So first of all it's Jeremy Clarkson, muttering the unexpurgated version of Eeny Meeny Miny Mo in an unbroadcast segment. Then a hapless Radio Devon DJ David Lowe playing The Sun Has Got His Hat On, unaware that it contained the lyric "He's been tanning n------ out in Timbuktu / Now he's coming back to do the same to you". Today the Premier League chief Richard Scudamore is in trouble for emails in which he advised a friend to keep a female colleague "off your shaft" and compared an ex-girlfriend to a double-decker bus - "happy for you to play upstairs but her Dad got angry if you went below".
(Hypocritical hats off to the Daily Mirror for laying into Scudamore whilst repeating the comments for the amusement of anyone puerile enough to be entertained by them.)
Let's deal with Scudamore first. His emails reveal him to be boorish and sexist, and his comments have been attached by such luminaries as Tessa Jowell and Women in Sport; a Labour MP comments that his position as Premier League boss has been "undermined". Well maybe. But if Scudamore is unfit for his post, so are an awful lot of other men. A brilliant doctor friend of mine once complained of "the creeping feminisation of the NHS", and observed of a woman we know that she was certainly "towards the danger end of the female irrationality spectrum". These half-serious musings on the temperamental differences between the genders, sexist if you like, are part of the small change of conversation between many men. You may find Scudamore a degree more loathsome, although it's not his fault that private musings - best kept in the locker-room - were published.
As for the n----- word, the idea that someone on Radio Devon should be sacked for playing The Sun Has Got His Hat On is surely just bizarre. Boris Johnson's contention that the BBC is hypocritical for showing Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with its plethora of n----- words, doesn't quite wash for me, but nevertheless shows how complex the issue is. The BBC swiftly offered David Lowe his job back, but Lowe has had enough.
What banning "n-----" reveals is that these decisions are made by individuals according to individual tastes. The Scudamore stuff suggests more clearly, being borderline, that what's offensive is a matter of opinion. I personally find "n------" pretty horrible because it is redolent of a time when black people were regarded by (often quite nice) white people as little better than animals. But my view, although widely shared in Britain now, is not universally accepted, and its use by black people to one another shows, like Johnson's Pulp Fiction point, that nuances are at work. When black people use the word, it means something quite different from its use by 1930s English dance band leaders; itself different again from its use by a Southern redneck at a lynching; itself different again from its use by a portly petrolhead reciting a nursery rhyme out of English cultural antiquity. In other words, context is everything.
In 1960s or even 1980s Britain, the status of black people in society was sufficiently precarious to justify the argument that racist language should be outlawed. However even its most zealous defenders would have to acknowledge that something has been lost in terms of freedom of speech. There's nothing quite so insidious as the notion that certain things are sayable and other things aren't. In Britain today the penalty for transgressors can be unemployment or even jail. It's a tempting path as long as people who agree with you are holding the reins of power, but it leaves those who don't buy in to your value set excluded; and when the reins are taken away from you, what then?
Moreover, the outrage that greets the broadcast of The Sun Has Got His Hat On fails to recognise the transience of social attitudes. In 1932 people thought it was OK to say n------. Now most of them don't. Who knows what people will think in the future? One of the fatuities of our age is the notion that the attitudes we have are correct, perhaps even definitive, the rounded gleaming Platonic certainties towards which our forefathers were groping in their fumbling way. What rubbish. Our views are merely staging posts on humanity's long march, clung to by us, laughed at by our grandchildren.
I grew up in the 1960s with Eeny Meeny Miny Mo. It was part of my cultural heritage, along with Meccano, the Johnny Seven gun and Mamod steam engines. It was probably part of Clarkson's too. I'm surprised he hasn't tried to claim his own heritage is being denied. After all, the white liberal metropolitan elite is quite keen on protecting everyone else's culture. Why not its own?
There were traces of this in the Guardian the day after the Scudamore story broke. The G2 cover ran a spoof pointing up the tendency of the tabloids to run anti-Muslim scare stories, while inside the main paper David Conn, that most po-faced of journalists, reported the "growing clamour" about Scudamore's sexism. It's ironic that the sexism of Islam, often rampant, gross, inhuman and endemic, should be overlooked so frequently by the Guardian and its fellow-travellers, whilst some pathetically unfunny comments by a football administrator should attract the whole of its attention. There's surely an element of self-hatred here.
