Britblog Round up

Tim Worstall has posted his latest selection of the best things in the British blogosphere here.

This year’s educational panacea

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. Although it covers the teaching of reading I managed to avoid mentioning Ladybird Books, but it can only be a matter of time before Lassie appears.

Later note: As the blogosphere has higher ethical standards than print journalism, I should thank Tim Hicks and Tim Worstall for postings that helped inspire this column.

Home Counties voice: Come on Tim!


Not so phonic

The Tories have decided what it is they object to most about Tony Blair’s government. There’s not enough micromanagement. The trouble with New Labour, they believe, is that it does not centralise things enough.

You don’t believe me? Look at the way they’ve taken up this year’s educational panacea: synthetic phonics. Here is Tim Collins (whatever happened to him?) during the election campaign: “We won’t waste time commissioning more reports and pilot projects – the evidence is there and we will act upon it.”

Now Nick Gibb is inveighing against “the education establishment, who have known about this research for some time, have not adapted the national literacy strategy to put synthetic phonics at its core."

Yes, something about phonics appeals to the Tory mind. The Daily Mail thinks “Phonics is taught through discipline and repetition.” Which fits with its belief that education is impossible without “discipline, authority, order, tradition, learning by heart, rigorous examinations, selection”. (If space had permitted it would undoubtedly have added cold showers and swishy canes to the list.)

Maybe synthetic phonics is a better way of teaching reading, even though many of those pushing it have a commercial interest in doing so. And it has its unattractive side. There are stories of children being denied books and its proponents are no keener on illustrations than your average Puritan clergymen was.

But if synthetic phonics is best, how have we found that out? Will someone help Collins please? Thank you, Widdecombe. It’s because of an experiment. And how will we make the next breakthrough in teaching reading if the government imposes synthetic phonics everywhere and allow no more experiments? No, Gibb, I don’t know either.

Excuse me for coming over all headmasterly. Think of it as a tribute to Phil Willis. During the election campaign he said: “We need to free teachers from endless central government diktats, testing and targets and allow them to practise the methods that are best for their pupils.”

He was right, but we need to go further. A maintained education sector with a wider variety of providers and more freedom to choose between them would not be kind to schools which didn’t teach children to read. And the best methods, be they synthetic phonics or anything else, would flourish.

More thoughts on Nick Cohen and Amnesty International

Nick Cohen, in a column I have already discussed here and here, complained about Amnesty International's use of the term "gulag" to describe Guananamo Bay and the USA's other facilities for detaining suspected terrorists around the world.

He wrote:

ever since [Irene] Khan took over, I've had an uneasy feeling that it is losing universal principles and treating the abuse of rights by the United States as worse than similar or more grotesque abuses by others. That feeling transformed into a certainty last week when Amnesty described Guantanamo Bay as the 'gulag of our times'.

By all means, Amnesty and everyone else should loudly deplore America's failure to treat prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But when they've finished, they should check the figures. If they exclude the millions who died of starvation, disease and exhaustion, they will find that 776,098 prisoners were murdered in summary executions in the gulag between 1930 and 1953. At Guantanamo Bay, no one has died of starvation, disease or exhaustion and no prisoners have been executed. Not one. If Amnesty's American obsession prevents it from seeing the worst crimes of the 20th century for what they are, how will it sound the alarm about the worst of the 21st?

It is hard to disagree with any of this, but two points are worth making in reply.

The first is made by Ted Barlow in his open letter to New Republic magazine on the Crooked Timber blog. In the PS he writes:

You can imagine a world in which the term “gulag” had not been used in that speech. In that world, do you imagine that the Amnesty report would have set off a serious effort on the part of the Bush Administration to correct its abuses? Or do you think that they would find another excuse- any excuse- to belittle and ignore the report? The question answers itself, doesn’t it?

