We have to be proud of our country? Now?

Just put up on Facebook:

Ah, on cue: as the economy takes a dive, the government wheek out the old trusty wagon of patriotism: we'll make children 'proud of their country'. Really? The governing classes can't even decide what is 'this country'? England? UK? UK minus Scotland? Are these common histories? Or separate? And did the countries of the UK go outside of these borders to do stuff in Ireland? Africa? India? Australasia? Why? How?

And should 'we' (who is this 'we'?) be unquestioningly 'proud' of everything? Right at the moment when 'our' government is waging war on the poor? Even as we discover that 'our' police covered up their lies about Hillsborough for 23 years? Why should I surrender my right to be critical of the UK past and present in some chunk of unquestioned feeling called 'pride'? Why can't I have a mix of feelings? Why can't I identify with different unities other than 'nation'?

Why should teachers have to be conscripted to deliver this stuff even as their pensions are being robbed by 'our country', even as their pay is frozen ,even as children they teach are arriving at school not having had breakfast ?

Go away with your 'pride'. While you're being 'proud', you're taking away benefits, trying to set the working poor against the unemployed, and slashing the services people need in order to survive and better themselves. Go away with your 'pride'.

Culture vs Interculture (re 'In Our Time' BBC Radio 4)

Some brief thoughts on culture after listening to first two of Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' 5 programmes investigating 'what is culture?'

1. Human beings have similarities and variations. On occasions the things that we think are 'the same' vary in how we do them, things that we think are 'fundamentally different' are in fact quite similar.  We all spend a lot of time thinking about these similarities and differences. We comment on them all the time. Some people have made this into an academic study.

2. It's easy to overlook in this study (amateur and professional) of similarity and difference that the very delineation of what is similar or different is itself a matter of opinion or ideology. So, let's say, 'the playing of drums' is something that is 'similar' in that people pick up sticks and whack hollow objects all over the world. However, the way that people do this varies enormously across nations, musics, individuals. That said, what I might call a difference eg whacking hollow objects with sticks as opposed to playing them with open palms, someone else might not notice. So while I might say that the difference is 'significant'. What may be 'significant' is that it's me who's noticed it.

3. One word for these similarities and differences is 'culture'. From working with children and seeing what they bring to a room if you ask them to talk about things that their parents or grandparents have told them, I've been fairly happy with the notion of children as collectors of 'cultures'. What have I understood by the word? Probably nothing more complicated than 'the ways we do things'.

4. A key word in that phrase is 'we'. In truth, the 'we' is ever-changing. In the setting of a classroom, lots of different groupings emerge and dissolve. As was pointed out in the programme, it is 'dangerous' to confine 'culture' to this or that social grouping as if it's fixed, or 'essential' ie that this or that way of behaving was the necessary or inevitable or essential way that this or that group behaves.

5. So, whatever notion we have of 'culture' or 'cultures' it needs to have built into it a sense that it's something we share, borrow and mix.

6. Ultimately, it is only politicians who pursue the notion that there are fixed cultures. Our lot keep trying to define eg 'Britishness'. This is at best embarrassing - because it is so incompetent and without evidence or reason. At worst it is fascistic: an attempt to ringfence a set of ideas about what people are or should be in order to make it easier for politicians to wield power in what is an increasingly unjust system.

7. One word that includes our ways of sharing how we do things is 'interculturalism'. As a single word, it can't do everything but it's not bad. It suggests that if I say that one thing that defines me is food, and one thing I eat is eg 'fish and chips', then I will be very cautious about claiming that 'fish and chips' is something essentially or uniquely English or essentially or uniquely anything! In fact, a historian of 'fish and chips' discovers a) that it evolved historically from different sources of peoples some of whom migrated 'outwards' from England and some who migrated inwards. b) the way people eat fish and chips is itself diverse and varies according to where, when and by whom it is eaten.

