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!