A Journal of the Plague Year, November 2020

Incompetence, Ideology and Entitlement: The Return of the Shit Show

Johnson versus The Grim Reaper: Christmas Day Movie details released

It is with no pleasure that I return to this chronicle of our nation’s darkest days, but needs must. The needs are distinct but all are pressing. A need for personal therapy. In the absence once more of social intercourse, the need to articulate the current situation and its impact, performs a vital function in terms of one’s own understanding of the crisis, not to mention mental health. A need to play my part in the popular revolt against Mr Johnson in particular and The Conservative Party in general. It is coming, sensation seekers, be patient. There will be a reckoning, along with a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. And, finally, a need simply to record for posterity the twists and turns in this long strange trip.

Reasons to be Cheerful

Although, of course, I’m gripped by fear and loathing, the portents look good for Tuesday’s American election. Unless the polls have completely messed it up (and our experience of Brexit and the last US election give pause for thought), it seems likely that the nightmare of Trumpery is coming to an end. This is tempered by an expectation of street violence by very well-armed and emboldened far right militias in the US. Trump really does need to stand trial for his crimes.
People are at last beginning to see through Mr Johnson’s bluster to conclude that, yes, The Emperor is very much not wearing clothes. And it’s not a pretty sight, gentle readers
News that a dossier of evidence about Slytherin Dominic Cummings has been passed to the CPS has warmed the cockles of my heart. The documents support allegations that Cummings perverted the course of justice in his away day to Durham and his subsequent No 10 Garden “explanation”. This (wait for it) carries a prison sentence if proven.
It’s all gone quiet on Brexit. It could yet end in no deal, but more likely is that a fig leaf “understanding” will be announced that can be presented as a great triumph by The Liar Extraordinaire. Even if that happens, le merde will hit le fan. Delays, shortages, lorry queues, rationing, emergency medical shortages. I know it’s harsh that that can be presented as a reason to be cheerful, but I am increasingly of the view that people need to feel the pain to fully understand what they voted for. Already the Lie Machine is in full vigour blaming the nasty foreigners for all of this. My hope is that Johnson’s tattered credibility will make this harder to stick than previously.

That’s enough of whistling in the dark to keep our spirits up. Now for grim reality. And so to Lock down, Act 2. Has anything ever been so predictable as this? The sight of Tories and Johnson himself, making themselves look stupid by condemning Labour’s call for a national lockdown has been priceless. Even two days before their ignominious u turn, they were criticising this as extreme. It is presented to us as Johnson making “difficult” political choices between health and the economy, and being such a libertarian (what a great guy) that he delayed until the bitter end before bowing to the inevitable. What arrant nonsense. As a result of this dithering he has successfully synthesised those polar opposites, health and economy, because the multiplier effect of delay has ensured that the economy will be locked down for significantly longer now than would have been the case. All the while we have had to endure the prospect of their entire Covid policy being calibrated by a calculation so self-serving, so empty, so crass and yet so predictable. It is this: Johnson’s brain has been whirring with the following equation. What do I have to do to be able to ease restrictive measures, so that some species of family Christmas can be preserved? Yes, dear reader, Johnson is motivated not by protecting citizens but by the prospect of headlines about Boris Saves Christmas. Even if Boxing Day were to be followed by the Dickensian spectacle of bodies piled in car parks, such is Johnson’s short-termism that he would have jumped at that as an opportunity. And then he would have blamed Michel Barnier.

To be honest, the first Lock Down was relatively painless for some people, including me. Retired with a juicy pension, in a nice house with a big garden, it has been perfectly manageable. Misanthropes like myself have enjoyed the excuse it provided for not seeing people. The return to eating out in Restaurants during the summer was also welcome, if misguided now in hindsight. Sport’s return, at least on the telly, was also welcome even if that, in saying that, I’m well aware that I’m part of the bread and circus’ response of Nero Johnson. The lack of cinema, theatre and gigs has been harder to bear. But the second wave, in the dead of winter, will be very much harder, not least psychologically. And I think, its doomed to failure because of some catastrophic policy errors, that stem from an obsession with presentation rather than substance.

