Political Economy

Michael Gove has decided that that there will be a new qualification. The English Bac, awarded to students with good passes in English, maths, science, a language, and history or geography.

Why this choice of subjects? Where is the Latin or Ancient Greek I hear you asking? After all there has been a lot of support for these subjects as the true core of a real education!

What will the history be about? Will it bang the drum for England and its achievements? Or perhaps ancient history, the study of ancient Greece and Rome, is a safer bet?

And why are there only five subjects in it? Why cannot RE  be included, or psychology or sociology or technology or art or music?

I tried to get my head around the Scottish system to see what they did but its jargon, innumerable levels and differences in terminolgy totally defeated me. Proof I supose of the superiority of the Scottish system.

There is the Middle Years programme (ages 11 – 16) of the International Baccalaureate which is an easily understood programme that aims to develop students academically, socially and emotionally and practically. Surely that could improve English education? Most probably it would, but it would also cost money to implement. Why did Gove not choose the Middle Years IB?

So have you spotted the real reason for Gove’s English Bac yet? It certainly has no academic or pedagogical foundation. It will not distinguish good teaching or good schools from bad. It is quite simply a measure that guarantees to show, at no cost, two things:

1. That private schools are better than state schools!
2. That Gove’s programmes of education have given rise to a huge improvement in standards in English state schools by the time of the next election!

Of course in reality it will show neither of these two things.  So how does it work?

Some years ago the Labour government made modern languages no longer compulsory. As a result in many state schools students have voted with their feet and the proportion of students taking a modern foreign language has dropped significantly. State schools will therefore automatically have poor English Bac results. Of course those students choosing their GCSE options to start this September for examination in May/June 2013 will find that languages are again, for large number of more able students, back on the subject list. So in 2013 results will be better.

Will Mr Gove be starting his measurements in 2013? Not at all. He has already started by publishing English Bac results for 2010! This is a full three years before the new system can possibly start to give results. As one would expect these 2013 figures will show two things:

1. That private schools still have much better results at the English Bac and are still “somehow better”
2. That state school results in 2013 will be much better than in 2010, the last year Labour had an influence on schools, so showing that conservative policies are much more successful than those of Labour!

Will either of these two assertions be true? No!

Private schools will, by and large, be selecting their students from amongst the brightest 16% in the nation. That is to say from those with a CAT score of 110 or better. The local comprehensive will have the whole range of student ability from a CAT score of between 70 and 130. If they are lucky the brightest students, those with a score of 110 or more, will make up 10% of their intake (the rest of the bright students will be in private schools) compared to the 100% for the private school. The private school result should therefore be 10 times better, shouldn’t it? The fact that they are never any where near that good attests to the good quality of much of state education.

Denbigh High School in Luton is led by one of the regions most outstanding head teachers, Dame Yasmin Bevan DBE Hon DEd BSc (Econ) BA MA. Are Denbigh’s English Bac results for 2010 better than poor? Probably not. Will they be better in 2013? Certainly they will. Will that have anything to do with Gove’s policies? Of course not! It will happen simply because more Denbigh students will be taking a modern foreign language.

Will the coalition government claim the improvement is because of Gove’s policies? Almost certainly!

What will it actually prove? You decide!

My Last question to you is this. Do we not deserve better government than this shoddy mixture of trickery and deceit?

Imagine that you are getting to the end of a not very good meal at your local restaurant. The dessert menu has arrived and you see that only ice cream is still available. Worse still there are only three flavours, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. You have tried all of them before and found some fault with each. However you are still hungry so you decide to choose, somewhat peversily,  your least favourite flavour, strawberry, in the hope that this time it might be more appealing.

As your ice cream arrives you notice that another table of three is getting quite different flavours, passion fruit and mango, mint chocolate chip and rum and raisin. You complain to the waiter who tells you that he has decided to offer only the three largest sellers as this makes his job easier. To get the others you have to know to ask.

You would quite rightly be upset and probably make a complaint. But this sort of thing is happening all the time at election hustings up and down the country. Only the three largest parties are allowed on the panel and the smaller parties have to make do with submitting their responses in written form for later publication in the hope that some voters may read them.

The silly thing is that with the planned televised debates you are going to hear what these three main parties think. Even worse is the fact that these are the parties who have run parliament for decades and are the primary architects of the mess we are in.  Limiting the panel in this way ensures that the innovative solutions that the smaller parties are espousing may not see the light of day. It is also constraining the democratic process in a way that will increase the likelihood of an adverse outcome for the country.

People are likely to vote for what they hear, or not vote at all. Worse still if there is a hung parliament it will consist of the three larger parties fighting it out to get their old fashioned and out of date ideas accepted. Any negotiation is likely to be along the lines of “You accept this stale policy of ours and we will accept one of your stale policies”. Melding one stale idea with another has little chance of creating one new idea. Or to put it another way. If you have one thousand monkeys typing stale ideas out for a million years the chance they will create one new idea is small.

