Brexit in a Nutcase: the story so far.

Let's just get this right - and do correct me if I'm missing something, particularly you Quitters out there.

So Britain spends over half a decade suffering from reduced public services, stripped-down local government, a crisis-ridden NHS, an education system that treads water, a shortage of housing to buy and to rent, and a reduction in income and living standards for all but the already-wealthy. (They continue to do nicely.) In many areas of the UK the European Union has had to step in with funding to fill the gaps and prop them up. The worst hit are the people who are already the poorest and most insecure. Understandably they are upset about it. They feel neglected by their government, which they think never listens to them and doesn't care. They are right.

Then, so that he and his party can win an election, the Prime Minister who has overseen the rise of all this anger promises to hold a referendum about whether or not the UK remains in the European Union. In a dishonest campaign targeting fear, insecurity and xenophobia, and with no idea how to deliver "Brexit" if they win, a group of mostly unscrupulous populist politicians encourage and exploit the ignorance of those angry people. They encourage them to target foreigners in general and the EU in particular. As a heartfelt but incoherent protest against the system, huge numbers of them vote to leave the EU. Many of them don't usually bother to vote but, because they're so angry and have been egged on by people who claim to be like them but aren't, even a little bit, for once they do. Even though they lose all the rational arguments, the Leave campaign surprises no one more than itself by winning the referendum.

A new, unelected Government replaces that of the old Prime Minister, who retires to the Cotswolds and years of comfortable obloquy. It is led by Remainers. Like the Leavers, the Remainers haven't a clue about how to deal with the uncertainties, complexities and dangers ahead. But even so, the Government commits to the biggest peacetime change in this country for generations if not centuries. It tries to do it without consulting Parliament, which is the UK's sovereign body. Leavers support this although they explicitly fought to leave the EU to strengthen Parliamentary power. The Government tries to justify itself by claiming to be fulfilling "the will of the British People" although just 37% of eligible adults voted to leave and the referendum's outcome is advisory not mandatory. They are stopped by the High Court. It rules that Parliament is sovereign so the Government must consult it. After standing by while the judiciary's independence is traduced and even threatened, it appeals to the Supreme Court, where an outcome is expected in January 2017. In the meantime, Leavers plan to besiege the Court with 100,000 marchers to force it to deny the very Parliamentary rights they fought a referendum to restore.

Meanwhile, Leave voters are getting even angrier. Having been told that everything will be simple and all their problems soon over, they can't understand why the Government doesn't just leave the EU and done with it. They weren't told (actually, they were, but they didn't listen) and certainly didn't imagine just how long, hard, unpredictable and painful the process will be. Also, they'll now look stupid if they admit to being fooled by a bunch of people who won their vote but then ran away or got nice positions either in the very Government that's now "delaying" Brexit or up the back passage of the President-Elect of the USA. So they don't admit it. They can't.

Of course, even though it doesn't know what to do next, the Government is still responsible for the nation's finances: it has to make big decisions right now based on what little of the future it can predict. These decisions, once made and triggered, can't just be stopped.

Yesterday it published its financial plans and guess what? All the years of "austerity" that made all those people angry enough that they were tricked into voting to quit the EU are going be nothing compared to what will hit them over the next few years! Against all the Government has ever said, after all the pain of the better part of a decade, incomes and living standards will fall, inflation will rise and the National Debt will soar to the highest level since the end of The Hundred Years' War (allowing for inflation). And there will be no EU structural and other funds to help out any more. Above all, the angry people who voted to leave the EU will be even poorer - and even angrier.

Now had there been no EU referendum - or had all those angry people stopped to wonder whether they were being fooled - any government announcing such plans after having put the nation through the mangle for so long would be running for the hills pursued by ... the very same angry people who voted Leave!

But no: the Government will press on because it lacks the imagination and guts to do what's right for the country; and the Quitters will get ever angrier, but instead of asking why they voted to shaft themselves - and the rest of us, and the nation they hold so dear, and the Union whose tattered banner they weepingly fly at every mawkish opportunity - they will blame the people they've saddled with the consequences of their actions.

