Civitas Blog

My head is spinning. There’s been too much talk of the EU to take it all in – you could say I don’t have the constitution for it.

EUsceptics often grumble at the lack of coverage the EU gets, proportionate to its impact on the UK’s political life. Well they haven’t had too much to complain about over the last fortnight. As you may have noticed there was a (admittedly brief) tidal wave of media attention. The result? An overwhelmed electorate, left dazed and confused by the sheer mass of commentary on the summit’s wranglings and resultant ‘mandate’.

Reality: the vast majority of the population is simply unprepared and under-educated to be able to negotiate the complexities of EU negotiations.

No, this is not another piece on the state of British education…

So far the country has been most fortunate not to have suffered any fatalities as a result of the latest wave of violent extremism to have descended upon it. We cannot yet know, however, whether all those involved in the violence have yet been rounded up.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

As a comment response to Wellington Grey's plea to AQA to save Physics as a body of knowledge rather than a series of opinions developed by a mass media consensus, Dr Debbie Barnett wrote:

I am also a Science teacher, and although not a Physicist, I share your despair at the diluting of Science in the vain attempt to make it accessible to the masses! I teach Chemistry and Biology and feel that the objectivity of Science and been replaced by a need for pupils to use language in a way that requires an eloquence not always seen in even the best Scientists. AQA have replaced proper Science with newspaper Science. Pupils are switching off, Science teachers are looking for ways out of teaching or jobs in private schools so they can teach the IGCSE.

Alan Johnson yesterday launched an ‘unprecedented’ review of the NHS, to advise on how to meet the challenges of delivering health care over the next decade. In particular this will examine how the NHS can provide better access to safer, high quality care for all, whilst delivering value for money for taxpayers. Sounds great, but while this may be unprecedented for Mr Johnson in his week-long tenure as Secretary of State for Health, it is hardly unprecedented in the recent history of the NHS – there have been two in the last five years, both of which have been very general in their nature.

Today we hear from the BBC that a well-known and highly successful private girls’ school, Colston Girls’ School in Bristol, is taking steps to move into the state sector.

According to a report in today’s Times, the Public Accounts Committee has condemned the government for having ‘left itself “financially exposed” over the 2012 Olympic Games and at risk of letting costs spiral put of control’. The basis for its charge has been the government's having let the original Olympic budget treble to £9 billion.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

It will take some time to unpick the latest additions and subtractions of the National Curriculum. But the main theme this round seems to be lowering children’s horizons. More compulsory elements of the History Curriculum have been axed, reduced down to essentials like the Glorious Revolution in order to tie into the requirement for pupils to understand the relationship between the Monarchy and Parliament. These reductions have been smuggled in under the guise of greater ‘flexibility’. If this were true, it would be admirable: allow teachers and schools to use their professional expertise to design a course that they think works for each class.

But there won’t be much opportunity for this while the school has to teach pupils how to open a bank account or how to calculate the size of their ‘carbon footprint’. If you want a vision of our children’s future, imagine trips to the Roman ruins at Cirencester cancelled so that the whole class can be shown the wonders of the local bank. Or instead of a trip to a local university to see the latest super-computer or MRI scanner in action, the local dump to spot how much rubbish their parents are failing to recycle!

See our report, The Corruption of the Curriculum (previewable on Amazon) to understand how we got here.

Just as you think some kind of consensus has emerged to let things be in the NHS for the moment, another bombshell comes along. ‘Localise where possible, centralise where necessary’, runs the catchy slogan to the latest reform package aimed at the NHS. The report, undertaken by Sir Ara Darzi, the new junior health minister, looks at the state of healthcare in London recommends what can only be described as a dizzying array of service transformations for the capital. But this one, if properly interpreted, isn’t all bad.

It is a response utterly characteristic of New Labour: ‘deal’ with a problem – generally years late – by creating a completely new one.

As we’d suspected, under Brown the direction of school reform is not going to change. For the last ten years, a critic’s template might well have been produced to pull out each time a new schools’ scheme was announced. Initiative after initiative showed almost uncanny consistency in managing to evade the causes of the crisis at hand. Continuing this trend was yesterday’s announcement of a secondary curriculum overhaul, a move, theoretically, to give teachers more flexibility.

The repeated statements of our government’s intention to deny the electorate a referendum on the EU's IGC mandate represent a concerning willingness on behalf of the British political elite to go above the heads of the public when making hugely consequential decisions.

At the heart of any democracy lie its people: their history, their priorities and how they delegate their power to representative politicians. Politicians are actors, mandated by those people alone. So how can it be that the head of this British politic can contemplate ratifying the proposals of the controversial IGC mandate – intrinsic to which is a significant transfer of power – without first regarding the inclination of its heart?

Three closely connected unresolved issues hold the key to peace abroad today and with that a resolution of the tensions currently posing the gravest threat to social cohesion at home.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

When the Civitas report on Blair’s failure to improve education over the last decades was released, Jim Knight MP squared off against Robert Coe, whose work we have cited, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (approximately 12 minutes in from the beginning). To the whole nation, he denied that exams had got any easier during Labour’s time in government and that an A level today had exactly the same value as a decade earlier. Perhaps he had no other choice but to take this line. The dramatic rise in exam results had to be due to the prudent stewardship of New Labour’s education reforms. What a difference a couple of weeks make! Now a new government adviser acknowledges that A levels have lost value at least in his area of Physics and Maths.

