and purpose to the detriment of those excellent students who feel that university isn't for them.

Will Russell Group control change this? Maybe, but I don't see why those universities should be privileged. I suspect you'll find that the really innovative curriculae and theoretical approaches are generated by the less traditional students. Shaping the curriculum to the preferences of a small and unrepresentative universities won't prepare them for the innovative, exciting work we do here and at other modern universities. Furthermore, they are likely to disdain subjects which they don't teach: you might laugh at Media Studies, but post-hacking and swimming in social media, isn't it important to understand and critique our media landscape? I certainly didn't discover Gramsci, Baudrillard and Jameson through my English degree: teaching Cultural Studies and Media has widened my literary perspectives too.

Nor do I think that university academics are particularly equipped to dictate school-level exams. Instead, I suspect that they'll form another private company and outsource the work required, using Russell Group as a brand. Conversely, they might harness the considerable talent of our educationalists only to have Gove - who is a rather pedestrian reactionary - to reject their suggestions. He's got a bit of a bee in his bonnet about Oxbridge being Paradise, but he thinks that all other academics are bearded Trotskyist subversives. Well I haven't got a beard!

Competition leads to corruption? Say it ain't so!

The media are leading today with the news that an exam board has been running seminars for teachers to show them how to get the kids to pass the exams. The Secretary of State for Education has launched an enquiry!

This is my cue to play - again - one of my favourite moments from that wonderful film, Casablanca.



Why? Because corruption is exactly what happens when things that shouldn't be businesses are made to compete against each other for profit. In the old days, exam boards were state institutions, or run by universities, with the aim of discovering a) what the kids had learned and b) whether they'd benefit from a university education. Seems simple enough.

Then they were privatised. They needed to attract 'business', e.g. schools which would use their exams, and would pay for the privilege. It doesn't take a genius to work out that there aren't many ways to do this. One is to reduce the cost, by farming the marking out to underpaid individuals on a piecework basis, which is why the standard of marking is so low, and making the questions more 'tick box' than discursive. The other is to make sure that the exams are easy to pass. Every school is now judged by the sledgehammer of league tables, so of course they're going to go for the exam provider which helps them achieve a high pass rate.

This is the insanity of a competitive privatised exam system allied to a functionalist, audit-obsessed regime. What's entirely irrelevant is the intellectual development of the children. You can't quantify that. Audit culture is entirely fraudulent.

So who's Captain Renault? At the moment, it's Michael Gove, and before him the Tory and Labour ministers who swallowed whole the depressing and reductive and totally untrue line that business is efficient and audit = facts  and competition drives up quality. These are lies. His enquiry should run along these lines:

• Do I tell everyone that private businesses lead to lower prices and higher quality?
• Is there a teensy flaw to this? 
• Might companies take shortcuts?
• So is this development due to my own ideological stupidity? 
• Should I nationalise exam boards, abolish competition and concentrate on children's needs?

The answer, should you need prompting, is yes. One more question Gove should ask himself:

• Am I a suppurating pimple on the face of humanity who should do the decent thing with a glass of whisky and a revolver?

Amusingly, I heard this exam boards question (not the one about Gove-as-pimple) being discussed on Radio 4's Today programme. The very next item was about separating water companies and retailers. There wasn't a hint of irony or opposition as two guests and the presenter repeated exactly the same tired old lies: competing companies will reduce prices and improve quality. Hello? Rail? Gas? Electricity? Have they not noticed that there's no true competition (how could there be, with the water coming out of the taps?)? Do they not know that bills have increased massively?

I hate knowing more than nationally prominent commentators, politicians and company directors. I want to leave it all up to better qualified people while I truffle around for pork scratchings and weird books. But every time I look up, these utter morons are either deluding themselves or lying to us.

Now go away, I'm toweringly angry.

Michael Gove and the Palin Manoeuvre

You may have seen today's newspaper reports that aides to the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, deliberately moved sensitive discussions away from official e-mail accounts onto private free ones, such as Gmail. 


On the face of it, this is a security matter: government officials discussing the future of this country using accounts which are frequently hacked. More seriously, this is a deliberate evasion of accountability: private accounts aren't subject to Freedom of Information requests, so any government business conducted this way can never be subject to the scrutiny of the public. 


Sarah Palin did the same thing - which is why some naughty boy hacked and released her emails, and why media outlets in the US took legal action to examine them. At the root of this is actually a serious philosophical question. In an ideal world, our political overlords are in the job to do what they think is best, secure in the knowledge that the electorate has decided to trust their judgement by voting them in. This should give the confidence to do everything in an  open and honest manner. 


However, when you see government officials behaving like this:

The FT reports that Dominic Cummings, Gove's chief political aide, wrote to colleagues shortly after he was appointed stating he "will not answer any further emails to my official DfE account …"

The email continued: "i will only answer things that come from gmail accounts from people who i know who they are. i suggest that you do the same in general but thats obv up to you guys – i can explain in person the reason for this …"

then one has to doubt their commitment to the public good. If they were convinced of their altruistic motives, they wouldn't move discussions into private, unaccountable spaces. It gives me a strong whiff of not quite guilt, but certainly awareness that the kinds of things they're up to - in this particular case inventing a special class of schools run by and for their political and social allies - are not in the best interests of the country, and automatically require evasion and dishonesty to achieve their aims. This isn't corruption in the classical sense of filling one's own bank account, but it's clearly moral and political corruption of the most corrosive kind.


It suggests that they consciously see government as a vehicle for their private interests, a fat cow to be milked for selfish gain rather than used to feed the masses: in a very real sense, this is class warfare from the top. There's no principle involved here: like Palin, they publicly denounce government as an oppressive enemy of individual enterprise, while distorting its authority for their own purposes. They've captured the government and they're going to extract every penny they can for as long as they're there. 


In Kenya, political corruption is so institutionalised that one incoming government minister announced that the new regime merely wanted its own turn at the udders: 'It is our turn to eat', rather than cleaning up the system. I can't see any difference between that and the hole-in-the-corner corruption of the Goves and Palins, other than the Kenyan minister's honesty.