Cheer up!

Are there any reasons to hope on this dreadful day for the world?
Perhaps Trump, his cronies and his constituency - the worst and most irrefutable example of ascendant moral scum since the days of Stalin and Hitler - will turn in on themselves; but at what cost and demanding what efforts from those ready to stand up for decency and ride others' blind anger to oppose them?
Perhaps the sheer nastiness and nihilistic, ignorant, culture-free cretinism of Trump and his people will energise Europe - even those who have up to now looked to the Brexit lobby and hateful xenophobic nationalism with admiration not revulsion. Perhaps the threat Trump poses to the world will force us Europeans to come together and fill the dangerous vacuum that we may otherwise become. Trump has said that we shouldn't shelter under the USA's umbrella - so let's not.
Perhaps, from a British perspective, it will become clearer than it would under a Clinton presidency that both Trump and the Quitter lobby suckle from the same toxic tit; that to wallow - as Farage has and will - in Trump's filth will slowly turn both our Government and decent Brexiteers back from the disaster unfolding on this side of the Atlantic. So let's stand back and watch Farage summon a hundred thousand people to "bow the judiciary to the will of the British people" on 5th December, and then let people draw their conclusions!
Perhaps both the Americans and we will finally ask what the hell has happened to our "Anglo-Saxon" societies, to our families, our kids and our educational systems that turns out people who let such a vile bastard trump thought and decency with little more than a snap of his fingers.
Above all, Trump's victory must energise all of us, whatever our politics. Join lobbies, write letters, pledge money, challenge bigotry, make opposition a public act; support morally and practically those in all four UK nations - and in the US, and on the continent - who take a stand: over here the Gina Millers, the Will Huttons, the Ken Clarkes - and MPs of any party brave and true enough to our constitution to say "enough".

A Bridge Too Far

Pardon the title, but these days I feel undraped without a war metaphor to accentuate my shame.
On Radio 4's 'Today' programme I just listened to a borderline-murderous "discussion" between two senior and regular political commentators, Michael White (a Remainer) and Julia Hartley-Brewer (a Leaver).
This was on a day when a Conservative MP resigned, accusing Theresa May of "tyranny" (like "treachery", it's a big word, that).
Today's newspaper headlines suppurate and ooze with accusations of ... ah, treachery ... on account of the High Court's unremarkable ruling that the Government should consult Parliament - which is, after all, the seat of the nation's sovereignty and was until recently lauded as such by the Leave campaign - rather than invoke a pre-democratic Crown prerogative before triggering Article 50.
Meanwhile, a Quitter councillor - who I believe will have more supporters out there than we imagine - has proposed to make it "treason" to call for the UK to rejoin the EU after Brexit.
I've made many failed attempts to have - or even start - constructive debates with Brexit supporters. It's been a depressing experience for many reasons. I've found all but one of them incapable of explaining their views let alone justifying them - or even spelling them in their native language for that matter (with the notable exception of regular obscenities). Which is kind of worrying.
I admit that I'm prone to a bit of overstatement myself from time to time and that I sometimes try to be too smart-arsed for my own good. But I do at least try to have that debate. The question now is: is it worth it?
I know that until someone comes up with a good argument against what I think, I'm not going to change my views. (That's not, as some Quitters have said, arrogance: in fact I'm so desperate to be right that I'll be delighted to be proved wrong. They don't quite get that, you see.) And I'm equally sure by now that the "little people" (and my goodness, I never realised until recently just how little they really are - SEE, THERE I GO AGAIN) aren't going to change their views, regardless of whether or not I or anyone else comes up with a good argument against them. That, I flatter myself, is the distinction between the good and the bad - and why I'm happy being on the side of the angels.
There are now in this country two sets of people who can no longer debate in a spirit of mutual respect or even share a rough idea of what this country is or should be. Forget for a moment who's right or wrong. This is uncharted territory, a chasm which the two sides will soon lack not just the will but the ability to bridge. Our long-disunited kingdom has at last been burst open - and along more than one seam. What now?
Scary times - and they won't go away soon.The same is happening in the USA and may yet destabilise the European continent before we "Anglo-Saxon nations" have finished having our fun.
God help us: the slowboat-turning wheels of the world may be coming round again after all ...

