Here's another example of who Labour is purging

"My daughter Rachel has just been expelled from the Labour Party. She can't apply to rejoin for five years. She is a full member of the Labour Party. She has never been a member of any other party.
She retweeted two tweets from the Green Party:
*one saying the Greens supported the striking teachers in the recent NUT strike. Rachel was on strike.
*the other was the funny video with the kids acting as Tory ministers.

This purge is beyond ridiculous."

from Alan Gibbons, writer, campaigner (also purged).

We weren't 'taught' to despise those who failed, we imbibed it through hint, gesture and rumour

Every day at primary school we were told who would pass and fail, we were 'placed' in class according to our positions in the tests, 

we were told that the 'other' class would all fail, 

we developed a sub-culture that feared local famous kids we knew as 'dangerous' (on no basis whatsoever), 

we knew that many families had a reward/no reward system (usually a bike) for kids who passed/failed, 

and a hundred other signs and gestures and attitudes and rumours. 

All I have to ask myself is how those of us who passed would typify those who would fail, and a put-on cockney voice comes to mind, and a supposedly 'thick' or 'dumb' way of thinking. 

Ironically for me, at precisely that moment (1957) my dad was teaching dockers' children in Walworth Comprehensive saying how brilliant they were at performing 'Antony and Cleopatra'!!!

I was 'taught' to despise or fear those who fail - education the grammar school way.

Those of us who went to grammar school were taught (even if we didn't necessarily accept it) to fear or despise those who failed. This also had an effect of despising or fearing the part of yourself that failed or might fail. These feelings and thoughts can last for the whole of your life. They are what Raymond Williams called 'structures of feeling' and can be as much part of what we usually call politics or history as The 1832 Reform Bill. 

There were no mechanisms within the system that I went through to pay even token respect to the idea that the human race is made up of people with different kinds of abilities, or even that, every person has a range of abilities and capabilities, or that these can change over time. 

It was all very binary - 

success/fail; 

heads people/hands people; 

good/bad. 

All very handy for the system. 

Not good for people.

Roger McGough said it: no streaming in cemeteries - or grammar schools

Streemin

Im in the bottom streme
which meens Im not brigth
Don’t like reedin
Cant hardly ryt

but all these divishns
arnt reely fair
look at the cemetery
no streemin there

How people are being eliminated from voting for Corbyn. True.

This is a true post and not one of my ironic monologues! It comes from someone - NOT ME - who posted this on my Facebook account.

REPEAT: THIS IS NOT A STORY ABOUT ME OR BY ME. IT'S BEEN WRITTEN BY ADRIAN VOCE.

ADRIAN VOCE WRITES:
""Yesterday I voted in the Labour leadership contest. Two hours later I received a letter from Iain McNicol, the party’s General Secretary, saying ‘It has been brought to our attention with supporting evidence that you have publicly shown support for the Conservative party, including on 22 April 2015’.


That threw me. Anyone who knows me, or who has read much of what I’ve published, will know how unlikely it is.


I trawled by Twitter account and found that on the date in question, 22 April 2015, I had re-tweeted David Cameron’s comment about something that Alex Salmond had said, dripping with irony, about his supposed influence on the Labour Party. Salmond’s comments were clearly a joke and I challenged Cameron for trying to represent them as a serious point. I’ve screenshot the tweets below.


I’m assuming this is the alleged offence and find it quite depressing that even this level of petty, blatant gerrymandering, which must cost them a fortune in staff time, is so shockingly incompetent as to not understand the nature of what they were digging up as ‘evidence’.
But even if my tweet had been in support of the Tories, I JOINED THE PARTY FIVE MONTHS AFTER THAT DATE. Does Labour not want to attract people from other parties? I think they need to look again at the Math. Quentin Davies, who defected from the Tories to Labour as an MP, was made a life peer for his troubles. I’m more likely to have once supported Man United than I am to have ever supported the Tories (I’m Liverpool: it’s a tribal thing), and I’ve been thrown out on my ear.


Anyway, the letter goes on (and on): ‘... the Labour Party's rules state: ‘A member of the party who joins and/or supports a political organisation other than Labour … shall automatically be ineligible to be or remain a party member… You are therefore ineligible to remain a member of the Labour Party. If you have received a ballot and cast a vote, it will not be counted.


‘Under … party rules you may apply for re-admission but this must be made directly to the National Executive Committee … Such applications shall not normally be considered by the NEC until a minimum of five years has elapsed...’


My Granddad was a shop steward at Camell Laird the shipbuilders. My Mum was named after Ramsey MacDonald’s daughter. My Dad was a social worker and a lifelong socialist. I’ve voted Labour all my life. Shit, they even gave me a gong for some work that I did with them when they were last in government.


I can’t see them being in government again for a long time, but that wouldn’t stop me supporting them. This will though. What just happened seems to me to be not only undemocratic but also anti-democratic. A political party that manipulates and subverts its own electoral process like this cannot claim to stand for fairness. Labour has seriously lost the plot. Whoever wins this contest, it is tearing itself apart. I doubt that I will ever vote for them again."

"Here at the DfE we're working on tests for children to get into the grammar school..."

'Here at the DfE we're working on the test that children will do to get into the 'New' grammar schools. We have been told that a) a single one-off test is not a good way of getting disadvantaged children into high attainment schools because better off parents find a way of 'gaming' the test. b) creating selective schools will depress standards in nearby non-selective schools.

So, the ideas we're working on are:
1) secret tests, where no one - apart from us - knows that the child is being tested. We just creep up on them, and administer a test. We're told there might be ethical problems with that.
2) Secret grammar schools. No one knows that we have created a selective school. Pupils are just directed towards them, and so the non-selective schools don't know that their intake has been 'top-sliced'.
3) We open digital files on all children and teachers at primary schools have to enter the children's weekly test data on files that we hold at the DfE. Part of the information here is parental income. We draw up a definition of disadvantage in relation to this, and monitor the data coming in. If the data is sufficiently promising over 5 or so years of primary school and there is the right 'disadvantage profile' we approach the child's parents and suggest there is a place for them at the 'New' local grammar. The formal approach should also include warnings about how that child's chances of achieving anything will be severely limited by going to a non-selective school. This last might be tricky in that the staff at that non-selective school might object.


Anyway, that's what we're working on at the moment. Thank you.'

There is going to be no meritocracy anywhere near you.

Greening and May are going to give us a 'meritocracy'. Oh please.

For there to be a meritocracy under capitalism, you would have to abolish any mechanism by which wealth can be passed on from generation to generation (that ain't going to happen), any mechanism by which anyone can avoid tax of any kind (that ain't going to happen), abolish all forms of private education (that ain't going to happen). All three of these mechanisms are in place precisely in order to avoid us having a meritocracy. Tinkering around with grammar schools (or not) isn't going to affect that.