The second was made by Cohen himself. In a posting made in January this year I quoted him as saying:

A few months ago, I shared a platform with Sion Simon, a new Labour cheerleader. I had a go at the government's assault on trial by jury, and his instant response was: "Nick Cohen thinks Blair's Hitler." I pointed out that I thought nothing of the sort, and asked if all criticism of new Labour's record would be illegitimate until the day the Cabinet dressed in black leather and invaded Poland.

Equally, Bush's America does not have to be as bad as Stalin's USSR for criticism of it to be legitimate.

The real idiocy in Irene Khan's comments (quoted by Cohen and included in my first posting on the subject) was her failure to understand that extending liberty is key to fighting poverty and ignorance, not a destraction from it.

Which brings us back to my favourite quotation about Karl Popper from Bryan Magee.

Sympathy for the Devil

Paul Goggins (silly name, silly man) has announced that his new incitement to religious hatred bill will protect Satanists.

I wonder how an outburst like this would fare under his new law?

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

Our caller, of course, is Jesus from Nazareth (John 8 :34), addressing the scribes and Pharisees. Which raises the intriguing prospect that, should Christ return to Earth, he will be prosecuted by New Labour.

No wonder the Evangelical Alliance has come out against Mr Goggins' bill.

Meanwhile in Melton Mowbray

It's not just Shropshire that produces great news stories. Here in Leicestershire the BBC reports that:

Engineers are trying to find out what has caused a giant hole that opened up in a Melton Mowbray car park.

The 10ft wide gap appeared outside the town's railway station last week and the area remains cordoned off, while investigations continue.

The story goes on to say:

Station staff are intrigued by what is below and ask for people who know about the area's history to come forward and see if they can provide answers.

Lord Bonkers writes: For centuries the Bonkers family fortunes were boosted by our ownership of a number of Stilton mines in the north of Leicestershire. Unfortunately their location has been quite lost, and I have spent many fruitless hours searching my Library for a map.

Peter O'Toole's socks

It had to happen. News of the remake of Lassie Come Home has reached the Shropshire Star:

Costumes made at a south Shropshire wool shop will be making an appearance on the silver screen later this year in the remake of the classic film Lassie.

The Wool Shop, in Ludlow's Broad Street, has been commissioned to produce a number of costumes for the film, including a pair of Argyle socks to be worn by legendary actor Peter O'Toole.

Read more here if you can stand the excitement.

Amnesty, liberty and poverty

I have been thinking some more about the column by Nick Cohen which I recommended here a couple of days ago.

Cohen was, quite rightly, taking issue with Irene Khan, the new secretary general of Amnesty International, and her claim that:

"If you look globally today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world's population they don't mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can't read the newspaper, to talk about the right to work to someone who has no job; human rights means nothing to them unless it brings some change on these particular issues."

I realised that I have already posted the best answer to this sort of argument to my other blog Serendib - an anthology of favourite bits and pieces from my reading.

In November 2003 I added an extract from Brian Magee's autobiography Confessions of a Philosopher where he discusses the importance of Karl Popper's work. It ran:

Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship.

Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies.

It is not - as, again, had been believed by most people before - because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.

That is all that needs to be said. You can read more about Popper's work here.

Making and Breaking Children's Lives

The fact that many children were sent from British institutions to live in Australia and other far-flung parts of the Empire is often referred to as a shameful "secret".

As I argued in a paper I on the history of child abuse that I gave at the Tavistock last year, it was nothing of the sort. It was public policy and widely discussed.

As a follower of Karl Popper I know that I should look for facts that refute my theories rather than ones that confirm them, but I was pleased to see this report in the Guardian the other day:

The files show Whitehall officials as early as 1955 had particular concerns over the St John Bosco Boys' Town in Glenorchy, Tasmania, run by the Salesian Brotherhood. A Home Office inspector who visited the home in 1951 was concerned there were no women involved, and recommended it should not be approved without a matron.

It is a little odd to say "as early as 1955" because the fate of children sent to Canada had been controversial decades before that.

