Miliband, UKIP and the 'I'm not racist but...' people.

Am fascinated 

by these 'I'm not racist but' people they show us. 

They say things like 'it's all got too much' 

and 'there's too many of them' etc etc 

So what do they think UKIP is going to do for them? 

Put people on trains and ship them out? 

And how will these people be chosen? 

And who is going to do the choosing? 

And if the people refuse to go? 

Will UKIP have special police to do that? 

And this is not racism? 

And UKIP isn't deliberately holding out hopes for people who say those things that that is precisely what they would do? 

And Labour can't say that about UKIP? 

And that Labour should keep saying that 'people have concerns' instead of saying what I'm saying here? 

For f.sake Miliband, it's what your parents fled from. 

Say it. Say it. Say it.

Hurrah for mortgages, say the zero hour contract workers.

You want a house?
You want a flat?
Do you want a mortgage?
Everyone should have a mortgage.
Do you want to 'get on the first rung of the housing ladder'?
Of course we do.
Do you want to be part of the property-owning democracy?
Of course we do.
Are we happy that this is what the Tories are doing for us?
Of course we are.

But at the same time
under Toryism there are many more people on zero-hour contracts
many more people on temporary contracts
many more people are low earning self-employed.

None of these people can get a mortgage.

Hurrah for that, we all say, that will ensure
that they don't become people who will default
they won't have 'sub-prime mortgages,
they won't 'trigger a crash'.

So what is this 'property owning democracy' then?
Ah it's the kind of democracy that is only available
to those with permanent contracts
and high enough salaries.

In the meantime, people have to live somewhere,
somewhere where they spend a huge chunk of what they earn,
such a large chunk that they can't save for a deposit
even if they ever did manage to turn their zero hour contract
or their temporary contract into a permanent one
or if ever the fees in the self-employed work
ever got big enough...

So, thank you Cameron for telling us on the Today Programme
of your thrill
that day you walked through the door of your first flat
knowing that it was yours.

Everyone on zero hour contracts
temporary contracts
and low earning self-employed rates
cheered when you said that.

Hurrah...hurrah...hurrah.

Farage and Clarkson - a new TV programme together.

You know those radio and TV programmes 

where people make up meanings for odd words 

or do a speech where they conceal something untrue? 

Farage and Clarkson could do a programme 

where they say racist things 

and then immediately afterwards say they're sorry. 

The job of the people in the other team would be to guess whether they meant to be 

a) genuinely racist or 

b) genuinely sorry or 

c) if it doesn't really matter whether they apologise or not because having said the racist stuff, the people who want to hear the racism are really quite pleased.

[when I posted this on Facebook, someone ("Micky Merch") said that it should be called 'Call My Nazi Bluff'. ]

Farage: the thoughts of the Great Leader

OK, I didn't mean to say, 'Who would want to live next door to Romanians?'
I didn't mean to say what I said that I meant to say which is
'All Romanians are thieves.'
I meant to say,
'Some Romanians are thieves.'

This is a fact.
It's worth saying because the fact that
some Romanians are thieves
is quite different from saying that
some Brits are thieves.

That's because
Romanian thieves are worse than British thieves.

I am not a racist.

I'm very glad to have cleared that up.

Sajid Javid plays the race card

The issue with Sajid Javid talking about migrants learning English etc is that:
 of course it's playing to the gallery while watching UKIP. 

First, of course most migrants try to learn English. Why wouldn't they? 

Second, if some find it difficult, even too difficult, it almost certainly isn't because they're being wilfully anti-British. It'll be because they find it difficult! 

Third, all the young offspring of migrants learn English at school. 

Fourth, it's not easy or free to get lessons in English. 

Fifth, it's a bit ripe Brits moaning about foreigners not learning English. A week in the south of France talking to emigre Brits and you soon find out that plenty of them can't be arsed to learn French. Same applies all over the world. 

Sixth, how many people are we actually talking about? How many people are not learning English? Typical of politicians to run up a flag about something without specifying dimensions or details. How many non-Brits are not bothering to learn English? 

How much of a 'problem' is it? So, for example, I hear Turkish people talking Turkish to each other in North London. This is while they are doing business - you know, that thing that the government say is wonderful - running shops - that sort of thing. What's the problem?!

Fascism: I sometimes fear...

I sometimes fear that 

people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress 

worn by grotesques and monsters 

as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. 

Fascism arrives as your friend. 

It will restore your honour, 

make you feel proud, 

protect your house, 

give you a job, 

clean up the neighbourhood, 

remind you of how great you once were, 

clear out the venal and the corrupt, 

remove anything you feel is unlike you...

It doesn't walk in saying, 

"Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution."