It is a huge mistake to leave Schools and Universities open. The case for closing Universities is unanswerable and the data on children, infection and schools is not yet all in. I am fairly certain, based on nothing more than intelligent observation, research evidence devotees, that schools will be found to have played a major role in the resurgence of the virus. But the libertarian hawks, buoyed by the case to be made on the grounds of “suffer the little children”, are nauseatingly hypocritical when they insist that children need schools to be open.

There are two reasons for school closures to be more problematic than other sectors of society. First, closure presents major threats to children who are at risk in abusive families. Secondly, deteriorating mental health amongst children and teenagers who are removed from society and networks by the lockdown, is a genuine worry. But, to be blunt, mental health and abuse are neither of them contagious and there are other ways of mitigating those risks short of a return to full time attendance.

But, of course, the opponents of this policy are all there, drip-dripping their bile and vitriol. So we have Kelvin Mckenzie tweeting that teachers are lazy, and didn’t do a stroke of work during the first lock down. He is backed up by other such intellectual power houses like Julia Hartley Brewer, Sarah Vine, Isabel Oakshott. The brain dead of Fleet street are joined by the ideologically fervent of Westminster, with their commitment to grand abstract nouns such as Liberty and Sovereignty. You know those Titans of the Commons, Iain Duncan Smith, Steve Baker, Desmond Swayne. Mark Francois would be fighting them on the beaches as well, but of course, he has his own little local difficulty to deal with at the moment. These Freedom Fighters, who so often invoke the Second World War as England’s finest hour, would have been useless during that actual conflict. Imagine them dealing with a polite request from the ARP to put that light out: “How dare you infringe my inalienable rights as a freeborn Englishman. I reserve the right to keep my lights blazing and to hell with Jerry. Those Europeans are all just frit.” As someone pointed out a few days ago, it is delicious watching Boris get shafted on his own side by the Libertarian Loony right. A richly deserved taste of his own medicine, and one hopes deeply instructive to be lectured by people who have the resources to protect themselves against Covid while making a quick killing financially.

“Put that light out!” “How dare you infringe my liberty as a free born Englishman!”

But why have they, Johnson in particular, been so unremittingly hopeless in dealing with this public health crisis? It’s because it goes to the heart of the lies and contradictions that being a Tory in the modern world now consists of. Every instinct in their body, every ideological sinew of belief screams in agony when the only solution that will work is one which requires them to spend billions of pounds of money to give to people for doing nothing. So they kick and scream and drag their heels. They don’t mind pending billions of pounds of public money that go to their mates or the wives of their mates. That’s business as usual and money well spent as far as they are concerned. This is where the sense of entitlement comes in. They are the ruling class. It’s something they have taken in with their mother’s milk. They deserve it. Scrutiny from the oiks in Parliament is an affront that normally can be tolerated but when their backs are against the wall and it actually means something they are furious that their decisions are being questioned.

All of their public health decisions have been made with an eye to the economic cost. Every single one. So they think that’s they can preside over a policy of repeated lock down and easing to buy enough time muddling along until a vaccine comes along. And people will die, but they are not the really important people, so we can put up with it and they can try to gloss it over and get away with it in time for some more giveaways before the next election. Easing the economy in July was essential to allow people to start to make money, so they could ease back on public spending. A terribly sort sighted, ideologically hide bound mistake that will lead to thousands more deaths and just as much if not more on the eventual public spending bill.

They really do need to take off the blinkers and think a little bit more about economics. Globalism and Thatcherism have comprehensively failed. Public spending needs to increase massively on the decent infrastructure that Germany has maintained. They are hardly a hotbed of Marxism, after all. A touch of Modern Monetary Theory is what is needed. The level of deficit is nowhere near as important as classical economics has taught us. Balancing the books is irrelevant. The last six times we have had a balanced budget in the last three hundred years, it has been followed by an incredibly deep recession. For countries that issue currency, deficits are good for the health of the economy, as long as you keep a weather eye on inflation. In the face of this new thinking, traditional Tory economic advocates are like flat earthers.

