What's gone wrong with comprehensives?

At the Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth last year I went to a fringe meeting where one of the speakers was Steve Sinnott, the new general secretary of the National Union of Teachers. Introducing him, the chair said that he was the first product of a comprehensive school to hold this post. From around the room there came little gasps of surprise and joy.

Comprehensives have been the major form of secondary education in Britain for 30 years or more. It should by now be utterly unremarkable for someone who attended one to gain an important, but not earth-shattering, job like Sinnott's. But it still seems a striking achievement, and that should tell us that something is going wrong.

Another anecdote. A few months ago Andrew Neil's TV programme This Week had Fiona Millar - Guardian columnist and Labour insider - on as a guest to talk about education. Neil, Michael Portillo and Dianne Abbott all agreed that in their youth grammar schools provided a ladder of opportunity that bright working-class children could climb in order to get better jobs than their parents had.

Neil said that in the 1960s he and his fellow grammar school products felt they were about to take over the world. Nowadays every young thruster he interviews for a job seems to have been to public school.

Fiona Millar sat through all this wearing the expression that Labour people always wear when they are forced to list with views they don't agree with. It is a mixture of disdain and martyrdom. She looked like St Sebastian discovering that the milk has gone off.

Millar contributed little to the discussion, but then there was little she could say because Neil and Co. were right. The widespread introduction of comprehensive education has led to a reduction in the opportunities open to bright working class children.

To understand how this has come about, read today's Observer column by Nick Cohen. He argues that the current system suits the middle classes very well. While defending the current system under the cover of anti-elitism, they can use their wealth to buy houses in the catchment areas of their best schools or use their contacts to talk their way into church schools.

Meanwhile, poor children - however bright - go to poor schools.

As Cohen writes:

40 years of comprehensives have left Britain a sclerotic society where parents' money matters more than a child's talent ... anti-elitist harangues from the upper middle class are the perfect cover for a system which suits it to a tee.

Oddly enough, Cohen's analysis is close to that of George Walden, the former Conservative minister. In his We Should Know Better: Solving the Education Crisis Walden argues that Britain is bedevilled by the class divide in education; and in The New Elites: Making a Career in the Masses he argues that we are "governed by an elite of anti-elitists".

What is to be done? The problem we have is that many on the left are more interested in social equality than they are in educational excellence, and that support for comprehensive education is so deeply entrenched that questioning it is treated as something close to heresy. Many Liberal Democrats take much the same view.

The usual charge made against someone who commits this heresy is to accuse them of wanting to turn the clock back and return to the 1950s. That is silly - it is not possible to put the clock back even if you want to. And if comprehensive schools are not working as it was hoped they would, shouldn't we say so?

Walden's answer was to offer private schools - particularly the former direct grant schools - the opportunity to opt back into the state system in return for being allowed to choose which pupils they admitted. Cohen merely argues that:

this is a more class-ridden country than when the grammar schools were in place and ... Unless the brightest in the working class get an elite education the Today listeners will always win.

Elitism is the worst sin of all - and particularly feared because no one has ever defined exactly what it means - but there has always been an element of hypocrisy, not just about the overall comprehensive system, but within the schools themselves. In my day at least, the best comprehensives were usually rigorously streamed.

I suspect that the problem, as so often, lies in the socialist attempt to impose one system upon all children and all communities. Worse, almost every proposal to salvage the present system involves more centralisation and standardisation. People want to remove parental choice from the system or abolish church schools?

Why not let many different kinds of schools with different curriculums flourish? Those who complain that this will lead to a two-tier system should read this quotation from George Walden. We have a two tier system already.

With this in mind it was interesting to see Nicol Stephen, a Lib Dem MSP and minister for enterprise and life-long learning at Holyrood, calling for children to be allowed the option of going to college at the age of 14 to train for trades for which there is strong demand.

A second-class education for the proles? I don't think so. One of the problems with education is that those who run it, who enjoyed academic work themselves, assume that it is a pleasure for all and that anyone denied the opportunity to do it is being robbed.

The reality is different. As Stephen says:

"I have seen children who are bullied and unhappy in the school environment who have been transformed by college where they have become motivated and want to learn, maybe in plumbing or electrical work. There are few young people who do not want a worthwhile job, they just need the chance to develop."