Reasons why I think Donald Trump will be President of the USA

What do you think?

After all these months, despite all his bombast, lies, insults, vain boasts, evasions and general loathsomeness, he’s within touching distance of Clinton. Over that time, Clinton’s lead has narrowed.

There’s a mood among enough electors – as in the UK – not only to tolerate but welcome anyone who will stick two fingers up at the system. Yes, Trump lies and veritably pumps bullshit, but we know when he does it because we see him doing it. With ‘them’ we never know one way or the other. Clinton is stuck with being one of ‘them’.

So it doesn’t really matter if she thrashes Trump – which she did – in presidential debates. To humiliate him (and the first debate was – or should have been – a humiliation) just makes him more like one of us. His incoherence of thought and rage are ours too. The first debate seems to have had no benefit for Clinton. Amazing – but true.

OK, Trump isn’t really one of us, but that doesn’t matter. He speaks for us, that’s all – but that’s enough. When was a president ever one of us? Might he be our mouthpiece as much as we are his voting fodder?

The demagogues of the first half of the 20^th century are distant and possibly unknown to many. Examples from history don’t wash. We might as well fear the Spanish Inquisition.

Trump will tread on the fingers of anyone lower on the ladder than us to make sure they can’t overtake us. We don't think that's one of his lies because we know he craves to do it.

We are modern consumers, not just in the marketplace but in politics and in our relations with the state, right down to tax and welfare. We've become spoilt for choice. Even brand loyalty is now dead: like Trump, in our lives we move from deal to deal and have to squeeze juice from the driest of apples. When Trump boasts that he's “smart” to pay as little tax as possible, that doesn’t repel us. And it’s irrelevant that Obama, a visibly fine and decent man, won two terms as president.

We are isolated from one another in everything but our fear – in that, we are a rock.

As did the Leave campaign in the UK’s referendum in June, Trump will get the non-voters, the angry and the gullible out on the day, and with the trenches apparently dug with a 2- to 4-point margin in Clinton’s favour, that can swing it the other way.

Let’s stop hoping that the old rules apply. They don’t.

Some meritocracy! Some "opportunity for all"!

As the Chief Inspector of Schools has rightly said, the Government's plans to extend grammar schools with a passing nod to increasing access for a few bright but poor pupils is simply likely to make those schools who lose them worse: social mobility for a few bought at the cost of even greater immobility for the many. It will increase not reduce the divisions which are holding this country back and which were so clearly shown on 23rd June.

Two points I'd like to make:

1. I don't have a problem with a school system that separates those better suited to stretching academic work and those with better practical skills, so long as the value of each is appreciated and the type of education each offers is good. Both should be excellent in their own way (not one being a shadow of the other in a demoralising, pigeon-holed hierarchy). They have something rather like this in The Netherlands and Germany which doesn't seem to require those taking the more practical route to be seen as less worthy. Although those countries still make things, of course ...

2) The Government's plans are a perfect example of one reason I believe we should stay in the EU (and why I said so well before the referendum): many of Britain's deepest problems, not least the educational, social and cultural gulf between those who did well and badly out of their education, are of our own making and result from our own bad governance. They were done on our watch, not the EU's. Nigel Lawson's recent plea to complete the unfinished Thatcher revolution tells me that the people who brought us to this are of late full of a passionate intensity. The last thing we need is to let these people out again at a time when we are once again looking inward. They have pissed in our pool for long enough.

If only as an example, we need Europe more than ever.

Parliamentarians: vote down Brexit!