Ultimately the right not to be offended, which so many people seem to think should be a feature of an open society, is unworkable (who decides?) and in any event should be trumped by the right to free expression. If freedom of utterance means anything it means the willingness to listen to something you don't like, because not liking it is not as bad as the other person not being able to say it.
PS The version of The Sun Has Got His Hat On played on Radio Devon was by Ambrose and His Orchestra. What a delicious irony it would have been had Mr Lowe played instead a rival version of the song recorded in the same year. It was by Henry Hall's BBC Dance Orchestra.
Monday 12 May 2014
Monday 28 April 2014
Lee Rigby, Britain First and the Electoral Commission
With the news that the Electoral Commission is hand-wringingly apologetic about allowing the right wing Britain First movement to allow the slogan "Remember Lee Rigby" on its local election ballot papers, the thought strikes me (not for the first time) that not many people seem to be bothered about free speech any more.
The fate of Lee Rigby, hacked to death in Woolwich by Islamic fundamentalists, was grisly, ghastly and undeserved. In my opinion his death deserves to be remembered, and not just by Britain First (whoever they are); but on the other hand there'll be people who think Rigby was an agent of a corrupt and warlike state who got what was coming to him. And all shades of opinion in between. That's pluralism.
While I might find distasteful an attempt to make political capital out of Rigby's death, I wouldn't dream of standing in the way of any political party that wanted to do so. If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to say things that other people don't like.
So many of my fellow liberals seem to think that freedom means being able to say things that they themselves more or less agree with.
Extremists are defeated when people can see what they stand for and don't support them. Telling them what they can and can't put on the ballot paper merely helps turn Britain into the kind of country they claim it is already - one where ordinary people's voices are stifled, a kind of liberal police state where free expression is thwarted. People should be able to judge for themselves what Britain First are about and decide whether to vote for them accordingly.
This seems so self-evident to me that the really shocking thing is not that a loony Right party should use Rigby's death as a gory rallying flag, but that the press can report the Electoral Commission's embarrassment without the hint of a suggestion that there might be something undemocratic about it.
The fate of Lee Rigby, hacked to death in Woolwich by Islamic fundamentalists, was grisly, ghastly and undeserved. In my opinion his death deserves to be remembered, and not just by Britain First (whoever they are); but on the other hand there'll be people who think Rigby was an agent of a corrupt and warlike state who got what was coming to him. And all shades of opinion in between. That's pluralism.
While I might find distasteful an attempt to make political capital out of Rigby's death, I wouldn't dream of standing in the way of any political party that wanted to do so. If freedom means anything, it means the freedom to say things that other people don't like.
So many of my fellow liberals seem to think that freedom means being able to say things that they themselves more or less agree with.
Extremists are defeated when people can see what they stand for and don't support them. Telling them what they can and can't put on the ballot paper merely helps turn Britain into the kind of country they claim it is already - one where ordinary people's voices are stifled, a kind of liberal police state where free expression is thwarted. People should be able to judge for themselves what Britain First are about and decide whether to vote for them accordingly.
This seems so self-evident to me that the really shocking thing is not that a loony Right party should use Rigby's death as a gory rallying flag, but that the press can report the Electoral Commission's embarrassment without the hint of a suggestion that there might be something undemocratic about it.
Wednesday 23 April 2014
Sympathy for the fundamentalists
Events in Birmingham suggest an Islamist plot to take over state schools. I'm not a natural supporter of anything concerning Islam, a religion which I think on the whole treats women pretty poorly, but I would like to spare a thought today for the beleaguered men of Allah.
In the first place, pressure groups of all kinds are at liberty to try and get themselves elected onto school governing boards. It's a thankless job done generally by the middle-class great and good (my wife does it). Why shouldn't Islamists have a go? There's nothing, as far as I'm concerned, preventing any organisation - boy scouts, naturists, the Woodcraft Folk, Morris dancers et al - from trying to do the same thing.