8. Much of this doesn't 'matter' very much until it becomes a matter of social conflict, social policy and/or government policy. So, for example: people had to fight very hard in this country for a) religious toleration and b) toleration of atheism. Until those positions were won, people were prevented from doing many things that were restricted to eg members of the Anglican church. Persecution and loss of liberty were suffered too.

9. In the present context, the notion that we share cultures comes under attack. One source of this attack are organisations like the BNP and the EDL who link their idea of an essential, unchanging 'British' or 'white' culture to biology ('race'), nation and ultimately to some kind of takeover of authoritarian power.  An inevitable part of their view and actions is expulsion. People identified as 'the other' have to go. This notion of expulsion has a long history of persecution, mass murder and genocide. Another source is government, who have announced at various times that eg 'multiculturalism' has failed.

10. This statement sometimes has an outward rationality about funding for migrant groups (as if this is a major cause of debt; or that it was the funding that has caused the 'separation' of migrant groups  or has caused their 'exclusion' from the 'mainstream'). Because neither of those suppositions are true (re debt and exclusion), I suspect that the attack on multiculturalism has another purpose. It is a crude shorthand for a form of racism: ie that this country used to be non-multicultural, now it is and that's why this country is 'worse'.

11. I utterly reject the notion that any form of multiculturalism or interculturalism is the cause of anything being worse. If we're going to point the finger as to why or how things have got worse for people, it is really quite simple. The last 30 years have involved a systematic transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. This is on top of the usual process of capitalism (which is to take away the fruits of the labour of the workers). The extra transfer is a result of policies against trade unions, and actions taken to keep down wages, create unemployment (eg through sackings in the public sector), the 'financialisation' of the British economy and the hiving of billions into tax-free havens.

12. However, some on the left attack multiculturalism claiming that it has hindered social progress because it has focussed on 'difference'. My view of this is that no matter what is policy, or what people say we should or should not do about 'the ways we do things', we are all 'cultural' beings. We all express ourselves through 'the ways we do things'. So, if we say, 'OK let's leave multiculturalism' at the door and get on with, say, enjoying a meal or going to the movies or listening to music' - this is a contradiction in terms. That meal, that movie and that music will itself be culturally specific. As I've said before, what matters is the degree to which it matters! It's not that there is actually difference and/ or perceived difference.  And it's not only the 'degree to which it matters' it is also how that 'degree of mattering' engages with 'power'.

13. So, there is a fundamental difference between the way we share cultures and defend our right to share cultures and when or if this comes under attack from those in power, or indeed if those in power try to impose a view of this on us.

14. So, unlike one or two speakers on the programme on Radio 4, I would suggest that we don't dispense with the word 'culture' or 'cultures' but claim another: 'interculturalism'.

Dictionary of Government Bullshit on the Economy

Dictionary of government bullshit on the economy...a series of tweets put together here.

"business" = "competition to find who can put together the smallest group of people owning the largest amount of wealth"

"manufacturers facing difficult times" = "manufacturers discover they want to pay low wages but have buy-everything consumers"

"low confidence in the manufacturing sector" = 'we've noticed that paying people less means that manufacturers sell less"

"low consumer confidence" = "we've noticed that if you cut poor people's wages, they buy less"

"we are in discussions with financial leaders" = "we have no idea what or where the real debts are and they won't tell us."

"we need a healthy financial sector" = "we'll do anything to let bankers do what they want"

"we need to regulate the banks" = "we won't regulate the banks"

"the economy" = "the means by which rich people can get poor people to work for them"

"it's unfair that people can earn more money on benefits than at work" = "the poor are taking your money. Rich people (like us) are nice.'

" we will be ruthless with tax avoiders" = "we'll do next to bugger-all about tax avoiders"

"we need a highly educated workforce" = 'we don't need a highly educated workforce, we want a very lowpaid workforce"

" in education we're slipping down the international tables" = 'we're not slipping down the international tables'.

"the colossal mess left by the last government" = " exactly the same mess we would have left if we had been in power"

" we cannot afford to go on paying ourselves more than we earn" = "you must have a lower standard of living, but we don't have to."

