I've been having a slow burn on this one...Over the last few days we've been hearing a good deal of self-congratulatory stuff about 'Kindertransport'. As it's being used as an example of how good 'we' once were, by way of pleading with today's government to take in more refugees/migrants/children etc etc, I've been reluctant to make a big deal out of the self-congratulation surrounding Kindertransport. Finally I can't resist.
1. The whole matter of how the UK behaved towards people wanting to migrate out of Nazi Germany has to be seen in the light of two key things: a) there were strong legal restrictions on migrants coming to Britain. b) the British government was not anti-Nazi, not anti-Hitler, not anti-Third Reich Germany. The official position might be described as 'guarded', whilst knowing full well that Germany was rearming. Then in 1937, there seems to be general agreement that the British government gave Hitler the green light to invade Czechoslovakia. This was done in the usual British way of saying that 'we' wouldn't do anything to oppose them. It should be remembered that Nazi Germany had already suspended the constitution, it was a police state and dictatorship, political parties and press were banned, the leadership of trade unions, socialist and communist parties were in prison - well Dachau concentration camp mostly - and Jews had severe restrictions on what they were allowed to do.
2. The decision to take in 10,000 children from Nazi Germany was not something that 'our government' decided to do. It came about because a joint delegation from Quakers and a Jewish organisation went to the government and put in a request. The government then agreed to it. Of course when or if Jews say, 'Er...it was only the children. The parents weren't allowed to come' - that's thought to be churlish and ungrateful. But if you think it through, the parents were at this point a heavily discriminated against minority and once Kristallnacht had happened, they were more than 'discriminated against' - they were persecuted and under threat - not threat of genocide at this point, but severe persecution including dispossession and murders.
3. So, yes, it's fine for us to say, 'Look, in 1938, 'we' took in 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany', but let's not somehow imagine that this was because this came from government, or that it was madly generous, or that it was part of an impulse that 'opposed Nazism'.
Saturday, 30 January 2016
Friday, 29 January 2016
Inequality of wealth...how come?
There's an article up on the Guardian website about inequality:
This is what I've posted on the thread.
"The best way to get to the root of wealth and wealth distribution is to look at how it's 'held'. (By the way, this article isn't about income inequality, is it? Some people on the thread seem to think it is.) The tiny number of people who own the wealth that we're talking about are not extremely well paid people. They are people who own assets...but what kinds of assets? Presumably it's a package made up of shares, physical things like buildings,and land, precious items, and a percentage claim on companies that they own or co-own and which can be valued as an asset. And there is also a chunk of money sitting in a bank somewhere that they can use.
They will have acquired all this through a combination of inherited wealth, and using money taken from one part of the package to buy the next bit. I suspect key stages in all this will have been through share dividends, selling shares that have increased in value, selling buildings that have increased in value and using that to buy even more valuable buildings and land.
We might then ask where does all this money(or 'value', or 'assets') come from? What produces it? Does it work mathematically, to say that they've done this all by themselves? Or does it need the work of others to produce some/most/all of it? Even when it appears that money can produce money (through lending or 'investing'), at one end of the chain involved, (i.e. who produced the goods and services that enabled money to come out at the end) involves people's work. More often than not, these are the people at the other end of the inequality map. They're the ones who haven't got this wealth.
That's the core problem with inequality. It's not that working people are or are not 'less poor' than they were a hundred years ago. It's that at the end of the process, they're not 'accumulating wealth' but the owners of shares, companies, land, buildings, plant, etc are."
This is what I've posted on the thread.
"The best way to get to the root of wealth and wealth distribution is to look at how it's 'held'. (By the way, this article isn't about income inequality, is it? Some people on the thread seem to think it is.) The tiny number of people who own the wealth that we're talking about are not extremely well paid people. They are people who own assets...but what kinds of assets? Presumably it's a package made up of shares, physical things like buildings,and land, precious items, and a percentage claim on companies that they own or co-own and which can be valued as an asset. And there is also a chunk of money sitting in a bank somewhere that they can use.
They will have acquired all this through a combination of inherited wealth, and using money taken from one part of the package to buy the next bit. I suspect key stages in all this will have been through share dividends, selling shares that have increased in value, selling buildings that have increased in value and using that to buy even more valuable buildings and land.
We might then ask where does all this money(or 'value', or 'assets') come from? What produces it? Does it work mathematically, to say that they've done this all by themselves? Or does it need the work of others to produce some/most/all of it? Even when it appears that money can produce money (through lending or 'investing'), at one end of the chain involved, (i.e. who produced the goods and services that enabled money to come out at the end) involves people's work. More often than not, these are the people at the other end of the inequality map. They're the ones who haven't got this wealth.
That's the core problem with inequality. It's not that working people are or are not 'less poor' than they were a hundred years ago. It's that at the end of the process, they're not 'accumulating wealth' but the owners of shares, companies, land, buildings, plant, etc are."
How and why manufacturing UK got a wipe-out in 1980. Clue: NOT the unions
I asked 'What became of 'the balance of payments crisis' we always used to hear so much about?'
This answer on Facebook came back from John Geoffrey Walker:
This answer on Facebook came back from John Geoffrey Walker:
"The problem was that Britain was not exporting enough manufactured goods to pay for the manufactured goods it was importing. Margaret Thatcher solved this problem by floating the pound (i.e. it is no longer exchanged for other currencies at a fixed rate). The result of this was that, in the winter of 1980-81 one third of Britain's manufacturing industry went bankrupt. Problem solved.
Part of the problem / solution (depending on your point of view) was the success of finance. Because the financial sector had become so profitable the pound rose in value. This made British manufactured goods more expensive, and therefore less competitive on the world market.
Michael and others of us old enough to recall the period may remember the calls to devalue the pound. This might have saved British manufacturing, but it would have cut profits in the finance sector, so that was a non-no as far as the Tories were concerned.
The other effect was that the assets owned by British manufacturing firms became more valuable than the firms themselves. The firms were bankrupt but they owned useable machinery, land, etc. So we saw the rise of the asset stripper, who bought up firms in order to close them down and sell off their assets. If the whole is worth less than the sum of the parts then buy the whole and sell the parts. A bonanza for the get-rush-quick crowd."
Part of the problem / solution (depending on your point of view) was the success of finance. Because the financial sector had become so profitable the pound rose in value. This made British manufactured goods more expensive, and therefore less competitive on the world market.
Michael and others of us old enough to recall the period may remember the calls to devalue the pound. This might have saved British manufacturing, but it would have cut profits in the finance sector, so that was a non-no as far as the Tories were concerned.
The other effect was that the assets owned by British manufacturing firms became more valuable than the firms themselves. The firms were bankrupt but they owned useable machinery, land, etc. So we saw the rise of the asset stripper, who bought up firms in order to close them down and sell off their assets. If the whole is worth less than the sum of the parts then buy the whole and sell the parts. A bonanza for the get-rush-quick crowd."
Poverty, wealth, tax, inequality, work, politics and chairs
Two people are sharing a bit of bread. It's all they've got to eat today. In the corner of the room, someone is eating a huge meal. A politician walks in and says that he's collecting tax. He takes a part of the bit of bread from the two. He goes over to the person eating the huge meal. He takes a bit from the plate.
The people eating the bread are sitting on the floor. They say, 'Can we have a chair?' The politician says, 'No, times are tough, we can't afford chairs in the present climate.' The people sharing the bread say that the politician took a quarter of their bread but only took a corner of the other person's meal. An argument breaks out about how unfair that is, but the politician explains that that's the law and anyway, last time anyone tried to collect anything of the person eating the huge meal, they didn't get anything.
The politician leaves.
The two people sharing the bread are wondering about the chair. The person eating the meal is on a chair. One of them remembers from another time that the person has many, many chairs. He remembers seeing them when he was cooking the meal for the person.
The politician comes back into the room and says things are getting better and goes out again.
The people eating the bread are sitting on the floor. They say, 'Can we have a chair?' The politician says, 'No, times are tough, we can't afford chairs in the present climate.' The people sharing the bread say that the politician took a quarter of their bread but only took a corner of the other person's meal. An argument breaks out about how unfair that is, but the politician explains that that's the law and anyway, last time anyone tried to collect anything of the person eating the huge meal, they didn't get anything.
The politician leaves.
The two people sharing the bread are wondering about the chair. The person eating the meal is on a chair. One of them remembers from another time that the person has many, many chairs. He remembers seeing them when he was cooking the meal for the person.
The politician comes back into the room and says things are getting better and goes out again.
Refugee problem solved
"Hey you! Are you on your own?
Do. You. Understand. Me?
Mmm?
How old are you? What? What? Fine.
But are you on your own?
Right. Good.
I'm going to give you an arm band.
Hold your arm still. That means you're coming with us.
You're going to be very happy.
People will take photos of you.
Make sure you look at the camera and smile.
It's very important that you smile.
And good people are going to meet you when we get to Britain. One of them is called David.
David Cameron.
Make sure you smile when you meet him.
That's very important.
Remember:
look happy whenever any of us get anywhere near you.
Do you like Haribo sweets?
Good. Here's one.
Keep the armband on, OK?"
Anti-Corbyn agendas
Tory agenda re Corbyn:
"This man threatens our positions of gross privilege, revolving door careers, sweetheart deals over taxation, core alliances between the monarchy, the Conservative Party, the Church, the monocultural state, networks of old boy associations, and our relentless drive to remove state provision of anything. So, when we attack him for his haircut, beard, jumper, bike, previous relationships - or anything really, we don't really give a damn about any of that.What we're doing is shoring ourselves up, by trying to ridicule and eliminate this threat to our positions. Privilege, our privilege must be maintained at all costs. If it means being insulting to different parts of the population at different times, that's no problem. Machiavelli was right. It's vital to have sections of the public hating each other. We are the beneficiaries because we stay put that way. "
Centre and centre-right Labour agenda re Corbyn:
"We have no idea whether the Corbyn approach is or is not electable but we will do whatever we can to make sure it's not. Whether we stage a coup now or later is only a matter of timing. We are pretending we are not at war with the membership over this, which we do by talking over the top of their heads to people we kid ourselves are our friends in the media. This is because we have very short memories and can't remember that it was only weeks ago in the pre-corbyn era, the media savaged every aspect of us, whether that was tripping up on a beach, eating bacon sandwiches, or mucking around with low-band taxation. But we can't remember any of this. What we plan is to change the constitution of the Labour Party again, so that we can guarantee our return to the leadership which we are entitled to. If necessary we will do all we can to sabotage Corbyn's efforts to win any elections between now and including the next general election."
"This man threatens our positions of gross privilege, revolving door careers, sweetheart deals over taxation, core alliances between the monarchy, the Conservative Party, the Church, the monocultural state, networks of old boy associations, and our relentless drive to remove state provision of anything. So, when we attack him for his haircut, beard, jumper, bike, previous relationships - or anything really, we don't really give a damn about any of that.What we're doing is shoring ourselves up, by trying to ridicule and eliminate this threat to our positions. Privilege, our privilege must be maintained at all costs. If it means being insulting to different parts of the population at different times, that's no problem. Machiavelli was right. It's vital to have sections of the public hating each other. We are the beneficiaries because we stay put that way. "
Centre and centre-right Labour agenda re Corbyn:
"We have no idea whether the Corbyn approach is or is not electable but we will do whatever we can to make sure it's not. Whether we stage a coup now or later is only a matter of timing. We are pretending we are not at war with the membership over this, which we do by talking over the top of their heads to people we kid ourselves are our friends in the media. This is because we have very short memories and can't remember that it was only weeks ago in the pre-corbyn era, the media savaged every aspect of us, whether that was tripping up on a beach, eating bacon sandwiches, or mucking around with low-band taxation. But we can't remember any of this. What we plan is to change the constitution of the Labour Party again, so that we can guarantee our return to the leadership which we are entitled to. If necessary we will do all we can to sabotage Corbyn's efforts to win any elections between now and including the next general election."
Let's franchise schools!
"I am standing as parent governor at Local Street Comprehensive because I want to do all I can to make the school efficient, competitive and 21st Century. I promise to do all I can to get it turned into an Academy and, if you elect me, I will do all I can to develop the assets of the site. Among my many ideas for this are: inviting franchises in to take over the classrooms on the ground floor, turning the gym into a commercially successful fitness and spa, getting rid of the library and turning it into a hi-tech media centre for aspiring entrepreneurs. I will work with Pearson or any other major company to convert the curriculum to a digital platform and will encourage them to make us an offer we can't refuse to provide us with tablets. We need many more vending machines in the school and these can be used to fund school trips to successful businesses in the area. There are far too many school trips to so-called 'educational' sites. We need to get the students thinking business, business, business.
On the discipline front, I'm proposing that the school bring in one-strike-and-out. One of my interests in the community is that I am running the first commercially viable pupil referral unit in the country, and I am delighted to say that schools all over the area send troublesome and challenging pupils to my unit to experience the tried and proven boot-camp regime. So far, we have successfully released more than 30% of the boys into the armed services, 30% into HM Prisons and very few have committed suicide.
Please vote for me."
[irony alert]
On the discipline front, I'm proposing that the school bring in one-strike-and-out. One of my interests in the community is that I am running the first commercially viable pupil referral unit in the country, and I am delighted to say that schools all over the area send troublesome and challenging pupils to my unit to experience the tried and proven boot-camp regime. So far, we have successfully released more than 30% of the boys into the armed services, 30% into HM Prisons and very few have committed suicide.
Please vote for me."
[irony alert]
Dividends. Lovely.
Dividends are good and lovely. We all rely on dividends. Profitable companies pay dividends to shareholders. And shareholders are people like our pension companies, who put our money into firms that pay dividends. There are other publicly 'good' institutions that 'invest' this way. Lovely, lovely dividends. Capitalism is really just a monetized socialism. It just keeps dishing out money in ways that benefit us all. That's why it's all working out so well.
Some dividends are paid out to people - not to 'funds' or 'institutions'. They're 'owners' of companies because they own 'shares' in companies. Anyone can do this who's got enough money to buy a share. This is monetised socialism too...or popular capitalism. Just buy a share and collect dividends. Done.
For some strange reason, though, something else seems to happen. Vast, eye-watering amounts of money end up in the hands of a tiny, tiny group of people. Most of this seems to be because these people's own companies (and other companies that they hold shares in) pay out dividends to them. In fact, in some mysterious way, no matter how often there are 'share flotations' for everybody and the whole country become shareholders, share-ownership seems to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands.
This huge sums of money are largely outside of any discussion when politicians talk about 'fairness' and the like. Great though all this talk about Google's taxes (er...non-taxes) is, it is in its own way a bit of a sideshow. Of course, we expect governments to get hold of the money it is legally bound to do. We trust them to do that. (ahem). But when they keep talking about how 'we' can't afford to this or that - take in refugees, say, what is the 'we'?
That seems to be a mix of: money from taxation (government spending), charities, and what people will personally afford out of their disposable income to provide for the refugees they meet, look after, or give money to through charities.
This other money, that comes through dividend pay-outs is invisible. It's outside of consideration. It's a private matter. It's not in the equation. It's due reward for being inventive and entrepreneurial.
Is it?
Some dividends are paid out to people - not to 'funds' or 'institutions'. They're 'owners' of companies because they own 'shares' in companies. Anyone can do this who's got enough money to buy a share. This is monetised socialism too...or popular capitalism. Just buy a share and collect dividends. Done.
For some strange reason, though, something else seems to happen. Vast, eye-watering amounts of money end up in the hands of a tiny, tiny group of people. Most of this seems to be because these people's own companies (and other companies that they hold shares in) pay out dividends to them. In fact, in some mysterious way, no matter how often there are 'share flotations' for everybody and the whole country become shareholders, share-ownership seems to concentrate into fewer and fewer hands.
This huge sums of money are largely outside of any discussion when politicians talk about 'fairness' and the like. Great though all this talk about Google's taxes (er...non-taxes) is, it is in its own way a bit of a sideshow. Of course, we expect governments to get hold of the money it is legally bound to do. We trust them to do that. (ahem). But when they keep talking about how 'we' can't afford to this or that - take in refugees, say, what is the 'we'?
That seems to be a mix of: money from taxation (government spending), charities, and what people will personally afford out of their disposable income to provide for the refugees they meet, look after, or give money to through charities.
This other money, that comes through dividend pay-outs is invisible. It's outside of consideration. It's a private matter. It's not in the equation. It's due reward for being inventive and entrepreneurial.
