Civitas Blog

With half of the Europe project team conducting research on the continent, this week's Tuesday blog entry will look sadly neglected. In the meantime, we can take a quick look to the US where a school choice revolution might be finally beginning in earnest after a few faltering starts. The sign of any real choices in education for parents seems as far off as ever in the UK. A recent report that I have compiled of the overseas evidence in support of parents having a free choice of schools to send their children and the British government's inability to include this in their reforms has been uploaded here.

I wasn’t immediately enamoured with the DfES’s new plan, based on an independent report by Sir Keith Ajegbo, to ensure every lesson on the national curriculum teaches the values of diversity, race relations and multiculturalism. There are the natural anxieties that the extra requirements would just get in the way of teaching core subjects properly and involve teachers having to push the latest government propaganda that wouldn’t make it past the class clown without being brutally mocked. However, my mind changed as soon as I heard that a similar, and already highly successful, scheme is already in full swing at the London School of Economics.

Courtesy of the Simpsons, we Brits are now subject on the last night of every October to the annoying ritual of being disturbed by incessant door-bell ringing by small groups of young children dressed up as ghouls who are being conducted by one of their long-suffering mums on a charmless round of ‘trick or treating’.

No old fogie or so I like to think of myself, this is one American custom I wish had not crossed the pond.

Another one that hasn’t done so but which I wish would is Thanksgiving Day. Occurring on the fourth Thursday of November, this year this American national holiday falls today.

When dusk rolls westwards across the north American continent tonight, and wherever else any of them might be temporarily domiciled, American citizens will sit down with friends and family for a traditional annual Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, sweet potatoes, corn, and cranberry sauce, followed by pumpkin pie.

Britain has no real equivalent festival, and that is a pity, but not because it could then serve as an occasion for a thousand and one tv cookery programmes.

On February 13th, DP World, a ports operator owned by the government of Dubai, a small but economically ambitious member of the United Arab Emirates, paid $6.8 billion to acquire P&O, a British firm which runs a global network of maritime terminals. With P&O came six American ports – Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, New Jersey and New York.

George Bush’s electoral victory last week has shaken the predominantly left-leaning Anglo-American intellectual elite to its core. How, they collectively have wondered, could the American electorate have been so stupid? And, more pointedly, what do the Democrats have to do to ensure such an electoral debacle will never be repeated in future?

The answers to these questions currently favoured by this elite go as follows. The Republicans won because the American heartland is so heavily populated by bigoted, ignorant Christian fundamentalists. The Republicans were able cleverly to exploit this electoral constituency to its to own advantage by being able to appeal to ‘flag, faith, and family’ in a way in which Democrats did not.

A lot of British commentators on the US election result find it incomprehensible, particularly the central role played by religious campaigners. It’s well worth taking a look at Gertrude Himmelfarb’s explanation in the Sunday Times. The attitude of Americans who thought the election was primarily about moral issues would not have been a mystery to Britons a couple of generations ago. Many Americans have remained true to values once taken for granted here, but now abandoned.