No, my objection lies with the people who are surprised that this is happening. In the first place, how dare they object when people try and get involved with local democracy. That's their right! Second, the objectors - Labour councillors who run Birmingham Council - are precisely the kind of people whose open door immigration policy invited the Islamic hardliners in to start with.
If you allow in an awful lot of people from a relatively small rural part of Pakistan (surprisingly, most of them from the area surrounding the town of Mirpur), you are going to find that population will pretty quickly start demanding that political and social rules come to reflect the mores and norms of the society they've left behind. Who can blame them?
And what norms those are. Muslims, extremist or otherwise, have radically different views about the role of religion in society, about the extent to which religion should dominate the individual's life, about the extent to which an individual should be free to marry whom they choose, about whether people can have sex before marriage, about whether women can go out to work or interact freely with other British people, about the way women should dress, about relations between husbands and their wives, about which legal system should govern their affairs, about women's right to enjoy sex without being hacked about, and even about the right of women to inherit money.
The idea that Muslims, extremist or otherwise, might want these cultural practices to be reflected in some way in the kind of things children should be taught at school seems to have come as a shock to some people. Not to me. It's inevitable, and all the more so when you dish out quite large sums of money to "community" groups, encouraging migrants to regard themselves as a self-contained pocket of the Asian sub-continent rather than New Britons.
I don't blame the Islamic fundamentalists for having a go. It's the people who brought them to Britain who need to have a look in the mirror.
In the first place, pressure groups of all kinds are at liberty to try and get themselves elected onto school governing boards. It's a thankless job done generally by the middle-class great and good (my wife does it). Why shouldn't Islamists have a go? There's nothing, as far as I'm concerned, preventing any organisation - boy scouts, naturists, the Woodcraft Folk, Morris dancers et al - from trying to do the same thing.
No, my objection lies with the people who are surprised that this is happening. In the first place, how dare they object when people try and get involved with local democracy. That's their right! Second, the objectors - Labour councillors who run Birmingham Council - are precisely the kind of people whose open door immigration policy invited the Islamic hardliners in to start with.
If you allow in an awful lot of people from a relatively small rural part of Pakistan (surprisingly, most of them from the area surrounding the town of Mirpur), you are going to find that population will pretty quickly start demanding that political and social rules come to reflect the mores and norms of the society they've left behind. Who can blame them?
And what norms those are. Muslims, extremist or otherwise, have radically different views about the role of religion in society, about the extent to which religion should dominate the individual's life, about the extent to which an individual should be free to marry whom they choose, about whether people can have sex before marriage, about whether women can go out to work or interact freely with other British people, about the way women should dress, about relations between husbands and their wives, about which legal system should govern their affairs, about women's right to enjoy sex without being hacked about, and even about the right of women to inherit money.
The idea that Muslims, extremist or otherwise, might want these cultural practices to be reflected in some way in the kind of things children should be taught at school seems to have come as a shock to some people. Not to me. It's inevitable, and all the more so when you dish out quite large sums of money to "community" groups, encouraging migrants to regard themselves as a self-contained pocket of the Asian sub-continent rather than New Britons.
I don't blame the Islamic fundamentalists for having a go. It's the people who brought them to Britain who need to have a look in the mirror.
Tuesday 22 April 2014
RIP David Moyes
Just like one of those old cowboy stories where the hero knows from the circling vultures up ahead that something bad has happened - the homestead sacked, the stagecoach waylaid - we the public have been able to tell from the sententiously regretful newspaper articles about the Manchester United manager's debut season that something bad was going on behind the scenes at Old Trafford. And now we have ridden around a bend in the draw to find the denouement laid out before us - yesterday David Moyes was "to be sacked"; today the tense has changed to "has been". The owners announced it on Twitter.
So United turn out to be just like any other club. The illusion fostered during the long years of Fergie's success that Man U were somehow different - the trope that the boardroom had stuck with the irascible Glaswegian during three years of mediocrity, had reaped the benefits of that stability and were going to pursue the same policy with the new man - is now gone. As is glassy-eyed Fergie Lite. Now United are going to be scrabbling around for someone with the Midas touch just like everyone else. How Jose Mourinho must be laughing this morning.