Is it?
Wednesday, 27 January 2016
Cameron: Is calling people a 'bunch' beneath him, or just him?
Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian has suggested that Cameron calling Calais a 'bunch of migrants' is 'beneath him'. I don't think so. I think it IS him.
It comes from his milieu. There's an 'us' who are normal, right and good. There are people who are loyal to 'us' and they are normal, right and good. They might be inferior but they're good. Then there are the 'other'. The 'other' are suspect, dangerous, surplus to requirements, and a possible or probably threat to the order that 'we' rule and run.
That's why it's a 'bunch of migrants'. If this country were bombed or invaded, Cameron might find his family were a 'bunch of migrants'. But only very rarely in history do the Camerons become the 'other'. It happens - but rarely. For now, and for the rest of his life, he'll be OK, I'm sure. He'll go on 'bunching' the 'other'.
It comes from his milieu. There's an 'us' who are normal, right and good. There are people who are loyal to 'us' and they are normal, right and good. They might be inferior but they're good. Then there are the 'other'. The 'other' are suspect, dangerous, surplus to requirements, and a possible or probably threat to the order that 'we' rule and run.
That's why it's a 'bunch of migrants'. If this country were bombed or invaded, Cameron might find his family were a 'bunch of migrants'. But only very rarely in history do the Camerons become the 'other'. It happens - but rarely. For now, and for the rest of his life, he'll be OK, I'm sure. He'll go on 'bunching' the 'other'.
Sharing picture books is child's play. But much more than what 'child's play' usually means.
I've often thought about, talked about and written about something that happens very easily when you sit with a very young child and read them a book.
As you read, a child with sight and hearing will hear the words you're reading and look at the pictures. These are never the 'same' story. Pictures don't really 'illustrate' the words. They tell a story or stories that are related in many different ways to the words that the child is hearing. But the child will be reading or trying to read the pictures while hearing and trying to interpret the words.
This means that complicated triangles and lines are being set up between interpreting words, interpreting pictures, interpreting how words are relating to pictures, how pictures are relating to words.
And it's never static.
What you get on one page, is different from what you get on another. What you get on one double page 'spread' is different from what you get on the next. And, if it's a story - fiction or non-fiction, there are all sorts of links and references and 'ties' between the page you're looking at and what precedes it. If you read the book more than once, the links and references stretch forwards as well as backwards because you know what's coming next.
What's more, artists and designers, vary the pages, creating expectations and upsetting them with variations in rhythm of words, rhythm of pictures, where pictures are placed on the page, how many, what change in colours and so on. Characters, features, landscapes may appear or disappear, change once, several or many times with no explicit mention in the text.
All this has to be made coherent by the child. That's to say, the child, in 'getting' the book, getting to like it, understand it, enjoy it, has to find how these things relate in ways that the child can make sense of. This involves the rest of their lives. That's to say, it all has to link with the world and the language(s) they're encountering in everyday life. It will probably link into and hook up with other books, and other 'texts' from TV, film, videos and so on. The act of interpreting will be made by the child using his or her experience of all these things. Running to and for between the 'dead' (inanimate) pages of the book, memories of life and language, and comparing them to 'live' things around them. More interpretation and reflection.
Some children get to do a huge amount of this. Some children get to do very little.
There are important social and political reasons for this. Enormous effort goes into putting people off doing these things: libraries close, early years work in schools focusses more and more on 'decoding' and less and less on frequent reading and re-reading of books which enables this kind of 'work' (or 'pleasure') to happen, the multi-billion dollar front-running media of the day - TV, tablets and videos - say, 'Watch-me!', 24 hours a day, and though I'm not one to say that this is all crap or meaningless or bad, some of this complex interaction that I'm describing that takes place with book-sharing is less prominent, less necessary.
People wonder how it is exactly that some children arrive in school aged 4 or 5 and seem 'school-ready'. One way to look at this is in a very reductive way, and see it in terms of being able to hold a knife and fork and do phonics. There's another way of looking at it in terms of being able to access school-knowledge and higher, more abstract ways of thinking - whether that's in maths, science, humanities or back with literature and language.
Sharing picture books may seem like a far cry from the abstract thinking needed to understand these subjects. What I'm suggesting is that in fact, it isn't. In order to do the 'work' (pleasure) of interpreting sound and image of the picture book in the circumstances I've described, a child has to use and develop a range of interpretation and reflection strategies. These are powerful capabilities, (call them 'transferrable skills', if you like) that you can use and develop through the rest of your life, long after you think you've put them behind you.
All this is extremely hard to explain to people in charge of education. And even harder to convince them of the need for it.
As you read, a child with sight and hearing will hear the words you're reading and look at the pictures. These are never the 'same' story. Pictures don't really 'illustrate' the words. They tell a story or stories that are related in many different ways to the words that the child is hearing. But the child will be reading or trying to read the pictures while hearing and trying to interpret the words.
This means that complicated triangles and lines are being set up between interpreting words, interpreting pictures, interpreting how words are relating to pictures, how pictures are relating to words.
And it's never static.
What you get on one page, is different from what you get on another. What you get on one double page 'spread' is different from what you get on the next. And, if it's a story - fiction or non-fiction, there are all sorts of links and references and 'ties' between the page you're looking at and what precedes it. If you read the book more than once, the links and references stretch forwards as well as backwards because you know what's coming next.
What's more, artists and designers, vary the pages, creating expectations and upsetting them with variations in rhythm of words, rhythm of pictures, where pictures are placed on the page, how many, what change in colours and so on. Characters, features, landscapes may appear or disappear, change once, several or many times with no explicit mention in the text.
All this has to be made coherent by the child. That's to say, the child, in 'getting' the book, getting to like it, understand it, enjoy it, has to find how these things relate in ways that the child can make sense of. This involves the rest of their lives. That's to say, it all has to link with the world and the language(s) they're encountering in everyday life. It will probably link into and hook up with other books, and other 'texts' from TV, film, videos and so on. The act of interpreting will be made by the child using his or her experience of all these things. Running to and for between the 'dead' (inanimate) pages of the book, memories of life and language, and comparing them to 'live' things around them. More interpretation and reflection.
Some children get to do a huge amount of this. Some children get to do very little.
There are important social and political reasons for this. Enormous effort goes into putting people off doing these things: libraries close, early years work in schools focusses more and more on 'decoding' and less and less on frequent reading and re-reading of books which enables this kind of 'work' (or 'pleasure') to happen, the multi-billion dollar front-running media of the day - TV, tablets and videos - say, 'Watch-me!', 24 hours a day, and though I'm not one to say that this is all crap or meaningless or bad, some of this complex interaction that I'm describing that takes place with book-sharing is less prominent, less necessary.
People wonder how it is exactly that some children arrive in school aged 4 or 5 and seem 'school-ready'. One way to look at this is in a very reductive way, and see it in terms of being able to hold a knife and fork and do phonics. There's another way of looking at it in terms of being able to access school-knowledge and higher, more abstract ways of thinking - whether that's in maths, science, humanities or back with literature and language.
Sharing picture books may seem like a far cry from the abstract thinking needed to understand these subjects. What I'm suggesting is that in fact, it isn't. In order to do the 'work' (pleasure) of interpreting sound and image of the picture book in the circumstances I've described, a child has to use and develop a range of interpretation and reflection strategies. These are powerful capabilities, (call them 'transferrable skills', if you like) that you can use and develop through the rest of your life, long after you think you've put them behind you.
All this is extremely hard to explain to people in charge of education. And even harder to convince them of the need for it.
What about...er....books? And...er....libraries?
I saw a shrink-wrapped Dorling Kindersley three-volume series: 'How to help your kids with Science', 'How to help your kids with Maths', 'How to help your kids with spelling and grammar'.
Hmmm....
Are these equivalents? Is doing 'science' or 'maths', similar to 'spelling and grammar'. Shouldn't that third one be 'writing' or 'reading and writing'? Something encompassing the whole area of using language? Perhaps the old one 'talking, listening, reading and writing'? (OK, that's too much for the title).
And I thought of a parent spending a tidy little sum on these three books, hoping that this would help their child through SATs, which in turn are devised to 'help' (?) children become literate, to read and write better etc...
Really? How many children given this shrink-wrapped package are really going to read their way through a volume called 'spelling and grammar'?
Now, let me see if I can think of anything else that might help a child to read and write well? er....what's it called...? er.....a book!!! That's it. A book that the child chose to read. That's it! And there's loads of them in a place where you can get them for free. What's that called...? er....oh yes, a library!
Hmmm....
Are these equivalents? Is doing 'science' or 'maths', similar to 'spelling and grammar'. Shouldn't that third one be 'writing' or 'reading and writing'? Something encompassing the whole area of using language? Perhaps the old one 'talking, listening, reading and writing'? (OK, that's too much for the title).
And I thought of a parent spending a tidy little sum on these three books, hoping that this would help their child through SATs, which in turn are devised to 'help' (?) children become literate, to read and write better etc...
Really? How many children given this shrink-wrapped package are really going to read their way through a volume called 'spelling and grammar'?
Now, let me see if I can think of anything else that might help a child to read and write well? er....what's it called...? er.....a book!!! That's it. A book that the child chose to read. That's it! And there's loads of them in a place where you can get them for free. What's that called...? er....oh yes, a library!
Sunday, 24 January 2016
My written evidence to HofC Holocaust Education sub-committee of Education Committee (report out this weekend)
Written evidence submitted by Professor Michael Rosen, Professor of Children’s Literature, Goldsmith University of London
1. I have been involved in Holocaust education in a variety of ways: making radio programmes, in many schools reading poems that are about members of my family, doing presentations to older school students about my family. I have also observed my own children’s perceptions of what they have been taught.
2. There is a difficulty about distinguishing between the Holocaust and other genocides. That’s to say, the issue is not simply one of numbers but of intention. So, as far as victims are concerned, it could be said it makes no difference: a death is a death. However, politically it is important to distinguish between brutal mass murder of people and the scientifically engineered attempt to eliminate a people from European history. This is a hard point to make to young children - perhaps impossible. It is one that can be discussed with older school students.
3. Holocaust denial is alive and well. I have faced it in colleges. Clearly, documents are circulating, things are being said that ‘the Jews’ invented the Holocaust. My own view is that it is vital that the story of the Holocaust is disentangled from the story of Israel. That is another discussion to be had. The Holocaust is a story that took place between 1933 and 1945, quite independently of the story of Israel. Intertwining it, either by the Zionist narrative or by the ‘denial narrative’ is counter-productive.
4. In order to counter denial it is vital - more than vital - essential that we get every minute fact is correct and corroborated. I see books of all kinds circulating around the world of education with glaring errors e.g. Belsen described as an ‘extermination’ camp, 6 million Jews were gassed in Auschwitz and so on. It is also vital that teachers are directed to up-to-date sources where testimonies can be verified e.g. Nizkor.
5. Personal testimony is vital. I’m not sure that there is enough video of personal testimony used in schools, as teachers feel under pressure to tell the whole story. There are several key films, - ‘Shoah’, ‘Le Chagrin et le Pitié’ and the BBC films of Lawrence Rees. Likewise, the testimonies that came through the courts.
6. We have to accept that from now on, it is becoming less and less possible to invite survivors into schools. We should be thinking in terms of the children or relatives of survivors where the family has documents and recordings of their relatives.
7. The UK was involved in the Holocaust in several ways. People came out of Poland and Germany with stories, the authorities here reacted to this. This has been documented. Antisemitism prior to the Holocaust has a long history, the UK played a role in both sustaining and combating it. The story of Guernsey reminds us of what could have happened if the Nazis had been successful in invading. In order to bring the story home, these aspects can be told.
8. There is fruitful discussion to be had around the subject of ‘What could have been done?’ The German state in 1930 was as democratic a state as any in Europe. How was it possible to dismantle this by January/February 1933 - that is, prior to the laws passed specifically against Jews? I see very little discussion around the so-called ‘Reichstag decree’ and the ‘Enabling Acts’ of that time. Democratically elected governments are capable of passing anti-democratic laws and instituting terror. I am of the strong opinion that we need to keep distinguishing between ‘the Nazis’ and ‘the Germans’. Most students have not lived under a regime of terror. We do not know what it is like to be coerced on a daily basis, whilst being subjected to daily propaganda.
9. There is fruitful discussion to be had around the subject of what do we do now? This applies to a) the rise of racist groups b) countries that appear to be on the verge of practising genocide c) refugees.
10. There is now a substantial body of fiction, poetry, cinema and TV which can be used thematically with any of this. It is not a sufficient condition for ‘Holocaust Education’ but I would argue that it is a necessary one.
None of this should be used to claim that one victim is more hard done by than another. A death is a death. A mass murder is a mass murder. As I stated at the outset, much of this is as much about ‘intention’ as ‘outcome’. This doesn’t make what happened worse. It affects how we view politics.
1. I have been involved in Holocaust education in a variety of ways: making radio programmes, in many schools reading poems that are about members of my family, doing presentations to older school students about my family. I have also observed my own children’s perceptions of what they have been taught.
2. There is a difficulty about distinguishing between the Holocaust and other genocides. That’s to say, the issue is not simply one of numbers but of intention. So, as far as victims are concerned, it could be said it makes no difference: a death is a death. However, politically it is important to distinguish between brutal mass murder of people and the scientifically engineered attempt to eliminate a people from European history. This is a hard point to make to young children - perhaps impossible. It is one that can be discussed with older school students.
3. Holocaust denial is alive and well. I have faced it in colleges. Clearly, documents are circulating, things are being said that ‘the Jews’ invented the Holocaust. My own view is that it is vital that the story of the Holocaust is disentangled from the story of Israel. That is another discussion to be had. The Holocaust is a story that took place between 1933 and 1945, quite independently of the story of Israel. Intertwining it, either by the Zionist narrative or by the ‘denial narrative’ is counter-productive.
4. In order to counter denial it is vital - more than vital - essential that we get every minute fact is correct and corroborated. I see books of all kinds circulating around the world of education with glaring errors e.g. Belsen described as an ‘extermination’ camp, 6 million Jews were gassed in Auschwitz and so on. It is also vital that teachers are directed to up-to-date sources where testimonies can be verified e.g. Nizkor.
5. Personal testimony is vital. I’m not sure that there is enough video of personal testimony used in schools, as teachers feel under pressure to tell the whole story. There are several key films, - ‘Shoah’, ‘Le Chagrin et le Pitié’ and the BBC films of Lawrence Rees. Likewise, the testimonies that came through the courts.
6. We have to accept that from now on, it is becoming less and less possible to invite survivors into schools. We should be thinking in terms of the children or relatives of survivors where the family has documents and recordings of their relatives.
7. The UK was involved in the Holocaust in several ways. People came out of Poland and Germany with stories, the authorities here reacted to this. This has been documented. Antisemitism prior to the Holocaust has a long history, the UK played a role in both sustaining and combating it. The story of Guernsey reminds us of what could have happened if the Nazis had been successful in invading. In order to bring the story home, these aspects can be told.
8. There is fruitful discussion to be had around the subject of ‘What could have been done?’ The German state in 1930 was as democratic a state as any in Europe. How was it possible to dismantle this by January/February 1933 - that is, prior to the laws passed specifically against Jews? I see very little discussion around the so-called ‘Reichstag decree’ and the ‘Enabling Acts’ of that time. Democratically elected governments are capable of passing anti-democratic laws and instituting terror. I am of the strong opinion that we need to keep distinguishing between ‘the Nazis’ and ‘the Germans’. Most students have not lived under a regime of terror. We do not know what it is like to be coerced on a daily basis, whilst being subjected to daily propaganda.
9. There is fruitful discussion to be had around the subject of what do we do now? This applies to a) the rise of racist groups b) countries that appear to be on the verge of practising genocide c) refugees.
10. There is now a substantial body of fiction, poetry, cinema and TV which can be used thematically with any of this. It is not a sufficient condition for ‘Holocaust Education’ but I would argue that it is a necessary one.
None of this should be used to claim that one victim is more hard done by than another. A death is a death. A mass murder is a mass murder. As I stated at the outset, much of this is as much about ‘intention’ as ‘outcome’. This doesn’t make what happened worse. It affects how we view politics.
Saturday, 23 January 2016
My reply to Martin Kettle's thoughts on communism and his parents.
