At the risk of seeming trivial too, I draw my innocent reader's view to Tom Paine's page here, in which he draws our attention to a political beauty contest on another site - a competition for the most beautiful (female) politicians in the world.
OK, it is trivial, but one or two points of slight substance:
A) why is there no British entry, for crying out loud, and B) why on earth is Hilary Clinton in there? She's done a lot of things, and some of them were only slightly dishonest, but a beauty queen she isn't. What kind of sick individual cares about the Democratic Party that much?
Needless to say, the Blessed Sarah's in there, but come on Blighty, where's the Brit? Britt?
His thoughts - and the thoughts of his first three commenters represent a weird mixture of wisdom and misunderstanding about the teaching profession.
Now that Snuffy’s taking a break from blogging, I thought I might say something about the family business.
The absurd demands of the NUT
James Forsyth
The National Union of Teachers is the spiritual successor to the National Union of Mineworkers; a union representing an honest, decent profession but with a leadership that is committed to an extreme version of leftism. The Union’s latest pay demands are a case in point.
Honest and decent and insanely hardworking, James. My father died in harness: my mother, uncle and cousin had their health broken by the job and only my cousin’s still alive, and other relatives and friends quite the business for reasons of survival. My lovely wife and I both ran screaming from modern-day teacher training as if the hounds of hell were following us.
But it’s not just the leadership.
The Daily Mail reports that:“Teachers want their days in the classroom cut to four a week – with a 10 per cent pay rise."
They’d be lucky to drop to five days a week in reality: my surviving teacher friend gets up at 5 to commute to school for six, and leaves work at the other six, or five, and there’s usually weekend preparation to be done. Don’t get me started on the holiday work. My childhood holidays were punctuated with side trips to gather materials for arts projects and seeds for science lessons. Ma and Pa Northwester never got the chalk from under their fingernails, rest their souls.
The pay rise is a crock.
All experienced teachers get paid according to their years’ service rather than any measure of worth – which is why sensible head teachers (read headmasters and headmistresses) often choose not to re-employ experience at the end of an academic year and hire someone younger and cheaper instead. I have a friend on his seventh year as a qualified teacher and he’s never had a contract for more than one year in that time and has been doing temporary and supply work pretty much every term since he qualified;apparently despite excellent results and popularity, he’s never been given a longer contract because he’s too expensive.
The National Union of Teachers is planning a campaign for contractual rights to spend one day a week marking work and preparing lessons.
It also wants a 35-hour limit on the working week.
Excuse the hollow laughter, but 35 hours? Seven hours per school day? Where are they going to find the tens of thousands of teachers to take up the slack and do all the lesson planning and preparation and marking and tick-boxing for LEA reports and tutoring hopeless would-be teachers and herding Newly Qualified Teachers and meeting-attending and retraining and case conferences and disciplining and listening to the grunts of the one sort of parents and the scholarship-to-Oxbridge-seeking of the other sort of parents. It’s not that there aren’t time-servers and blank files in teaching - I remember them existing even in the 1970s in my grammar school – but laziness is rare, I contend, in the staff rooms. Hard-working cultural Marxists and the other kind of Marxists in the classroom were there a-plenty, I’ll bet, and hard-working others I know for sure, for I grew up amongst them and was trained by them.
Demanding a 10 pay cent pay rise across the board and a reduction in working hours would be a stretch at any time, but to do so in the midst of a recession is just ridiculous. It suggests that the NUT's leadership is just looking for a fight.
Yes, they are. But someone elects them, and it just isn’t a tiny, well-organised extremist bloc. It’s a large, well-organised extremist bloc.
We undervalue teachers in this country.
I bloody don’t, but I get your drift. The underclass are especially vicious to them, as are the pushiest parents who won’t recognize that little Stephanie isn’t going to MIT no matter how nice their 4x4 and the ballet lessons they pay for.
We should offer the best ones more respect…
Respect only at first, I contend…
…and more pay.
...because then we’ll see how well the employment market handles it when schools stop being war zones and anticipating a meeting with parents stops feeling like the lead up to the World Light Heavyweight Championship, shall we? You’ll get a lot fewer resignations if the little sods are no longer allowed to abuse teachers and threaten them with rape, court proceedings or and parental violence.
Doing that will require moving away from national pay-bargaining and allowing individual schools to negotiate with individual teachers and to pay them by results.