So what should be done?

Lock the economy down just as in March.
Impose a rent and mortgage freeze
Maintain furlough and extend to the self employed

This puts the economy in a deep freeze, still alive, ready to revive next year.

Close schools and universities. Refund part of fees paid. Have rota systems for schools so that children get regular contact with others outside of their household
Cancel exams and do ongoing assessment

This will give us a chance of getting to the end of Spring next year with a workable vaccine and everything in place to bounce back strongly.

Next time: My five point plan to rid the world of disease, prevent war, and train everyone to be nice to each other. Or was that my five pint plan?

Tory Education Minister thinks the unthinkable

_{Marcus Grovelle, the Tory Education Secretary, in an eerie foreshadowing of Gavin Williamson, solves the problems of the NHS, Social care and Teacher recruitment at a stroke}.

In this extract from “Zero Tolerance”, Grovelle, speaking at a conference of POCSE, a teachers’ group designed to raise exam performance, tackles the pressing issues of the day.

Grovelle’s speech was reaching its zenith and the crowd, seduced by the charisma of power, were lapping it up, with its strange mixture of flattery, eccentricity and outright madness.

“And there are so many points of agreement between this Government’s challenging of the status quo and the Partnership’s challenging of sloppy teaching and low standards in exams. We have broken the dead hand of Local Authorities and their monopoly control of education, we’ve provided real choice with the creation of Academies that have transformed educational standards in this country and took that step further with a whole new category of Free Schools, giving parents the right to set up schools that will give greater priority to standards and old-fashioned values. We’ve finally dealt with the runaway grade inflation and cheating that flourished under the last socialist government, introducing exams that are rigorous and which don’t patronise working class children and instead expect the same high standards for students whether they come from a council estate or a country estate.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, we are clearly cut from the same cloth. We want the same things, we have the same passion, we refuse to accept the same old excuses. Now, I ask you to join me in our new venture, the next step in transforming Britain’s education system and moving from being the laughing stock of the free world to being the best in the world. I can announce today, that after consultation, from next September we will be introducing the following major reforms:

All students will have an entitlement to follow a five-year course, leading to GCSE, of Latin and Greek. These courses will be double weighted in the performance tables, to incentivise more timid institutions to embrace the reform. Let’s bring back the standards from historically our finest institutions and spread them to Bash Street Kids Comprehensive.

We are going to tackle the problem of teacher recruitment with a series of bold and innovative initiatives. Every University, College and Higher Education Institute will be affiliated to a network of local schools and undergraduates will be able to supplement their Maintenance Loans by taking up the places that will be on offer as affiliated teachers. This will, at a stroke, get the brightest and the best of our young people working in the Secondary School system without the need for costly and time-consuming training, most of which frankly, could have come out of Jeremy Corbyn’s Marxist handbook.”

Here he paused and beamed at his audience, evidently delighted with his clever joke, one he had personally inserted in the text of the speech, against the wishes of his Central Office writers. The audience nervously blinked back, not sure of what their response should be to these extraordinary proposals. Grovelle steamed forward.

“We will tackle once and for all the divide between vocational education and academic. For too long we have been in thrall to the crazy notion that everyone should go to University. We have denigrated practical subjects and sneered at those who have chosen to follow their aptitude for hands-on work. Our new apprenticeships were a start in tackling the ludicrous, over-complicated schemes of the last Labour Government, but now we are going to go one step further. I am delighted to be able to announce today that, from September, from the age of fourteen all students will be able to choose to sign up to do National Service, either in any of the armed forces, or, and this idea is truly inspired and revolutionary, in our National Health Service, with particular emphasis on Social Care. The sneering naysayers in the Remoaners camp, who constantly talk this great country of ours down, have carped and moaned continually about how our great institutions would collapse without foreign workers to staff them. Why on earth should we condemn the bottom forty percent of our young people to failure in the academic exam system, just for the sake of political correctness? We anticipate that, in the first instance, there will be a traditional gender split, with boys opting for the armed forces and girls for the caring professions, but the choice will be available for anyone who to express a preference for either. The only obstacle they would have to face would be the comments of their friends.” Again, Grovelle paused to allow the audience to show their appreciation of his daring joke. He was rewarded with a few nervous titters.

