That tortoise was just too fast for me

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Bypassing Brown

Good news from the Budget debate: Gordon Brown does not have as much influence on British education as he likes to pretend.

The chancellor presents himself as the saviour of our schools: now providing billions to improve standards; now finding extra money for some desirable policy goal. Monday’s budget debate showed that the truth is rather different.

Take Brown’s headline figure of an extra £34bn for schools. As Sarah Teather pointed out, this was arrived at by adding up all the capital spending over the next five years, and much of this money has been announced already.

Or take the pledge to fund state school pupils at the same level as pupils in the private sector. This turns out to be merely an “aspiration”, and an aspiration to reach the current level of spending in the private sector at that. By Sarah’s calculation this will take 16 years, and by then private schools will be spending a lot more than they are now.

Incidentally, Tony Blair announced a similar aspiration during the 2001 election campaign. Then the gap between the state and private sectors was £2000 per pupil each year. Today it is £3000.

Achilles writes: I’m sorry, but that tortoise was just too fast for me.

If all that isn’t good news, the next bit is. Because it turns out that the micromanagement of schools Brown is so keen on is largely a myth.

He may announce £2000 for every school to buy books, as he did in the 1999 budget. Or he may promise £220 million next year for personalised learning, as he did this time. But there is no sign that the Treasury has any mechanism for ensuring that schools spend this money the way Brown wants them to.

Maybe he knows this, and his announcements are all spin. Or maybe he thinks every head in the country really is doing what he tells them, and none of his acolytes has the courage to tell him the truth. (In other words, Balls doesn’t have the balls.)

Whatever the explanation, this is welcome news. We Lib Dems believe in local control of schools, and it looks as though there is more of it about than we thought.

Garry Kasparov

I am watching Question Time from Moscow, and it is worth pointing out what a remarkable man Garry Kasparov is. He has a strong claim to be called the strongest chess player ever: certainly, he dominated the game for two decades from the mid 1980s.

Now he has given chess up to enter Russian politics on the side of the angels. This article gives his account of that decision:

Russia is in a moment of crisis and every decent person must stand up and resist the rise of the Putin dictatorship. Russia boasts too many generals and colonels in politics and too few thinkers. (Even Russia's chess players are in decline, a symptom of the larger malady.) I hope my vision and ability to think strategically can be of help to my native land. We must act now to unite and to create real democratic opposition to the Putin regime. I can now offer not only my name and my advice, but my active participation.

The New Art Gallery, Walsall

Yesterday I visited the New Art Gallery in Walsall. This is one of those white elephants, built with Lottery money, which dot provincial England. But the collection it houses is special and worth going to see.

It is easy to find as it stands in the centre of town beside the canal basin. It looms over the water like a dreadnought where the narrow boats used to load. There was a family of swans in the basin. The cygnets were very adolescent - their feathers, turning from grey to white, looked like drifted snow with highways department salt dumped on it - and gave the impression they would be a happier in hoodies.

Walsall, at least the short stretch of it you see between the railway station and the gallery, is not inspiring. But I have seen tree-lined streets on the outskirts which suggest that it has been prosperous in its time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries its wealth came from coal mining - today the area to the south is badly affected by subsidence - and later it became famous as a centre of the leather trade. (The local schools used to do their bit for the town's economy by beating the children with leather straps rather than canes.)

With celebrity architects (Caruso St John) and a celebrity director (Peter Jenkinson), the gallery made a great splash when it opened. Jenkinson wrote about its early success in the New Statesman in 2000. But the Wikipedia article on it suggests that it has not had such a happy time since then and is now run by council officers.

This would explain the display that greets you upon entering. There are trade union banners (Lambeth NALGO Women's Group, NUT Bexley Association) and poems from schoolchildren about racism and bullying. No doubt they are meant to represent popular culture, but they are characteristic of the cheerlessness and sententiousness of municipal Labourism. Still, if you climb the stairs to the galleries the views along the canal lift the heart and make you want to walk the towpath.

The galleries are upstairs too, and the art displayed in them is what makes the trip to Walsall worthwhile. The heart of the gallery's collection is the Garman Ryan Collection which, the gallery's website explains, was:

donated to the Borough in 1972 by Lady Kathleen Epstein. It consists of three hundred and sixty-five works of art, over a third of them being three-dimensional works from many different cultures and periods around the world. It also contains a wide-ranging body of the work of Sir Jacob Epstein and many significant works by European artists such as Van Gogh, Monet, Turner, Corot, Renoir and Constable represented in prints, sketches and drawings as well as paintings and sculptures.