"the government has to take some tough decisions" = 'the govt will be doing what the rich tell them to do so that the rich can stay rich.'

"our AAA rating" means 'bankers' fixing system so that it suits bankers'.

'bloated public sector' means 'nearly adequate health care for all''

"Structural adjustments'" means 'making many people unemployed'.

"cutting labour costs" should be translated as 'making poor people poorer'.

"Reassures the markets" should be translated as, "makes sure that the rich stay rich this week".

Every time they say 'we have to deal with the deficit' we should translate that into 'we are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich'

Leveson: avoiding thinking of the whole structure

This is about Leveson, viewed through 'semiotics' and 'grammar'.

If I write 'The cat sat on the mat', I can change that in several different ways.
If I write 'The dog sat on the mat', that's different from writing 'The cats sat on the mat' and different again from writing 'Did the cat sit on the mat?'

In the past some linguists have said that the way a sentence joins together in a 'chain' is a 'horizontal' way of sticking together. This is the 'syntax' of the sentence, the words are in a 'syntagmatic' relationship with each other. Swapping 'cat' and 'dog' has altered things in a 'vertical' way, they are in what is called a 'paradigmatic' relationship. Then again, turning 'the cat' to 'the cats' has made a change but within the 'paradigm' of 'cat' (ie changing cat to one of the ways in which the word 'cat' can change. Finally, by turning the whole sentence into a question, I made a 'syntagmatic' change, I changed the grammar of the whole sentence from a statement into a question.

If this is hard to visualise, imagine that each word is written on a piece of lego and the lego bricks. Swapping 'cat' for 'dog', we might say, meant swapping a green brick for a blue one, leaving everything in the same place and in the same positions. We might imagine that if 'cat' was blue then so are 'the cats', 'cats', 'a cat', 'some cats'*. Maybe they are different size blue lego bricks. And to turn the sentence into a question, we would of course have had to change the positions of the bricks.

After the linguists played with this idea, various critics and theoreticians said that much of what we perceive and make can be described in this way. Jonathan Culler asked us to think of how, say, in Western food, we think of a meal: starters, main and dessert. That would be the 'horizontal' line, or 'syntagmatic' line. Now, for starters you might have olives or melon or hummus. Swap one for the other and you've swapped the 'paradigm'. Alter the order  you eat the starters, main and dessert or indeed leave one of them out and you have changed the 'syntax' (or 'syntagm' - but I can't pronounce that).

Again, think of conventional western male clothing: footwear, trousers, top (as opposed to, say, one long robe or, say, a toga). We might imagine that 'shoes' can be changed from 'within the paradigm of the shoes, but we switch the paradigm when we swap shoes for sandals...and so on. The syntax of this kind of clothing arrangement (mine) remains unchanged until I choose to change from this three-part structure (shoes, trousers, top) to wearing a robe, say.

This can be applied to thinking about movies, poems, novels and politics. When I work with children writing poems, it is possible (and many teachers and poets do this without dressing it up in paradigm-syntax theory!) is take a poem and invite children to do their own versions. An obvious case is the limerick, where, let's say, we stick to the basic shape but change the paradigms but in fact  you can look at a lot of poems, figure the 'structure' or 'syntax' and swap some paradigms and then see what happens.

Again, if you watch a Hollywood movies - let's say a 'rom-com', you can see a pattern (or syntax) and the producers/writers/director has simply swapped some elements either in a 'shift' or 'within the paradigm'. When there are clear hybrids (Harry Potter marrying 'fantasy' with 'school story') you can see two 'syntaxes' (?) being combined.

What about politics?

Consider what's gone on with the hacking scandal and Leveson. As it unfolded, I, along with millions of others (I thought) started to see a 'syntax' - a chain of relations between the police, the press and senior politicians. They were having social relationships which were part of their political relationships (appointments), which affected whether complaints were or were not being taken up. Money was passing between, say, members of the press and the police and so on. This was, we might say, the 'syntax' of what was going on. I thought that there was a consensus forming which said that this was wrong.