Whose fault is all this? Not much of it is David Moyes'. He inherited a squad whose young players (many of them fostered by Ferguson) weren't good enough, and whose good players were getting too old. Rio Ferdinand is so slow now that Moyes himself could probably run faster. The fear that used to inhibit opponents and referees went when Ferguson did. There have been perhaps more injuries than usual. Some players haven't stepped up, which is unprofessional and an insult to the fans.
None of these things could be laid at Moyes' door.
There have no doubt been individual decisions Moyes got wrong, although no-one will ever be able to prove that. The summer failures in the transfer window might be partly to do with him, although surely the board must take some responsibility for failing to spend big when it was so evidently needed. But that's been true for several years now.
Which brings us to the Glazers. The Americans borrowed massively against the security of the club in order to buy it, and have transformed it from one with negligible debt to one massively in hock to the banks. It beggars belief that that change in ownership had no effect on United's ability to buy world beating new stars.
Actually David Moyes inherited a club that desperately needed an infusion of new talent. That's the fault of its owners. The same people who sacked the manager this morning. As I was saying, that's the vultures you can hear Twittering.
PS - As for the much-hyped managerial credentials of the journalists' darling Ryan Giggs, I would bet a hefty sum that when he turns to management he'll be as rubbish as so many other former stars. Giggs strikes me as a bit thick, which won't help, but doesn't preclude success in the dugout. No, the reason I think he'll fail is for the simple statistical fact that most people do. Individuals like David Moyes, humiliated as he now is, are exceptional in being able to do the job at all. People like Mourinho and Ferguson are rare as hen's teeth.
So United turn out to be just like any other club. The illusion fostered during the long years of Fergie's success that Man U were somehow different - the trope that the boardroom had stuck with the irascible Glaswegian during three years of mediocrity, had reaped the benefits of that stability and were going to pursue the same policy with the new man - is now gone. As is glassy-eyed Fergie Lite. Now United are going to be scrabbling around for someone with the Midas touch just like everyone else. How Jose Mourinho must be laughing this morning.
Whose fault is all this? Not much of it is David Moyes'. He inherited a squad whose young players (many of them fostered by Ferguson) weren't good enough, and whose good players were getting too old. Rio Ferdinand is so slow now that Moyes himself could probably run faster. The fear that used to inhibit opponents and referees went when Ferguson did. There have been perhaps more injuries than usual. Some players haven't stepped up, which is unprofessional and an insult to the fans.
None of these things could be laid at Moyes' door.
There have no doubt been individual decisions Moyes got wrong, although no-one will ever be able to prove that. The summer failures in the transfer window might be partly to do with him, although surely the board must take some responsibility for failing to spend big when it was so evidently needed. But that's been true for several years now.
Which brings us to the Glazers. The Americans borrowed massively against the security of the club in order to buy it, and have transformed it from one with negligible debt to one massively in hock to the banks. It beggars belief that that change in ownership had no effect on United's ability to buy world beating new stars.
Actually David Moyes inherited a club that desperately needed an infusion of new talent. That's the fault of its owners. The same people who sacked the manager this morning. As I was saying, that's the vultures you can hear Twittering.
PS - As for the much-hyped managerial credentials of the journalists' darling Ryan Giggs, I would bet a hefty sum that when he turns to management he'll be as rubbish as so many other former stars. Giggs strikes me as a bit thick, which won't help, but doesn't preclude success in the dugout. No, the reason I think he'll fail is for the simple statistical fact that most people do. Individuals like David Moyes, humiliated as he now is, are exceptional in being able to do the job at all. People like Mourinho and Ferguson are rare as hen's teeth.
Thursday 10 April 2014
Maria Miller - brazening it out.
So Maria Miller has gone. Predictable enough I suppose. I don't have any feelings either way about Ms Miller, who seems neither to have behaved desperately badly nor terribly well. Most of the general public will greet the news with a shrug - another politician who may or may not have had her snout in the trough. She was cleared of the charges brought against her, but found to have been unco-operative with the investigation. "Legalistic" was the term used. That's what happens when your husband is a solicitor.