Incidentally, a revised version of my Tavistock Clinic paper is included as a chapter in the book Making and Breaking Children's Lives, which is about to be published by PCCS Books. Full details here.

How We Fell for Europe

Don't despair if you missed Michael Cockerell's excellent film on Saturday. The BBC has a page devoted to it here.

David Dimbleby’s bladder

Some broadcasters are so bland and inoffensive that it’s offensive. Nick Ross is one such. I remember a magazine article that featured photographs of celebrities as children and invited you to guess who they grew up to become. It was somehow inevitable that the young Nick Ross should look exactly like the older Nick Ross.

Two more such creatures are the Dimblebys. The first part of David Dimbleby’s new series A Picture of Britain, which looks at British landscape and its effect on British painting and other arts, was shown on BBC1 this evening.

Inevitably the pictures were beautiful, though when you see clouds racing over an otherwise still landscape for the tenth time it ceases to impress. And there was someone with a terribly literal mind at work too. When Dimbleby mentioned Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush swelled up on the soundtrack at once. Yorkshire as a whole was introduced by a brass band. Playing “On Ilkley Moor Baht ’At”. On Ilkley Moor.

What was most striking, though, was an extract from David Dimbleby’s first television film. He made it with his younger brother Jonathan. At the age of 17.

No doubt it does your career little harm if your father is the most famous broadcaster in the land,* but this film crystallised what is objectionable about David Dimbleby. He is a public school boy of no great imagination or ability, projected on to the national stage by television fame and family connections.

Though his performance on election night this year was not his worst, his occasional misunderstanding of the statistics or miscalling of results reveal someone with no great passion for psephology. You feel he would be just as happy covering ballroom dancing or show jumping.

It has been suggested to me that Dimbleby has made election night his own because he possesses a bladder of iron and has no need to nip away from the camera in the small hours. If so, this lucky heredity may be the real reason the Dimbleby family has made our state occasions its own.

It’s not talent. It’s not nepotism. It’s urology.

* In his latest diary Lord Bonkers suggests that Richard Dimbleby “commentated upon every state occasion from the launch of the Queen Mary to the conception of Princess Anne”.

Nick Cohen on Amnesty International

Nick Cohen is controversial and right in today's Observer:

"If you look globally today and want to talk about human rights, for the vast majority of the world's population they don't mean very much. To talk about freedom of expression to a man who can't read the newspaper, to talk about the right to work to someone who has no job; human rights means nothing to them unless it brings some change on these particular issues.'

This clunking and faintly sinister statement did not come from a colonial administrator explaining that liberty was all well and good for freeborn Englishmen but the half-savage natives needed order. Nor was it a communist apparatchik saying that there was no need for bourgeois freedoms in the proletarian paradise of the Soviet Union. Nor was it Edward Heath or Henry Kissinger announcing that the Chinese liked autocracy or Abu Musab Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden denouncing democracy as a Greek heresy.

Rather, it fell from the lips of Irene Khan, the new secretary general of Amnesty International, an organisation which used to believe that human rights meant everything.

Read the full article here.

Lassie: Latest news

Following my posting the other day I have made some more discoveries.

First, Lassie Comes Home is being remade at the moment, starring Peter O'Toole. (He is not playing the title role but the Duke of Rudling.) It is being shot in Ireland and the Isle of Man, and other cast members include Steve Pemberton from the League of Gentlemen, John Lynch, Jemma Redgrave and Gregor Fisher. The press coverage suggests the script is true to Eric Knight's original story.

Second, I have come across a substantial academic analysis of the meaning of the Lassie films and the later American TV series. It is Henry Jenkins' essay: "Her suffering aristocratic majesty": The sentimental value of Lassie.

Here is just a taste:

Neither the Duke nor Joe, neither Jeff nor Timmy, nor any of the others who were blessed to own Lassie through the years, needed a microchip to identify her. I recognize that the microchip is an act of love, a response to a changed society, a harsh reality we have to live with. But reality falls far short of our cherished myths. Lassie was unique, priceless, without possible imitation or counterfeit. Her spiritual qualities, her moral authority, her "suffering aristocratic majesty" was possessed by no other dog, and only those who understand that distinction were allowed to possess a dog like Lassie. And, even if her human owners were confused, Lassie would have known and would have made her wishes known.