Then Leveson was appointed and the hearings took place. This exposed the syntax. We could see the shape and process of how it all joined up: who scratched whose back. Who ensured that this or that happened or didn't happen. Meetings took place, appointments were made, notebooks filled, phones were tapped, newspapers sold, police took money or indeed proceeded towards other jobs...and so on.

The Leveson pronounced. And here's the mystery. Apart from an aside where he seems to have admonished the press and the politicians for being too close and some kind of ticking off about improper behaviour by the police, all his attention has been on the 'freedom of the press'. He has recommended one syntactic change ie with his recommendation that government 'underpins' the new 'independent body'.

The new independent body would, then we might say, like swapping 'cat' for 'cats' (ie within the paradigm). Yes, suggesting that government 'underpin' this body is syntactic but one which leaves the overall power structure intact, so perhaps this would be analogous to writing 'Do you think that the cats sat on the mat?' (!) or some such, a tentative shift where the original stays intact but nothing fundamental changes overall.Why, for example, will journos stop trying to slip coppers money for information? Why, when this happens, will it be the journos who lose their jobs and not the proprietors? (Of course not!). There will of course be no ending of the revolving doors between press, politics and police, jobs will continue to flow between all three, which means much more than a matter of personnel. People take with them 'spheres of influence', knowledge of where and how to apply pressure and to get things done so that nothing shakes the system, even when there are clear miscarriages of justice eg Hillsborough.

To be blunt, I think that what is going on is a massive distraction from the real and full 'syntax'. A combination of Nick Davies' articles, articles in 'Private Eye', and what we heard in Leveson (or didn't hear) exposed the syntax of how political, press and 'security' power interrelates. (The horizontal chain.)  And then, (using whatever metaphor you want), the curtains are closing, the waves wash back, the box is closed - and we can't see it anymore. The heavyweight apologists try to focus everyone's attention on one part of what's happened so that we don't see the whole picture.

Perhaps, when the law cases open - we will get some more glimpses but more often than not, law cases end up being about the crimes, mistakes etc of one person with an underlying assumption that if he or she had been someone else, such crimes and mistakes wouldn't have happened (ie paradigms not syntax).

Apologies if this all seems rather laboured, as a way of explaining something comparatively simple. I find that this way of thinking can sometimes illuminate what's going on. I mean, it does for me!


* eagle-eyed linguists would say that the paradigm for 'cat' is: cat, cats. 'A cat', 'cats', 'the cat' and 'some cats' is a piece of mini-syntax ie how 'cat' and a 'determiner' are linked syntactically. The determiner is a paradigm of itself ie 'a' (or 'an'), 'the', 'some' and no determiner is a paradigm of itself.  Think how hard it is to learn this piece of mini-syntax when you learn another language: eg French un/une, le, la, les, du, de la, des, and no determiner. When do you use which? Aaaaaaagh.

The arts and Ebacc: get it, Gove?

This is the text of what I've sent to the NUT as part of their consultation and submission re the proposed Ebacc and the threat to the arts that it poses.



1. We should bear in mind that teachers will do their utmost to teach what will benefit their pupils the most.  However, there is often a clash between what teachers know engages the pupils or leads them into greater personal, social and academic development, and what teachers are required to teach. They do this in particular when they know that their first priority is to enable their pupils score well in key tests and exams. I have been told many times recently that the curriculum has in effect become the GCSE exam. In other words, teachers have indeed 'taught to the test' - something condemned by all major government reports in the recent period. To be clear, I'm not blaming teachers for this. It is a direct outcome of an exam-  and test-led culture which is intent on evaluating pupils purely and solely in terms of their scores.

2. Bearing this in mind, the Ebacc exam will to all intents and purposes be the syllabus. This will have an impact in many areas of the students' lives and study and yet in some respects it is based on a hoax. It is quite clear from statements leaked to the press that each grade will be norm-referenced ie the numbers (in percentage terms) will be fixed prior to the students sitting the exam. This is a cruel and unfair method of assessment.  It means that the improvements (in teaching, pupil work-effort, whole-school culture - much demanded from ministers) will go unrewarded.