We must call on our MPs to vote Brexit down. Among many other reasons (I have more: please do ask):

Cameron shamefully called the EU Referendum for the short-term benefit of the Conservative Party not the long-term benefit of the nation, including the integrity of the United Kingdom itself.

No respectable organisation - not even a ballroom dancing club let alone a major nation of 60 million people - would let a constitutional change of this size and future impact be decided by a simple majority of those who turned out to vote.

Enormous lies and deceptions were perpetrated and admitted by both sides: the campaign wasn't a sign of democracy but a dispiriting insult to it.

Lies told by the demagogues of the winning side became clear within hours of the result, as did their desire to quit the field once they'd surprised themselves by winning and now feared having to see it through.

Many Leave voters did so out of ignorance, anger, fear, and a desire to hit back at political and economic classes by whom they felt betrayed. Their scapegoat was - as so often in history - foreigners. A referendum of this kind and about this specific question is no place for such a protest vote, however justified their anger might be.

3 million people who'd never bothered to vote before did so on 23rd June and nearly all voted Leave. This swung it. Leavers have no right to lecture the rest of us about democracy if so many couldn't even be bothered until now to cast a vote for which others fought and died.

Unlike Hitler's Germany, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and many other corrupt and brutal countries down the years, Britain isn't a plebiscitary democracy. That is one of the things of which we should be most proud and should defend rather than undermine: we elect MPs as representatives not delegates. The referendum result is not binding and there is nothing unconstitutional in throwing it out.

MPs should now stand up and terminate this mean farce. They should forget both their personal careers and their party's fortunes. They need to do it for the nation and to explain carefully and fully why.

I'm supporting, joining and getting directly and practically involved with people who think the same way. We all know that the Brexit campaign lost the argument even if it (only just) called out the vote; we must now defend, restate, redouble and massively extend the narrowly economic argument for remaining which so badly neglected the real cultural issues at stake.

The biggest - and I think decisive - challenge will be to make clear that most of the things which caused the anger behind June 23rd's protest vote were not due to the European Union. Rather, they happened on the watch of the very class of politicians who now stand to benefit from it, and against whom that anger should now be constructively directed.

As a song goes, if you tolerate this, then your children will be next.

Or, simpler, the decent internationalist message of 1936: ¡No pasaran!

The Examined Life, 7

Me: "Bonjour, mes petits champignons!"
Them: "Uh? 'E's tawkin' dat langwidge again innit." 
Me: Good morning all, and welcome to our penultimate class!"
Them: "'E's doin' it again ... woss pen ... pen ... penmultiplate ... pen ...?
Me: "Penultimate, Gorgon! And I was hoping YOU might tell ME!"
Gorgon looks at me as though I had asked him to disembowel himself in front of a whole-school assembly wearing nothing but a pair of ballet shoes while singing the Eton Boating Song.
Me: "Cabbidge?"
Cabbidge: "It's a ... it's a ... it's a ting, innit."
Me: "Penultimate, Cabbidge: 'the one before last'! After today there is just one lesson to go before I say farewell to you all."
After a couple of minutes the silence is broken by one or two inadequately stifled cheers.
Me: "I am sure that many of you will be delighted to see the back of me, and may I fraternally assure you that such sentiments are most warmly and fervently reciprocated."
Chlamydia: "Oh Sir, dassa first nice ting wot you've said to us all year. Why couldn't you of been so nice earlier like?"
LaShagga: "Sir, are you bipolar?"
Me: "Yes, LaShagga. Half the time I'm angry and the rest of the time I'm a bastard. But enough banter: today's end-of-year task is very simple. I would like you all to take a sheet of A3 paper and a selection of pens from the front of the class. Then, with due reference to the no-doubt copious notes in your exercise books, I require you to prepare a short visual presentation about one topic you have learnt about this year and that has stayed with you. As you will probably have forgotten, we have looked at Britain's Celtic origins, Saxon England, the Norman Conquest, William's consolidation of power, the feudal system, life on the land and in medieval towns, the Crusades, King John, Magna Carta and the origins of Parliament, food and hygiene, and the impact of the Black Death on the population and economy of Britain. To confirm: an A3 sheet presenting one thing that you have learnt this year and that you'll never forget. You have thirty minutes. Get on with it and if I hear as much as a sound then by Christ I shall Behaviour-Point the miscreant out of existence."