Or by the preferences of the headmaster or the governors, or by a lower truancy rate, or by parental choice picking out schools with relaxed and happy teachers. We’re talking parent-controlled vouchers here whatever their criteria of choice, because the next point is bang on the money.
The NUT will go to the wall to prevent any government from allowing this. When it comes to improving education in this country and the respect in which teachers are held in, the NUT are part of the problem not the solution.
And the reason that the commies are elected to NUT leadership is that the teacher training colleges are cultural Marxist and they are owned by the local education authorities. The LEAs control teacher training and head teacher recruitment, pay, curriculum and the fabric of the schools themselves. The beaks themselves (now thoroughly incapable of thinking outside the West-As-Oppressor and children-as-innocent-factory-fodder box) elect the delegates who vote in the policies that continue to ruin education.
This is not just a political battle; it is a cultural one.
It’s no good paying teachers ‘by results’ if the only results they’ll ever manage achieving is via the narrow and dishonest lens that hates our culture and that subverts its norms. I don’t care how good their displays on slavery are: if they exclude mention of and deny the existence and success of the abolitionists and the West Africa Squadron, then the results will be one-sided at best.
Look at the American Press and broadcast media – the mainstream is owned and operated (apart from Fox) by the Left.
To stop the rot, we need to attack its source – indoctrination during training. Ditch the LEAs and strengthen the power to hire and fire to the headmasters and headmistresses; themselves motivated by ambitious and mobile parents, and even the most fanatical Lefties will have to turn up the maths and turn down the Marxism… or lose their jobs.
See, the 60-hours a week teachers are really dedicated. If the current culture survives, then their dedication will be tainted from the outset -at 18 or 21 when they enter teacher training. Teachers are like mediaval monks or nuns; utterly devoted to chasing out the devil of inequality and all its offspring. They’ll suffer privations and strikes and long, thankless hours if they think they’re doing the right thing.
We need to broaden their concept of the ‘right thing’ to include upholding our civilization.
Start them young.
JimBob
Do you seriously think that the nation's biggest champagne socialist collective is 'honest and decent'?
Yep – honest and decent according to their own, blinkered, lights.
Rather than ask for this they should be glad for their job security and we should be looking to chop some of the fat - i.e. administrators, classroom assistants, and the rest.
Verity
How many days' holiday do teachers in Britain get?
Many more than they enjoy. They really do spend most of them at school or in training or on courses. Please don’t let envy and disappointment overcome the truth. A lazy enemy we could defeat easily – but not this honest mob.
Also, what is the basis of their demanding a shorter work week when they are currently the most ineffective teachers in the advanced world. Swathes of British children are leaving school illiterate and innumerate.
The system the unions and LEAs put in place with its ever-lower standards and ever vaguer ‘subjects’ is the result of the rot; not its cause. The power’s in the wrong place, i.e. not with the parents. Feed parents portable cash and let the headmasters sort them out.
Why do the teachers think that failure merits a pay rise? And shorter hours? - given that they have failed to do their job during the hours they currently work?
How could they do what we think of as a good job when they themselves campaigned against discipline and measureable educational standards? By the time we get to this opinion it is a career to late?
Fergus Pickering
Teachers are quite well paid these days but the job is much more horrible than it used to be partly because of all the forms they have to fill in and partly because the children are much more horrible than they used to be. The NUT has always been exactly as it is now.
The unions and the educational theorists and the LEAs made it horrible. Bin them all.
Glastonbury is beacon of toleration and freedom. In its small gaudy way it represents the highest flowering of Christendom and the capitalist free society that grew out of it.
It’s also a worm in freedom’s apple.
The heart of Glastonbury is a series of complexes that serve and cater to Britain’s alternative spirituality. The first is the Abbey itself where Joseph of Arimathea‘s staff was supposed to have sprouted into a thorn tree on his (and maybe Jesus’) apocryphal visit to Britain: ‘And did those feet in ancient time,’ and all that. Secret knowledge and the secret of life has been on sale here on and off for centuries.
Then there’s the Tor on a nearby hill, and so full of mystic allusions and associations with Christianity and Arthurian and grail legends, and so often visited and climbed and its pathways eroded that there’s talk of limiting hourly visitors by quota: ten Wiccans to two English Orthodox Christians to three cider-burdened Goths to one hopelessly lost Rolf Harris fan wanting to hear his hero sing the famous Stairway to Heaven cover live at Glastonbury, but he’s got the year, century and indeed the millennium wrong.