Something has broken down in the relations between dogs and their masters. The myth of the faithful dog no longer offer us condolences in the face of a feckless world. If the myths of canine fidelity and childhood innocence were central tropes through which our culture dealt with the threats of modernity, such myths of authenticity and of natural social relations have no place in a postmodern world.

Finally, let us not forget the pioneer of the canine heroics mocked in the Guardian article which started me off on this Lassie kick. In my review of Matthew Sweet's book Shepperton Babylon here I wrote:

Mention should also be made of the eponymous hero of Rescued by Rover who, in a later film

pounds off in hot pursuit, jumps into the driving seat of the abductor's car and, paws on the steering wheel, chugs his charge back to safety along the road from Shepperton to Walton.

No wonder Sweet calls The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper "a minor masterpiece of British surrealism".

South Staffordshire election

From the latest LDYS mailing:

Jo Crotty's Liberal Democrat campaign team have now set up their HQ at Unit 9 on the Wombourne Enterprise Park, Bridgnorth Road, Wombourne, Wolverhampton WV5 0AL. They are now open and ready for action! We need your help now, the first sets of leaflets are ready and waiting for you!

Come by car if you can - other than about 5000 homes in Wombourne itself, the rest of the seat can only be easily got at by car as buses and trains need lengthy trips into and out of Wolverhampton. Wombourne is a large village typical of the South Staffordshire constituency. Pubs are plentiful and stocks of Black Country-sourced real ales easy to find, as are restaurants of every hue.

If you are looking for accommodation please contact us in the first instance at info@southstaffslibdems.org.uk.

Comments added to Liberal England

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog. I am not entirely clear how they work - or what "trackback" is, to be honest - but let's see how we get on with them.

To be given the option of leaving a comment it seems you need to have an individual posting open, rather than the blog as whole. To get an individual posting open, click on the orange # sign at the bottom lefthand corner of each of them. I hope that makes sense. If it doesn't you can leave me a comment - or maybe you can't.

I don't intend to reply to every comment, and will delete any that are obscene or too tedious to live.

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Later: Thanks to advice in a comment left by one of those nice people at Haloscan, comments now appear on the main page and the archive pages. So you can ignore the text I have greyed out.

Even more exciting, they had proportional representation

Attentive readers may spot some similarities between today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News and an earlier posting on this blog.

Different tunes

Parliament is in recess, so we begin with a quiz. Which is the only constituency where the sitting member has been defeated at each of the last three general elections?

While you are thinking about that, we will discuss what the Eurovision Song Contest says about the difficulties facing the European project. You may remember that Britain’s representative was Javine. She sang “Touch my Fire” but got her fingers burnt.

For Spain, the United Kingdom, France and Germany – the largest contributors to the European Broadcasting Union – occupied the bottom four places in the voting.

In our case it’s tempting to blame Blair’s foreign policy. As Terry Wogan put it: ''We've invaded too many countries and nobody likes us anymore.” But something more profound was at work. Something not even the ruthless block voting of the Baltic and Balkan states can explain.

It is that the heart of Europe has moved east. You could tell that from the Eurovision entries. When Britain’s was chosen we probably thought we were daring to pick a song with a Bollywood sound. There turned out to be nothing daring about it. Poor Javine was lost in a crowd of eastern sounds, led by that Moldovan granny and her drum.

Which means we are going to have to reconsider what Europe means to us. For a couple of generations it represented a more civilised way of life. They had subsidised public transport, sane labour relations and adventurous sex lives. Even more exciting, they had proportional representation.

This Europe to which Liberals owed allegiance, which convinced them that, despite appearances, they were the party of the future, was the Europe of the six original Common Market members. That Europe no longer exists.