There is a need for new thinking in education: a need to go beyond the unthinking defence of the comprehensive principle. And the Liberal Democrats should be leading it.

The week's best reading

Tim Worsall has posted his latest selection of the best in British blogging. Soon to be a book.

England unchanged for second test

The England selectors have named an unchanged squad for Edgbaston.

I think they are right: this is not the time for panic. That will come later in the summer.

When it does, they could do worse than heed the words of Dave Podmore in yesterday's Guardian:

So the first big question is, who's going to open the batting with David Steele? Chris Tavare and Kim Barnett are in the mix obviously, although some would go with Mark Lathwell to get us off to a flier.

New links added

Hello to The Apollo Project and perfect.co.uk.

Suicide bombing at Greenwich

In Greenwich on Thursday afternoon:

Two members of the Observatory staff were still in the building at 4.45 p.m. This they described as working "late" - all the other staff had left by that time. Mr Thackeray and Mr Hollis were both in the Lower Computing Room when they were startled by a "sharp and clear detonation, like a shell going through the air". They looked out to see the door porter running across the courtyard and rapidly followed him so as to be able to look down the hillside North of the Observatory into Greenwich Park. They saw a park-warden and some school-boys running towards a figure that appeared to be crouched on the zig-zag path below the Observatory.

Racing down, their first thought was that the man had shot himself, but the scene they encountered was unexpected and horrific. The park-warden was holding a man who, despite massive injuries, was still alive and able to speak. The man's left hand was completely missing and he had a gaping hole in his stomach. Soon a doctor and stretcher were fetched from the nearby Seaman's Hospital, to where he was carried. The man died about 30 minutes later, having said nothing about who he was or what had happened.

On the afternoon of Thursday 15 February 1894, that is.

Subsequent investigations - as this account shows - revealed that the bomber was a Frenchman by the name of Martial Bourdin. He was a member of the London-based Club Autonomie, which attracted foreign anarchists. After the Greenwich incident many of its members were deported, though none was charged with a criminal offence. (There is an account of Bourdin's funeral here.)

It is hard to discern any rational purpose behind the bombing, and later anarchist sympathisers have generally put it down to the influence of an agent provocateur. Certainly, Bourdin's brother-in-law was widely believed to be a police agent.

Today Greenwich would be a historical curiosity if it were not for the influence it had on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. This novel tells the story of a young man who is duped into taking a bomb to Greenwich and trips and falls, setting it off, before he can plant it. The instigator is his brother-in-law, ostensibly an anarchist but in reality the paid agent of a foreign agency.

I might have written "contains spoilers" here, but Conrad spells out all this, or allows you to guess it, early on. The book's real interest is in the fate of the characters left behind and in its satire of wider society.

Here there are certainly contemporary resonances. The Secret Agent was published in 1907 and nominally deals with events 20 years or so earlier, but it is not hard to detect the anxieties of the Edwardian age in it.

Then, just as today, foreign governments were complaining that the British authorities were lax and allowed radicals and terrorists too much freedom to operate here. The confidence of the Victorian period, when such protests would be ignored, was already ebbing, and in 1911 Churchill would superintend his extraordinary Siege of Sidney Street. (See also his defence of his conduct.)

A particularly memorable character in the novel is The Professor - a thwarted scientist and expert in explosives who makes himself a walking bomb, always holding the detonator in his hand. Only this can make him feel powerful, and Conrad generally sees terrorists and radicals as morally weak - though he is little kinder to any other sector of society.

In painting terrorism as the resort of damaged characters rather than the work of some fiendish criminal mastermind, Conrad shows affinity with the general line the Spiked website has taken on the London bombings.

As Brendan O'Neill says in his essay "Creating the enemy":

The real problem of terrorism, in terms of both its origins and its impact on contemporary society, begins at home, in the struggle for moral consensus and moral authority. Instead of launching wars in far-off lands, surely what our societies need are debates about what we stand for and why; about the values we hold dear and wish to pass on to future generations; about our vision of the Good Society and how we might achieve it. Such debates might help to move us away from the deep moral uncertainties that can give rise to nihilistic violence, and make us more resilient against those who execute such violence.