The real reason Ms Miller has resigned however is that, rightly or wrongly, she became the subject of a rolling news story. You can see the way it works. Journalists have 24 hour news programmes to fill, and no journalist ever made a reputation by saying, "You know what, I don't think this is a very big story". The news is full of "Growing pressure on Mrs Miller to quit", omitting to say that the pressure is coming from journalists themselves. Eventually someone from No.10 rings up and says, "You know what Maria, I think it would be better if you went".
The next phase is that journalists then reflect on the process they themselves have put in train (I saw a feature on Sky news yesterday in which Kay Burley went through a timeline of David Cameron's supportive pre-resignation utterances; and of course disgruntled back-benchers are always happy to put in their two penn'orth, on or off the record, to keep things spicy).
So journalists win at both ends of the story. They win by rehashing stories about the hapless politician, thus applying pressure which generally forces a resignation. Then when the resignation has happened they run another series of stories about the political processes involved and the fault lines it reveals in the MP's party.
Most fatuously of all, a few years down the line the politician makes a come back. Look at Peter Mandelson. Look at David Laws, who resigned as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2010 over an expenses scandal, spent two years on the backbenches and has now returned as a minister in the Department of Education. Where was the outcry in the press at Laws's return to Government? Curiously, the press isn't anything like as interested in the returning sinners. And Maria Miller will be back herself, I'd bet my last penny.
This is pretty much the acme of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
At PMQs yesterday Ed Miliband laid into David Cameron. Perhaps because the TV in the gym had the sound turned down, my attention was drawn to the figures on either side of Mr Miliband. One was Ed Balls. The other was Harriet Harman. It was Harman, you will remember, who was under the media spotlight not long ago because in her capacity as Legal Officer of the NCCL she associated with an organisation which thought it was OK for adults to have sex with children. And yet there she was, nodding sanctimoniously along with her leader. Now that's how to brazen it out.
The real reason Ms Miller has resigned however is that, rightly or wrongly, she became the subject of a rolling news story. You can see the way it works. Journalists have 24 hour news programmes to fill, and no journalist ever made a reputation by saying, "You know what, I don't think this is a very big story". The news is full of "Growing pressure on Mrs Miller to quit", omitting to say that the pressure is coming from journalists themselves. Eventually someone from No.10 rings up and says, "You know what Maria, I think it would be better if you went".
The next phase is that journalists then reflect on the process they themselves have put in train (I saw a feature on Sky news yesterday in which Kay Burley went through a timeline of David Cameron's supportive pre-resignation utterances; and of course disgruntled back-benchers are always happy to put in their two penn'orth, on or off the record, to keep things spicy).
So journalists win at both ends of the story. They win by rehashing stories about the hapless politician, thus applying pressure which generally forces a resignation. Then when the resignation has happened they run another series of stories about the political processes involved and the fault lines it reveals in the MP's party.
Most fatuously of all, a few years down the line the politician makes a come back. Look at Peter Mandelson. Look at David Laws, who resigned as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2010 over an expenses scandal, spent two years on the backbenches and has now returned as a minister in the Department of Education. Where was the outcry in the press at Laws's return to Government? Curiously, the press isn't anything like as interested in the returning sinners. And Maria Miller will be back herself, I'd bet my last penny.
This is pretty much the acme of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
At PMQs yesterday Ed Miliband laid into David Cameron. Perhaps because the TV in the gym had the sound turned down, my attention was drawn to the figures on either side of Mr Miliband. One was Ed Balls. The other was Harriet Harman. It was Harman, you will remember, who was under the media spotlight not long ago because in her capacity as Legal Officer of the NCCL she associated with an organisation which thought it was OK for adults to have sex with children. And yet there she was, nodding sanctimoniously along with her leader. Now that's how to brazen it out.
Thursday 27 March 2014
The Moral Maze - meritocracy and class
On a long drive back from a Scottish mountaineering trip the other day I channel-hopped into an episode of the Moral Maze, in which Michael Buerk and his chums crossed swords on the subject of class with, amongst others, hard-left cheeky chappie Owen Jones and right-wing loud mouth James Delingpole.