I commented on the thread following Martin Kettle's article in Guardian which I've linked to below:
"One sure way to get a hearing in the press at the moment is to write about one's commie parents as being totally wrong about politics and then to use that to slate Corbyn. It's a neat little package. Martin doesn't have the time (or perhaps it's the inclination) to write a sentence or two on why or how his parents ended up in the CP or why and how they did hang on. Mine joined in 1936 when they were 16 because they found that it was only the Communists who were prepared to confront the fascists on the streets of East London who were attacking them. They then found an ideology which appeared to answer some of the big problems around them and internationally: fascism in Spain and Germany, oncoming war, and (as they saw it) a 'solution' to the poverty of all people's, not a programme of 'national' this or 'national' that. They studied Marx and Marxism and liked it. They left the CP in 1957.
Scoot forwards 10 years, and a new Left has emerged drawing together ex-CP-ers, anarchists, young trade unionists, students and 'third worlders' as they were sometimes called, anti-colonial movements all over the world. The US is carrying out the longest most deadly bombing campaign in history and it's on a non-industrial country.
At this moment, I meet Martin Kettle and Christopher Hitchens. Martin is dyed in the wool CP. Hitchens is with 'IS' - the International Socialists. They're friends. Every move that anyone makes in the student movement, Martin appears to stand to one side. He adopts the CP line on student revolt as laid down by the party's expert Monty Johnstone. If Martin wants to talk about 'religion' he should perhaps spend less time scrutinising his parents behaviour and turn some of his attention on his own. Martin's journey from CP supporter in his late teens and early 20s (I lost sight of him after university, until he popped up as a lead columnist on the Guardian) to being a 'centre' or 'rightwing' Labour supporter is just as much worthy of attention as going over why the generation affected so deeply by the poverty and cruelty of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Let's hear it. At what moment and why did Martin's Soviet-British CP version of socialism stop making sense and centre-right Labourism seem the right way? Is this a discontinuity - as he always maintains - or a continuity. Is there indeed some kind of 'centre-right Labour' politics that sits quite nicely with Soviet-British CP politics? And his attempt to make Corbyn+ followers the true inheritors of Stalin might possibly be an empty smear.
And let's look at the record of Labour centre-rightists. They were in power only recently with a massive mandate to alter the Thatcher record. How did they handle the basic questions of welfare for all? How did it handle the social provision of services for all? How did it handle foreign policy? On all the former policies, it continued the Thatcherite policies of privatisation, calling it 'contestability' as if this was a guarantee of provision and/or fairness. It introduced PFI which has been a milk-cow for the rich beyond their dreams, and it slavishly followed extreme rightwing US policy (acting in its own interests) in the Middle East.
This of course is not a 'religion' says Kettle though anyone anywhere near the Blairites witnessed an extraordinary cult-like behaviour of newly be-suited ideologues, spouting managerial cock, inserting believers into constituencies and places of power (as they saw it) flicking open their samsonites and talking targets. People like Kettle could be relied on to provide some columns in this paper and elsewhere in support. They acted as cheerleaders for another massive bombing exercise on a largely un-industrialised country - led by someone, who, guess what, did some of it for deeply held religious reasons. Really religious. And really crackpot - it's called Christian Zionism. Of course Martin brought rationality to the matter: there are WMDs there. Yeah right.
Ye, there is a 'centre-right' critique of the SU and we've heard it many times and part of its purpose is to buttress the centre-right view of politics. There is also a left critique of the Soviet Union. Part of the job of the centre-right is to do what it can to keep that off the pages of newspapers of the centre right. To take one e.g.: at several key moments in the SU persecuted its own supporters: wiping out Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 30s, wiping out Communists and socialists in eastern Europe. Why would the Soviets have wiped out people like my and Martin's parents? Because it wasn't 'communist'. So what was the regime that Martin (never mind his parents) supported so keenly when he was in his 20s? What happens if you take the tools of left and marxist thought to the matter?
The problem for Martin is this approach might curve back and look at what his version of good politics did for us even as it plots how to disenfranchise the Labour membership and get back to the good old days of Blair and Mandelson."
"One sure way to get a hearing in the press at the moment is to write about one's commie parents as being totally wrong about politics and then to use that to slate Corbyn. It's a neat little package. Martin doesn't have the time (or perhaps it's the inclination) to write a sentence or two on why or how his parents ended up in the CP or why and how they did hang on. Mine joined in 1936 when they were 16 because they found that it was only the Communists who were prepared to confront the fascists on the streets of East London who were attacking them. They then found an ideology which appeared to answer some of the big problems around them and internationally: fascism in Spain and Germany, oncoming war, and (as they saw it) a 'solution' to the poverty of all people's, not a programme of 'national' this or 'national' that. They studied Marx and Marxism and liked it. They left the CP in 1957.
Scoot forwards 10 years, and a new Left has emerged drawing together ex-CP-ers, anarchists, young trade unionists, students and 'third worlders' as they were sometimes called, anti-colonial movements all over the world. The US is carrying out the longest most deadly bombing campaign in history and it's on a non-industrial country.
At this moment, I meet Martin Kettle and Christopher Hitchens. Martin is dyed in the wool CP. Hitchens is with 'IS' - the International Socialists. They're friends. Every move that anyone makes in the student movement, Martin appears to stand to one side. He adopts the CP line on student revolt as laid down by the party's expert Monty Johnstone. If Martin wants to talk about 'religion' he should perhaps spend less time scrutinising his parents behaviour and turn some of his attention on his own. Martin's journey from CP supporter in his late teens and early 20s (I lost sight of him after university, until he popped up as a lead columnist on the Guardian) to being a 'centre' or 'rightwing' Labour supporter is just as much worthy of attention as going over why the generation affected so deeply by the poverty and cruelty of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Let's hear it. At what moment and why did Martin's Soviet-British CP version of socialism stop making sense and centre-right Labourism seem the right way? Is this a discontinuity - as he always maintains - or a continuity. Is there indeed some kind of 'centre-right Labour' politics that sits quite nicely with Soviet-British CP politics? And his attempt to make Corbyn+ followers the true inheritors of Stalin might possibly be an empty smear.
And let's look at the record of Labour centre-rightists. They were in power only recently with a massive mandate to alter the Thatcher record. How did they handle the basic questions of welfare for all? How did it handle the social provision of services for all? How did it handle foreign policy? On all the former policies, it continued the Thatcherite policies of privatisation, calling it 'contestability' as if this was a guarantee of provision and/or fairness. It introduced PFI which has been a milk-cow for the rich beyond their dreams, and it slavishly followed extreme rightwing US policy (acting in its own interests) in the Middle East.
This of course is not a 'religion' says Kettle though anyone anywhere near the Blairites witnessed an extraordinary cult-like behaviour of newly be-suited ideologues, spouting managerial cock, inserting believers into constituencies and places of power (as they saw it) flicking open their samsonites and talking targets. People like Kettle could be relied on to provide some columns in this paper and elsewhere in support. They acted as cheerleaders for another massive bombing exercise on a largely un-industrialised country - led by someone, who, guess what, did some of it for deeply held religious reasons. Really religious. And really crackpot - it's called Christian Zionism. Of course Martin brought rationality to the matter: there are WMDs there. Yeah right.
Ye, there is a 'centre-right' critique of the SU and we've heard it many times and part of its purpose is to buttress the centre-right view of politics. There is also a left critique of the Soviet Union. Part of the job of the centre-right is to do what it can to keep that off the pages of newspapers of the centre right. To take one e.g.: at several key moments in the SU persecuted its own supporters: wiping out Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 30s, wiping out Communists and socialists in eastern Europe. Why would the Soviets have wiped out people like my and Martin's parents? Because it wasn't 'communist'. So what was the regime that Martin (never mind his parents) supported so keenly when he was in his 20s? What happens if you take the tools of left and marxist thought to the matter?
The problem for Martin is this approach might curve back and look at what his version of good politics did for us even as it plots how to disenfranchise the Labour membership and get back to the good old days of Blair and Mandelson."
SATs homework booklet 'Reading' gets poetry wrong
Loving SATs-type homework booklet on 'Reading' which asks things about the 'writer' in poems.
Hello: the 'I' of a poem is not 'the writer'.
The 'I' of a poem is the 'I' of a poem. It's the 'I' the writer has created and all we know about 'I' is what the poem shows the 'I' to be doing.
Pathetic SATs homework booklets asks how the 'writer keeps warm'. But it's 'I' keeping warm.That 'I' could be anyone.
Poetry is ventriloquism.
Even as SATs homework booklet thinks it's teaching children how to 'understand' poems, it's in fact getting it wrong.
It's also laughable crap.
Hello: the 'I' of a poem is not 'the writer'.
The 'I' of a poem is the 'I' of a poem. It's the 'I' the writer has created and all we know about 'I' is what the poem shows the 'I' to be doing.
Pathetic SATs homework booklets asks how the 'writer keeps warm'. But it's 'I' keeping warm.That 'I' could be anyone.
Poetry is ventriloquism.
Even as SATs homework booklet thinks it's teaching children how to 'understand' poems, it's in fact getting it wrong.
It's also laughable crap.
Bad things, good things, un-asked or un-answered questions
I'm beginning to feel like a crank.
For the last week or so I've been asking on Facebook and twitter if anyone has the figures for losses sustained by the UK's banks and financial houses during and as a result of the crash of 2008. For the moment, I haven't got an answer, though Paul Mason very kindly says that he's looking it up. I will come back to you on this.
Why am I asking?
We are being given several explanations for why people are badly off or why they could be better off. The main ones are:
1. The EU is a bad thing.
2. The EU is a good thing but it could be better if we stop 'immigrants' getting benefits.
3. Immigration is a bad thing.
4. Capitalism is great and it'll get better if the government can stop spending so much money.
Most of these arguments are taking place in the shadow of what happened in 2008. But what did happen?
As I understand it, banks and financial houses mainly but not entirely in the UK and US lent money that they never got back. (I won't go into how they lent money and how they lent each other money.)
Some questions: whose money did they lend? These were 'funds' or 'investments' but did they 'belong' to anyone? I'm not absolutely sure that they did. They were funds at the disposal of these banks and financial houses but some of it (i'm not sure how much) was actually created by them.
So, perhaps when I ask the question, how much did those banks etc 'lose', technically, they weren't necessarily 'losing' anything. Perhaps I'll get clarification on that one from Paul Mason.
But, if nothing was lost, how come many parts of the world 'went into recession'? And how come as a consequence of the crash, many governments have said that they have had to make cuts in wages, cuts in welfare and cuts in social services?
Part of their answer is that it's because they (the governments - which is us) had to prop up these banks and financial houses because if they didn't, we would all be on the streets with no food and nowhere to live.
So, straight off, there was a price to pay by us. We paid for these 'losses'. That sum can be calculated. It's in the government statistics. What is harder to calculate is what kind of combined aggregated loss did working people suffer as a result. But it's a loss all the same.
Even so, back with the banks and finance houses - was there any kind of loss from their combined coffers? Some of them went bust. Some of them were propped up. Some of them lost money and have been trying to recoup it ever since through 'cutting costs' (lay offs, sloughing off unprofitable chunks of their business, bank charges, keeping their employees' wages down, trying to find profitable investments in other parts of the economies of the world...etc).
And, if there were true losses, whose money was lost? Investors' money?
If that's right, then one version says that 'investors' money' is theirs. Another version says that these great chunks of money come from 'exploitation' - that is through 'rent, profit, or interest': the exploitation of other people's work, exploitation of property (that's rent) or through investment in profitable enterprises which are themselves profitable because they successfully exploit people's work.
So if investors lost money, they in effect lost the outcome or fruits of other people's work.
Now, when we go back to the list of 4 competing claims for how we might be better off, I don't see on that list anything that says we might be better off if we could get hold of any of these great slabs of money and distribute them more fairly. Nor any way in which we could have a system of production and finance which didn't involve people competing with each other to find things to invest in, no matter how risky or useless.
That argument is not put or hardly put in the mainstream media.
If, tomorrow I decided that I would back any of those four 'solutions' in a slightly jokey, aggressive way, and that I repented my socialist views and withdrew any of the kinds of questions I'm asking here, that I recanted, then I'm pretty sure I'd get a good hearing in the mainstream media for the rest of my life. Especially if I could include something about Jeremy Corbyn being a danger to health.
For the last week or so I've been asking on Facebook and twitter if anyone has the figures for losses sustained by the UK's banks and financial houses during and as a result of the crash of 2008. For the moment, I haven't got an answer, though Paul Mason very kindly says that he's looking it up. I will come back to you on this.
Why am I asking?
We are being given several explanations for why people are badly off or why they could be better off. The main ones are:
1. The EU is a bad thing.
2. The EU is a good thing but it could be better if we stop 'immigrants' getting benefits.
3. Immigration is a bad thing.
4. Capitalism is great and it'll get better if the government can stop spending so much money.
Most of these arguments are taking place in the shadow of what happened in 2008. But what did happen?
As I understand it, banks and financial houses mainly but not entirely in the UK and US lent money that they never got back. (I won't go into how they lent money and how they lent each other money.)
Some questions: whose money did they lend? These were 'funds' or 'investments' but did they 'belong' to anyone? I'm not absolutely sure that they did. They were funds at the disposal of these banks and financial houses but some of it (i'm not sure how much) was actually created by them.
So, perhaps when I ask the question, how much did those banks etc 'lose', technically, they weren't necessarily 'losing' anything. Perhaps I'll get clarification on that one from Paul Mason.
But, if nothing was lost, how come many parts of the world 'went into recession'? And how come as a consequence of the crash, many governments have said that they have had to make cuts in wages, cuts in welfare and cuts in social services?
Part of their answer is that it's because they (the governments - which is us) had to prop up these banks and financial houses because if they didn't, we would all be on the streets with no food and nowhere to live.
So, straight off, there was a price to pay by us. We paid for these 'losses'. That sum can be calculated. It's in the government statistics. What is harder to calculate is what kind of combined aggregated loss did working people suffer as a result. But it's a loss all the same.
Even so, back with the banks and finance houses - was there any kind of loss from their combined coffers? Some of them went bust. Some of them were propped up. Some of them lost money and have been trying to recoup it ever since through 'cutting costs' (lay offs, sloughing off unprofitable chunks of their business, bank charges, keeping their employees' wages down, trying to find profitable investments in other parts of the economies of the world...etc).
And, if there were true losses, whose money was lost? Investors' money?
If that's right, then one version says that 'investors' money' is theirs. Another version says that these great chunks of money come from 'exploitation' - that is through 'rent, profit, or interest': the exploitation of other people's work, exploitation of property (that's rent) or through investment in profitable enterprises which are themselves profitable because they successfully exploit people's work.
So if investors lost money, they in effect lost the outcome or fruits of other people's work.
Now, when we go back to the list of 4 competing claims for how we might be better off, I don't see on that list anything that says we might be better off if we could get hold of any of these great slabs of money and distribute them more fairly. Nor any way in which we could have a system of production and finance which didn't involve people competing with each other to find things to invest in, no matter how risky or useless.
That argument is not put or hardly put in the mainstream media.
If, tomorrow I decided that I would back any of those four 'solutions' in a slightly jokey, aggressive way, and that I repented my socialist views and withdrew any of the kinds of questions I'm asking here, that I recanted, then I'm pretty sure I'd get a good hearing in the mainstream media for the rest of my life. Especially if I could include something about Jeremy Corbyn being a danger to health.
Tuesday, 19 January 2016
Same old same old when it comes to berating migrant women for not speaking English
Here is a link to a page in a book which reminds us that when politicians open their mouths to reveal something new or significant about migration or migrant communities, they are nearly always repeating what previous politicians, press or experts said before, and before that, and before that.
David Cameron berating 'Muslim women' for not speaking English was based, it seems, on a) dodgy figures, b) the kinds of things said about Jewish women in the 1920s.
Here's the link:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HHtECgAAQBAJ&pg=PT86&lpg=PT86&dq=k.pearson+m.moul+literacy+of+immigrant+parents&source=bl&ots=c6gnuCWOQz&sig=cCrTFA-Igp3VMkEmhNgtCEl9pqA&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=k.pearson%20m.moul%20literacy%20of%20immigrant%20parents&f=false
Note, the two 'researchers' claimed that with evidence like this they could 'prove' that Jews were inferior and a threat to the British.
What they weren't able to explain is how people like me ended up speaking and writing English.