News in this morning: the rich got richer this year

Imagine:
someone in the Labour Party would dare to say
that the whole charade of this government
has not been about 'the deficit'
or 'getting the economy right'
but about the onward advance of capital -
that is, as part of the class war waged by capital,
to get for itself a larger and larger share of wealth
than that earned through wages.
The poor got poorer
and the rich got richer.
Either you're with that
or against it.
That's all.

"People are anxious about immigration..."

Politicians keep telling me I'm anxious about immigration.
They say, people are anxious about immigration.
I'm not anxious about immigration.
I'm anxious about what power people think they can get 

by saying that people are anxious about immigration.

Dear football commentators, Arsenal, Wenger, Capitalism

Dear commentators,


In the greasy world of top-flight, professional football, it's not a matter of whether Arsenal have loads of dosh, it's whether they have had as much cash to splash as Man City, Chelsea and Man Utd. It's relative. The only way to evaluate Wenger is not whether he's won things, but whether he did well, given the relative difference. I'm not bemoaning the difference. That's just capitalism in sport. I'm bemoaning the idiocy of commentators who think they are saying something significant when they don't factor in the imbalance when they make their comments.

As it happens, given the imbalance, of course Wenger has done incredibly well. As a sideline, it does also tell you something about capitalism and sport which is not often mentioned. The board members at various points in the last ten years have taken home dividends; board members leaving the club have sold shares for hundreds of millions of quids. The footballers' work and Wenger's work gave them that money. The board members 'risked' very little. The board members did very little. When people like me notice the imbalance between Arsenal and the other clubs, I should always remember that this also involves board members making off home with bag loads of dosh, which of course, they choose not to spend on the club. They're in business, they would say. However, it would also be good, if commentators commentating on the performance of clubs also talked about this stuff. Otherwise it's invisible.

Thanks guys,
Yours
Michael Rosen.

Bad behaviour, bad grammar?

Every so often someone (sometimes me, or,  this week - Hadley Freeman) writes a 'Comment is Free' note in the Guardian or a book (eg Harry Ritchie, Simon Heffer) which raises the question about 'good' or 'bad' grammar. The Bad Grammar Awards bring the matter to the surface too. If, like me, you follow the threads of comments after, say, Hadley Freeman's recent article, you realise that part of the problem is that people use the word 'grammar' to mean quite different things: 1) the grammar of all language, 2) the terms people use to describe this grammar, and 3) the grammar of Standard English - which some people would prefer to call 'good' or 'correct'. 

(By the way, in this article, when I write the phrase 'Standard English', I am only talking about writing. This article is not about how we speak to each other. )

One way of thinking about all this is to make an analogy: take the word 'behaviour'. Behaviour can be:

1) a general term to describe the whole of how people, animals, plants - even inanimate objects like planets - behave. And 'behaving' often means something to do with movement and interaction. The point is that it's intended to be a general, neutral term to talk about something that we are agreed exists. It's not of itself a comment about whether it's good or not. 

Then, 2) there are terms to describe this behaviour, which are constantly being reviewed and adapted. So, we might, say, talk about 'aggressive' behaviour. But then, at some point in the last 20 years or so people started talking about 'passive-aggressive' behaviour. Two terms which people thought were different and distinct were brought together to describe something that, let's say, hadn't been noticed before. It wasn't that the 'behaviour' changed: it was that we now had a new word to describe something that had always been there. Interestingly, you could make an argument for saying that now we have a new phrase which we think describes our behaviour, if we are aware of it, we end up modifying our behaviour! 

Then, again, 3), we have ideas about good and bad behaviour. Clearly, this isn't the same as behaviour, on its own, as I've used it in the first sense. Good behaviour is a set of agreed guidelines between groups of people. Within institutions that have the power to control its members, these become instructions or rules. Society as a whole has laws to lay down some rules though the history of societies is that there is a permanent disregard of many of the rules, even by those who lay them down. 

If we take these three ideas to do with behaviour across to 'language', we can see some analogies. 

With 1) - language goes on without us having terms to describe it (ie 2)). And language can happen whether the language going on is 3) 'standard' or not.  And in category 2), linguists argue about terms to describe grammar. So, one example: I was taught that the word 'my' in 'my brother' was a 'possessive pronoun'. Some grammarians say that 'my' in that example is not being used instead of a noun which is what pronouns do. So it should be called a 'determiner'.  I'm not taking sides on this. I'm merely pointing out that the words to describe 'my' might change, but we go on being grammatical and saying 'my brother' anyway. 


In an ideal world we would have three different words for these three quite different ways of talking about 'grammar'. Then, when discussion and argument break out about 'grammar' we could argue about the same things and not all three at the same time. 