You can explore the collection online on this page of the gallery's website.

Jacob Epstein is an appealing figure. He was born in 1880 in New York, the son of Polish refugees, and settled in England in 1905. He was a friend of leading British artists like Augustus John and Eric Gill, and one of his daughters married the painter Lucian Freud. The collection at Walsall has works by all these friends and family connections.

Epstein was at first a controversial artist, thanks to his predilection for nude figures on buildings such as the former BMA headquarters on The Strand in London and John Lewis's in Liverpool. But he lived to be knighted, to produce a bronze of Churchill just after the war and to contribute the sculpture of St Michael and the Devil to the new Coventry Cathedral. (The model for St Michael, incidentally, was the distinguished economist Wynne Godley.)

So that is the New Art Gallery at Walsall. The cafe is friendly but limited, and you may do better to eat next door at The Wharf, described as "Walsall's trendiest bar". How much competition there is, the writer does not say.

The Ming Dynasty

So we've had the elections for Liberal Democrat leader, deputy leader and chief whip.

If you are experiencing withdrawal symptoms from internal party elections, go to politicalbetting.com where they are already discussing who will succeed Ming:

Like Tony Blair and David Cameron the top four in the betting have a lot in common:

• They are all male;
• They are all white;
• They all went to public school;
• They all went to either Oxford or Cambridge.
  

Vince Cable elected Deputy Leader

Vince Cable has been elected as Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats, reports ePolitix.com.

Ballot Results

Round One
Matthew Taylor - 25
Dr Vince Cable - 21
David Heath - 17

Round Two
Dr Vince Cable - 31
Matthew Taylor - 29

So it's Ming Campbell and Vince Cable. Hmm. Not the most varied of tickets, is it?

Opera at Bonkers Hall

I have commented before on the strange absence of Bonkers Hall from Ordnance Survey maps, and remarked that Nevill Holt near Market Harborough is the best approximation to it that you are likely to find.

This summer Grange Park Opera is staging performances of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville at Nevill Holt.

I doubt that Lord Bonkers would settle for anything less than a complete performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle with the first Lady Bonkers (or possibly Elspeth Campbell) as Brunhilde, but it is good to see Bonkers Hall becoming the Glyndebourne of the East Midlands.

Is this all your own work, Tompkins?

There is a good article by Frank Furedi in today's Guardian. He looks at the factors that have led to an increase in plagiarism and cheating in schools and universities:

From day one in primary school ... [parents] are told that the performance of their children is intimately linked to how much support they get at home. In a desperate attempt to improve standards of education, parents' concern for their children is manipulated to draw them in as unpaid teachers. The outsourcing of education by schools encourages a dynamic where many parents become far too directly involved in producing their children's homework.

Surveys suggest that parents spend on average six or seven hours a week on homework duties.

This article is also discussed by Scott Burgess. And see Furedi's own website for more of his articles.

Jodie Marsh slams Phil Willis

Recess Monkey reports an extraordinary attack on Phil Willis by Jodie Marsh.

Phil Willis is a topless model and former Page 3 girl; Jodie Marsh is Lib Dem MP for Harrogate. (Are you sure about this? Ed.)

Orange Book 2?

A throwaway line from an editorial in this morning's Guardian:

Some of this may come in a successor volume to the influential Orange Book, due out later this year.

Your read it here first. (Unless you read the Guardian, obviously.)

Localism and equality

Stephen spells out "new localism"

said the BBC website, reporting last weekend's Scottish Lib Dem Spring Conference. And the report began:

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Nicol Stephen has outlined plans to devolve control of health and education away from Scottish Executive ministers.

Addressing delegates at his party's spring conference in Aviemore, Mr Stephen said "new localism" would help the Lib Dems to overtake Labour.

Yet when you read on, you see that there are tensions between this support for localism and the egalitarianism which now dominates Lib Dem discourse on education. For, as reported by the BBC, the centrepiece of Stephen speech was this call:

"Let's get the best headteachers moving to new schools and new challenges every five or seven years - using their skills to prevent complacency in our best performing schools and to transform poorly-achieving schools," he said.

"And if it means we should pay more to get the best teachers in areas with the hardest challenges, where they need it most, I say we should."