What we see instead is a more diverse and interesting Europe. Yet it scares some, as the prominence of Turkey in the French referendum campaign shows. You also wonder how long Western voters will be happy to go on funding it – or the song contest, for that matter.

And the quiz? The answer is Taunton, where David Nicholson lost in 1997, Jackie Ballard in 2001 and Adrian Flook in 2005. The new MP for Taunton is our own Jeremy Browne, and House Points has every confidence that history will not repeat itself.

Lord Bonkers' Diary

I have posted his lordship's latest diary to his website:

Speaking in a purely personal capacity, I view the prospect of house arrest with equanimity – particularly if no one spills the beans about the secret passage that comes out in the cellar of the Bonkers Arms.

To Scotland to enjoy that blissful period after it stops raining for the winter and before the midgies appear for the summer. Why, in a good year it can last as long as three days!

When such dirty business is afoot, we would all do well to remember the sage counsel of my agent in ’06: “If it votes Liberal, offer it a poster. If it doesn’t, hit it with your orchard doughty.”

You can also find an archive of the old brute's thoughts and adventures on his site.

In defence of Lassie

The trouble with the Guardian is that nothing - with the possible exceptions of Tony Benn and comprehensive education - is sacred to it. Take today's parody of Lassie Come Home by David Ward:

Scene 1

Enter friendly collie dog, barking.

Well-scrubbed child: "What Lassie? Granny has fallen down the mine shaft again? We'd better get help!"

Scene 2

Lassie in phone box dials 999.

Well-scrubbed police officer: Hi Lassie. Granny in the mine shaft? We'll be right there.

Scene 3

Enter Lassie with Granny in mouth. All pat Lassie.

We are not talking about Flipper or Skippy here, but Lassie Come Home - one of the greatest family films ever made.

It was shot in 1943, based on the book by Eric Knight. Knight was born in England but settled in the United States as a teenager. By the time the film had made him famous he was already dead. A Major in the US Army, he perished in a wartime aircrash.

Lassie Comes Home is one of those films, like Mrs Miniver and Suspicion, that was set in Britain but made in Hollywood. The result is that every detail is slightly wrong but the whole is immensely interesting. The cast is also terrific: Nigel Bruce, Dame May Whitty and Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor as children.

There is nothing sugary about the film: poverty is at its heart. Lassie is sold because a rich man coverts her and the poor family that owns her cannot turn his offer down. If Roddy McDowall is "well scrubbed", it is his mother's attempt to retain her family's dignity in the face of that poverty.

After that the film becomes a hymn to unfashionable virtues like loyalty and steadfastness. You can see why the Guardian hates it, but I love it.

The new Liberator is out

Issue 302 of Liberator is being mailed to subscribers tonight, and the magazine's website has been updated to include some articles from it.

See also this story in today's Guardian, which quotes extensively from the issue.

A new Liberal blog

Welcome to Jane Leaper's Mira, which comes to you from the beautiful Churnet valley in Staffordshire.

I shall be having a revamp of my links shortly, and will also allow people to add comments. (The worry when you launch a new blog is that no one will bother to leave any.)

The Week's Good Cause

Spare a thought for the MPs defeated at the recent general election. Joe Ashton does, reports the Guardian.

The former MP for Bassetlaw, latterly famous for discovering the hitherto overlooked Thai quarter of Northampton, was:

especially struck by the plight of some of the Tories defeated in 1997, when 160 lost their seats in the New Labour landslide. "One drank himself to death, two or three more suffered from alcohol problems and depression, another was so broke he had to take his kids out of school," he says. His response was to form an association of ex-MPs, a support group that aims to help members once their 15 minutes of fame - or perhaps their eight and a half years of infamy - is over.

Ashton paints a grim picture for those who have been defeated at the polls. "The shock of losing is traumatic," he says. "You learn that you've lost at midnight, your opponents are singing and chortling, it's a cruel, ruthless arena."