Next there is the Chalice Well: gardens and garden rooms through which water flows (I think) off the Tor, and in which as legend has it Joseph hid the Holy Grail. Now it has been extended and modelled and forms a series of spaces where neo-pagans and all kinds of alternatives hang out, relax, meditate, and get a load of the ambience. The Chalice Well is a Disneyland of the New Age, and as peaceful a place as can be found anywhere, I think, so near to a main road in England.
Lastly there is the High Street where a half dozen or more mind, body, spirit bookshops nestle amongst numerous Earth Mysteries amulet shops, purveyors of spiral-grown magic sticks with crystals in their handles, Green Man plaque retailers, incense and elfin robe vendors, and emporiums selling more glistening resin dragons, repro medieval Excaliburs and pentagram pendants than you could shake a spiral-grown magic stick at. Most of the eateries do several choices of proper, nourishing vegetarian food and the convenience store has a Julian Graves health foods franchise in the corner and stocks as much fresh antipasto and mead as your average Spar knocks out Walkers’ Crisps and Stella Artois.
The shopkeepers and spiritual advisers and incense blenders are elegantly dressed in tunics or green velvet frocks, shimmering robes or old-fashioned waistcoats of many buttons and stand shiny-brooched amongst leaf-stencilled walls and are all just lovely. The temptation is almost irresistible to shout ‘Let’s go hunt some dork’.
This is where the Age of Aquarius set down its water jar and got to business.
I think it must have more yoga teachers, crystallomancers, Reiki Masters, Wiccan High Priestesses and rune-readers per square yard than anywhere else on Earth, and it’s the place to get your chakras felt. All the bookshops and some of the groceries and the hemp-cloth boutique have numerous flyers and postcards for workshops and events and dance classes and meditation sessions and initiations and the whole goddess-earth-mysteries-grail-celticky stuff you could want, though the stabby-slashy Viking stuff that floats my boat is disappointingly thin on the ground. I once found a handbook of contemporary Mithraism here, so the spirit of the Legions walks elsewhere than along the nearby Roman roads.
When do we get to the social conservatism and other brutal Right-wingery, North Northwester?
Be patient, my dead-eyed Hobbesian hordes. All will soon be made plain and you can fall upon the helpless throats of the liberals. And feed.
If you think I’m being sarcastic here about this welcoming little town then I should point out that I love the place. My faithful readers may both have sussed by now that I’m a tree-hugger myself, and I have visited the town as a tourist and customer on many occasions. I treasure the place and always enjoy the welcome and kindness of the people who run the businesses that support the modern Pilgrim on his/her/its Path To Wherever.
Here’s where it all looks to be working.
Here’s the place where the impersonal forces of the free market with its Smithian Invisible Hand gather Earth-mysteries pamphlets and coffee-table ley-line books and compose-yourself grimoires from all over the world and wherein freedom of religion and conscience shine amid the thoroughly respectable middle-class town centre. There seems to be little or no class conflict with the cider-drinking and wellied natives who work in the town’s many non-tourist small businesses but who live right beside all the shiny new hippydom. This is where free enterprise ever-present in mediaeval England’s ubiquitous fairs and markets and the privacy that derives from Magna Carta and the toleration implicit in Blessed are the meek and a man’s a man for a’ thatfrom the Scottish Enlightenment all come together into as accommodating, as truly diverse and as peaceful a way of life that the most natural-rights natural right libertarian or neo-conservative or Burkean supporter of the ‘little platoons’ and compromise and barter and give and take might dreams of. Merry England and the Isle of Avalon dwell and profit alongside each other in the melting-pot or cauldron.I recommend you visit it before it’s destroyed.And yet. And yet
There’s that worm in the apple.
It’s pacifism.
It’s Greenery.
It’s liberalism writ large and broad and garlic-lentil-stencilled on the faces and the lovely, generous souls of these everyday mystics and on the covers of many of their books.