“Imagine, the problems of Social care, the NHS, the Armed Forces in the face of the conventional threat posed by Russia and by terrorism and the academic standards of the bottom 40% of our young people, all solved at a stroke.”

The expressions on the sea of faces in front of him told their own story of people picturing the reality of what had just been described to them. There were expressions of bafflement, incomprehension, with a few furrowed brows of those who were turning to anger. Grovelle, oblivious to his audience, ploughed on. The unthinkable had to be thought, and he was the man to think it.

Will Williamson have more success than Grovelle? Read the rest of “Zero Tolerance” to find out.

https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/zero-tolerance/

A Journal of The Plague Year 2020

Week 14, June 19^th

Spot the difference

One is articulate, community driven, and responsible and the other is hopelessly out of his depth

Amidst all of the hopeless Tory floundering over their pathetic handling of the pandemic, such that even hardened liars have started to look a little embarrassed at the nonsense Cummings has told them to spout, they have inadvertently stumbled on a get-out-jail-free card, like Bilbo in the tunnels under The Misty Mountains finding the ring of power in the darkness. (apologies – there will be no further fey Lord of the Rings type references in the remainder of this blog) And to their great relief, it’s a combination of bogeymen that they are very familiar with. Buried deep in the Tory psyche, is the fundamental conviction that The British People (Pompous voice, serious expression) love bashing the unions and in particular, they love bashing teachers unions’ and Local Authorities (sometimes known as “Communists” and “Soviets”). So, at PM questions this week (shortly to be renamed, “Are you talkin’ to me?”) the execrable LiarMan Johnson was wetting himself with joy at his cunning wheeze for ignoring the questions by asking a load of his own. The use of the word “Asking” in this context is a little misleading. “Asking” implies complete sentences but The Great Orator will not be tied down by the restrictions imposed by Standard English Grammar. Those sort of rules are for losers and oiks. Bellowed single words, Latin phrases, and the stamping of feet takes Boris right back to the good old days at The Bullingdon club.

This was compounded by Robert Halfon at the Education select committee asking the unions (Mary Bousted, I think) why Students could go shopping in Primark but not go to school. Halfon is usually one of the more sympathetic Tories, someone who does a passable impersonation of a human being most of the time, so this intervention was particularly disappointing. It really does not take a lot of brain power to work out that easing the lockdown on shops is a question for his boss to answer, not the teaching unions. In the great new Tory spirit of nothing being their responsibility, they seem both baffled and outraged that the situation in schools is no more than the consequences arising from a responsible following through of the Government’s own safety guidelines for Covid 19. Sorry guys, it’s not a Union plot, no matter how convenient that would have been for you.

Then came the Great Tory Plan for saving a generation of students, probably purchased on line from the same CunningPlans ‘R Us store as the one they were supposed to have in place for Social Care. Oh, and the one for a comprehensive free trade deal (both “oven-ready” plans, if memory serves me well). This involves a startled looking Gavin Williamson, announcing a scheme to give one to one tuition next year so that no student will fall behind. Apart from the ones whose names are already down for a zero hours contract opportunity, when they leave school, because they don’t really count. Until Daniel Rashford (keep up, Mr Hancock!) gets wind of it, then at the last minute they will really, really count and will all be promised scholarships to Oxbridge, instead. Until everyone has forgotten about it, after we all get back from Tuscany in October.