The problem with not having three separate words often occurs precisely when we say that Standard English is 'good' or 'correct', of itself. That's because it immediately tells us that that any other way of writing is 'bad' or 'incorrect'. So, whereas it would be fairer to say, 'this is Standard English' and if you depart from this Standard, you are being 'incorrect according to this Standard', it's surely not right to say that 'all non-Standard forms of writing are bad and incorrect'. To take an obvious example, instructions, headlines, signs and advertisements disobey the rules of written Standard English to do with sentences. Yet, no one is going to give a Bad Grammar award to Transport for London for leaving off full stops at the ends of their instructions and signs in the London Underground. Most of us accept that there is a non-Standard written English for that kind of writing. Even the sign 'No Smoking' is 'wrong' or 'bad', as it is, in terms of Standard English, 'bad'. It is given to us as a complete instruction but it has no verb. There is no instruction, or command - which we usually take from a verb, as we do with 'Don't', or 'Get out'. We don't demand that the sign should read, 'Don't smoke'. We're fine with 'No Smoking'. 

How then should we describe, 'No Smoking'? As a Standard way of writing something that is Non-Standard? So we can be OK with it? 

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of slips, errors, mistakes, oversights and the rest which we all make, even as we are trying to write Standard English. If the person reading the slip or mistake can understand what that person has written, then it seems to me it's not 'bad grammar' within my first general category of grammar as a description of how the language works. If we got the meaning, it worked. The language interaction 'happened'. Indeed, as is often pointed out, if you can spot the mistake, the chances are you understood what was intended anyway! The grammar worked even though it didn't conform to the instructions of Standard English. 

So, for example, some people will say that a 'double superlative' is 'bad grammar'. This is when we not only use a 'most' we also put '-est' on the end of a word. Shakespeare was fine with it. He wrote, and we hear Mark Antony saying,  'the most unkindest cut of all'. There is no problem with understanding this. The grammar (in my first sense) works. There is no problem with meaning. The only problem can be that some people think that stylistically, it's no good. For some people, double superlatives may well be 'bad style' but that's a whole other ball game. 

Then again, Standard English itself changes. In my lifetime, many features that were given to us at school as rules have been adapted and changed in the very places where Standard English was supposed to prevail: newspapers, novels, broadcasting (though that involves speech, which is a whole other matter) and so on. 

So, to take one simple example, we were told over and over again, never write 'don't' or 'can't' in formal prose. You can only use it when you're writing dialogue. That rule has gone. 

No one said, that it had gone. So what happened to it? Did it get 'eroded'? And who decided?

This leads us to one of the mysteries of Standard English. It changes but we don't know exactly why or how. The Oxford English Dictionary can often chart when it first happens - in writing, but it can't definitively tell us why. All we can say, is that to pretend that Standard English is a constant, unchanging way of writing is not true. 

Mismatch between international education league table and the realities of the economy.

I'm having an OECD, PISA educational league tables moment. Or, to be more precise: an OECD, PISA, educational league tables AND UK politicians moment.

There is a mismatch between the politicians' constant league-table-itis, going on about how 'we' are slipping down or up or standing still and how this is entirely due to this or that educational method, this or that party in power, this or that structure of schools...and so on. Most of it is bullshit because the tables do not compare like with like, they never tell us whether the differences in position on the league table are 'significant' or not, and the factors they try to correlate the league table positions with  (eg who is in power, or educational method) are usually so nebulous, or so specific, that they can't relate to one year's sample testing.

All that to one side, isn't there a mismatch between what is going on in the economy and what the league tables are supposedly about which is, in theory, higher and higher achievement and standards. So, on the one hand, we have an economy being made attractive to employers by creating a low-pay labour force, many of whom are on zero-hour contracts, or so-called 'self-employed' but are in reality part-time receivers of low fees.

So, in reality Tory austerity Britain is not looking for a high-skills, high achieving population as a whole. It's looking for a large sector who will passively accept low income. 

Now the question is how does a government 'achieve' that? 

One way is to create an education system which pretends to reward all the pupils with the possibility of getting to know a lot and to get great grades, whilst hiding from them that the system pre-judges how many will pass, and through subtle systems of selection, exclusion, private education, pretty well guarantees who will get those great grades.

Meanwhile, great grades or not, wealth itself is not only restricted to a tiny, tiny minority, it largely stays in the hands of those families who inherit that wealth.

Then, back with the idea of a high-skill economy. Surely an economy that is skewed towards financial services and gambling - sorry I mean lending money - it is not based on 'high skills'. I met a banker who had made millions during the bubble and he was clearly bright and a bit of a wide boy but one thing he wasn't was 'high skill' in the sense that educationalists mean. He didn't have a vast array of knowledge and skills to do with science, the humanities or technology. Quite the opposite. He was someone who had learned very quickly how to blag and lie. What he had done is learn how to sell debt packages in a way that people didn't know they were buying them. He had the skills of a market stall holder who sells crap whilst telling people that he's selling top quality gear.

As I say, there's a mismatch between high-achievement propaganda linked to international league tables, and the realities of the economy.