Hey Cameron!

Dear David Cameron,

You will be judged a truly disastrous Prime Minister as well a political coward, a liar and a cynic who staked your country on securing a Conservative parliamentary majority in 2015. As so often, the Conservative Party won and your - our - country lost.

You then said you would stay on until October but didn't.

You then promised to remain as a backbencher but you haven't. 

You have run away from the mess you have made and in which you leave everyone else.

May your nights be forever sleepless as you contemplate the future's verdict on the damage you have done, and may every one of the fat cheques you will now go on to receive bounce.

May you be hung from the lamp post of history for the dogs of the Apocalypse you have unleashed to piss on.

Hey America!

Americans!

Cast your minds back, if you will, to the 1920s and 1930s. In a country called Germany at that time there was a man called Adolf Hitler, and he made all sorts of promises that Germany would be great again. He said that the country’s problems were the fault of traitors inside Germany, horrible foreigners outside it, and particularly some people called “Jews”. Herr Hitler said that these were the most horrible of the lot and that they shouldn’t even be allowed inside the country.

“Don’t worry, Germans,” said Herr Hitler, “I will sort everything out and make sure that all is OK again: just leave it to me!”

A lot of people liked the promises Herr Hitler made. They were all about having more jobs and being able to defend the country and so on. And because times were hard and they were angry and scared and felt hard done by, a lot of them thought, “I know, let’s give him a chance! He can’t be worse than the current lot, and at least he speaks his mind, and he's promised to defeat all the horrible people who have been so nasty to us – and to make our wonderful country great again like we all know it should be!”

So Herr Hitler became very popular with many people in Germany, and as things got worse and worse they started to vote for him in large numbers. Then things got really bad, and everyone was arguing and shouting and fighting each other and even killing each other quite a lot, and Herr Hitler’s political party, which was called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (or "Nazis", because it was a very long name to remember) became the largest party in Germany’s parliament. But it still didn’t have a majority of the seats, so this meant all sorts of problems and the government just couldn’t function.

So one day some crafty German politicians said, “Why don’t we make Herr Hitler leader! Then he will bring all his supporters’ votes with him and we will at last have a government that works. But we are craftier than him, so we will only give him the leadership and a couple of ministers, and the government will really be controlled by us.”

And that’s what they did. But within a year Herr Hitler, who was not quite as nice a man as many people thought he was, had taken complete control of the country and had put his enemies in prison – or even had them killed! He made everyone in Germany do what exactly what he said, including the police and the judges and teachers and even people who wrote books and painted pictures and things like that!

Now that Herr Hitler ruled Germany, he kept many of his promises, but he also had ideas of his own that he hadn’t been so honest about.

Unfortunately this meant lots of invasions and fighting and wars and death and misery and destruction all over the world. In the end, after millions and millions of deaths, Germany and several other countries were almost completely destroyed and Herr Hitler killed himself. It took the whole World ages to put things back together again, and it nearly didn’t manage it.

Of course, Herr Hitler lived in the middle of Europe. The same piece of land reaches halfway round the world to both the east and south, and this is where a lot of Herr Hitler’s wars were fought. Far across the ocean to the west, the continents of America were safe from Germany at that time. The USA had big problems of its own but a more genuinely nice man called Mr Roosevelt, who was President, didn’t tell Americans that they could only survive by hating people and taking their anger out on them.

Instead, Mr Roosevelt tried to put the country back together again by pulling together, and what’s more he helped the Europeans and Asians fight people like Herr Hitler and his friends the leaders of Japan, who were also not very nice. Many people, especially in Europe, think that this was a fine thing to do and is one of the things that make America a great country.