That's a conundrum that Cameron won't be solving. He has other fish to fry: how to stoke up aggression and racism.
Incidentally, the left has been accused of falsely dubbing attacks on Islam as a form of racism. Now unpack what Cameron is saying: if you are a Muslim woman you are quite likely to not speak English. Really? It's Islam that prevents them, is it? Or is he using the term 'Muslim' to hide the fact that he is talking about some specific people who are Muslim? In which case he is talking in terms of cultural groups. In which case it would be a form of racism, if by any chance we were saying that he's discriminating against those people.
Well, there is the matter of the Tories cutting classes in English for migrants. In other words, the Tories have made it harder for people to learn English, even as he is berating them for not doing so.
Sounds like racism to me.
MIGRATION CAUSES MISERY TO MILLIONS (er....migration of money, that is.)
Greg Hands, Chief Secretary to the Treasury said that the banking crisis led to what he called the 'great recession' and 'misery to millions of families'.
At such times, governments find it convenient to claim that it's poor people who cause the 'misery' and one group of poor people easiest to identify as the 'problem' are migrants. Politicians and willing press people unleash hosts of stories which claim that it's migrants that cause you 'misery'.
However, if you comb the business pages, you find that it's another kind of migration that causes the walloping great crises.
The migration of money - sometimes called 'investment'.
Here's an article from the Economist which was looking at why 'foreign investment' by British banks has slowed since 2008. The interesting bit is where it explains that our bit of the crisis here in the UK was caused by....foreign investment, our banks being 'exposed' overseas.
So, the 'misery of millions of families' was caused the migration of money, was it? Funny how that doesn't make the front pages of the Sun, Express, Telegraph, Mail....
"Businesses were increasingly operating across borders and needed banks that could travel with them. America and Britain, which excelled at finance, were anxious to market their expertise abroad. A more integrated global economy also needed a financial system to funnel capital from countries with a surplus of savings to those with a surplus of investment opportunities. Banks had long played that role within countries, taking in deposits in one market and deploying them in another. It made sense to do the same thing across borders.
...
Financial globalisation did just what it was meant to, perhaps a little too well. Cross-border bank flows expanded enormously between 2000 and 2007, with 80% of the increase coming from Europe, according to McKinsey. Those flows enabled debtor countries such as America, Spain and Greece to finance housing booms and government deficits without paying punitive interest rates. But a large part of those flows reflected banks’ own leverage as they both borrowed and lent heavily abroad.
Tellingly, the event that touched off the crisis in the summer of 2007 was an announcement by France’s BNP Paribas that it was suspending redemptions to an investment fund heavily invested in American mortgage securities. Eventually a number of banks across Europe needed government bailouts because of losses sustained on mortgages in America and elsewhere.
The cost of bailing domestic banks out of foreign misadventures exposed one risk of financial globalisation; the losses sustained by domestic creditors and savers when foreign banks went bust showed up another. In 2008, when Landsbanki, an Icelandic bank, went bust, British and Dutch depositors had to be bailed out by their own governments because Iceland would guarantee only Icelandic deposits. Sir Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, famously commented that “global banks are international in life but national in death.” "
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At such times, governments find it convenient to claim that it's poor people who cause the 'misery' and one group of poor people easiest to identify as the 'problem' are migrants. Politicians and willing press people unleash hosts of stories which claim that it's migrants that cause you 'misery'.
However, if you comb the business pages, you find that it's another kind of migration that causes the walloping great crises.
The migration of money - sometimes called 'investment'.
Here's an article from the Economist which was looking at why 'foreign investment' by British banks has slowed since 2008. The interesting bit is where it explains that our bit of the crisis here in the UK was caused by....foreign investment, our banks being 'exposed' overseas.
So, the 'misery of millions of families' was caused the migration of money, was it? Funny how that doesn't make the front pages of the Sun, Express, Telegraph, Mail....
"Businesses were increasingly operating across borders and needed banks that could travel with them. America and Britain, which excelled at finance, were anxious to market their expertise abroad. A more integrated global economy also needed a financial system to funnel capital from countries with a surplus of savings to those with a surplus of investment opportunities. Banks had long played that role within countries, taking in deposits in one market and deploying them in another. It made sense to do the same thing across borders.
...
Financial globalisation did just what it was meant to, perhaps a little too well. Cross-border bank flows expanded enormously between 2000 and 2007, with 80% of the increase coming from Europe, according to McKinsey. Those flows enabled debtor countries such as America, Spain and Greece to finance housing booms and government deficits without paying punitive interest rates. But a large part of those flows reflected banks’ own leverage as they both borrowed and lent heavily abroad.
Tellingly, the event that touched off the crisis in the summer of 2007 was an announcement by France’s BNP Paribas that it was suspending redemptions to an investment fund heavily invested in American mortgage securities. Eventually a number of banks across Europe needed government bailouts because of losses sustained on mortgages in America and elsewhere.
The cost of bailing domestic banks out of foreign misadventures exposed one risk of financial globalisation; the losses sustained by domestic creditors and savers when foreign banks went bust showed up another. In 2008, when Landsbanki, an Icelandic bank, went bust, British and Dutch depositors had to be bailed out by their own governments because Iceland would guarantee only Icelandic deposits. Sir Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, famously commented that “global banks are international in life but national in death.” "
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Monday, 18 January 2016
Journalists: are you asking Cameron about this?
from English for Action (London)
"David Cameron has today connected Muslim women not learning English with terrorism. He has also suggested (again) that many migrants do not want to learn English. Our experience of teaching ESOL in London over the last ten years leads us to believe that both these statements are dangerous lies. Conflating language learning and terrorism does not have any basis in reality. According to ex-police superintendent Dal Babu the families of the children who went to Syria all spoke perfect English.
"David Cameron has today connected Muslim women not learning English with terrorism. He has also suggested (again) that many migrants do not want to learn English. Our experience of teaching ESOL in London over the last ten years leads us to believe that both these statements are dangerous lies. Conflating language learning and terrorism does not have any basis in reality. According to ex-police superintendent Dal Babu the families of the children who went to Syria all spoke perfect English.
To suggest that migrants should be forced to learn English implies that a) they don't want to and b) they could if they wanted to. Many colleges have over 1000 people on their waiting list for ESOL courses and can wait for up to 2 years.
The same prime minister who is saying everyone must learn English if they want to stay in this country has cut ESOL classes by around 50% in the last five years. We know that if you provide ESOL classes, with trained, paid teachers supported by creches so women with children can attend, they are full. It is of course true that it is vital to learn the language of the country you live in. Of all the myriad benefits though, stopping terrorism is not one of them."
Media people: the Tories have stopped people learning English!
"I used to teach volunteer TESOL classes via the Refugee Council to newly arrived immigrants and refugees. Those classes no longer exist because Tories stopped government subsidies for them a few years back."
from a post on my Facebook account today.
Saturday, 16 January 2016
Education that is 'Not-Education' but educates all the same
Many moons ago we used to discuss aspects of education which went on unseen and unnoticed. The emphasis on testing and so-called knowledge-based education has pushed this focus away. I happen to think it's still as relevant as it always was. That's to say, out of sight and out of mind, many hidden messages reach children in schools about what kind of learners they are and what kind of people they are. Here are some of them.
1. We shouldn't pretend it's not going on: there is in-class setting in many schools from Yr 1 to Yr 6. To be clear, I'm not having a go at classroom teachers for this. In almost cases, they don't have a say in the matter. It's decided by a combination of Ofsted and school management. Some questions: is there an evidence that this is a successful way for children to learn?
Quite apart from what children are learning in terms of the curriculum, what messages might we suppose the children in setted classes learn?
a) there are systems in life over which you have no control. They are created by people bigger and better than you.
b) these systems are beyond questioning. They just 'are'. They represent 'reality' or 'how life is'. In this particular case, the 'reality' is that we are 'naturally' or 'really' grouped in these so-called ability groups.
2. Because of the massive emphasis on testing, there are in effect in schools, two kinds of activity: the kind that is tested and testable, the kind that is not. We can't pretend otherwise: the tests matter. I don't mean by that that they should matter. I mean that no matter what soothing messages we give to children, the children can see that they matter to staff and parents so they end up mattering to the children. Inevitably this means that all the other things they do in school - and perhaps outside - are of lower status. We can list them: the arts, PE, play, philosophy, holidays, games, clubs and more. Again, schools can and do try to give some of these activities high status but what messages do children pick up about them in the present context? How about: 'Yes, adults keep saying they're important but when it really comes to it, it's the testing stuff that really counts, isn't it?'
But that list of activities (they're not all ones that I necessarily put at the centre of my priorities) comprises a massively important part of our lives. How come we have an education system that puts them on the margins in terms of importance and value. Aside from how socially or mentally 'valuable' they are, some of them are also professionally valuable. They are just as useful ways of getting a career as maths or English. Further - some of them are ways in which some children can get a handle on why there's any point in doing this education thing, or - more specifically - ways in which some children can get a handle on specific things like literacy. (Just think of the effect of, say, doing drama - a school play or some such - on literacy!)
Teachers know all this. It's just that in the present set up, it's become increasingly hard for them to do these things. It's all become squeezed or pushed to the margins. In itself this squeezing to the edges is another way in which children can read it all as 'less important' or 'not mattering very much', or 'not mattering as much as the real stuff' (that is, the stuff you have to do for the tests).
3. Any activity within the traditional, tested subjects which is not immediately apparent as having a learning objective or learning outcome attached to it, must, by definition appear to children as less important, less valuable. The one that I hear most about in my own field is 'silent reading'. With 'reading' having several high stakes tests attached to it (SPaG, SATs) and all the rehearsal and mock versions of the tests that go with the actual ones, then the priority in school becomes these versions of reading. But let's say that one of the really important things we need to help children acquire is a sense of pleasure attached to the reading process. Otherwise, the moment the compulsion that comes with testing is removed, why bother? So, where does this pleasure come from? Purely from doing well in the tests? (Not necessarily, I would argue.) And then what about all those who don't do really well in the tests but who could still get pleasure from reading? Where will their desire to read come from?
I've focussed here on reading silently but there must be countless examples in other parts of the curriculum where valuable activities and processes are being squeezed out by virtue of them not being tested or testable. From my own observation, my hunch is that these include such things as experiments and open-ended observations in science; creating environments in which children start their learning on a topic by coming up with questions of their own, bringing their own out-of-school experiences into the classroom. I'm sure other people can think of their own.
4. Picking up on this last point - the out-of-school experiences: a distinct move was made some ten years ago against what was seen as the lower value of children's own lives, experiences and language(s). This is all part of the drive towards 'core' knowledge and the knowledge-based curriculum. The curriculum as it is now laid out in the documents hardly acknowledges this area of knowledge. Nor does it acknowledge that no matter what kind of learning goes on, it can only ever start from where children are at. If it starts somewhere else, then the child in question won't get it. However, even for me to say that, lays me open to the accusation of 'dumbing down', 'having low expectations' and the like. But what if we put the problem the other way round: if the message we put over to children is that their own lives and experience have no place or a very unimportant place in education, what hidden messages do we give them about them and their families as people? And if this is a sense of themselves as somehow less worthy than people who run schools, or who do really well at education, how does that help such children learn? Or can we say that this simply reinforces a perception of themselves as less valuable, less important?
5. It's nothing new in education but perhaps it's become more intense: individualising of learning. If you raise the status of tests and exams, inevitably this has a knock-on effect in terms of defining the shape and kind of knowledge you acquire. One aspect of this says to the child: learning is something that only matters if it's yours as an individual. And yet, society and civilisation itself has always relied and depended on collaboration and co-operation in acquiring and using knowledge. In almost every sphere of life, people have to share and co-operate with at least one other person in order to make progress or 'to get things done'. Knowing how to do this is a desperately needed ability. People who find it difficult or seemingly against doing it, often find themselves in difficulty, or frozen out by whatever's going on. But where do schools find the time or opportunity to do important, high prestige co-operative activity? Schools do, but it's difficult and not usually given the learning objective-learning outcome badge of success.
6. Finally, discipline and behaviour. The basic principle that has always hovered over this is that whatever system a school uses, it is invented, owned and controlled by adults. In fact, this is so much part of our collective psyche it's extremely difficult to think of any other way of doing things. Does this matter? Some would say not. It's just the way it's got to be. I would argue that whether we think it's inevitable or whether (as I do) think there are other ways it could operate, we teach children that the ordering of children into 'good' and 'bad' or into 'well behaved' and 'badly behaved' is something beyond their control. Again, rather like the testing procedures, it's beyond questioning. In other words, as individuals - at least when we are young - we have no right to be part of decisions about how we are divided up into 'good' and 'bad'. In fact, the way we are divided up like that is a kind of secret or arcane knowledge. Behind the system there are books on 'discipline' and as a child being acted on by this system are not really privy to why it's set up. So, for example, we don't discuss with children what a detention is for, what is the meaning of a detention, who invented them, is there any evidence that they do what they claim to do - which is...er...make children better? Improve them?
If we put all this together - and I'm sure other people will be able to think of other invisible parts of schooling into this mix - what do we get? For the high-flyers, I suspect that a good deal of this reinforces their right to be high-flyers. It's all a kind of self-fulfilling system: 'This system works well because I've come out at the top of it.' (This is not to blame or despise them for thinking that.)
But what of the rest?
Might it not be possible that they are encouraged by this system to go on and on and on thinking of themselves as 'not good enough'? And that they have little or no leverage on the system to be able to question its right to tell them to. 'It says I'm not good enough, and it must be right to say I am not good enough'. The word for this is 'self-blame'.
My own feeling is that self-blame is one of the most destructive emotions of our time. I think that this is how we 'learn' to accept the system, even if we are irritated, annoyed or depressed by it. We think, 'It might not be good, or it makes me fed up, but what can I do about it? Nothing!'
In addition, the test and exam system reinforces this too. All teachers I know try to encourage children to do well in tests and exams by telling them that they can do better or can do well, if they work hard or harder. Yet we all know that when the test is marked, everyone is graded. In other words it's not true that everyone can do well. So, don't I, as a child getting my not-good-enough results think that the only reason for them not-being-good-enough is me? It's my fault. There can't be any other reason. The system was always unquestioned and unquestionable. There is no subject in school called 'The Curriculum' or 'Education' or 'Schooling'.
Irony of ironies: in the midst of the knowledge-based curriculum enthusiasm, very few people seem to be asking questions about what happens to the children who don't 'get' that curriculum, the children who 'fail'. If the knowledge-based curriculum is supposedly liberating, is it liberating for all? Or for some? And what happens to those who don't get it? Is it the opposite? that's to say does such a curriculum tell the 'failures' that they are not liberated, not worthy of being liberated, not able to be liberated and indeed responsible for their own inability to be liberated by this curriculum?
In the end a lot of this is about hierarchies and segregation. Well, more than this: it's about how we come to accept such hierarchies. Our political system loves us accepting hierarchies and self-blame. Doesn't our political system rely on the fact that millions of people who do not thrive under the present set-up accept that it's the only system that is possible and that if they themselves don't thrive it must be their own fault or their own lot?
I suspect so.
1. We shouldn't pretend it's not going on: there is in-class setting in many schools from Yr 1 to Yr 6. To be clear, I'm not having a go at classroom teachers for this. In almost cases, they don't have a say in the matter. It's decided by a combination of Ofsted and school management. Some questions: is there an evidence that this is a successful way for children to learn?
Quite apart from what children are learning in terms of the curriculum, what messages might we suppose the children in setted classes learn?
a) there are systems in life over which you have no control. They are created by people bigger and better than you.
b) these systems are beyond questioning. They just 'are'. They represent 'reality' or 'how life is'. In this particular case, the 'reality' is that we are 'naturally' or 'really' grouped in these so-called ability groups.
2. Because of the massive emphasis on testing, there are in effect in schools, two kinds of activity: the kind that is tested and testable, the kind that is not. We can't pretend otherwise: the tests matter. I don't mean by that that they should matter. I mean that no matter what soothing messages we give to children, the children can see that they matter to staff and parents so they end up mattering to the children. Inevitably this means that all the other things they do in school - and perhaps outside - are of lower status. We can list them: the arts, PE, play, philosophy, holidays, games, clubs and more. Again, schools can and do try to give some of these activities high status but what messages do children pick up about them in the present context? How about: 'Yes, adults keep saying they're important but when it really comes to it, it's the testing stuff that really counts, isn't it?'