I don't know enough about other countries to have a view on whether Johnny Foreigner is as obsessed by class as we are (although one academic contributor said that all human societies - and some animal - are similarly stratified), but like most Brits I'm at least averagely interested in the subject. Of course part of the fascination arises from the nuance that, although it clearly has something to do with it, money isn't everything.
My aunt, poor as a church mouse throughout most of her life and by today's standards hardly educated at all, nevertheless contrived to be as upper middle class as they come, with a deep interest in all things cultural and a patrician drawl that lingered long over the a in the middle of pasta. Language, attitudes to food, art and education are all part of the mix too.
But that's not the only reason Owen Jones was totally wrong to say that "class defines who has wealth and power and who doesn't . . . working class people work for others and lack autonomy over what they do". I know plenty of builders, butchers and window cleaners who are - in some cases defiantly - working class, but who don't work for others and enjoy an autonomy over their job which my middle class doctor friends can only dream of.
The funniest exchange in the programme came when leftist policy wonk Matthew Taylor sparred with James Delingpole about meritocracy. "Why is it", Taylor wanted to know, "that the best schools are almost completely monopolised by the middle classes?" Delingpole waffled something about believing in meritocracy. Taylor, smelling blood, snapped, "So you believe the middle classes have got more merit? Why are the middle classes more able?" Delingpole, who has sent his son to Eton, replied that selective schools have an obligation to pick the best. "And they just happen to be overwhelmingly middle class", sneered Taylor.
My opinion of Delingpole, not sky-high to start with, went south about here. Because the obvious riposte to Taylor is that the best schools get the best results because they are monopolised by the middle classes. It's the quality of the intake, stupid. Taylor seemed to want Delingpole to say this too, if only so he could knock him down, but it's true.
If you have a meritocracy, or something like it, for a century or so, the bright and industrious will tend to rise up the social ladder. They will meet and marry other bright and industrious people, and their children will not only tend to be bright and industrious but will have the benefit of being brought up by parents who believe in academic achievement and who tend not to have the social problems associated by being lower down the socio-economic scale. This isn't to say that all middle class kids are bright and all working class kids stupid, but of course the middle class taken as a generality will tend to be brighter. It's not difficult to grasp.
I am no great friend to meritocracy. It will in the end produce a stratified society with low social mobility (some will argue that's a destination we have already reached), but at any rate that seems fairer than one in which there are no means of breaking out of the bottom percentages. Ironically, grammar schools, the means by which working class children traditionally did so, were abolished by Matthew Taylor's political fellow-traveller Anthony Crosland in the Wilson government of the mid 1960s.
As with so many things you can end up arguing over words and what they mean. People like me tend to be interested in the social and cultural complexities of class, whereas Owen Jones wants class to relate to an economic struggle, and economic inequality in particular.
But just as Labour's abolition of grammar schools is embarrassing for Taylor, it's inconvenient for Jones that inequality rose in the boom years of the Blair / Brown governments, as the availability of hundreds of thousands of East Europeans increased labour supply and depressed wage inflation at the bottom end of society, while those at the top end forged ahead.
Affluent people like me enjoyed (and are still enjoying) the cheaper access to the service industries mass immigration brought with it. My breakfast in the Braemar hotel the other day was served by a smiling Romanian called Bogdan Ionescu. Every other member of staff I spoke to was East European.
People like Owen Jones lament the low wages of the working class, blind to the possibility that the open door immigration policy they supported helped wages stay low, and is helping to keep them that way still. When is the light going to dawn?
I don't know enough about other countries to have a view on whether Johnny Foreigner is as obsessed by class as we are (although one academic contributor said that all human societies - and some animal - are similarly stratified), but like most Brits I'm at least averagely interested in the subject. Of course part of the fascination arises from the nuance that, although it clearly has something to do with it, money isn't everything.
My aunt, poor as a church mouse throughout most of her life and by today's standards hardly educated at all, nevertheless contrived to be as upper middle class as they come, with a deep interest in all things cultural and a patrician drawl that lingered long over the a in the middle of pasta. Language, attitudes to food, art and education are all part of the mix too.