The CND chicken-foot – (which for the interested amongst you also happens also to be the Elk rune which represents a strong and magical defensive shield but it was inverted by CND -I wonder if they know?) – adorns many a card or psychedelic T-shirt and Arthurian-age pewter firestone ring. Save The Planet calendars and diaries glare out from behind commercially-cleaned gleaming windows. Most of the anti-Bush stuff is gone by now, but A For Anarchy and all the rest sit there amid the gleaming and mass-produced yoni-statues and purple-dyed geodes. You can’t move for pictures and statues of dolphins and polar bears and wise wolves and all the other beautiful, delicious and useful animals we’re supposed to never, ever annoy.
I’m not saying it’s true of all of them but there’s a distinct hint here of the effete aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France or the corrupt and bohemian nightclub culture of the WeimarRepublic.
Perhaps, to be charitable, I should say they are more like the Railway Children before Dear Papa went bust and exiled them to the sticks.
These gaudy, green, good-to-their-fellow-creatures people must represent an extraordinary rural concentration of anti-war (that is anti-our conduct of wars; not the hidden okay sort with the wrong-coloured butchers in charge) campaigners and activists.
Anti-capitalism and anti-globalization and anti-cultural imperialism screeds jostle for space amongst statues of Hindu gods, the ubiquitous smiling Buddha and Native American shaman drums and clothing. Think of that; anti-globalization propaganda right next to imported Red Indian headdresses and spirit drums. I’ll bet they aren’t imported from the United States or Canada or Mexico, either. To be fair, some books are printed on recycled paper but I’m betting that most of them weren’t and that none was brought across the Mendips by packhorse or porter.
It’s not the possible hypocrisy of this that gets me here (nobody can live a purely pure life, if you see what I mean). And they are truly tolerant of the unfamiliar – my cammo pants and combat boots (I have terrible arches, you know) draw no glares of pacific hostility from the gauzy-robed Goddess-priestesses walking in the spring sunshine between their cash registers and the bank. All of that’s fine.
No. It’s the ignorance that gets to me. Of everything.
Their sheer, unbreakable ignorance misses the untraceably-long lines of supply that feed the town’s demand for rain sticks and ‘eagle’ feathers and sacred gemstones, and of all the thousands of unknown and probably lowly-paid workers and farmers and businessmen and polluters who send those plants and animal waste and minerals into their shops. These supply lines are called markets. The people who do their lovely dreaming are against markets and international free trade and their shops are full of foreign goods.
They don’t understand trade despite being in it, and they dream of banning it or controlling it or otherwise shrinking it.
They’re against global warming which, to look on the bookshelves, is caused solely and unquestionably by the profit motive and carbon pollution and partly at least from the international transportation of goods and materials.
I’m sure they recycle if they can – I honestly believe that most folk try to live up to their ideals most of the time – but they stock what’s in the catalogue that they know or think might sell irrespective of its carbon footprint. They don’t know how much carbon this generates, and I don’t care. Go figure.
These good townsfolk cherish the differences in arts and crafts and manners and beliefs of – almost - all kinds of foreign peoples and nations and disapprove of the West corrupting them, and yet they import third-party knock-off sweatshop trinkets for Westerners to follow and copy or adapt and corrupt those overseas native folkways. Do they know what’s happening to the Indian looms weaving cloth for Chinese jackets or the Brazilian mills turning out Plains Indians tomahawk handles?
They peddle westernised versions of the holy objects of dozens of cultures, along with some of the genuine philosophy and theology behind them, but I wonder what Hindu swamis or Navajo Hatałiimight think looking at the European names of the teachers who offer training courses in their own faiths.
I could see no books that had any accounts of the creation of wealth.
(Please note, ‘Build your own yurt’ doesn’t have much to do with the production of wealth – at least not wealth for a future containing maternity wards served by ambulances and antibiotics and the machine that goes ‘ping.’)
There was tons of stuff on pollution and intensive farming/mining/fishing and how to do without them, but no recognition that a tree is a lousy shelter and may only feed you once a year (if you can get the nutshells open easily), unless you are prepared to process it; that is, to harvest it and industrialize it.
I repeat; this is a very nice place to be; restful and clean and peaceful, but its dream of unlimited choices of lifestyle and values is overlain by the wrong sort of unworldliness, and contains [if we’re not careful] the curse of its own destruction.
You’d think (if you weren’t already inclined to read my rants) that they’d appreciate the country and the civilization that built the toleration and freedom that lets people practise and proclaim their invented or imported religions, make a living, and dress up like it’s Halloween and know that if anyone tries to hurt them or stop them violently then it’s illegal and will be stopped by passing policemen, possibly investigated, and maybe even prosecuted.