But that list of activities (they're not all ones that I necessarily put at the centre of my priorities) comprises a massively important part of our lives. How come we have an education system that puts them on the margins in terms of importance and value. Aside from how socially or mentally 'valuable' they are, some of them are also professionally valuable. They are just as useful ways of getting a career as maths or English. Further - some of them are ways in which some children can get a handle on why there's any point in doing this education thing, or - more specifically - ways in which some children can get a handle on specific things like literacy. (Just think of the effect of, say, doing drama - a school play or some such - on literacy!)
Teachers know all this. It's just that in the present set up, it's become increasingly hard for them to do these things. It's all become squeezed or pushed to the margins. In itself this squeezing to the edges is another way in which children can read it all as 'less important' or 'not mattering very much', or 'not mattering as much as the real stuff' (that is, the stuff you have to do for the tests).
3. Any activity within the traditional, tested subjects which is not immediately apparent as having a learning objective or learning outcome attached to it, must, by definition appear to children as less important, less valuable. The one that I hear most about in my own field is 'silent reading'. With 'reading' having several high stakes tests attached to it (SPaG, SATs) and all the rehearsal and mock versions of the tests that go with the actual ones, then the priority in school becomes these versions of reading. But let's say that one of the really important things we need to help children acquire is a sense of pleasure attached to the reading process. Otherwise, the moment the compulsion that comes with testing is removed, why bother? So, where does this pleasure come from? Purely from doing well in the tests? (Not necessarily, I would argue.) And then what about all those who don't do really well in the tests but who could still get pleasure from reading? Where will their desire to read come from?
I've focussed here on reading silently but there must be countless examples in other parts of the curriculum where valuable activities and processes are being squeezed out by virtue of them not being tested or testable. From my own observation, my hunch is that these include such things as experiments and open-ended observations in science; creating environments in which children start their learning on a topic by coming up with questions of their own, bringing their own out-of-school experiences into the classroom. I'm sure other people can think of their own.
4. Picking up on this last point - the out-of-school experiences: a distinct move was made some ten years ago against what was seen as the lower value of children's own lives, experiences and language(s). This is all part of the drive towards 'core' knowledge and the knowledge-based curriculum. The curriculum as it is now laid out in the documents hardly acknowledges this area of knowledge. Nor does it acknowledge that no matter what kind of learning goes on, it can only ever start from where children are at. If it starts somewhere else, then the child in question won't get it. However, even for me to say that, lays me open to the accusation of 'dumbing down', 'having low expectations' and the like. But what if we put the problem the other way round: if the message we put over to children is that their own lives and experience have no place or a very unimportant place in education, what hidden messages do we give them about them and their families as people? And if this is a sense of themselves as somehow less worthy than people who run schools, or who do really well at education, how does that help such children learn? Or can we say that this simply reinforces a perception of themselves as less valuable, less important?
5. It's nothing new in education but perhaps it's become more intense: individualising of learning. If you raise the status of tests and exams, inevitably this has a knock-on effect in terms of defining the shape and kind of knowledge you acquire. One aspect of this says to the child: learning is something that only matters if it's yours as an individual. And yet, society and civilisation itself has always relied and depended on collaboration and co-operation in acquiring and using knowledge. In almost every sphere of life, people have to share and co-operate with at least one other person in order to make progress or 'to get things done'. Knowing how to do this is a desperately needed ability. People who find it difficult or seemingly against doing it, often find themselves in difficulty, or frozen out by whatever's going on. But where do schools find the time or opportunity to do important, high prestige co-operative activity? Schools do, but it's difficult and not usually given the learning objective-learning outcome badge of success.
6. Finally, discipline and behaviour. The basic principle that has always hovered over this is that whatever system a school uses, it is invented, owned and controlled by adults. In fact, this is so much part of our collective psyche it's extremely difficult to think of any other way of doing things. Does this matter? Some would say not. It's just the way it's got to be. I would argue that whether we think it's inevitable or whether (as I do) think there are other ways it could operate, we teach children that the ordering of children into 'good' and 'bad' or into 'well behaved' and 'badly behaved' is something beyond their control. Again, rather like the testing procedures, it's beyond questioning. In other words, as individuals - at least when we are young - we have no right to be part of decisions about how we are divided up into 'good' and 'bad'. In fact, the way we are divided up like that is a kind of secret or arcane knowledge. Behind the system there are books on 'discipline' and as a child being acted on by this system are not really privy to why it's set up. So, for example, we don't discuss with children what a detention is for, what is the meaning of a detention, who invented them, is there any evidence that they do what they claim to do - which is...er...make children better? Improve them?
If we put all this together - and I'm sure other people will be able to think of other invisible parts of schooling into this mix - what do we get? For the high-flyers, I suspect that a good deal of this reinforces their right to be high-flyers. It's all a kind of self-fulfilling system: 'This system works well because I've come out at the top of it.' (This is not to blame or despise them for thinking that.)
But what of the rest?
Might it not be possible that they are encouraged by this system to go on and on and on thinking of themselves as 'not good enough'? And that they have little or no leverage on the system to be able to question its right to tell them to. 'It says I'm not good enough, and it must be right to say I am not good enough'. The word for this is 'self-blame'.
My own feeling is that self-blame is one of the most destructive emotions of our time. I think that this is how we 'learn' to accept the system, even if we are irritated, annoyed or depressed by it. We think, 'It might not be good, or it makes me fed up, but what can I do about it? Nothing!'
In addition, the test and exam system reinforces this too. All teachers I know try to encourage children to do well in tests and exams by telling them that they can do better or can do well, if they work hard or harder. Yet we all know that when the test is marked, everyone is graded. In other words it's not true that everyone can do well. So, don't I, as a child getting my not-good-enough results think that the only reason for them not-being-good-enough is me? It's my fault. There can't be any other reason. The system was always unquestioned and unquestionable. There is no subject in school called 'The Curriculum' or 'Education' or 'Schooling'.
Irony of ironies: in the midst of the knowledge-based curriculum enthusiasm, very few people seem to be asking questions about what happens to the children who don't 'get' that curriculum, the children who 'fail'. If the knowledge-based curriculum is supposedly liberating, is it liberating for all? Or for some? And what happens to those who don't get it? Is it the opposite? that's to say does such a curriculum tell the 'failures' that they are not liberated, not worthy of being liberated, not able to be liberated and indeed responsible for their own inability to be liberated by this curriculum?
In the end a lot of this is about hierarchies and segregation. Well, more than this: it's about how we come to accept such hierarchies. Our political system loves us accepting hierarchies and self-blame. Doesn't our political system rely on the fact that millions of people who do not thrive under the present set-up accept that it's the only system that is possible and that if they themselves don't thrive it must be their own fault or their own lot?
I suspect so.
Thursday, 14 January 2016
Vulgar
When we did our first lesson in vulgar fractions at school
there were children who giggled.
I didn't get the joke.
'Vulgar', they said.
'Why's that funny?' I said.
'Rude,' they said.
'What's rude?' I said.
'Vulgar,' they said.
I had never met the word 'vulgar'.
In fact, my mother and father
were people who the kind of person
who used the word 'vulgar'
might have called 'vulgar'.
But my mum and dad didn't call it 'vulgar'.
So I didn't get the joke.
there were children who giggled.
I didn't get the joke.
'Vulgar', they said.
'Why's that funny?' I said.
'Rude,' they said.
'What's rude?' I said.
'Vulgar,' they said.
I had never met the word 'vulgar'.
In fact, my mother and father
were people who the kind of person
who used the word 'vulgar'
might have called 'vulgar'.
But my mum and dad didn't call it 'vulgar'.
So I didn't get the joke.
Wednesday, 13 January 2016
'...us medics manning the barricades..."
This post comes from Ken Muller who posted it on Facebook
"Our Danny gives his take on the junior doctors' strike action yesterday:
So all of us medics are manning the barricades in more or less unprecedented industrial action. Doctors striking has more implications than most public services including a hugely regrettable reduced workforce to look after patients. With all the spin and unhelpful butting-in and faux-journalism from The Sun and Daily Mail, it can be difficult understand why he have been forced to take this action against Mr. Hunt and his new contract. I thought I would briefly try and elaborate what I know about the dispute a bit for any non-medic friends that might be slightly confused.
The main issue is around the removal of safeguards against even more excessive hours. Most people know that the vast vast majority of doctors work long hours, 7 days a week. Currently, hospitals have to pay Doctors back-pay for all the time they work over the legal limit, which I believe is based in the European Working Time Directive. This currently acts as a deterrent to hospitals overworking doctors. The govt would like to remove these safeguards, effectively leaving us open to being heavily overworked, leaving us tired and less able to look after our sick patients properly. Being forced to provide a lower standard of care by people like David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt is completely and utterly unacceptable to us.
The issue with pay, where Jeremy Hunt has knowingly lied to and misled the public by saying we will get an 11% pay rise, will actually see doctors see a pay cut of around 25%. This is because juniors are currently paid with a basic salary, supplemented with 'banding'. This banding is a percentage of our basic pay paid on top of that basic pay and it is paid based on how much overtime you work. All doctors work a large amount of overtime. This means basic salary is topped up with around what I think is another 25-50% for most doctors. The govt wants to remove banding in return for an increase in basic salary. This amounts to a de facto pay cut and less compensation for the heavily antisocial hours medics can work. The govt know this.
I'm sure most people understand that doctors are not motivated by money and we are not paid well for our efforts until very late in our careers. We object to being degraded by a rich, malevolent, overpaid Conservative govt like the one currently in power. They have approved massive pay increases for themselves and appeased tax-dodging financial workers and big business because they are seen as too valuable to lose overseas. What does that say about how they value us? Furthermore, if we do not take action now, which group of hardworking, high-contributing workers will be threatened next? Whether we like it or not this is a proxy battle between public service workers and the Conservatives' policy of privatisation. If we don't dig in hard now we could lose our NHS to defunding, degradation and privatisation. It's about who you trust more, NHS doctors or Conservative MPs and we need all the help we can get."
"Our Danny gives his take on the junior doctors' strike action yesterday:
So all of us medics are manning the barricades in more or less unprecedented industrial action. Doctors striking has more implications than most public services including a hugely regrettable reduced workforce to look after patients. With all the spin and unhelpful butting-in and faux-journalism from The Sun and Daily Mail, it can be difficult understand why he have been forced to take this action against Mr. Hunt and his new contract. I thought I would briefly try and elaborate what I know about the dispute a bit for any non-medic friends that might be slightly confused.
The main issue is around the removal of safeguards against even more excessive hours. Most people know that the vast vast majority of doctors work long hours, 7 days a week. Currently, hospitals have to pay Doctors back-pay for all the time they work over the legal limit, which I believe is based in the European Working Time Directive. This currently acts as a deterrent to hospitals overworking doctors. The govt would like to remove these safeguards, effectively leaving us open to being heavily overworked, leaving us tired and less able to look after our sick patients properly. Being forced to provide a lower standard of care by people like David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt is completely and utterly unacceptable to us.
The issue with pay, where Jeremy Hunt has knowingly lied to and misled the public by saying we will get an 11% pay rise, will actually see doctors see a pay cut of around 25%. This is because juniors are currently paid with a basic salary, supplemented with 'banding'. This banding is a percentage of our basic pay paid on top of that basic pay and it is paid based on how much overtime you work. All doctors work a large amount of overtime. This means basic salary is topped up with around what I think is another 25-50% for most doctors. The govt wants to remove banding in return for an increase in basic salary. This amounts to a de facto pay cut and less compensation for the heavily antisocial hours medics can work. The govt know this.
I'm sure most people understand that doctors are not motivated by money and we are not paid well for our efforts until very late in our careers. We object to being degraded by a rich, malevolent, overpaid Conservative govt like the one currently in power. They have approved massive pay increases for themselves and appeased tax-dodging financial workers and big business because they are seen as too valuable to lose overseas. What does that say about how they value us? Furthermore, if we do not take action now, which group of hardworking, high-contributing workers will be threatened next? Whether we like it or not this is a proxy battle between public service workers and the Conservatives' policy of privatisation. If we don't dig in hard now we could lose our NHS to defunding, degradation and privatisation. It's about who you trust more, NHS doctors or Conservative MPs and we need all the help we can get."
Marxism: language, literature and children's literature
1.
Literature is language.
(Some books combine language and pictures. Films combine language and moving image. Musicals combine language and music. I'll leave all that to one side for the moment.)
Of course, literature is language. But this means that every time we use words like 'character' or 'alliteration' or 'drama' or 'metaphor' or 'chapter' or 'dialogue' - these are all uses of language.
All language originates with human beings. When we separate 'language' off from human behaviour for the purposes of discussing what it is, or for looking at in its different forms, we make it inert. So, though we say things like 'Drama can...' or 'The chapter says...', in reality, it can't. It's the human who uses language who is 'doing' something.
In that sense, language is a form of human behaviour.
Whenever we use language, we make decisions about who it's for. Sometimes this is quite conscious and we say or write something with a deliberate 'sense of audience'. Other times, we might be hardly aware of it. That's because our uses of language already have audiences 'implied' within it.
Audiences can be 'implied' for a variety of reasons:
1. because of the kinds of words we use, and the ways we 'stick the words together' - i.e. passages of text (compare a 'phonics reader', say, with a 'No Smoking' sign, with a flat pack assembly manual.)
2. because of the 'form' - a Shakespeare play, a birthday card, a football chant.
3. and, crucially, because of the total and specific context in which that use of language is produced and received, (spoken and heard, written and read). The sign 'Carry dogs' (which I saw yesterday) could mean that you must find a dog and carry it. (Terry Eagleton has a similar example!) Or it could mean, if you have a dog, you must carry it. Context of it being on an escalator at an underground station is that it means the second.
So, the first thing that listeners and readers do is they influence what the speaker and writer say and write. We may do that over time - people have been going to plays for thousands of years. The form of language we call 'the play' has evolved because of thousands of years of audiences influencing what and how plays are written. We may do it face to face. We may do it in all sorts of combinations of both the historical as well as the face to face.
The second thing that listeners and readers do is that we 'interpret' what is being said and written. We do not merely receive it, or are 'stimulated' by it, or even simply 'respond' to it. The human senses and mind are extraordinarily complex and we do not do ourselves any favours by simplifying it.
Interpretation involves a complex, interrelated set of processes to do with such things as perceiving, remembering, selecting, collating, sorting, ordering, reflecting on the new, reflecting on what we have already reflected on, revising, evaluating. Though I've said it involves perception and mind, it will also involve the body (e.g. laughter, squirming, dilation of the eyes, sweating, etc). Part of interpretation will also be responding to our own bodies as they respond.
Producing language and interpreting (speaking and listening, writing and reading) are social activities. Though we may appear to be, say, reading on our own, or writing on our own, all language is itself social. That's to say, embedded in language are the experiences and intentions of thousands of years of use. Every single word, every bit of how words are stuck together (grammar, and literary forms, how we construct conversations etc) is all social. It's all been made and re-made and being made again in the context of human interaction.
This is at the heart of the term 'intertextuality'. Any 'text' we create or interpret or come across is at a point in the history of all texts. It comes out of texts that precede it, and it becomes part of future texts in the eyes, ears and minds of those who hear it or read it. No part of the text is of itself new. It will in some way or another be related to previous texts. Nothing in our interpretations are themselves new as they will be made in part because of our previous encounters with texts, that is our 'repertoire' of texts that we have come across in our lives - for reasons that are 'social'.
This focuses us on interpretation. No matter how 'personal' interpretation appears to be, each part of my total interpretation is made of social interactions with previous texts and social interactions with other people and my own uses of language. There is no possible model of a totally lone human being, coming into the world, living isolated from all other human beings, and producing language alone.
If the producing and interpretation of language (including literature, of course) is social, this raises the question of how to understand 'the social'.
2.
One way is to think of ourselves as lottery balls in a lottery machine, bouncing around, bouncing into each other, unable to determine our fate, not really influencing each other very much. A good deal of everyday talk implies this view of ourselves. We are, supposedly, all 'individuals' doing what we as individuals have to do, or is being done to us; our work, our hopes, our wishes and desires, our tragedies are often treated and described as 'individual'.
Alternatives suggest that this isn't really possible. However and wherever we live, however and wherever we produce and interpret language, we are doing this socially, influencing each other, being influenced by each other.