But that's not the only reason Owen Jones was totally wrong to say that "class defines who has wealth and power and who doesn't . . . working class people work for others and lack autonomy over what they do". I know plenty of builders, butchers and window cleaners who are - in some cases defiantly - working class, but who don't work for others and enjoy an autonomy over their job which my middle class doctor friends can only dream of.
The funniest exchange in the programme came when leftist policy wonk Matthew Taylor sparred with James Delingpole about meritocracy. "Why is it", Taylor wanted to know, "that the best schools are almost completely monopolised by the middle classes?" Delingpole waffled something about believing in meritocracy. Taylor, smelling blood, snapped, "So you believe the middle classes have got more merit? Why are the middle classes more able?" Delingpole, who has sent his son to Eton, replied that selective schools have an obligation to pick the best. "And they just happen to be overwhelmingly middle class", sneered Taylor.
My opinion of Delingpole, not sky-high to start with, went south about here. Because the obvious riposte to Taylor is that the best schools get the best results because they are monopolised by the middle classes. It's the quality of the intake, stupid. Taylor seemed to want Delingpole to say this too, if only so he could knock him down, but it's true.
If you have a meritocracy, or something like it, for a century or so, the bright and industrious will tend to rise up the social ladder. They will meet and marry other bright and industrious people, and their children will not only tend to be bright and industrious but will have the benefit of being brought up by parents who believe in academic achievement and who tend not to have the social problems associated by being lower down the socio-economic scale. This isn't to say that all middle class kids are bright and all working class kids stupid, but of course the middle class taken as a generality will tend to be brighter. It's not difficult to grasp.
I am no great friend to meritocracy. It will in the end produce a stratified society with low social mobility (some will argue that's a destination we have already reached), but at any rate that seems fairer than one in which there are no means of breaking out of the bottom percentages. Ironically, grammar schools, the means by which working class children traditionally did so, were abolished by Matthew Taylor's political fellow-traveller Anthony Crosland in the Wilson government of the mid 1960s.
As with so many things you can end up arguing over words and what they mean. People like me tend to be interested in the social and cultural complexities of class, whereas Owen Jones wants class to relate to an economic struggle, and economic inequality in particular.
But just as Labour's abolition of grammar schools is embarrassing for Taylor, it's inconvenient for Jones that inequality rose in the boom years of the Blair / Brown governments, as the availability of hundreds of thousands of East Europeans increased labour supply and depressed wage inflation at the bottom end of society, while those at the top end forged ahead.
Affluent people like me enjoyed (and are still enjoying) the cheaper access to the service industries mass immigration brought with it. My breakfast in the Braemar hotel the other day was served by a smiling Romanian called Bogdan Ionescu. Every other member of staff I spoke to was East European.
People like Owen Jones lament the low wages of the working class, blind to the possibility that the open door immigration policy they supported helped wages stay low, and is helping to keep them that way still. When is the light going to dawn?
Friday 21 March 2014
FGM, aliens and Arnold Schwarzenegger - all in one post
Just very occasionally I have cause to think of that little celebrated Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Last Action Hero, in which a young fan is thrust into the world of his screen idol, a daredevil steroid-pumped bicep-flexing meat head with a dubious Austrian accent.
This film was not well received by Schwarzenegger's fan base, being too long and developing an unhealthy film buff's interest in the philosophical niceties of cinematic reality (as opposed to car-chases and shoot-outs); the climactic scene, as I remember, takes places in a theatre showing a re-run of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, with Ian McKellen playing the scythe-wielding Death figure. But there were moments to treasure (other moments to treasure), one of them in a video store where a poster advertises The Terminator, featuring Sylvestor Stallone. Yes, you read that right. And I always liked the police station scene where a special unit pairs up, this being a movie, oddball detectives - the couple I particularly remember were a stripper and a Hasidic Jew.