Conrad was too sceptical about politicians to think things are that easy, but he would surely share O'Neill's rejection of the platitudes of the "War on Terror".

New laws are not the answer

In Yesterday's House Points I wrote about government's desperation to seen to be doing something after a tragedy. Hence all the talk of new laws against terrorism.

The same condition afflicts other bodies too. A few days ago there was a report in the Guardian saying that:

A rise of more than 70% in cases of animal neglect have been encountered by the RSPCA, which said today that the "truly shocking" figures showed a new animal welfare bill was urgently needed.

Such shock rises generally have more to do with the way statistics are collected or the enthusiasm with which they are sought than with any objective increase in what is being measured.

But even if there has been a rise, why would it show the need for new animal welfare laws? Why wouldn't it show a need for the existing laws to be enforced?

If you pass new laws and do nothing else, then the number of offences is bound to go up not down. Which, of course, will prove the need for further legislation.

Apostrophe catastrophe

The Apostrophic Church has pronounced its first fatwa.

I have found, via a posting on Castrovalva, an article on the BBC website which reports the views of Kate Burridge. She is a linguist who questions the need to use possessive apostrophes at all. Apparently she has written a book called Weeds in the Garden of Words. No doubt we shall have to burn it (and quite possibly the author too).

Arguments like this, along with calls for "spelling reform" or the promotion of Esperanto, miss the point. What we should be asking is why, when the rules for using apostrophes are simple enough, so many people are mystified by them and even a little scared.

Let us now seek the answer in prayer, brothers and sisters.

Simon Hughes needs a holiday

Here is today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. It is the last of the current season, but anyone suffering withdrawal symptoms over the summer can find an archive of my earlier columns here.

Holiday time

When the England cricket team loses an overseas test, the management organises extra net sessions for the next day. Not because the players need more practice, but because the authorities want it to look as though something is being done.

Some people want MPs to cut short their summer recess for much the same reason. They are not sure what it would achieve, but at least it would look good.

We can agree it was odd for Charles Clarke to choose this week to pack his trunk and that Tony Blair should rely on cosmetics for his tan a little longer. But it is hard to see the point of recalling MPs to Westminster before October.

There is talk of new laws, but what can there be about plotting, preparing and carrying out a terrorist attack that is not already illegal?

This anger at MPs’ long break is a cousin to that “they never do anything, they’re in it for themselves” whine you sometimes get on the doorstep.

The real problem is just the reverse. These days MPs are expected to be a cross between a social worker, a local councillor and a fairy godmother. They must vote for all the petty laws that get passed in the hope they will make their constituents leave them in peace. It doesn’t work. They come back with even more trivial problems.

One person who could certainly do with a holiday is our own President, Simon Hughes. He was quoted in the Guardian on Tuesday as blaming a few people at Conference for the wacky ideas that sometimes end up as party policy. But we all know those wacky ideas usually originate in Federal Policy Committee working parties.

And he suggested the party should advertise in the press for PPCs to get away from the idea that “only people who have been activists for 15 years and have delivered a million leaflets can be candidates”.

If he means a party needs philosophers, economists and novelists as well as activists, he is right. But our opponents would hang a crass idea like advertising for candidates round our necks for years afterwards.

Simon should take his shrimping net off to Herne Bay for a week or two and return refreshed for the fight.

News management in the internet age

Martin Stabe gives us more evidence that - for better or worse - the overseas media are being freer with details of the recent terrorist attacks in London than their British counterparts.

For more examples see this posting of mine from a couple of weeks ago.

Broken angels and weed-choked cherubs

The BBC reports:

Work has started on a three-quarters of a million pound restoration of a 150-year-old Leicester cemetery.

The Welford Road Cemetery scheme, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, will include repairs to driveways and the replacement of fencing.

Welford Road is already well cared for, and so short of the broken angels and weed-choked cherubs you look for in a cemetery, but it is a good place for a walk. You can see it beside the railway a little way south of Leicester station.

There are some nice views of the cemetery here and a guide to its occupants here. Many are long-forgotten Liberal worthies whose activities led to the city being known as "radical Leicester" in the nineteenth century. Look too for Thomas Cook, the pioneer travel agent.