Within a range of alternatives for how we do this, are attempts to 'clump' us into groups, sections of the population, identities, organisations, institutions, people with similar outlooks and behaviours, nations, 'races', regions, cultural types, classes, traditions, genders, children, adults, and so on.
Some of these descriptions are used as explanations for why and how we produce and interpret language in the way we do. Descriptions like 'British' or 'women's' or 'old people's' or 'children's' are sometimes used as 'sufficient' explanations for why this particular kind of writing was written, or why this particular response was made.
The marxist argument is primarily that these are not 'sufficient' explanations. They are not necessarily false or wrong, but not enough. That's because marxism looks at the 'social' (i.e. society) and says that society is organised mainly or mostly in a particular kind of way. Starting out from the prime needs that humans have: to eat, be protected from the elements and to reproduce, people are organised (or organise themselves) according to an 'economic system'. The shape or 'configuration' not only produces and distributes things. It also places us in particular positions within that economic system.
They system we live with at the moment is 'capitalism', but in the past people have lived with other systems such as 'hunter-gatherer', or feudalism.
'Capitalism' describes how things are made and distributed, how wealth is made. Marxists tend to use the word to mean more than that: that is, not only as an economic system but also how that economic system produces or determines the growth of such institutions as the nation state or the instruments and institutions OF that state, such as government, law, health care, nurture, education. The word is used to define a total way of being at a particular time or 'epoch'.
Starting from the word at the heart of 'capitalism', people with 'capital' (money, assets) employ people to work in order to make (or try to make) profits i.e. come out with more than they put in. Clearly, there are different kinds of capitalist and different sizes of capitalist.
It's convenient and important to think of the different kinds as putting capital 'to work' in different ways such as 'finance' (banking etc), financial services (insurance and the like), manufacture, distribution, rent (renting out property or plant). And again size is important - sometimes we're talking about capitalists with turnovers bigger and more important than the sums handled by a whole nation, other times we're talking about nothing bigger than a market-stall and people who work for the stall-holder on a Saturday.
The body of people who have no means of earning money other than through being employed are called by marxists either 'the working-class' or the 'proletariat'. This is not a value-judgement, or a description in itself of behaviour or culture. It's a description of nothing more or less than this matter of how such people earn a living. However, it's not just a matter of earning a living. It's their 'position in relation to production'. The capitalist is in one position, the worker is in another. The capitalist buys labour to make profits. The worker sells labour to earn the means by which to live.
The marxist argument is that this is a fundamental matter for how the whole of society works. That's because these two positions are in conflict with each other. The two sides may sometimes appear to have similar interests (to keep the business going, for example) but underlying that, there is a conflict over what the capitalist calls 'costs' and the workers call 'wages' or 'salaries'. It is in the interest of the capitalist to keep costs down. It is in the interests of the worker to get as good a price (wages) for the job as is possible. When marxists or anyone else talks of 'class struggle' or 'class conflict' that's at heart what is being talked about, though the given dispute might be about hours worked or conditions of work too. The point is, though, that 'class struggle' is in reality, a struggle between classes not just one class doing the struggling.
Aside from people using capital and people employed by owners of capital, there are others in society who survive by any of the following: selling what they do on a fee by fee basis - sometimes enormous fees, sometimes nothing more than cash 'under the counter' for small jobs. There are also people who work but who are unpaid by an employer - homeworkers, carers. There are people who are retired who live off pensions. There are people who receive some kind of state benefit and/or charity whilst not being employed for money. There are people who are too young to work full-time because they are either in full-time education or too young even for that (under fives) or in full-time education thanks to the ability to survive whilst doing it (students).
Again, as well as capitalists coming in different sizes and kinds, within those who earn money through wages, there are a variety of other positions: some earn enormous wages in comparison to others and as a result use some of that money to buy property and rent it out, or to buy shares and make money through dividends. This makes them have two positions, wage-earners and capitalists. Capitalism cannot survive through all workers being of equal status, so it creates managers and supervisors who may have actual power on a day to day basis over other wage-earners. For that reason and/or for the reason that they earn enough money to earn yet more through their capital, they are effectively in a different position in relation to people earning only through their wages.
On the other hand, at the other end of the scale, some may only have wages but these may not be enough to survive and therefore need other means to supplement what they do through (depending on which nation state) charity, or state benefits and so on.
3.
As a set of descriptions they key element missing from all this is 'change'. If the core element going on this description is a 'struggle' or 'conflict' over prices (this sometimes seems to be about other things such as tax, rich and poor, benefits, state provision of services and so on), the marxist argument is that this conflict always leads to change.
And change can happen to capital, to 'labour' and to the various elements in between that I've described as having other means of earning a living or are in a special supervisory or managerial position, or indeed find themselves in several positions.
So, all this describes the 'economic system' but we don't just live under that heading. We live in relation to the nation, the state, the law, religion, education, nurture, and social services provision, the mass media and the arts. And, returning to language, throughout all this we are all using language to express, reflect, describe our positions, our views, our intentions, our demands, commands, desires.
The marxist argument is that these all have a role to play in how this economic system runs, how the class conflict is managed, how the next generation is produced ('social reproduction'), how wars and peace are organised. The argument goes on to say that the main or 'prevailing' view expressed through these institutions of nation, state, law, the arts, nurture, education and the rest is an outlook that is more or less the same as that of the big capitalists or the 'ruling class', the group of people who own and control most of the 'means of production', that is the assets that enable production to take place.
Within these institutions, though, there is nearly always dissent, contest and argument.
The origins of that dissent are twofold: on the one hand there is the permanent conflict over price (and conditions), the other is that there is what is sometimes called a 'contradiction'. The main contradiction here is that on the one hand a capitalist society positions everyone in relation to objects, things and processes such that it can all be made private through the medium of money. You can buy a shirt, a car, a painting, or indeed, ways of affecting your body shape or mind. 'Everything has its price', which is another way of saying, if I have money, I can make anything private property. However, and in 'contradiction' to that, in order to produce all these private things, the system brings people together in a collective, co-operative way in places of work and also in some of the institutions of e.g. education or health. Even as we find ourselves pricing and privatising our consumption of goods and services, we may also find ourselves brought together in production, sometimes in the use of something like education, and when there is conflict over price, conditions and the like. we may find old or new collective behaviours and associations (e.g. trade unions) to protect our interests and improve our chances of doing better.
So, though the situation as I've described it, has resources and power largely clumped together on one side of the equation (the owners and controllers of most of the resources), there is constant conflict and dissent coming from various quarters: sometimes even from when the owners of different sections of capital (finance, manufacture, distribution, small capital etc) are in conflict with each other. As I've said, language is one of the main means by which both the control and the dissent can be expressed, and within language there is literature. And within that there is children's literature.
4.
As I've written elsewhere, children's literature is to my mind positioned not just within the arts but primarily as part of nurture and education. Nurture and education are both sites of conflict and dissent. There are prevailing or dominant views about how these should be conducted by carers and teachers, but there are many dissident views that contest these.
Children's literature is at the very heart of these conflicts, conflicts which ultimately owe their origins to a view about 'the status quo' (i.e. how things are run now) and how they do or might change. Broadly speaking, some aspects of children's literature have an outlook in favour of the status quo and are supporting 'social reproduction' - that is in support of how the economic system - and all or any the institutions dependent on it or supporting it - run. Others contest either or both some aspect of the economic system or the institutions dependent on it or supporting it. This may well not be described like that by writers, critics, readers, educationists or anyone. These conflicts may be described as being over gender, power, race and the like - that is NOT about the economic system. A good reason for that is that people aged between nought and 18 are mostly in the west not immediately or directly engaged in that economic system. They are in 'nurture' (the means by which they are being brought up) and education. So it may well look as if the contest is purely or only about say, gender, or 'authority' but the marxist argument is that these are in their own different ways all related to 'society', the 'economic system' or to 'capitalism' (in the present epoch).
In other words, the dominant ideas and dissenting ideas of children's literature are primarily those located within nurture and education but of course, everything written here is an argument to say that in turn all these ideas, dominant or dissenting, are themselves derived ultimately from the wider economic system - even if this are not immediately apparent.
Marxist criticism - and indeed the art or literature itself - is often engaged in making some of those connections apparent.
Sometimes the criticism talks of this as an expression of a class outlook, or that literature expresses history, or literature is itself or 'constitutes' part of the means by which social reproduction takes place. or constitutes the means by which one class comes to dominate another...and so on.
5.
Returning to the matter of language and how we use language, the key element here is that we should ideally avoid implying or stating baldly that language simply 'expresses' something - no matter how tempting it is to write or say that. Language is always a means by which humans interpret, whether that's through producing it or through hearing and reading it.
Bearing in mind that we are all positioned by the economic system (which we may sometimes end up calling 'society'), and bearing in mind that this economic system is always involved in conflict and change, how we write and how we read (i.e. the language we use and interpret) will depend on both the positions we're in and how we interpret these positions.
So, 'out there' is society. Writers and readers are in society in various positions and are interpreting those positions.
To be clear, we are never in one position. The complex nature of society will call on us at different times in our life to be in, or to express, or to interpret those positions in different ways. Sometimes these positions are in opposition or in contradiction with each other. Sometimes this is a conflict between what we say and what we do. Sometimes it's a conflict between our sympathies and our actual way of life. Sometimes it's a conflict between ideologies that we were or are now part of or on the receiving end of at different times in our life and so on. All this will affect what and how we write, what and how we read.
To take one example: Hans Christian Andersen's story 'The Tinder Box' tells the story (in my interpretation) of a poor ex-soldier who both yearns for an aspect of what the aristocratic ruling class owns ('the princess') while also yearning for the means to destroy it (throwing them up in the air and killing them). In the end he does both, and joins that class - marries the princess. In its own way, this expresses two co-existing but contradictory views that Andersen had. On the one hand as the son of an impoverished, republican mercenary soldier who had dissenting ideas about equality, Andersen was well acquainted with ideas that could and, in the view of his father, should overthrow the ancient regime of Europe, based as it was on the aristocracy and the dynastic system. On the other hand, he yearned for what that aristocracy owned and, once he became successful, spent many years of his life touring the royal and aristocratic households of Europe.
6.
Note: none of these ideas are original. They are expressed elsewhere in many classic texts by Marx himself, and many people who have taken these on and developed them under such headings as: ideology, base and superstructure, commodity fetishism, dialectics, contradiction, historical materialism, cultural materialism and so on. I haven't filled this article with quotes and citations because many readers, I know, find this sort of thing harder to read.
People interested in any of it may find it useful or interesting to read Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Tony Bennett, Alex Callinicos, who all in turn provide excellent bibliographies, or Marx himself, particularly in the collection of writings known as 'The German Ideology'. It's online.
There are collections of Marx's writings, conveniently extracted and put under headings by Tom Bottomore. I've found these great ways of getting into the writing as a whole.
Earlier writers of interest might be Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin.
There are some books of criticism of children's literature which express some or most of these ideas:
any of
Jack Zipes many books,
Angela Hubler (ed) 'Little Red Readings' (which has an excellent introduction along similar lines to this article here),
Jenny Plastow (ed) 'Owners of the Means of Instruction?' (including an introduction by me on how marxist criticism doesn't need to be in conflict with various other kinds of criticism) ,
Bob Leeson, 'Reading and Righting' which tells the history of children's literature from a broadly marxist perspective and, to date, has never been bettered.
The Lion and the Unicorn (Vol 17, No. 2) Theories of Class in Childrens Literature Paperback – 1993
As and when people contact me through Facebook or twitter, I can and will add more names and publications here.
A very, very useful overview with articles written by many of the major thinkers in the field is in:
'Marxist Literary Theory, a reader', Terry Eagleton, Drew Milne (editors) published by Blackwell, 1996.
Useful chapters:
Chapter 8 'Marxist Criticism'
Chapter 9 'New historicism and cultural materialism'
Chapter 10 'Postcolonial criticism'
(and many other chapters in the same book:
'Beginning Theory, an introduction to literary and cultural theory' by Peter Barry, Manchester University Press.
For people who have figured out that 'intertextuality' is not just a random matter of texts flying about between us but is 'socially and politically constructed' try:
'The Social Construction of Intertextuality in Classroom Reading and Writing Lessons' by David Bloome and Anne Egan-Robertson in
'Uses of Intertextuality in Classroom and Educational Research', Nora Shuart-Ellis, David Bloome (editors), IAP, 2004
Literature is language.
(Some books combine language and pictures. Films combine language and moving image. Musicals combine language and music. I'll leave all that to one side for the moment.)
Of course, literature is language. But this means that every time we use words like 'character' or 'alliteration' or 'drama' or 'metaphor' or 'chapter' or 'dialogue' - these are all uses of language.
All language originates with human beings. When we separate 'language' off from human behaviour for the purposes of discussing what it is, or for looking at in its different forms, we make it inert. So, though we say things like 'Drama can...' or 'The chapter says...', in reality, it can't. It's the human who uses language who is 'doing' something.
In that sense, language is a form of human behaviour.
Whenever we use language, we make decisions about who it's for. Sometimes this is quite conscious and we say or write something with a deliberate 'sense of audience'. Other times, we might be hardly aware of it. That's because our uses of language already have audiences 'implied' within it.
Audiences can be 'implied' for a variety of reasons:
1. because of the kinds of words we use, and the ways we 'stick the words together' - i.e. passages of text (compare a 'phonics reader', say, with a 'No Smoking' sign, with a flat pack assembly manual.)
2. because of the 'form' - a Shakespeare play, a birthday card, a football chant.
3. and, crucially, because of the total and specific context in which that use of language is produced and received, (spoken and heard, written and read). The sign 'Carry dogs' (which I saw yesterday) could mean that you must find a dog and carry it. (Terry Eagleton has a similar example!) Or it could mean, if you have a dog, you must carry it. Context of it being on an escalator at an underground station is that it means the second.
So, the first thing that listeners and readers do is they influence what the speaker and writer say and write. We may do that over time - people have been going to plays for thousands of years. The form of language we call 'the play' has evolved because of thousands of years of audiences influencing what and how plays are written. We may do it face to face. We may do it in all sorts of combinations of both the historical as well as the face to face.
The second thing that listeners and readers do is that we 'interpret' what is being said and written. We do not merely receive it, or are 'stimulated' by it, or even simply 'respond' to it. The human senses and mind are extraordinarily complex and we do not do ourselves any favours by simplifying it.
Interpretation involves a complex, interrelated set of processes to do with such things as perceiving, remembering, selecting, collating, sorting, ordering, reflecting on the new, reflecting on what we have already reflected on, revising, evaluating. Though I've said it involves perception and mind, it will also involve the body (e.g. laughter, squirming, dilation of the eyes, sweating, etc). Part of interpretation will also be responding to our own bodies as they respond.
Producing language and interpreting (speaking and listening, writing and reading) are social activities. Though we may appear to be, say, reading on our own, or writing on our own, all language is itself social. That's to say, embedded in language are the experiences and intentions of thousands of years of use. Every single word, every bit of how words are stuck together (grammar, and literary forms, how we construct conversations etc) is all social. It's all been made and re-made and being made again in the context of human interaction.
This is at the heart of the term 'intertextuality'. Any 'text' we create or interpret or come across is at a point in the history of all texts. It comes out of texts that precede it, and it becomes part of future texts in the eyes, ears and minds of those who hear it or read it. No part of the text is of itself new. It will in some way or another be related to previous texts. Nothing in our interpretations are themselves new as they will be made in part because of our previous encounters with texts, that is our 'repertoire' of texts that we have come across in our lives - for reasons that are 'social'.
This focuses us on interpretation. No matter how 'personal' interpretation appears to be, each part of my total interpretation is made of social interactions with previous texts and social interactions with other people and my own uses of language. There is no possible model of a totally lone human being, coming into the world, living isolated from all other human beings, and producing language alone.
If the producing and interpretation of language (including literature, of course) is social, this raises the question of how to understand 'the social'.
2.
One way is to think of ourselves as lottery balls in a lottery machine, bouncing around, bouncing into each other, unable to determine our fate, not really influencing each other very much. A good deal of everyday talk implies this view of ourselves. We are, supposedly, all 'individuals' doing what we as individuals have to do, or is being done to us; our work, our hopes, our wishes and desires, our tragedies are often treated and described as 'individual'.
Alternatives suggest that this isn't really possible. However and wherever we live, however and wherever we produce and interpret language, we are doing this socially, influencing each other, being influenced by each other.
