Tag Archives: politics

From Polling Station to Philip Larkin

6 May

I wandered into the British Legion, Hawkhurst mid afternoon last Thursday to exercise my democratic right. A queue. Wow, didn’t expect that. One man with a tiny laptop was processing the (mostly) greybeards shuffling through while several functionaries squatted alongside him in plastic garden chairs, looking both bored and important as they passed voting papers along. A bureaucratic chain gang.

Three voting slips: pink, green and orange. Parish, Borough Council and Police Commisioner elections. In front of me in the queue a Chinese couple, late middle age. I wondered if they were exercising their right to vote because it was a privilege to cherish given their life journey from oppression to, a sort of, freedom. Or was I being fanciful? They took a while to digest the instructions. I was listening closely and even with my moderately good English I was looking forward to them being repeated. And, of course, we had the ID checking. No blundering Borises here.

One vote for Police Commisioner; three votes for Tunbridge Wells Borough councillors and up to 13, yes 13, for Parish Councillors. Extraordinary. I scanned the names. There had been no leafleting for Police Commisioner as far as I was aware. Why were the four names on the list affiliated to a political party? Is being a police and crime commisioner a political appointment? I would have thought such an affiliation a disadvantage. Common sense would seem to be the box to tick. I had no idea, save for the fact that I hadn’t heard anything against the incumbent, a Matthew Scott (Con). Given that the short termism in most public appointments has reached epidemic levels, I reckoned that someone who has just about settled to the role should be allowed to continue in the job, rather than get a newbie in who has to start all over again. What do police and crime commissioners do, by the way? Apart from drain the public purse. Checks and balances someone once said. Hmm.

I moved on to the local election. Three candidates to vote for. Again most of the ballot sheet names were loved up to a party but there was the odd independent and one or two representing the Tunbridge Wells Alliance. Was this a nimbyist group or a benign enlightenment of ‘local councillors for local people and local issues’? I wasn’t sure. One of the candidates lives up the road from me and I’d heard nice things about her. So that sorted one vote to the TW Alliance. I felt that I had to place a cross against a Lib Dem candidate even though she didn’t live near me but I reserved my last vote for a chap with whom I once worked and who lives in Benenden. Very nice bloke. Job done.

Before I moved on to the weighty votes ( up to 13 allowed) for the Parish Council, I pondered on how our affiliations straitjacket us into groupthink. The party line often precludes free thinking and, in Parliament, free voting. There are times ( not many) when I have that Daily Mail take on things rather than the more moderate Times. If I lean towards the Guardian, some of its journalism is likely to make me sigh with the Primrose Hill ivory tower loftiness of it all. Political affiliations can fuck you up, make you see less clearly. Predispose you to temporary ( even permanent) lapses in common sense. Didn’t Larkin say that about parents?

They fuck you up your mum and dad,

They may not mean to but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And some extra just for you.

And so as I was exercising my democratic right I pondered the far reaching truth of Larkin. We’re all buggered up in one way or another and that’s why we need to listen TO each other rather than shout AT each other. I realise that typing capitals is a form of shouting so please think lower case.

Back in the voting booth I pondered the parish council names. I recognised some names but had no idea of their views on local issues. My fault? Possibly. I voted for three. I refer you to my reasoning on the police and crime commissioner. I reflected on the strange and flawed business of democracy and how to get the best out of it. I really don’t know.

I discovered later that the local turnout was 31.8% and in the borough as a whole a whopping 45%. The Lib Dems have won control of Tunbridge Wells. Matthew Scott (Con) retained his right to draw a large wedge and help run the county police. Only 20% voted for any of the police candidates. Lots of parish councillors got in, including those with my patronage.

The voting across the country was predictable. Tories go home, basically. The squabbling pandemic continues unabated. Whether it is the culture wars (Rowling v Radcliffe etc etc ad nauseam), the dreadful polarisation of the Palestinian/ Israeli tragedy, now being exacerbated by student protests thousands of miles from the real theatre of devastation or any number of issues in the public domain – unless we find a way to conduct the public discourse with respect and an attempt to understand the other point of view …we will be as Larkin said, more or less, fucked.

He also wrote in An Arundel Tomb : What will survive of us is love.

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Education, education….

3 Sep

Watching Sir Michael Wilshaw Ofsted-speak his way through the Andrew Marr experience on Sunday sent a few shivers down my spine. Sir Mike has big credibility with his mate Mike Gove because he kicks teachers’ asses. The public secretly like this because it means their children aren’t to blame and they can rest easy in the sure knowledge that education way back when was so much better than here and now. It’s also true that anyone who talks of raising standards, doing justice for the youth of the country, reinventing ‘satisfactory’ so it can mean ‘good’  and so on, is going to find a nice soft chair of popularity to squat in for a while.

Add to this the confusions of the English GCSE debacle, the apparently unarguable news that we are sliding down the Maths and English world league tables and that 30% of school leaders are poor..and Sir Mike has plenty of ammo to arm his inspectors for fresh assaults on schools in the coming years. To this end we hear that inspectors will alight upon schools with only 24hours’ notice (big deal) and will focus almost exclusively on observing teachers ‘perform’ in the classroom.

Now here’s the issue. What is the difference between teaching and education? When I was trained as a teacher – at around the same time as Sir Mikey was going through his paces at St. Mary’s College, Twickenham – I learned about educational innovators who recognised the need to educate the whole person – this meant understanding the varied ways in which we can help children to grow – knowledge and skills, yes, but also the arts, sport, culture, service, responsibilities to society- respect, good behaviour.

Now few might feel moved to disagree with this  but  much of what constitutes good education is unrecognised by our inspection regime. Further, the game that a slavish reliance on attainment and achievement data has led schools to play has unbalanced young people’s perception of what we value in education and thrown society off the scent of pursuing much of what is valuable.

For example the notion that there is a template for a good lesson, a good teacher (and those of us in education have endlessly reinvented this wheel over many years of statutory training days) is hugely flawed. Good teachers build trust and respect in a variety of ways over time – and, crucially, have the knack of instilling trust and respect in their pupils. I once mentored a young teacher in her first year of teaching. She had skill with the interactive whiteboard, timed her 3 part lessons ( starter, main, plenary) expertly, wrote the aim of her lessons on the board just in case the pupils couldn’t work out where she was heading,  asked a few AfL (Assessment for Learning, aka ‘good’ ) questions and set the homework with time for any queries. Problem? The kids didn’t like her. She looked down her nose at them (and she had no right to because she wasn’t an Einstein herself) and they spotted it, of course.

The Head of Department was a less well-organised and, in Ofsted terms, a less effective teacher. But she liked children, was an expert who they trusted – and she ran trips and excursions galore: she gave of her time and was rewarded with trust and respect. She was an educator – that’s a teacher ‘plus’ and the plus is what Ofsted don’t see, don’t understand. There

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