This is a classic Tory response to a situation they have fundamentally misunderstood and then misrepresented. It is infuriating that it appears that, emerging from the mist, oven ready, so to speak, are teachers, to take on the role of Tory scapegoat. The narrative goes something like this. Lockdown and continued school closure is a tragedy for the life chances of young people. It is doing irreparable damage to their education and therefore to their eventual outcomes and prospects. It is doing particular damage to the lives of those working – class kids. You know, the ones the Tories really care about so much. Well, when Marcus Rashford tells them to. In order to mitigate the damage inflicted on young people by Marxists and Trade unions, teachers must give up some of their holidays, or work at the weekends for the next year so that the kids can catch up what they’ve missed. So much education has been lost, they say. So much Damage has been done, they say. Decent ordinary teachers want to work themselves into the ground to make things right, but they are being held back by the Socialist teaching unions, who, rumour has it, aren’t patriotic and think Churchill was a racist. (They do tend to get a bit confused, after a while. I think this is called “Cognitive overload”)

This, as you have probably gathered, drives me mad.

Lockdown and non-attendance at school has not done “irreparable damage” to the vast majority of students.

Learning has not been “Lost”, like a piece of PE kit without a name tag. It may well have been delayed, but it’s definitely not “Lost”

The idea of lost learning comes from a confusion about the distinction between learning and covering a set curriculum. Learning is vital. Covering a set curriculum to an arbitrary timescale and set of assessment criteria is as important as we deem it to be. And in this situation, that’s not very.

Two groups of students have suffered terribly during this period: Those at risk in child protection terms and those whose mental health has worsened because of the lack of opportunities to socialise with their peers and adults other than those in their close family. It is vital that these children get back into school as quickly as possible, not to be crammed with the knowledge they have missed learning, but to experience positive interactions, whether that be play or discussion, with others.

The Tory plan to plug the gaps of what has been missed, by first testing, supposedly to identify “Gaps” and then by “catch up” programmes before and after school, at weekends and in the holidays is a dreadful, unimaginative, useless response to this unprecedented situation. More than anything else, children need to go back to normal. The situation envisaged in September is not normal. It piles pressure on staff and students after the extraordinary challenge that the pandemic has presented. In short, it’s the worst of all possible worlds.

One to one tuition can make a contribution, but it can also mess things up even more. Unknown tutors, teaching a programme uncalibrated to the needs of the school, the class and the individual, with little accountability is potentially a huge waste of money. And, at the risk of being cynical, who exactly will trouser the vast sums of money being talked about? The Government has specified that they will control the provision of accredited tutors from approved Tuition companies. And guess who will own those little beauties? Friends and family of The Conservative Party. And donors, of course. Some people will get a tidy little wedge from this “crisis”.

And, of course, if you think about this situation in terms of lost learning, you are immediately in crisis territory, leading to a panicked response. The minute you start to think of it as simply learning delayed, the crisis evaporates (notwithstanding the two groups mentioned above) and a rational plan can emerge.

Let me suggest my alternative. If education is so important, if the learning that would have taken place needs to be achieved, if the Government is prepared to spend considerable sums of money on this, then why not just repeat the year?

That’s right – Repeat the year.

No additional pressure. Going over some of the same ground will reinforce learning. Repeating will allow time for greater depth, nay, even mastery.

In Primary you could either keep the Year 6 children and devise the most thrilling transition programme ever. Reception would be deferred for a year because International best practice from those jurisdictions we so admire, is to give children more playing time by starting formal education at least a year later than the UK. Or, to avoid their disappointment, they could transition, and do their interim programme in secondary before staring the Year 7 curriculum. The departed Year 11s means that there is physical space in the schools, as usual.

This way you would cover the curriculum, but without a panicked sense of rush that “Catch up” implies. And students going on the Higher Education would do so, but just a year later than usual. No big loss there. People have been doing gap years for decades now, so it can’t do any damage, surely.

This is not quite a back of the fag packet solution. I have actually turned over and gone on to the front as well. But I do recognise that inevitably, there will be lots of things that my brilliant solution does not account for. But I imagine, given the adversarial nature of Twitter and Social media in general, that there will shortly be a tsunami of people telling me how dim I am not to have considered X, Y and particularly Z.

I’m looking forward to it.