Within a range of alternatives for how we do this, are attempts to 'clump' us into groups, sections of the population, identities, organisations, institutions, people with similar outlooks and behaviours, nations, 'races', regions, cultural types, classes, traditions, genders, children, adults, and so on.
Some of these descriptions are used as explanations for why and how we produce and interpret language in the way we do. Descriptions like 'British' or 'women's' or 'old people's' or 'children's' are sometimes used as 'sufficient' explanations for why this particular kind of writing was written, or why this particular response was made.
The marxist argument is primarily that these are not 'sufficient' explanations. They are not necessarily false or wrong, but not enough. That's because marxism looks at the 'social' (i.e. society) and says that society is organised mainly or mostly in a particular kind of way. Starting out from the prime needs that humans have: to eat, be protected from the elements and to reproduce, people are organised (or organise themselves) according to an 'economic system'. The shape or 'configuration' not only produces and distributes things. It also places us in particular positions within that economic system.
They system we live with at the moment is 'capitalism', but in the past people have lived with other systems such as 'hunter-gatherer', or feudalism.
'Capitalism' describes how things are made and distributed, how wealth is made. Marxists tend to use the word to mean more than that: that is, not only as an economic system but also how that economic system produces or determines the growth of such institutions as the nation state or the instruments and institutions OF that state, such as government, law, health care, nurture, education. The word is used to define a total way of being at a particular time or 'epoch'.
Starting from the word at the heart of 'capitalism', people with 'capital' (money, assets) employ people to work in order to make (or try to make) profits i.e. come out with more than they put in. Clearly, there are different kinds of capitalist and different sizes of capitalist.
It's convenient and important to think of the different kinds as putting capital 'to work' in different ways such as 'finance' (banking etc), financial services (insurance and the like), manufacture, distribution, rent (renting out property or plant). And again size is important - sometimes we're talking about capitalists with turnovers bigger and more important than the sums handled by a whole nation, other times we're talking about nothing bigger than a market-stall and people who work for the stall-holder on a Saturday.
The body of people who have no means of earning money other than through being employed are called by marxists either 'the working-class' or the 'proletariat'. This is not a value-judgement, or a description in itself of behaviour or culture. It's a description of nothing more or less than this matter of how such people earn a living. However, it's not just a matter of earning a living. It's their 'position in relation to production'. The capitalist is in one position, the worker is in another. The capitalist buys labour to make profits. The worker sells labour to earn the means by which to live.
The marxist argument is that this is a fundamental matter for how the whole of society works. That's because these two positions are in conflict with each other. The two sides may sometimes appear to have similar interests (to keep the business going, for example) but underlying that, there is a conflict over what the capitalist calls 'costs' and the workers call 'wages' or 'salaries'. It is in the interest of the capitalist to keep costs down. It is in the interests of the worker to get as good a price (wages) for the job as is possible. When marxists or anyone else talks of 'class struggle' or 'class conflict' that's at heart what is being talked about, though the given dispute might be about hours worked or conditions of work too. The point is, though, that 'class struggle' is in reality, a struggle between classes not just one class doing the struggling.
Aside from people using capital and people employed by owners of capital, there are others in society who survive by any of the following: selling what they do on a fee by fee basis - sometimes enormous fees, sometimes nothing more than cash 'under the counter' for small jobs. There are also people who work but who are unpaid by an employer - homeworkers, carers. There are people who are retired who live off pensions. There are people who receive some kind of state benefit and/or charity whilst not being employed for money. There are people who are too young to work full-time because they are either in full-time education or too young even for that (under fives) or in full-time education thanks to the ability to survive whilst doing it (students).
Again, as well as capitalists coming in different sizes and kinds, within those who earn money through wages, there are a variety of other positions: some earn enormous wages in comparison to others and as a result use some of that money to buy property and rent it out, or to buy shares and make money through dividends. This makes them have two positions, wage-earners and capitalists. Capitalism cannot survive through all workers being of equal status, so it creates managers and supervisors who may have actual power on a day to day basis over other wage-earners. For that reason and/or for the reason that they earn enough money to earn yet more through their capital, they are effectively in a different position in relation to people earning only through their wages.
On the other hand, at the other end of the scale, some may only have wages but these may not be enough to survive and therefore need other means to supplement what they do through (depending on which nation state) charity, or state benefits and so on.
3.
As a set of descriptions they key element missing from all this is 'change'. If the core element going on this description is a 'struggle' or 'conflict' over prices (this sometimes seems to be about other things such as tax, rich and poor, benefits, state provision of services and so on), the marxist argument is that this conflict always leads to change.
And change can happen to capital, to 'labour' and to the various elements in between that I've described as having other means of earning a living or are in a special supervisory or managerial position, or indeed find themselves in several positions.
So, all this describes the 'economic system' but we don't just live under that heading. We live in relation to the nation, the state, the law, religion, education, nurture, and social services provision, the mass media and the arts. And, returning to language, throughout all this we are all using language to express, reflect, describe our positions, our views, our intentions, our demands, commands, desires.
The marxist argument is that these all have a role to play in how this economic system runs, how the class conflict is managed, how the next generation is produced ('social reproduction'), how wars and peace are organised. The argument goes on to say that the main or 'prevailing' view expressed through these institutions of nation, state, law, the arts, nurture, education and the rest is an outlook that is more or less the same as that of the big capitalists or the 'ruling class', the group of people who own and control most of the 'means of production', that is the assets that enable production to take place.
Within these institutions, though, there is nearly always dissent, contest and argument.
The origins of that dissent are twofold: on the one hand there is the permanent conflict over price (and conditions), the other is that there is what is sometimes called a 'contradiction'. The main contradiction here is that on the one hand a capitalist society positions everyone in relation to objects, things and processes such that it can all be made private through the medium of money. You can buy a shirt, a car, a painting, or indeed, ways of affecting your body shape or mind. 'Everything has its price', which is another way of saying, if I have money, I can make anything private property. However, and in 'contradiction' to that, in order to produce all these private things, the system brings people together in a collective, co-operative way in places of work and also in some of the institutions of e.g. education or health. Even as we find ourselves pricing and privatising our consumption of goods and services, we may also find ourselves brought together in production, sometimes in the use of something like education, and when there is conflict over price, conditions and the like. we may find old or new collective behaviours and associations (e.g. trade unions) to protect our interests and improve our chances of doing better.
So, though the situation as I've described it, has resources and power largely clumped together on one side of the equation (the owners and controllers of most of the resources), there is constant conflict and dissent coming from various quarters: sometimes even from when the owners of different sections of capital (finance, manufacture, distribution, small capital etc) are in conflict with each other. As I've said, language is one of the main means by which both the control and the dissent can be expressed, and within language there is literature. And within that there is children's literature.
4.
As I've written elsewhere, children's literature is to my mind positioned not just within the arts but primarily as part of nurture and education. Nurture and education are both sites of conflict and dissent. There are prevailing or dominant views about how these should be conducted by carers and teachers, but there are many dissident views that contest these.
Children's literature is at the very heart of these conflicts, conflicts which ultimately owe their origins to a view about 'the status quo' (i.e. how things are run now) and how they do or might change. Broadly speaking, some aspects of children's literature have an outlook in favour of the status quo and are supporting 'social reproduction' - that is in support of how the economic system - and all or any the institutions dependent on it or supporting it - run. Others contest either or both some aspect of the economic system or the institutions dependent on it or supporting it. This may well not be described like that by writers, critics, readers, educationists or anyone. These conflicts may be described as being over gender, power, race and the like - that is NOT about the economic system. A good reason for that is that people aged between nought and 18 are mostly in the west not immediately or directly engaged in that economic system. They are in 'nurture' (the means by which they are being brought up) and education. So it may well look as if the contest is purely or only about say, gender, or 'authority' but the marxist argument is that these are in their own different ways all related to 'society', the 'economic system' or to 'capitalism' (in the present epoch).
In other words, the dominant ideas and dissenting ideas of children's literature are primarily those located within nurture and education but of course, everything written here is an argument to say that in turn all these ideas, dominant or dissenting, are themselves derived ultimately from the wider economic system - even if this are not immediately apparent.
Marxist criticism - and indeed the art or literature itself - is often engaged in making some of those connections apparent.
Sometimes the criticism talks of this as an expression of a class outlook, or that literature expresses history, or literature is itself or 'constitutes' part of the means by which social reproduction takes place. or constitutes the means by which one class comes to dominate another...and so on.
5.
Returning to the matter of language and how we use language, the key element here is that we should ideally avoid implying or stating baldly that language simply 'expresses' something - no matter how tempting it is to write or say that. Language is always a means by which humans interpret, whether that's through producing it or through hearing and reading it.
Bearing in mind that we are all positioned by the economic system (which we may sometimes end up calling 'society'), and bearing in mind that this economic system is always involved in conflict and change, how we write and how we read (i.e. the language we use and interpret) will depend on both the positions we're in and how we interpret these positions.
So, 'out there' is society. Writers and readers are in society in various positions and are interpreting those positions.
To be clear, we are never in one position. The complex nature of society will call on us at different times in our life to be in, or to express, or to interpret those positions in different ways. Sometimes these positions are in opposition or in contradiction with each other. Sometimes this is a conflict between what we say and what we do. Sometimes it's a conflict between our sympathies and our actual way of life. Sometimes it's a conflict between ideologies that we were or are now part of or on the receiving end of at different times in our life and so on. All this will affect what and how we write, what and how we read.
To take one example: Hans Christian Andersen's story 'The Tinder Box' tells the story (in my interpretation) of a poor ex-soldier who both yearns for an aspect of what the aristocratic ruling class owns ('the princess') while also yearning for the means to destroy it (throwing them up in the air and killing them). In the end he does both, and joins that class - marries the princess. In its own way, this expresses two co-existing but contradictory views that Andersen had. On the one hand as the son of an impoverished, republican mercenary soldier who had dissenting ideas about equality, Andersen was well acquainted with ideas that could and, in the view of his father, should overthrow the ancient regime of Europe, based as it was on the aristocracy and the dynastic system. On the other hand, he yearned for what that aristocracy owned and, once he became successful, spent many years of his life touring the royal and aristocratic households of Europe.
6.
Note: none of these ideas are original. They are expressed elsewhere in many classic texts by Marx himself, and many people who have taken these on and developed them under such headings as: ideology, base and superstructure, commodity fetishism, dialectics, contradiction, historical materialism, cultural materialism and so on. I haven't filled this article with quotes and citations because many readers, I know, find this sort of thing harder to read.
People interested in any of it may find it useful or interesting to read Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Tony Bennett, Alex Callinicos, who all in turn provide excellent bibliographies, or Marx himself, particularly in the collection of writings known as 'The German Ideology'. It's online.
There are collections of Marx's writings, conveniently extracted and put under headings by Tom Bottomore. I've found these great ways of getting into the writing as a whole.
Earlier writers of interest might be Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin.
There are some books of criticism of children's literature which express some or most of these ideas:
any of
Jack Zipes many books,
Angela Hubler (ed) 'Little Red Readings' (which has an excellent introduction along similar lines to this article here),
Jenny Plastow (ed) 'Owners of the Means of Instruction?' (including an introduction by me on how marxist criticism doesn't need to be in conflict with various other kinds of criticism) ,
Bob Leeson, 'Reading and Righting' which tells the history of children's literature from a broadly marxist perspective and, to date, has never been bettered.
The Lion and the Unicorn (Vol 17, No. 2) Theories of Class in Childrens Literature Paperback – 1993
As and when people contact me through Facebook or twitter, I can and will add more names and publications here.
A very, very useful overview with articles written by many of the major thinkers in the field is in:
'Marxist Literary Theory, a reader', Terry Eagleton, Drew Milne (editors) published by Blackwell, 1996.
Useful chapters:
Chapter 8 'Marxist Criticism'
Chapter 9 'New historicism and cultural materialism'
Chapter 10 'Postcolonial criticism'
(and many other chapters in the same book:
'Beginning Theory, an introduction to literary and cultural theory' by Peter Barry, Manchester University Press.
For people who have figured out that 'intertextuality' is not just a random matter of texts flying about between us but is 'socially and politically constructed' try:
'The Social Construction of Intertextuality in Classroom Reading and Writing Lessons' by David Bloome and Anne Egan-Robertson in
'Uses of Intertextuality in Classroom and Educational Research', Nora Shuart-Ellis, David Bloome (editors), IAP, 2004
Sunday, 10 January 2016
Cameron quoting Shakespeare
It's great that Cameron is quoting Shakespeare. It reminds me that one of the most subversive things that Shakespeare does is put fine words into the mouths of unpleasant people. Here's the 'usurper' Henry IV, who has used people to help him seize the throne and kill the previous king:
"How now, my Lord of Worcester? 'Tis not well
That you and I should meet upon such terms
As now we meet. You have deceived our trust
And made us doff our easy robes of peace
To crush our old limbs in ungentle steel."
Dear oh dear, poor Henry - having to face the very same kind of rebellion (barons rising up against the king) as he organised himself. Note the pompous 'deceived our trust' - which is precisely what he himself did.
"How now, my Lord of Worcester? 'Tis not well
That you and I should meet upon such terms
As now we meet. You have deceived our trust
And made us doff our easy robes of peace
To crush our old limbs in ungentle steel."
Dear oh dear, poor Henry - having to face the very same kind of rebellion (barons rising up against the king) as he organised himself. Note the pompous 'deceived our trust' - which is precisely what he himself did.
"I'm hating being on television..." Unknown MP resigns from committee that no one's heard of.
You won't know me, but I am a member of a parliamentary Labour sub-committee that you've never heard of and it gives me enormous pain to say that I'm going to have to resign. I'm afraid, here I am on television and if there's one thing I really didn't want to do, it's come on television. I'm hating being on television. I really am. Later, "The Westminster Bubble' show is going to be covering this, which I think is an excellent thing because this matter of me being unknown and a member of a committee you haven't heard of really needs to be aired. It's a major news item and shows just how deeply divided the Corbynistas have made our beloved Labour Party. In fact, the people who run the 'The Westminster Bubble' are good honest people who have no vested in interest in saying that the Labour Party is deeply divided and the group I belong to, - called 'Suspect' - have no vested interest or ulterior motive in talking about a divided Labour Party. The whole thing makes me very sad. Could I just say hello to my mother?
Saturday, 9 January 2016
'Naming of parts' approach to grammar and testing children
I think the reason why the 'naming of parts' approach to 'grammar' hinders an interest in grammar and language is that it presents a false picture of how grammar works.
I believe that humans invented grammar as a branch of human behaviour. If we are to name parts of grammar it is a mistake to treat grammar as if it is a sealed system on the 'communications' model.
'Determiner' is a classic case of this type of terminology. It implies that the sole function and purpose of the word in question is to 'determine' something that comes after it. That is 'sealed system' thinking.
In fact, to take 'my' as an example, in say, 'My table is red', the function within language at that moment is not simply to 'determine' something coming after it. It is to indicate possession (thus the old 'possessive' word at least has the merit of saying why we have the word in the language.) However, it is also doing something 'cohesively' i.e. in helping words stick together: it is referring to whoever is the 'me' who may e.g. have appeared earlier in the text or, in the case of a conversation, may be present as 'me' outside of the text in 'real life': 'my' will nearly always refer to these 'me's prior, or exterior to that phrase.
That's why humans invented this bit of grammar.
I would suggest that most of the 'sealed system' grammar is deadly boring to most people precisely because it is abstracted from everything that is interesting about language! Of course, some people are fascinated by sealed systems of anything. There is a fascination in trying to deduce a code from something that is not saying 'this is my code'. It feels like insider knowledge, only known to the priesthood.
Even better, you can then use it to test children and prove that some are cleverer than others or work harder than others and you can entrap them in useless and ambiguous tests in which the terminology of the sealed system is itself all over the place.
I believe that humans invented grammar as a branch of human behaviour. If we are to name parts of grammar it is a mistake to treat grammar as if it is a sealed system on the 'communications' model.
'Determiner' is a classic case of this type of terminology. It implies that the sole function and purpose of the word in question is to 'determine' something that comes after it. That is 'sealed system' thinking.