You might think that such people; fulfilled, prosperous and hopeful, might make some effort to discover the source of the peace, the privacy, and the prosperity that they enjoy. You’d think that, unless you were a conservative, or similar.
Of course there’s nothing much about the way the Hellenistic civilization built up science and mathematics and spread the techniques of geometry and engineering for Rome to flourish and lay the roads and the bureaucratic seeds of Mediaeval Europe, nor of the lords and knights and soldiers that saved it from the extinction that Islam brought to the Eastern Roman Empire. There is some Christian stuff for sure, almost all of it mystical and no doubt very fine it is too, but I must have missed the shelves about William of Ockhamand his early musings on separation of church and state, constitutional and limited government, and the importance of property rights comparable to all those other books saying how much of our wealth and security derive from the many gifts of Confucianism and Hinduism and the Wisdom of the Rainforest.
Now of course none of this would matter if all they were doing there was exploring different philosophies and ways of life as examples for the rest of us to pick and choose from, which is often how society grows and progresses. Nine to Five, anyone? How about monogamy? Fire? Sticking the spare seeds in the mud and seeing whether we get more plants next year? But of course they’re doing no such thing.
Peace - as in the West not fighting - is the serpent in this mass-market wisdomGarden of Eden. Peace runs through their writings and the names of their incenses and their children and their ceremonies, but they don’t seem to know how you achieve it in the first place. Not only do these gorgeous folk not know or value much of the millennia of history that led to a place where you pick and choose gods and clothes and music and friends like women at a market choosing fruit, but they are actively involved in subverting it and opposing its defence.
The worst thing, the thing that’s worse to me than having to wear men’s’ clothes at work is that they don’t seem to know why any more than I do. I hang out with their equivalents in the north from time to time and they can never give logical or even coherently emotional reasons why defending the West is worse than allowing barbarians to destroy it, and them along with it.
Property rights and the freedom to follow your own selection of amusements and obsessions within a rule of law which protects the similar rights of others are useful to all of us but they aren’t obviously precious to some. Miniature car modellers and kite flyers and table footballers and Civil War re-enactors don’t seem to have much difficulty appreciating their freedom – only liberals (and these people are open-minded about generous and hospitable to a fault, if that’s what liberalism means) seem wilfully blind to the enemies of what we have and what we need most. They are as often as not actively involved in subverting their own security. And it’s not like they look in any way capable of defending themselves.
These aren’t great haters – I’ve seen narrow-eyed Marxists and mad-as-rabid-dogs crusty anarchist types for decades and Glastonbury’s folk are nothing like that. They don’t despise themselves and therefore long for their own destruction; they are serene and content and even their kids seem to like them. And yet they’re sitting on the branch that this country’s culture and history and industry and jurisprudence and servicemen and women have allowed to grow above the circling wolves, and they’re determined to saw through that branch because it’s knotty and mossy and imperfect.
As to why they take the risk and avoid ever thinking about the risk…well that’s the biggest mystery of all.
Off to one of Britain's distant shores at the weekend for quality time with Tiny Northwester. It'll probably rain. So here's my pick of what I've enjoyed recently. (Sorry about all the good stuff I've missed, but it's late and I want to post this at breakfast before the journey.)
One answer is CherryPie in puckish mood about the Japanese and why their success is better than our bureaucracy by land and sea.
Another is this guy, who's celebrating the olive tree which, alongside the hoplite army and the belief in Man's reason led the greeks to democracy. And tyranny. And aristocracy. Sigh.Good stuff on warmist lunacy, too.
And on...
Why Britain is a failing state - hard hitting contents of Xanthippa's Chamberpot. Never seen it done so crisply and so quickly and ye gods it has to stop!
A brand new conservative site. Hooray!Reflections on the culture wars from Ultramontanity. Demons, radicals, liberal, serfs and popes. Very sound and a welcome newcomer to social conservative blogging.
The delectable Mel on the new Stalin, Big 0 himself. Can't wait for the first show trials.Must wait for the slow-loading Speccy.
Penny Patch Patrician does a CSI job on the mind of the Easter Egg in the White House: like Mel's stuff but with added liberal idiot cartoon - well worth a visit just for that one graphic.