The Falling Standards Board for England

This blog used to complain regularly about the Standards Board for England, as in this House Points column from February.

The Tories took up the cause before the general election, but things seemed to go quiet after that.

Now a Labour backbencher, the unlovable but effective Andrew Dismore, has come out for the forces of light. He was interviewed on the Today programme this morning and his comments are reported on the Guardian website:

The body that investigates allegations of sleaze and misconduct in local government is an out-of-control "Frankenstein's monster", a Labour MP protested today.

Andrew Dismore, a member of the parliamentary standards and privileges committee, said the Standards Board for England was not choosy enough about its investigations.

He believes that many take too long and, at an average cost of £5,000, are too expensive.

An interview with John Gray

My old professor was fond of saying that there are two kinds of statements in philosophy: those that are true but not interesting, and those that are interesting but not true.

I am not sure if everything John Gray says is true, but he is never less than interesting. Jonathan Derbyshire has just reproduced a magazine interview he conducted with Gray a couple of years ago. It deals largely with the nature of Islam and the Western liberal response to it.

Well worth a look.

New kid on the blogroll

It's hello to Rob Knight's A Blog from Under the Floorboards.

Funny place to keep it.

Don't blame me, I voted for Lembit

Simon Titley is sound on Simon Hughes' outburst in the Guardian today:

Anyone who thought the Liberal Democrats' president Simon Hughes was slightly barmy would have had their prejudices confirmed...

You can find the original report here.

Watching the Nationalists

Worth a visit is Nat Watch, which bills itself as "Exposing the failure, mendacity and xenophobia of nationalists in Scotland and Wales".

It is more interested in Wales than Scotland, and Peter Black warns us that its vendetta against Plaid's Leanne Wood is part of a Labour campaign against Regional AMs in general and, by implication, proportional representation.

You may recall that Wood was once ordered out of the chamber at Cardiff for referring to the Queen as "Mrs Windsor". Thanks to an intervention by Radical Liberal turned New Labour suit Leighton Andrews, that is.

Charlie the Elephant unpacks his trunk

Charles Clarke has postponed his holiday plans following pressure from Cabinet colleagues, reports politics.co.uk.

According to press reports last week, the home secretary had been planning to go on holiday with his family despite the terror crisis in London. Now he will join them later.

A rather flimsy story.

Yes, but I wanted to use that headline.

The sharp elbows of the aristocracy

When in November 2000 Judith Keppel became the first person to win the top prize on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? there were those who grumbled that she was too posh. And being posh is just about the worst sin imaginable in New Britain

But in this case "posh" was not being used to mean educated as, shockingly, it so often is. Because Keppel really is posh. She is granddaughter of the ninth Earl of Albermarle and great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel, the mistress of the Prince of Wales (who became Edward VII).

She is even a distant cousin of Camilla Parker Bowles, or the Duchess of Cornwall as we must now call her.

Yes, it is nicer when someone who obviously needs the money wins a big prize, as this rather prissy Guardian editorial pointed out at the time. But it is hard to begrudge Keppel her winnings. I am afraid that until socialism has been established educated people will continue to enjoy an unfair advantage in quizzes.

What no one mentioned at the time was that there is a precedent for someone with aristocratic connections winning a big TV quiz prize.

In 1957 Lady Cynthia Asquith, the wife of Herbert Asquith (second son of the Liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith), won the pioneering ITV quiz The $64,000 Question. It is hard to find out much about the show in general (there is a little information here), but thanks to the miracle of the internet it is possible to discover four of the questions Lady Cynthia answered to win her prize.

Colin Clifford's book The Asquiths tells us that Cynthia Asquith was born Cynthia Charteris, the daughter of the Earl of Wemyss. She became well known as a novelist and writer of ghost stories and was a friend of both D. H. Lawrence and, says Wikipedia, L. P. Hartley. (Herbert, incidentally, was known as Beb and once dined with Lord Bonkers - see Monday.)

Cynthia also worked as secretary to J. M. Barrie, revealing a talent for winning money long before she became a TV star. She persuaded Barrie to alter his will in her favour on his deathbed. The result was that the considerable earnings from his estate went to her rather than to the three surviving Llewelyn Davies boys whom he had adopted.