Anyway, this story is meant to make people think carefully about politicians who make huge promises, don’t worry about the detail or leave it to later, tell us that we should be scared of other people, and say that everything will be OK if we put all our trust in them so they can take all the anger away from us and turn it on our enemies. They might not be quite as bad as Herr Hitler – though it’s always hard to tell before they get power, isn’t it? But then again, the world is a much smaller place than it was in the 1930s, and a few big mistakes could lead to terrible consequences just like back then.

The funny thing is that a majority of the German people never actually voted for the Nazis. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing – or perhaps even worse – if someone in America made the same kinds of promises as Herr Hitler, and raised the same kind of anger, and then a majority of Americans did!

Time to get serious

Sarah Lall​ has just rightly reminded me that the UK's EU referendum next Thursday is deeply, deeply serious. Despite trying my best to joke about it, I’m as serious about it as she and many others.

Leave aside the economic, social and constitutional arguments for a minute.

WHATEVER the outcome next Thursday, Britain’s well will be poisoned for some time to come, because this referendum has both revealed and encouraged some truly horrible things about our country that will not go away. It will also seep into others’ water tables.

Above all, I believe David Cameron will be castigated by history.

As our Prime Minister he has, for party political purposes - that is, to stop UKIP making inroads into the Conservative Party's seats at the last general election - abdicated his responsibility as the nation’s leader.

As an international statesman he has been the epitome of perfidious Albion, subjecting nations with whom we should be cooperating to the possible whirlwind of our withdrawal at a time when neither we nor they will benefit and when dark forces are stirring all over Europe and beyond. Revenge will follow, even if it others may choose to or have to eat it cold.

As the custodian of a nation – his and our own union, the UK – Cameron risks its imminent demise, because if we do vote to leave the EU than it’s almost certain that the Scots and perhaps others will leave and so the UK will cease to exist. This bitter irony appears lost on those imbecile flag-wavers who are too angry now to see what stands before them.

John Major at least took the ‘bastards’ on as a leader should: by leading from the front not delegating the decision to often incoherently angry voters who resent the whole political class he represents and are now, like the rest of us and thanks to Cameron, at the mercy of demagogues, liars, quacks and charlatans.

Shame on David Cameron and God help us all – whatever the result.

America is looking old.

In 1991, Supreme Court Judge Warren Burger called the American gun lobby’s interpretation of  the US Constitution’s Second Amendment – the right to have and bear arms – “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by any special interest group that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Burger – and others – pointed out that the rights it conferred made sense in the context of the then necessary existence of state militias to keep the peace.

The fraud has been the gun lobby’s successful reworking of a pragmatic, late 18th-century decision into a general and pretty-much unfettered right for any US citizen who isn’t chained up in a padded cell to carry just about any lethal weapon as a piece of arm candy in the early 21st.

I think that is a just criticism of the NRA’s stance.

It also raises something else:

It’s worth recalling that, while the founding of the USA at the end of the 18th century was a revolutionary novelty – a New World indeed – it’s in fact the oldest and in many ways the most antiquated of all constitutional states apart, I believe, from San Marino.

I wonder whether the reverence which US citizens give to their Constitution may actually hinder America’s development, whereas many older European nations, bloodied from wars and ideological strife, have had to re-imagine and even reconstitute themselves from time to time, which has encouraged a necessary pragmatism.

Perhaps this may lie behind some of the US’s present dysfunctions?

In short, has the USA become too old for its own good?

The History Boy

There are many things to despise about this newspaper headline and the antics of Boris Johnson below it.

One is the poverty of the historical analogy.

Another is that the one right-wing newspaper which sometimes shows that non-political conservatism is at root a decent thing should present it in the manner of its guttersnipe half-siblings.

Then there is the contempt Johnson deserves from any decent person living on this island, on the European continent or anywhere else, made worse because he's clearly angling to become our Prime Minister. Shame on him, on us if we ever elect him, and on any foreign politician who then fails to remind him of what he said today.