A theatre on Broadway. A Hollywood actor starring at a blockbuster show. Demand is high and a waiting list is building up. But there it seems there aren’t enough ushers to put on a matinée performance, so the cast go and put on the show in a private members’ club instead – those who can’t afford to join are forced to wait, and wait…and, yes, wait, until they finally get to see the evening show on Broadway. Now think of the NHS…sound a familiar story?

John Petri, an orthopaedic surgeon, formerly under the employment of James Paget NHS Foundation Trust, is adamant that NHS waiting lists can, and should, be eliminated. But the problem is that no-one is asking the obvious question: why do we have waiting lists? It’s surely the lack of resources and the lack of doctors and nurses, right? Wrong.

Asked this morning on BBC Breakfast if there was one history book he would recommend, historian and Observer columnist Tristram Hunt answered “Our Island Story”. This of course is H.E Marshall’s enchanting children’s history book which Civitas brought back to life in 2005. Since this single mention, just hours ago, sales of Our Island Story have rocketed. How we know is because, incredibly, the book’s hardback sales rating on Amazon has zoomed up to 25 on their Hot 100 Books list. (To give you an idea, all but the very latest of the Harry Potters are just a few ahead in the sales league).

What is a Philistine? Strictly speaking, the Philistines were the Canaanite enemies of the Hebrews living along the southwestern coastline of present-day Gaza. However, its modern usage derives from the great Victorian cultural commentator Matthew Arnold who used the term to describe those who have no conception of the value of art, culture or spiritual values in life. 'The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich... are just the very people whom we call the Philistines.'

It is sad to have to report that the well-known think-tank Demos has just published a report which exposes both it and the report’s author to grave suspicions of philistinism. ‘Publicly-funded culture and the creative industries’ by John Holden, published by Demos, is the most grossly philistine account of the arts, or the ‘creative industries’, that I have ever read.

‘The noble Lord Hannay … will understand better than most the importance of a united position around the UN principles. Our policy has not changed. We expect Hamas to adhere to the principles set by the Quartet in January 2006. These are to renounce violence, recognise Israel and accept all previous agreements and obligations, as set out in the road map. I hope that it does that and that it takes the opportunity for dialogue and progress, but a political dialogue is impossible as long as Hamas dedicates itself to violence and destruction.’

Thus remarked Baroness Royall of Blaisdon earlier this month in the House of Lords, winding up for the government there a debate on Palestine and the Occupied Territories.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

The National Trust is to celebrate reaching a 3.5 million-membership landmark by changing its focus. No longer will it just look after the buildings and artefacts that constitute our national heritage. Now it will “advise people how to adapt their lifestyles to climate change and challenge government to be more ecologically aware.” How is it beginning? By throwing its weight behind opposition against the expansion of Stansted airport.

As it so happens, there are a number of simple things that the National Trust could initiate in order to reduce its own ‘carbon footprint’, if indeed that is to be considered a genuine priority. The most obvious would be to eliminate the farming of animals on all its land. Since, according to the currently popular theory of anthropogenic climate change, world meat consumption is a large contributor to global warming, this would mean the National Trust would reduce its own contribution to climate change and be taking a principled stand for other landowners to follow. Indeed, they could set aside their land not for carbon inefficient British agriculture but to grow more forests to act as carbon sinks. Whether the National Trust will commit do doing this remains to be seen.

There is a theory in management, pioneered by Douglas Macgregor in the 1960s, which say that when it comes down to it management basically takes one of two forms.

Theory X management is based on the belief that people will give their best only when under external pressure – they prefer to be directed, have little ambition, don’t like work and don’t want responsibility. A manager’s role must therefore be a preoccupation with coercing and controlling employees in order to get them to do what’s best. Theory Y management, on the other hand, assumes that people will give their best when they are given genuine responsibility and are able to have a sense of pride in their work – people have potential, like working and want to use their natural abilities. A manager’s role is then completely different – to develop potential in employees and help them release their potential for creativity, ingenuity and imagination.

The government and the Department of Health (DH) love to think they go in for Theory Y. It’s the public service ethos. I don’t think you’ll ever hear either of them saying they think NHS staff are fundamentally lazy and don’t really care about patient care unless they have to. But in reality while they pay a lot of lip-service to Theory Y – and may even think they believe it – they somehow can’t resist extending their tentacles. Actions speak louder than words. And the actions have more often than not been symptomatic of Theory X.

The call to scrap GCSE coursework takes on a new resonance in light of the most recent evidence. An investigation for BBC Radio Five Live, conducted by the Teacher Support Network, has shown that the pressures on schools to raise results has led to widespread cheating.

Although only just out of the spotlight of the endless reports on the recent ICG mandate (and no, this is not yet another spiel on the dry subject of the EU constitution), Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s nationalist Polish government is again railing against the rulings of EU authorities. While a dispute over the construction of a bypass through the Rospuda Valley might seem somewhat trivial on the surface, it actually cuts deep into that irritating thing the EU has been plagued with time and time again throughout its history: national sovereignty – writes Pippa Knott.

To mark next month’s sixtieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan, earlier this month the BBC Asian Network commissioned a poll of 500 young British citizens of south Asian extraction, aged between 16 and 34. A control group was also polled about the same matters made up of 235 young whites of comparable age currently residing in Britain. However, the results of the poll, whch were published yesterday, leave it unclear how many of these whites were British citizens as opposed to being immigrants from the EU.

The results of the poll make very interesting reading, but not for the reasons the BBC chose to highlight in its account of the poll issued on its website yesterday.

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.