The story of these boys and their role in the genesis of Peter Pan is well known. It was told in the recent film Finding Neverland and also in Andrew Birkin's trilogy of plays The Lost Boys from 1978, with their superlative performance by Ian Holm as Barrie, and his later book J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys.

If you want to know the depth of Cynthia Asquith's infamy, you should visit the wonderful website Birkin maintains. Click on Davies Family on the lefthand side, then Nico on the right and then Nico's letters to Andrew Birkin 1975-1978 in the middle.

If you scroll down to the letter dated 1975-12-05 and you will read:

When Uncle Jim got really ill, and was not expected to last the night, Peter made the Greatest Mistake of his Life and telephoned her down in Devon or Cornwall. She hired a car and motored through the night. Meanwhile Peter, I and General Freyberg went on watch - 8 to 12, 12 to 4, 4 to 8 am - each of us expecting to see JMB die. Cynthia arrived towards the end of Bernard Freyberg's watch ... still alive ... got hold of surgeon Horder and solicitor Poole with the will ... Horder gave an injection, and sufficient energy was pumped into Uncle Jim so that he could put his name to the will that Poole laid before him ...
Believe it or not, much as I would have relished the money, the two things that broke my heart were firstly that I had no say in the reproduction of his plays - how I would have loved to be consulted in the casting and management of this play and that, all of which I knew so well and had watched so closely as JMB told the various actors what was in his mind etc etc: secondly that the relatively small amounts that were going to my daughter and others of her generation were removed. All very sad.

But then aristocratic families do not gain their wealth by behaving honourably. Except on TV quizzes, of course.

I have issues around the appropriateness of your tickling, Jock

I have been known to grumble that, despite the presence of Lib Dem cabinet members, the Scottish Executive often seems even keener on the more nannyish aspects of New Labour than its counterpart in London does.

Alex C. at Land of the Nearly Free, by setting out the professional backgrounds of the Labour ministers at Holyrood, gives us a clue as to why this is the case. He finds a preponderance of former teachers and social workers.

Floon! The whole thing collapsed

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Not as planned

Ted Heath was awkward to the last. This week I had intended to write about the tunnel collapse at Gerrards Cross, reporting a debate called by the local MP.

You may know the story. Struggling to find a site there, Tesco hit upon the idea of roofing over a railway cutting and building their new store on top of it. The council opposed the plan, but the office of the deputy prime minister waved it through.

A Tesco spokeswoman said brightly: “We can see no reason why the store should not be open by the summer.” Then a couple of weeks ago: Floon! The whole thing collapsed. The Almighty has more respect for local planning authorities than John Prescott does.

But when Ted Heath died this debate was shelved so that everyone could say nice things about him instead.

My clearest memory of Heath is his swansong. As father of the house he presided over the painful process that saw Michael Martin elected as the new speaker. Many people suggested saner methods, but he would not hear of them and so the day ground on.

You suspected that somewhere beneath that bovine stubbornness he was slyly enjoying himself. There were echoes of Charles Ryder’s father in Brideshead Revisited or of Evelyn Waugh himself.

Ted Heath’s heyday is now a foreign country. Union militancy, striking miners – working miners, come to that – and the three-day week. Commentators asked whether Britain was governable and retired colonels drilled private armies in case the balloon went up.

Heath’s claim to immortality as the man who took Britain into the Common Market must be seen in this light. He had distinguished himself in a European war and the argument that it must never happen again had real authority when he expressed it.

But for lesser figures it was the West German economic miracle that was the attraction. They hoped a little of its stardust would brush off on us and offer a way out of the mess of the early 1970s.

Now that miracle is tarnished and it is Britain that sees itself as the model to be followed. Yet you wonder how attractive an economy dominated by a few giant supermarkets appears to others. Which brings us back to Gerrards Cross.

First Church of Christ the Pedant

Through my door comes a leaflet from the Kettering Christadelphians. It says:

God and his son Jesus Christ hold the answer to ALL lifes (sic) problems.

I am going to found an Apostrophic Church to put a stop to things like this. I am not sure what it will look like yet, but here is a picture of the decrepit former Apostolic Chapel at Pontesbury Hill in Shropshire