Which brings me, circuitously I admit, to female genital mutilation. And aliens. To be exact, the Raelians, the world's largest UFO religion. To explain about Raelians I can do no better than quote from Wikipedia, which states that "The Raelian Movement teaches that life on Earth was scientifically created by a species of extraterrestials, which they call the Elohim". The movement was founded by a former motor racing journalist, Claude Vorilhon, who claimed that in 1973 he came upon a UFO on a hilltop in France.
If you are bored or need cheering up, it is well worth reading about the Raelians. I particularly enjoyed the revelation that the Raelians "frequently use the swastika as a symbol of peace, which halted Raelian requests for territory in Israel, and later Lebanon, for establishing an embassy for extraterrestials". For them that would have been a no shit Sherlock moment, one would hope. It can't have helped their Israeli ambitions that "the religion also uses the swastika embedded on the Star of David".
More alert readers will have noticed that two paragraphs ago I mentioned female genital mutilation. What does this have to do with the Raelians? Well, like many a cult - sorry, religion - the Raelians are quite keen on sex, particularly a woman's right to go topless, as the following picture of South Korean Raelians makes clear:
So keen are they on sex, that the Raelians, for all that their eyes must perforce often be turned skywards in search of further UFOs, are laudably enthusiastic about extending its charms to all. Including Muslim women who have been hacked about by evil co-religionist killjoys. And the Guardian reports this morning that Raelians are now putting their money where their - but I see I'm treading on thin ice - they are putting their money, shall we say, into a hospital project in Burkina Faso which will specialise in genital repair.
The Raelian backed NGO which is to pay for this facility is called Clitoraid.
FGM is a desperately awful thing, but amidst the lowering stench of human meanness and stupidity emanating from this story, comes a joyfully unlikely pairing, too implausible even for the writers of Last Action Hero. FGM and aliens. Thank God we can laugh.
This film was not well received by Schwarzenegger's fan base, being too long and developing an unhealthy film buff's interest in the philosophical niceties of cinematic reality (as opposed to car-chases and shoot-outs); the climactic scene, as I remember, takes places in a theatre showing a re-run of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, with Ian McKellen playing the scythe-wielding Death figure. But there were moments to treasure (other moments to treasure), one of them in a video store where a poster advertises The Terminator, featuring Sylvestor Stallone. Yes, you read that right. And I always liked the police station scene where a special unit pairs up, this being a movie, oddball detectives - the couple I particularly remember were a stripper and a Hasidic Jew.
Which brings me, circuitously I admit, to female genital mutilation. And aliens. To be exact, the Raelians, the world's largest UFO religion. To explain about Raelians I can do no better than quote from Wikipedia, which states that "The Raelian Movement teaches that life on Earth was scientifically created by a species of extraterrestials, which they call the Elohim". The movement was founded by a former motor racing journalist, Claude Vorilhon, who claimed that in 1973 he came upon a UFO on a hilltop in France.
If you are bored or need cheering up, it is well worth reading about the Raelians. I particularly enjoyed the revelation that the Raelians "frequently use the swastika as a symbol of peace, which halted Raelian requests for territory in Israel, and later Lebanon, for establishing an embassy for extraterrestials". For them that would have been a no shit Sherlock moment, one would hope. It can't have helped their Israeli ambitions that "the religion also uses the swastika embedded on the Star of David".
More alert readers will have noticed that two paragraphs ago I mentioned female genital mutilation. What does this have to do with the Raelians? Well, like many a cult - sorry, religion - the Raelians are quite keen on sex, particularly a woman's right to go topless, as the following picture of South Korean Raelians makes clear:
So keen are they on sex, that the Raelians, for all that their eyes must perforce often be turned skywards in search of further UFOs, are laudably enthusiastic about extending its charms to all. Including Muslim women who have been hacked about by evil co-religionist killjoys. And the Guardian reports this morning that Raelians are now putting their money where their - but I see I'm treading on thin ice - they are putting their money, shall we say, into a hospital project in Burkina Faso which will specialise in genital repair.
The Raelian backed NGO which is to pay for this facility is called Clitoraid.
FGM is a desperately awful thing, but amidst the lowering stench of human meanness and stupidity emanating from this story, comes a joyfully unlikely pairing, too implausible even for the writers of Last Action Hero. FGM and aliens. Thank God we can laugh.
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