Worst for me is that Johnson, here displaying all the faux-sauciness and cynical ease of manner which so often masks the ruthless ambition of the English public schoolboy, is actually a published historian.

As an American newspaperman once said, "No one ever went broke by underestimating the public's intelligence."

I hope to God he was wrong but I fear he may not have been.

Labour's Love Lost

As so often happens when a serious matter is taken up by political interests, the Labour Party's row about anti-Semitism is clouding it further. Ken Livingstone in particular has bigmouthed his way into the debate in a manner that is as unhelpful as it was crass because he has simply given everyone a chance to get all upset.

Far from drawing a line between criticising Israel's policies (legitimate) and attacking Jews because they are Jews (which is what I take to be anti-Semitism, and which is wrong, bad and stupid), we seem right now to be hovering over the matter of the right of Israel to exist and equating this with anti-Semitism. That is at root a political question, although people may - or may not - have anti-Semitic motives for taking it up. It's a unique question too because of the enormous significance it has to Jews, the enormity of the Holocaust, the purpose and manner of Israel's creation, the inevitable disruption it has caused in the region and the effects on those who were there already.

In short, criticism of the existence of Israel CAN be made without being an anti-Semite, and I can't see how the necessary political compromises can be made unless this is allowed to be discussed openly so that real anti-Semites can be seen for what they are.

Why we need the European Union more than it needs us

Here are the really important questions which need to be answered before deciding how to vote in the British referendum about membership of the European Union on 23rd June.

Compared to other nations of similar wealth in the EU, does Britain have

- a better education system?
- higher levels of literacy and numeracy?
- a better general standard of health?
- a better standard of food and diet?
- higher productivity?
- a more equitable distribution of its wealth?
- a better urban environment?
- better quality housing?
- a better transport system?
- better quality roads?
- more independently run shops and restaurants?
- fewer corporate chain stores?
- higher standards of public behaviour?
- less alcohol-fuelled night-time aggression?
- a better football team?

The answer to all of these questions about vital indicators of a nation's health is "no". With regard to all of them, comparable European nations are ahead of us, often significantly so.

Yet the European Union has no control over any of them.

Things have slipped behind on our governments' - and our - watch. They are our doing. And if this is what we have achieved through exercising our sovereign powers with no European interference, having more of them might not be such a good idea after all.

I am a patriot yet I've never been afraid to say that we have a huge amount to learn from our neighbours about how to live, and to live well, and it has never been more important than now. In short, we need Europe more than Europe needs us.

Little Englanders - those small-minded, queasy, mincing dwarves of whom this great country has always spawned too many and who are to a great extent culpable in the failings above - will waste no words or expense to make Great Britain a lesser place. We will only have ourselves to blame if they win the referendum.

So, on balance, I think I'll vote to stay in the European Union.

The Eighth Deadly Sin

I hope you'll find the following amusing but even more concerning, because it's worth asking whether we are turning out citizens who can think as well as cram disaggregated and promptly-forgotten knowledge for the purpose of passing exams, leaving a dangerous vacuum thereafter.

I've been covering some Religious Studies lessons at school. One of the lessons was to look at and define Christianity's 'Seven Sins' and their corresponding virtues. The lesson plan said that the pupils should research in their dictionary and then write down the definitions of each Sin. In a class of 25 about a third wrote the following (or a version so close to it as to make no difference):

ANGER: a strong emotion brought on by a person or event that causes one great pain or trouble.

PRIDE: a sense of one's own value that is too high.

GREED: a great desire for more wealth and possessions than one needs or deserves.

LUST: a strong desire for something or someone.

ENVY: a feeling of wanting what someone else has.

GLUTTONY: a habit of excessive eating and drinking.

SLOTH: a mammal that spends its entire life in trees, using its long claws to hang upside down. Sloths live in the tropical rain forests of Central and South America. They move very slowly, and their long fur turns green from algae growing in it. Sloths are related to armadillos and anteaters.