This may be a good idea, but it has little to do with localism. It is about national government (in this case the Scottish Executive) using its powers and resources to override local preferences. After all, if a school has a good head the local community has a strong interest into holding on to him. For the best of motives, Stephen wants to make it more difficult for that community to do so.

The essence of localism is experiment: different communities will do things in different ways. Some of these ways will work, others will not. So localism is likely to lead to unequal provision.

The Liberal argument is that in the long run people will see which experiments work and which do not, and the more successful methods will be widely adopted. And this will raise standards everywhere.

As a good Liberal I believe this, though I suspect that many good services community, including schools, are down to exceptional individuals. So the extent to which the lessons drawn can be generalised is probably more limited than we sometimes argue.

But there is no doubt that in the short term localism will lead to inequality, and I wonder how many Liberal Democrats will react to this. For them, equality seems to have become the overriding consideration.

For instance, they hold the government's plans for city academies and foundation schools in contempt because they are not available to all children. The argument seems to be that unless a reform can be introduced everywhere, all at once, then it should not be introduced at all.

That view is a long way from localism, and I see a lot of, er, interesting debates ahead.

Nostalgia, Marxism and Miss Marple

I have found a short article by Alan McKee discussing the appeal of the BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books. These are the ones starring Joan Hickson, which I have discussed here before.

He suggests three reasons why this series was so appealing. I have no quarrel with the second and third of them, which are the quality of Joan Hickson's performance and the way the programmes offer a "pleasantly female-oriented version of detective mythology".

But the first worries me a little. McKee argues that it is because the Miss Marple adaptations are "prime examples of 'heritage' television":

The term "heritage television" sums up a certain attitude towards the past which developed in Britain during the 1980s, when a mixture of a new Victorianism in moral standards and an increasingly frenetic late-capitalistic commodification led to two tendencies. The first was an attraction to a particularly sanitised version of England's past. The second capitalized on the first with various moves towards rendering that past easily consumable - in television programs, films, bed sheets, jams and preserves, and so on.

I wonder. I always distrust this sort of Marxist analysis, if only because of the unexplained use of the term "late capitalism". Presumably we are now living through "even later capitalism", but there is still no sign of the Revolution.

It also assumes that an interest in the past is somehow excaptional and a sign that there is something wrong with present-day society. Presumably the idea is that in a socialist economy people would spend all their time working bare-chested in fields and factories and looking to the future, like the heroes of early Soviet propaganda films.

I suspect nostalgia is more central to the human condition than that. For it is not accurate to date the nostalgia boom to the Thatcherite 1980s.

The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady -which gave rise to lots of associated merchandise - was no.1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list for 64 weeks in the more collectivist years of 1977 and 1978. And I am sure it would be possible to find examples going back much further than that.

Besides, is Miss Marple as nostalgic as all that? Yes, there is great pleasure to be had from the period cars, clothes and so on. But the Joan Hickson programmes were precisely set in the years around 1950, and we do see social change taking place. Where an institution - Bertram's Hotel - has resisted all change, it turns out to be sinister.

Perhaps significantly, the series looked both forward and back in its casting too. It looked forward in that it featured George Baker as a police inspector and Kevin Whatley as a sergeant before either Wexford or Lewis came to the screen.

And it looked back in its use of actors and actresses familiar from films made decades before.

The most remarkable example of this was the cameo appearance by Joyce Carey in A Murder is Announced, made in 1985. She had appeared as an elderly landlady (Alastair Sim, as a fake medium, schemes to marry her) in London Belongs to Me, as early as 1948.

Two Shropshire Star classics

A couple of characteristic headlines from my favourite newspaper:

Rain holds off during half-marathon

Abattoir set to move in £10m plan

Mind you, if you have been to Craven Arms you will know that moving the abattoir threatens to tear the heart out of the place.

The real Master

Will Howells writes about Anthony Ainley and the Ainley family's (rather tenuous) links with the Asquiths. He also says that Ainley played The Master in Doctor Who during the 1980s.

No doubt he did. But the real Master - the original one who flourished in the late 1960s* when I was just of an age to hide behind the sofa - was Roger Delgado.

* Actually in the early 1970s - see Will's comment below.

Government support for elite athletes

A couple of weeks ago I argued in Liberal Democrat News that there was something sinister about the government's rush to associate itself with British sporting success:

It's good to praise people when they have done well. But somewhere behind all these congratulations is the belief that all achievements by British people are really government achievements. And that is downright sinister.