3. Another aspect of the impact is in the area of the creative subjects, but I would also want to include in this the creative work that should ideally take place within English courses ie writing. It is known and understood worldwide that students of this age, when given opportunities to express themselves through the arts, demonstrate and enjoy many clear outcomes. One way to express this is to say that it is not obvious to many students that a school is a place where their immediate interests and personalities have a place. Quite simply, the formal subjects in the curriculum have little or no place for students' own voices to be heard; there are not many times in a day when all students will necessarily hear that what they think and do are valuable. Again, this is absolutely not teachers' fault. It is a direct result of an overload of subjects which demand right and wrong answers. Understanding and interpretation of knowledge require a wider response than 'right or wrong'.

4. The arts provide an environment and practice where the students' powers of interpretation are centre stage. This is not in any way less important than more knowledge-based subjects. It is an essential part of maturation and development and with young people comes at precisely the moment when the world appears difficult, puzzling or even unwelcoming. What's more, the arts provide an environment when the relations between adults (teachers) and the students can be on a truly co-operative footing. Again, it is well known that many of the problems that arise in schools occur when the basic trust between the adults and students is under stress or has broken down. I believe that more often than not this arises because students come to feel that they are not believed in; that adults unfairly judge or blame young people. The arts offer an environment when such attitudes can be eroded and new relationships established.

5. Far from this sort of thing being a distraction from the more formal subjects, many teachers can vouch for the fact that the arts offer many students a platform from which they can find routes into the other subjects. Having found themselves respected or 'at home' or achieving something, it enables the students to find belief in themselves to proceed with these other subjects.

6. That said, there is a fundamental principle at the heart of creative arts: that they are ways of investigating the world through making transformations of materials, ideas and texts. This has a radical and profound effect on speech, writing, physical and mental well-being. It offers ways in which people can see that the world is not an unchanging, unchangeable place but is something that you can engage with. Many people talk of how important this is, but if we neglect or exclude the arts, this talk is lip-service only.

7. The arts are not a luxury or a side-show or some kind of soft option. Teachers who teach drama, dance, music and art are amongst some of the most demanding teachers I have ever met, believing in students who are often 'challenging' as the jargon puts it. I have seen many times how such teachers ask of students more and more, asking them to work late, to try again, to analyse what they have done, to produce lengthy reports interpreting what they or others have done. To neglect, marginalise or exclude this will be a major mistake for all the reasons I've outlined. However, there is every likelihood that this neglect or exclusion will have a knock-on effect for many students who find school difficult. I mean by that, that schooling as a process will become that more alienating. Unless it is a hidden objective (ie to further alienate those who are already at risk of being alienated!) then this would be a disastrous outcome.

8. One alternative way to view all this is in economic terms. It is by no means clear how the UK is going to fare in the global market over the next twenty years. If we are honest, no one really knows. There are, however, strong reasons to think that the arts (and that includes design) is an area that the UK has offered the world something that the world wants to see, buy and use. To say this, also involves pointing out that the arts need a strong participatory base of practitioners. Yes, there is the romantic notion that 'artists' are special, isolated people who are born with 'imagination' but in fact almost all art forms require a large backlog or repertoire of experience in order that new forms, new products can be made. The place where this backlog or repertoire can be laid down is of course school. To be personal for a moment, it was through my reading of a wide range of texts for the old O-level English Literature course, the space in which to write (thanks to an English teacher who encouraged it, and school publications which circulated it) that I became a writer. Many people from many walks of life can give similar accounts from moments at school when they 'heard their own voice' and discovered that others liked it. This may or may not have led to them doing such things for a career. However, in terms of their own well-being, many tell us that it was at this point that they learned that could paint or sing or dance or act as part of their life, no matter what job they went on to do. After all, it is part of education's job to educate people in such a way that they can live as fulfilled lives as possible. This is not to negate the importance of doing the basics but to say that they are not sufficient. People need to find ways in which to express and re-express aspects of their personality and lives. People who don't or can't,  quite often become withdrawn and depressed. We must not ever be in a position where we find ourselves saying that one of the causes for that is a monolithic curriculum which never gave young people a chance to find out what they could say through the arts.