Everybody in the world's seen it by now (except for the BBC's viewers of course), as the Number Twos from Number Ten gets a new out-door installed by Dan The Man, but I especially like I Unknown's plea to spread the word - like the last bit of Independence Day - minus the Morse code, of course.
Bon appetit, and..
Igor, release the squirrels, and bring the girl to me. Fly, fly my beauties!
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad renounces violent jihad, gives up his country’s nuclear programme and sets out for Denmark to divide his time between work in that country’s flourishing bacon industry and satirical cartooning.
Saudi Arabia adopts Iceland’s constitution and allows women to campaign for office in free elections. Bjork becomes Earth Mother and Prime Minister when Íslenska Ásatrúarfélagið sweeps to power.
Hamas’ Adventures On The Riverbank becomes unlikely favourite for best selling Christmas children’s film DVD for 2009.
Scores of terrified British schoolboys breathe sighs of relief, start shaving again and plot massive cultural revenge on West.
Wisden site crashes. Willow futures soar. Headingley and TrentBridge become preferred sites for Haj…
I’ll be quick, what with my age and blood sugar problems.
I’m going to put Real World comments just after the bits that make me want to reach for my culture club…There’s a serious analysis at the end if you’re interested, but I’m all light-headed at the moment, what with Labour doing something halfway decent for the second time in a mere four years…
David Cameron tells party that NHS is key to victory at the polls.
Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor.
David Cameron is to make the NHS a key campaign theme in an attempt to convince voters that the Conservatives share their priorities.
Gordon Brown is to make the protection of grammar schools against furthercomprehensivisation a key campaign theme in an attempt to convince voters that Labour shares their priorities.
In a private briefing to shadow ministers yesterday, the Tory leader set out how he planned to build momentum towards victory in the general election.
Success in the European and council polls in June was a must, Mr Cameron told his frontbench team in a pep talk at the Commons. Stephen Gilbert, his campaign chief, revealed that the party had set a target of winning 43 per cent of the vote in both elections.
Say just about what the general polls say most of the time (talk about aiming high!) now that Mister Brown’s been rumbled as having put the Christmas Club money on a whippet called Bubble. Poor Bubble.
But while such an outcome would help to boost confidence, the party faced a serious challenge convincing voters that it was not out of touch, Mr Cameron said. He showed shadow ministers polling that suggested a gulf between voters’ own priorities and what they believe the Conservatives care most about.
Those old polls, eh? Pray, do tell.
In a warning to hardline Eurosceptic MPs, he pointed out that most people do not rank Europe among the ten most important issues. The NHS and education remain key concerns.
So the wise thing to do here is obviously:
A) Ignore and then insult and outrage the very people who’ll be stuffing the envelopes and manning the phones and driving the old dears to the polling station on Election Day; you know, those…What was that word? Ah, ‘Conservatives’, I think.
B) Concentrate on the one hand on one topic that if any conservative mentions it outside the privacy of his own silk-sheeted boudoir (complete with handcuff-equipped head board and flogging post for the privately-educated and collection of Biggles novels for the last surviving grammar school boy), then everyone in Britain over the age of six will immediately accuse the Tories of promoting cannibalism on the Intensive Care Ward and prompt the BBC and Channel Four to run 24-hour telethons showing American ambulances stopping to drop black gunshot victims in the gutter once the paramedic’s phoned the victim’s credit card rating through to the dispatcher.
C) Concentrate on the other hand on a topic for which your entire cure involves Carol Vorderman (pbuh).
Now look, David. Carol Vorderman can cure lots of things, including a problem of mine which I choose not to elaborate now before my reading millions, but…
The whole of the teaching profession (bar about twelve individuals and the tiny private sector) plus all the local education authorities and all the universities [except maybe Buckingham] would rather die than do anything conservative up to and including saying something nice about Britain since the Old Stone Age – and even then the people here weren’t vegetarians so that’s touch and go too – and you think someone who can do Sudoku in the bath in ink is going to change the cultural Marxist stranglehold on our school children’s’ minds?
Can we just pause a moment and think about that?
OK, thought about it. Back to politics.
Senior strategists have been dismayed at recent polling evidence showing a dramatic slide in the Tories’ ratings as the party best placed to run the NHS.
Senior strategists have been dismayed at recent polling evidence showing a dramatic slide in Labour’s ratings as the party best placed to run the Quorn Hunt.