It will be as though you complained to the waiter and all he could offer as compensation was Neapolitan ice cream with layers of  vanilla-chocolate-strawberry. The fact that you like not one of the flavours makes no difference.

Now you might remark that as the English Democrats Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Stevenage that I would say all of that wouldn’t I? But the fact remains that the English Democrats party does have an important contribution to make.  First we are an English nationalist party in the same way that the SNP are a Scottish nationalist party or Plaid Cymru are a Welsh nationalist party. We will put England first just as the SNP puts Scotland first and Plaid puts Wales first. The English Democrats are the only party that is committed to putting England first. English voters might welcome such voting option as election day approaches and the demands for yet more money by the SNP and Plaid become yet more strident.

Secondly we are the only party with a well thought through but radical alternative to the current constitutional settlement. Our plans have matured over the last eight years and are not a knee-jerk reaction to current problems. So have the rest of the policies in our Manifesto

Thirdly we are not that small anyway. In the 2009 European elections over 280,000 people in England voted for the English Democrats – compare this to around 321,000 for the SNP and 127,000 for Plaid. We will soon be the largest nationalist party in the UK. We plan to field over 100 candidates in the Parliamentary election, much more than the SNP or Plaid. The Alliance for Democracy, of which the English Democrats are a founding member, plans to field 300 or more candidates.

We are in a critical election period. A recent survey said that 38% of the population wanted a hung parliament. It is quite possible that as the election date gets closer this proportion will increase. But do voters know what they wish for? A hung parliament of the three main parties plus the nationalist parties of Scotland and Wales will lead to an unprincipled grab for yet more English taxpayers money for the already over-paid Scots and Welsh.  The three main parties will eagerly connive in this, driven as they are by ego and bombast rather than a true love of country. They have already shown themselves  happy to sell the English down the road in order to get an opportunity to implement their already degraded ideas. They will not stop at this. For the English it will be a bit like a vanilla-chocolate-strawberry Neapolitan ice cream with an added extra – a layer of strong mustard!

The results of this will not be pretty. A severe reaction by the English leading to civil unrest, riots and mayhem by a nation that has already signalled that it has had enough is an almost certain outcome of this scenario.

And all for the want of not allowing the voter to see the full range of ideas and parties open to them. How sad can you get?

Westminster is in a mess.The Economy is a mess. The war in Afghanistan is a mess. And British politicians in the main parties do what comes naturally. They dump on the English.

So the heavenly duo (they come from up there after all, don’t they) have come up with the bright idea of selling off English Assets. Gordo’s list of quick sales; the Dartford tunnel, the Chanel tunnel, the Tote and so on are all English. When he says that he will be asking local authorities to make sales of their assets he is referring only to English local authorities.

Note that he will not be selling off Scottish assets, even though the two worst offenders in the current Banking crisis are Scottish Banks. That is because Gordo, when he worked on the legislation to form the Scottish Parliament and give the Scots Home Rule, made quite sure that it completely protected the assets of Scottish local authorities so that Westminster could not direct the sale of their assets as he can those of English local authorities.

This means that every school playing field, every public space, every local airport, the pride and joy of the local people as well as a source of employment will be up for sale, quite possibly to foreign European companies flush with back-handers from their governments. And are they going to employ local workers or will they bus in their own people?

However when it comes to preserving their own power and egos it isn’t just plundering English assets that the heavenly duo are so good at. They also deal a good hand in cynicism. On Wednesday  14th October 2009 the government announced a plan to spend £12 million in 130 white working class wards. Where is this money coming from? From the £16 billion of English Assets. In other words the Labour government intends to buy votes in next years general election by returning to the English less than 0.1% of the money it gets from selling their playing fields, leisure centres and employment opportunities.

The Tories are no better. Despite the fact that their web site calls them the English Tories their leader, David Cameron, is on record as saying “I do not want to be the Prime Minister of England”. Well Mr Cameron, the Leader of an English Parliament would be the First Minster, as in the Scottish Parliament. Only someone totally uninterested in England and the English could make that mistake.

The best that can be said about the Liberal Democrats is that they simply ignore England.

Only a few days ago the Sun newspaper transferred its allegiance to the Tories from Labour. Gordo’s response was proudly to  announce that it wasn’t the Sun that would decide who ruled at the next general election, it would be the British People.

Wrong, Gordo! it is the English people, as always, who will decide who rules next.

Will they vote for Gordo, the financial genius who sold off more than half of England’s gold at $275 and ounce or $3.5 billion when at today’s price of  $1063 per ounce it would have been worth $13.5 billion, the financial genius who claimed to have put an end to booms and busts, the financial genius who claimed to have saved the world?

Will they vote for Cameron, surely he must be a Scot, who cares so little for the English that he has stated that he doesn’t even want to lead them?

Will they vote for Nick Clegg, a man indifferent to the aspirations of the English?

Or will they vote for a party that will put England first, that wants England to be a nation once again, a party that cares for England, English jobs and English assets?

Only time will tell!