A petition re the way education policy is produced

I have put up on twitter and facebook the suggestion that we need a petition to state clearly what is wrong with the idea that Michael Gove comes up with policies based on his (or a tiny group of people's) wishes and that education polices are not emerging from comparing research and evidence or coming out of informed discussion from interested parties.

In my view, such a petition should come from one of the professional or union bodies rather than from me. Quite clearly, if it came from me I would be reproducing the very same problem that I'm criticising Gove for ie that policy comes from the whim or bias of one person!

So can I propose from here that NATE or LATE or NAPE or NUT or UKLA or some body come up with a very simple petition that teachers, parents and school students can sign? I offer this as a suggestion: something along the lines of

We, the undersigned wish to register our opposition to the way in which education policy is being devised. We object to the way in which this policy is emerging from the Secretary of State's personal bias and/or the views of a very small group of advisers. We propose instead that policy should be developed from research, evidence and informed discussion between interested parties.


I'm sure more experienced drafters of petitions could come up with something and a means to distribute the petition too...

Newsnight and the BBC

I just posted this series of thoughts on the BBC Newsnight affair, on the Guardian Comment is Free website in response to an article by Tariq Ali.

1. People should be cautious in assuming that they know how the BBC is run. It is a very peculiar organisation with many unwritten rules, some of which prevail in some parts, some which prevail in others.

2. There isn't one BBC. Most people writing here talk as if there is one monolithic organisation with everyone being ruled, or running programmes in the same way. In fact, there are fiefdoms and the fiefdoms build up their own mini-cultures.

3. Talking about the output of 'the BBC' as if it too is one uniform world view is at best an exaggeration, at worst a distortion.

4. The BBC isn't 'free'. We pay for it out of our special TV tax and so the people who administer that revenue have the major say in running it. In an ideal world, I would like to see every institution paid for out or our various kinds of institution controlled more democratically. The only alternative posed in these times is privatisation which involves no democracy over 'production' either by producers or interested parties of any kind.

5. The private media aren't 'free'. They are paid for mostly from advertising. Advertising is a form of private taxation. The ludicrous structure of capitalist society rests on trillions of pounds being spent by capitalists taking money out of useful production into making ads - and paying for them to be seen and heard. Ultimately we pay for that in our wages and the cost of the things we buy. We pay for private media invisibly. It's not free.

6. This Newsnight affair was crap journalism. Basic journalistic ground rules weren't kept to. This is not a matter which is a sign of a sickness all the way across the whole of the BBC in its many different parts. Just to make a point: does this major mistake have anything to do with how the BBC broadcasts the Proms? Or Gardeners' Question Time?

7. I've worked inside the BBC on and off since 1969. I was sacked by the BBC because MI5 had an office in Broadcasting House and recommended that I be sacked. The BBC agreed. While that was going on, in another part of the BBC, those in control were turning a blind eye to how Top of the Pops was being run. As I say, there isn't one BBC.

8. Those of us who work in the BBC cannot understand how and why the Newsnight story got to the screen. We are all bound by two key rules 'compliance' and 'trust'. These were de facto rules but were made highly specific following such events as Hutton and the Queen documentary. In effect, it means that everything we say goes through a set of filters: producer, editor and each programme is 'signed off'. In the areas I work, this means that certain specific criteria about verifiability, honesty about who is speaking (and where from) have to be adhered to. As someone who has been through that mill many times, I have to figure out how and why the Newsnight story got made.

9. There can only be one reason: some people inside that part of the BBC got to be sufficiently powerful for them to be able to waive the rules that the rest of us abide by. This then raises the important question of why and how.

10. I think I know the answer to that question and it is to do with the kind of power that the broadcast 'departments'': 'News' and 'Current Affairs' wields in most broadcast organisations including the BBC.