Tony Blair was at it again in Melbourne today. Praising Scotland's success in the Commonwealth Games, he said:

"Scotland has done superbly well with 11 gold medals and sixth place in the medal table.

"I think people worked hard before the games as well and I know that Jack McConnell, (Sports Minister) Patricia Ferguson, the Scottish Institute of Sport - they've all been putting their shoulder to the wheel and it's paid off."

The people to be praised are the medalists themselves, their coaches and (I suspect most of all) the parents who gave up their spare time to ferry them from event to event when they were younger. But you will rarely hear a Labour politician admit that. It all has to be down to the Scottish Executive.

These days it is taken as a given that state investment in elite athletes is a good thing. Governments boast of it: opposition parties demand more. Which makes Michael Johnson's condemnation of the set up in British athletics all the more interesting:

"We as American athletes used to be a little envious of the support that British athletes got but that system in Britain, that support that the athletes get, can hurt you at times.

"These athletes have it all - the status, the support - before they have done anything.

"All of those young guys wanted to be a champion when they came into it and now they are satisfied with being a relay gold medallist."

So perhaps there is another side to this argument?

From Beastly to Eastleigh

It's wonderful what a browse of the Internet Movie Database reveals.

You probably know that James Aubrey, who played Ralph in Peter Brook's famous 1963 film of Lord of the Flies, became an actor when he grew up. He has been appearing regularly in films and on TV ever since.

What you may not know is his most recent role. He played David Chidgey (former Lib Dem MP for Eastleigh) in The Government Inspector - last year's TV drama about Dr David Kelly.

From Brackley to the Lincolnshire coast

Today's House Points from Liberal Democrat News.

Home truths

Evenin’ all. We’ve had a nasty gang in Dock Green this week: Jumbo Clarke and his henchmen. That’s Mauler Mactaggart, Nasty McNulty, Andy “The Card” Burnham and Asbo Blears. (There’s also Paul Goggins, but he’s too boring to have a nickname.)

Thank you, PC Dixon. Home office questions made it clear why Charles Clarke keeps that crew round him. They are the only people in the Commons who make him look good by comparison.

Take Tony McNulty. When it comes to being rude, not even Clarke can compete. On Monday he accused Julian Brazier of confusing six different aspects of government policy. And he greeted Nick Clegg’s first question as Lib Dem shadow home secretary with: “As ever, the honourable gentleman … is wrong. He should read things other than the Guardian and get a life.”

That made Charles Clarke sound almost reasonable when he announced plans to merge police forces. Here in the East Midlands, for instance, he wants to combine five into one force covering everywhere from Brackley to the Lincolnshire coast.

Clarke took the first questions of this restructuring, but left the rest to Hazel Blears. It was she who deployed what the home office sees as its clinching argument. Forces must “be certain that they can cope with increased threats from serious and organised crime, and can counter terrorism”.

Never mind traditions of local accountability and mistrust of an overmighty state: whisper the word “terrorism” and we are supposed to throwaway everything we believe in. The problem with today’s world is not that terrorists believe in their cause so strongly: it’s that the democracies’ belief in theirs is so weak.

Just as McNulty makes Clarke look civilised, Blears and Andy Burnham makes him look like an intellectual. For, at the same time as defending her slaughter of county police forces, Blears was insisting on the importance of neighbourhood policing.

And when John Barrett asked Burnham how the government would accommodate the Scottish Executive’s wish not to use identity cards for access to devolved services, he rambled on about how popular the “biometrics roadshow” had proved with the public.

So that’s the home office view. If only we could abolish all these counties and national parliaments, the government would be able to make local accountability work.

At home with the Darbyshires

By common consent in the Lib Dem blogosphere, there's just one place to point you to tonight.

If you ain't never read the Darbyshires, you ain't never read nothing like this.

Big cats at Marston Trussell

There's only one place to be this weekend: the Sun Inn at Marston Trussell near Market Harborough. It is hosting the first national British Big Cats Conference.

As an article in this morning's Guardian said:

It is estimated that up to 7,000 people a year see panther-like (black) animals, or puma-like (brown) animals at large in the UK.

If you do visit the conference, be careful. As the Rutland and Leicestershire Panther Watch site shows, this part of the world is simply crawling with the beasts.

Mind you, Marston Trussell is just over the Northamptonshire border, so it may be less dangerous than other local villages.

Paul Burstow new Lib Dem chief whip

The BBC reports that Paul Burstow has won the contest to become our new chief whip.

English whisky

Look what I've just found.