In fact, to take 'my' as an example, in say, 'My table is red', the function within language at that moment is not simply to 'determine' something coming after it. It is to indicate possession (thus the old 'possessive' word at least has the merit of saying why we have the word in the language.) However, it is also doing something 'cohesively' i.e. in helping words stick together: it is referring to whoever is the 'me' who may e.g. have appeared earlier in the text or, in the case of a conversation, may be present as 'me' outside of the text in 'real life': 'my' will nearly always refer to these 'me's prior, or exterior to that phrase.
That's why humans invented this bit of grammar.
I would suggest that most of the 'sealed system' grammar is deadly boring to most people precisely because it is abstracted from everything that is interesting about language! Of course, some people are fascinated by sealed systems of anything. There is a fascination in trying to deduce a code from something that is not saying 'this is my code'. It feels like insider knowledge, only known to the priesthood.
Even better, you can then use it to test children and prove that some are cleverer than others or work harder than others and you can entrap them in useless and ambiguous tests in which the terminology of the sealed system is itself all over the place.
My position as head of the BBC's flagship politics programme...
My position as head of the BBC's flagship politics programme 'The Westminster Bubble' has come into question. I am proud of my involvement in grassroots politics right from when I was a young man. I and my sister were members of 'Tory Tyros' - an activist youth organisation promoting Tory values. At university, I was member of a Tory student group called 'Conservatives Serve' and following that I am very proud to have served under the then Minister for British Values Sir Brampton Bampton KCG as his private secretary, and election agent.
As the now executive producer on 'The Westminster Bubble' I fail to see why anyone would question my impartiality, particularly in relation to the recent allegations concerning the 'tailor' incident in which we appeared to entrap Jeremy Corbyn into taking the offer of a free suit from one of our intrepid reporters, Michael Rosen.
As I've made clear, this was not in breach of any BBC guidelines. Corbyn clearly needs a new suit and if he appeared to admit that on air and accept the offer, that's a matter for him and his terrorist colleagues to discuss.
My sister is the present Minister for Times Tables. Long may she and they prosper.
How I entrapped Corbyn
You may have seen a blog which I inadvertently wrote and put up on the BBC website. It concerned an incident in which I posed as a tailor and approached Jeremy Corbyn with the offer of a suit. Unbeknownst to Corbyn, I was carrying a camera on my person and the whole incident was filmed. I said to Corbyn that I was a fan of his but felt that his appeal could be broadened if he wore a suit. Corbyn said that I should put it in writing but I pressed him and said that I just wanted to show him my catalogue and that I could offer him a very good deal. He laughed, said that he was glad of my support and took the little pack of samples. I called after him, 'So it's a deal?' He smiled. I said, 'Are you glad I support you?' He said, 'Yes.'
Back in the cutting room, we cut this together as, 'So it's a deal?' 'Yes.' and viewers could see him taking the pack of samples, and we put this out on our politics comedy show, 'The Westminster Bubble' and it's brilliant because in PMQ, Cameron made a joke about Corbyn's suit. Fantastic.
Anyway, I pulled down this blog, because it might give the impression that there was some kind of entrapment going on, or that we creating news rather than reporting it. Some Corbynistas and their hangers-on have objected to the item but I'm glad to say that the BBC has defended our right to do it. After all, Corbyn needs a suit and he didn't say that he didn't want a suit.
Looking good for 'The Westminster Bubble'. Don't forget to keep watching!
Back in the cutting room, we cut this together as, 'So it's a deal?' 'Yes.' and viewers could see him taking the pack of samples, and we put this out on our politics comedy show, 'The Westminster Bubble' and it's brilliant because in PMQ, Cameron made a joke about Corbyn's suit. Fantastic.
Anyway, I pulled down this blog, because it might give the impression that there was some kind of entrapment going on, or that we creating news rather than reporting it. Some Corbynistas and their hangers-on have objected to the item but I'm glad to say that the BBC has defended our right to do it. After all, Corbyn needs a suit and he didn't say that he didn't want a suit.
Looking good for 'The Westminster Bubble'. Don't forget to keep watching!
We all need Doctors. What we don't need are Junior Doctors.
We all need doctors. The thing is, what we don't need are Junior Doctors. Doctors are brilliant, hard-working, brave, overworked people who save lives. Junior Doctors are greedy, deluded and destructive people, who have let themselves become controlled by a small group of Trotskyites who jeopardise the security of the country. I love Doctors. I once went to see a Doctor. So did my wife. And my children. They made us better. That's the kind of work that Doctors do. I once saw a Junior Doctor in a car park outside a hospital. Why wasn't she in the hospital? That's what you get with Junior Doctors. One moment they're in the hospital, the next they're in the Car Park. Small wonder we need to close Accident and Emergency departments. I think we need the NHS 24/7. The Junior Doctors don't. They would rather be in the Car Park. I've always loved and admired doctors. My wife too. I've got a bad foot.
I am a backbench Labour MP and I'm against Corbyn and suddenly everyone wants to interview me...
I am a backbench Labour MP. You may once have seen me on a TV programme about garden paths and why garden paths aren't the way they used to be. I hope so. This week I've been on the TV 14 times, on the radio 13 and a half times, I've been interviewed in the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, Metro, and our local paper, the Wiffly Mercury. My point is this: I am not in favour of Jeremy Corbyn. What I'm saying is that I'm not in favour of Jeremy Corbyn. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying it loud and clear. Very loud and very clear. I am a backbench Labour MP. I think we need to go back to when Labour was electable. When Labour was electable we transformed this country from being nasty into one that was nice. We brought the nation together and stood up against tyrants. We need to go back to that and not give in. Stand up and don't give in. That's my firm belief. I am a happily married man with children. Most of the time. I am a backbench Labour MP. Did you see the programme about garden paths? They aren't the way they used to be, are they?
Friday, 8 January 2016
Debate at Guardian about BBC and Stephen Doughty's resignation
5455
So that people know - and this report doesn't mention it - the BBC requires all of us involved in making programmes to sign up to the Trust Agenda, as it's known. This came in the wake of the scandals over the TV programme about the Queen appearing to walk out in an interview (?) and Alan Yentob showing what looked like a face to face interview but wasn't.
So, we were all given (well, I was) a 40 minute talking to, face to face, one on one, on what was the new trust agenda. We had to win back the trust of the viewer/listener by behaving in certain ways.
I don't remember the exact details but it was made clear to each of us that we mustn't ever appear to be interviewing or talking to someone if we weren't, we mustn't ever 'create' situations that are false or untrue and pass them off as untrue, we mustn't do anything to bring the BBC into disrepute (as Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand had apparently done).
This particular situation with the resignation can be dressed up as 'news' as much as the BBC likes, but there is no question that the appropriate way for someone to resign is with his or her party. That's where you start. Clearly, that's his choice rather than the BBC's, though these matters are always mutual, and if this resigner is so full of himself and so excited that he's got his moment in the sun, there are of course always always always willing media people ready to put the glow on this moment. (As an aside, what a cock if for a second he thinks that the media going to do him or his views any favours as and when he comes to stand in the election, when, as usual, the media will crawl all over Labour coming up with stories about the dreadful mishandling of bacon sandwiches and unsuitable wearing of jumpers. He, like the rest, will be toast. Media love-ins last as long as the dagger he's stuck in Corbyn's back.)
Meanwhile, back with the beeb, there is no question in my mind that a situation has been constructed so that the BBC can have some sort of scoop. He's 'their' resignation. I would be very interested to hear from other broadcasters (in front of behind the microphone) who think that this is appropriate or not. To my mind, I think it's completely inappropriate. It's halfway down the slippery slope of constructing news which journalists have been accused of e.g. handing rioters a stone and filming it.
Reply
Report
That's certainly how it looks, and what the blog post appears to suggest. As you add further up, it's probably not really a question of balance. But if we take the blog post at face value it appears to be a question of ethics.I'm also concerned that they don't seem to think it's problematic to do this right before PMQs. The focus was entirely on the strength of the scoop and there doesn't appear to have been any thought given to the advantage it would hand the PM moments later. That's a problem. Seems to me that it's one thing to break stories that do political damage, another to construct a stunt that disadvantages someone at the despatch box.
If you think that at this very moment there is some serious thinking and talking NOT going on in the BBC about whether this was appropriate or not, think again. Why do you think the post on the BBC's site taking down?As for suggesting that I would be more or less bothered if it was another news outlet, why would you think that?! I'm merely pointing out the guidelines under which I work. I don't think I would be able in my area of work be part of a situation in which we became the news. The point is the BBC hates being the news. This was not merely 'reporting' or merely 'commenting on' or merely 'being there when it happened'. They provided the space and means for it to happen. That is not how the BBC is supposed to do things. They will be worried that they might have brought the BBC into disrepute with this, even if you're not. They will almost certainly get away with it. No one will be censured. People like me will appear to be bad losers (or something) and the slow, slow, drip feed of people (out there) will continue to think that what the media do in relation to politics is a mix of dull, tedious and 'they're all in it together'.
I have always respected you...you know me as well I sit in the other House...but...it seems to me that your saying that the BBC shouldnt scoop?....this was an open secret I posted here about it at 8 on Tuesday...it was rife in PH and in the MarquisSo if it's an open secret is Corbyns Comms Director to be taken to task?
It seems Laura had confirmation of this resignation full 2 hours before he 'announced' it , live on TV and a few minutes before PMQs therefor wrong footing Corbyn's team and giving something for the Tories to play with . So why didn't Laura and the BBC report this fact earlier knowing full well the delay would cause maximum damage to the Labour leadership team ? And if the BBC are so cavalier in their attitude to maintain 'balance' , why should we continue to fund it ?
I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about.People decide things all the time, and clever journalists persuade them to make the announcement exclusively to them. This is what the Daily Politics did. You may not like the fact that Corbyn was embarrassed by it, but there was nothing anti-Corbyn here, just the usual desire for a journalist to make as big a splash as possible. The BBC would do the same to any party, given the chance.What you appear to be requesting is for the BBC to stop being a news organisation, and instead structure its news as it structures its entertainment programmes, and somehow prep people before they make an announcement of the organisation's values. That would be an absolutely dreadful dreadful idea. MPs are grown-ups, and can look after themselves.IMO, you'd be better off asking Corbyn why he so consistently looks like a wally, than criticising the people who point it out.
I don't know if I know you.The BBC can scoop as much as it wants. The question is whether it's the job of the BBC to hold someone's coat while they're having a fight. As I say, if you think this is going down well in the corridors of the BBC, think again. We were all asked to sign up to something that this is, if nothing else, right on the very edge of the appropriate/inappropriate border. If you think the BBC likes even being on the edge of such things, not so - no matter how many press releases they put out defending the action.Whether or not you respect me is by the by.
"news organisations' can indeed do what they want - and do, the hacking saga being the case in point. The BBC is governed by a charter, and - to repeat - everyone who works for it has to sign up to this trust agenda. As far as I know, (correct me if I'm wrong) other news organisations don't have anything as elaborate. This was because of what happened with several BBC 'stories' before when it appeared as if the BBC was 'constructing' the news or constructing stories rather than reporting them.As I've said, I think this is on the border of 'appropriate/inappropriate' and the BBC hates even being there. They will of course say it was fine. Meanwhile, they have to deal with the fact that a) yes it has brought the organisation into disrepute with large number of people (us) (who can of course go blow as far as some people are concerned) and b) - and this is the real crisis - the mainstream media of all kinds - newspapers. radio, TV (in the news and current affairs areas) are losing audiences on a massive scale. One reason is because people like my grown-up children are scornful of it all as being a massive cooked-up, dull shouting match that has very little to do with their lives.
I've worked for the BBC quite a lot over the years and have no idea what this trust agenda you signed is. It certainly sounds quite BBC to waste everyone's time with a pointless piece of bureaucracy, but I can't imagine why you're making so much of it. Those things are best ignored, in my opinion. You're right, of course, that the BBC probably is uncomfortable right now. They hate being criticised, and get all in a tizz. That isn't something to be happy about, however. Journalism should be on the edge all the time. 'Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations,' as quite a famous leftist writer once said.It may have brought the organisation into disrepute for you, but for me, it made them look like a proper news organisation and I was delighted. I wish they'd do things like this again, again and again, and stop worrying about offending precious folks who can't bear to see Salmond, Farage, Corbyn or whoever called out for being the wallies they are.As for how this creates some kind of media crisis, I have no idea what you're talking about. Everyone would have forgotten all about it if twitter hadn't got all steamed up.
The reporter in this case appears on that programme at that time every week.
She had a good story which the BBC could run with when she was on the programme.
Doughty only resigned shortly before he went on the programme and agreed to publicly announce it when he went on the programme.
How Doughty chooses to resign is entirely a matter for him and he was entirely free to publicise his resignation via any other means.
Part of the BBC's job is to attract viewers and listeners and the reporter was doing her job.
If Doughty had told her a month ago he was going to resign and they'd somehow saved it up for the first PMQs of the year it would be questionable.
But he told hour a couple of hours before the programme and hadn't at that point told Corbyn. I would expect the reporter quite possibly agreed not to run the story at that point.
There's an increasing danger some people are seeking to undermine the media because they can't accept the near daily messes created by Labour's leadership.
The problem is with the message, not the messenger.
the mainstream media of all kinds - newspapers. radio, TV (in the news and current affairs areas) are losing audiences on a massive scale. One reason is because people like my grown-up children are scornful of it all as being a massive cooked-up, dull shouting match that has very little to do with their lives.Thanks for articulating the nub of it so well. This thing is a storm in a Westminster teacup, of course, for the usual Britpol wonks to get excited about, but the issue is much wider. I long since gave up listening to anything said by the awful Kuenssberg, or her predecessors, or indeed any of the pap the BBC News churns out, because it bears absolutely no relation to anything which is going on out here in the real world. None. Even the little coverage I saw of the floods struck me as petrified, desperate to show "plucky" communities fighting back to normal asap, rather than the full scale of the issue we're facing. No analysis, no connections to people's lives. And the net result is, no one I know, old or young, watches it or trusts it. This is just another nail in the coffin.I sometimes think the BBC news wonks don't even care if it's publically owned any more. They probably think the game's up, and are salivating at the thought that when it gets sold off, they'll get the franchise and make a ton of cash. But good public broadcasting this is not.
I don't think I would be able in my area of work be part of a situation in which we became the news. The point is the BBC hates being the news. This was not merely 'reporting' or merely 'commenting on' or merely 'being there when it happened'. They provided the space and means for it to happen. That is not how the BBC is supposed to do things.
That is exactly the point. Thats how Kuennsberg has abused her priveliged position. But its not the first time. Other BBC colleagues, with her, and Stratton manufactured the 'my finger will not go on the nuke button' right at the end of Corbyns first party conference as leader, in order to create a story of disarray at the end of a conference which had gone reasonably well. Kueensberg ambushed shadow cab members as they trundled through the hotel corridoors, and got them to condemn the statement, Stratton gleefully rerported on 'disarry' on twitter they were congratulated by Nick Robinson for engineering this (my words) and if I call correctly Michael Crick also tweeted that he wished he'd done it...
The focus was entirely on the strength of the scoop and there doesn't appear to have been any thought given to the advantage it would hand the PM moments later.What concerns me, and makes this situation unacceptable, is that the deleted blog post makes it clear that thought very much WAS given to handing the PM that advantage.
Well, I really admire your chutzpah...though it's interesting that you're posting here anonymously. Feel free to knock BBC 'bureaucracy' other than it came about because of two pieces of crass deception - Queen doc, and Yentob's 'noddies'. No BBC execs too the hit for those, nor indeed for allowing Ross and Brand to chat away in the small hours of the morning without their programme being 'signed off' properly. Indeed, I forgot to add that that was part of the 'trust agenda' document that was read to me. Henceforth all programmes would have to fit a 'compliance' arrangement and be signed off by management of that programme. If you've never come across this, then I would suggest you're not talking to the right people or the right people are not talking to you. Every word you say or edit or film on the BBC has to be 'compliant'. Perhaps you hadn't noticed.The key thing about this episode is that a) it was compliant and b) the bloke who put up and then deleted his post about how they ensured they got Stephen D in the studio was also 'compliant'. So was it compliant before he posted it or after he had deleted it?No one will ask this question - partly because a lot of people - including you, have no idea what I'm talking about. And even if I am talking about it, I am wrong.Rock on.
I'm not sure why you're pursuing this one. Do you think I've met these MPs? When? How? I hardly ever meet MPs. The last time I did, I was asked to give evidence at the Education committee, sub-committee on Holocaust education and all I got was rudeness, and aggression from Ian Austin MP.