Where once it led Labour on the issue,..
Would that be when the whole economy went south or when the anti-Tony-Blair-war fuss was at its height, I wonder? I forget. Happy days, but now long gone, I fear.
… it now trails by about 8 per cent, according to the last Populus poll for The Times.
“His main message was that we should be doing better on health,” one senior Conservative said. Another reported: “He said we needed to do more to reassure people that we had changed and that we weren’t threatening the public sector.”
So that whole idea of having different parties in this country suggesting different visions of the good life is where, exactly, in all this?
Mr Cameron said that entrenching the Conservatives as the party of economic competence was a key priority.
‘Economic competence’ here meaning national spending levels equivalent to the Royal Navy in a foreign port on New Year’s Eve with a year and a half’s pay in cash in every man’s pocket – that kind of ‘economic competence’, huh?
But showing that it could best tackle the recession did not mean abandoning efforts to convince voters that the party had changed, he said.
Although the Tories maintain a pledge to match Labour spending on health and schools until 2011, the downturn led Mr Cameron and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, to ditch a commitment to equal public spending overall last year.
So it’s a bad thing to spend less than Labour and we promise only to start doing so in two years’ time, right?
Say, I think I’m getting the hang of this entrenching the Conservatives as the party of economic competence thing already.
Mr Cameron said last week that the Tories must accept a share of the blame for the “cosy economic consensus” that allowed debt to rise to unsustainable levels.
‘Yeah, just what he said’ doesn’t make it any more.
The Conservative leader’s private presentation reveals that he expects that the political battleground will shift back on to public services in the months ahead as Labour accuses the party of preparing to slash spending.
You’re in a spot of bother here, aren’t you, David?
The pep talk to about 70 senior MPs and peers was given in the Boothroyd Room of Portcullis House. In his presentation on the June elections, Mr Gilbert said that the party was targeting the North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, Somerset and Cornwall.
A Conservative spokeswoman said: “We do not comment on leaks of private meetings.”
Meanwhile, a Guardian/ICM poll shows the Conservatives maintaining a 12-point lead over Labour. The two parties are unchanged on 42 per cent and 30 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats up 2 points on 20 per cent.
And this is the problem. The culture war problem. The propaganda problem. The party political problem.
If you spend your whole career as leader trying to get the other kids to like you by joining in their games and by not being too rude about their Transformers and Thundercats but kind of hinting that maybe your He-Man dolls might be a bit better and also telling the whole schoolyard that you’re not too different from those nice Lib Dems with their Power Rangers and you do manage to take some of their friends away from them because your Castle Grayskull’s, like, totally awesome,then when your pals’ voices start to break and action figures lose their allure and maybe some of the lads start to look meaningfully at the lasses what do you do?
You’ve invested so much time and drawn limited praise from your command of the Masters of the Universe worlds that nobody believes you’re really interested in or up to the grown-up stuff.
But now it’s time for the grown-up stuff, and his culture’s all wrong. And the best things in life aren’t free, it seems, and someone’s spent all of our pocket money for us and…
David Cameron, George Osborne and all are Political Class through and through, which means that they can’t think of; can’t contemplate let alone deliver a smaller and more efficient State.
It’s just not in them to do so; they can no more wish for and seek limited government as beloved of both libertarians and Old Right, than the Puritans of the Civil War period could understand and desire sustainable development, or the Vikings a centralized Welfare State.
“We have spent an extra £90 billion on the health service, the third-biggest employer in the world after the Red Army and Indian Railways. We have Third World maternity wards, elderly patients discharged with malnutrition, lower cancer and stroke survival rates than most of Europe and Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, which has apparently allowed more than 400 people to die through sheer neglect. Why? Not for lack of money. Not for want of teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists or radiographers. But because the law of diminishing returns kicks in particularly viciously in heavily unionised, bureaucratic, monopoly services.”
For Call Me Dave and his pals, the above just isn’t real. We’ve got to have high levels of public spending on services, especially health and education because, because… because that’s what“we needed to do more to reassure people that we had changed and that we weren’t threatening the public sector” means. That’s what the Political Class does, all the time. They can’t envision responsible, independent people shifting for themselves in life and seeking to run their own lives without massive, tax-funded public spending run and owned by government .
“But this does not just affect accountants. It also lets down the most vulnerable people. Take Baby P. He died not because Haringey Council had no money: he was visited 60 times by different agencies. He died because bureaucracy had grown to a point where no one took responsibility for him. This Government created safeguarding boards, children's trusts, Cafcass, Sure Starts, children's services departments, and required them to work together. This means that people are attending meetings rather than seeing families, ticking boxes rather than exercising judgment.”
No, sorry, still not getting it. If we allowed churches or private charities – the sort of charities that actually have to collect money to finance them rather than being given wedges of tax and thus become quangos – or even reduced the number of agencies and their duties and staffing then who knows what might happened to the children of the poor? They might die? In large numbers.
CMD & Co. live in the political world of broadsheet editorials and focus groups and policy conferences and TV interviews with their blinkered perspective.
Cutting childcare budgets must lead to genocide in their tunnel vision.
In chasing some mythical ‘middle ground’ in the focus groups and polls that they run they’re missing the majorities they need to win and govern.
40% of the working class voted for Mrs. Thatcher’s Tories in the 1980’s and a few stuck around whilst Mister Major blew the whole deal.
Mrs. Thatcher’s government weathered all kinds of storms because it connected, across party lines, with ambitions and hopes – and fears – of people across all party lines and across class lines.
Her administrations were scarcely lily-white and scandal-free, but until the federasts blew it on behalf of their home country of Europe, nothing could touch her:
# Not Western rearmament and small wars against the will of the USSR despite massive Soviet rearmament and worldwide ‘peace’ propaganda campaigns because the British people rightly feared the USSR.
# Not the sometimes vile private misbehavior of Tory politicians when the economy was freed up, growing, and ever-more prosperous because the British people rightly wanted to share in prosperity.
# Not the ever-shrill shrieking of the Leftist firmament about jobsandhealthandwomenandhousingandcuts when people were free to find jobs or start their own businesses and provide for their own health - or a least not abuse it by working in stinking old factories that ‘she’ shut down -and were buying or renting the much more readily available private housing.
All the sources Mister Cameron seeks his advice from are up there in their ivory towers, and would run screaming from what millions of voters would leave their homes and their UKIP membership, and BNP meetings and council and housing association homes to achieve at the polls if offered:
# A majority of the British people would like to leave the EU, though few of the Political Class does.
# A majority of the British people would like violent criminals locked up for longer, though few of the Political Class does.
# A majority of the British people would like cleaner hospitals, though few of the Political Class does to the extent they’d contemplate allowing the sacking of NHS trade union members being disciplined for unsanitary behaviour of poor cleaning work.
# A majority of the British people would like to limit immigration, though few of the Political Class does.
# A majority of the British people would like better discipline and recognizable subjects in schools, though few of the Political Class does.
# A majority of the British people would like a bigger share of what they earn for themselves and their families rather than the meat people-carriers and hoodie armies on the dole and on the sick.
Suggest any of that, and practically everyone whom Mister Cameron knows personally and professionally would be up in arms calling for his (humane) removal from office. All he has is the Political Class and their tunnel vision.
Which is why he comes up with the idea of freezing the BBC budget instead of selling off the Marxist filth-mongers to scrabble in the marketplace. Which is why he seeks help in maths from the adorable Ms. Vorderman instead of abolishing the LEAs and putting the rest of the education budget into parents’ vouchers and setting up examinations charities to run the O-Level and A-Levels on a you-can-fail basis.
Conservatives in disarray over 'sooner or later' tax promise Kenneth Clarke appeared to cast doubt on whether the Tories would deliver on their inheritance tax pledgConservative Party tax policy was in disarray last night after George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, was forced to contradict Kenneth Clarke over a flagship Tory promise to voters.
Big deal. We need a chain saw taking to the overspending on quality-of-live political correctness of quangos and fake charities and all the soppy, stupid, anti-wealth ‘health legislation’ and their sponsors and employees and the tax reductions to follow, and all the public will see on TV is ‘disarray’ or disunity.
Nobody outside of the circles of the Wise and the Good cared a hoot if Mrs. Thatcher’s ministers or ‘friends’ were cross with her, or if backbench Tory MPs were internalizing all kinds of organic and non-organic compounds and objects as long as she was delivering spendable prosperity, national security, and some sense of law and order.
If your political culture doesn’t let you connect with the nation and follow its dreams and morality, then all you have left...
