Class Hatred

Classroom war

The class war came into the classroom last week with the appalling skewing of the English A-level results to favour private schools over the state sector, potentially locking masses of 18 year olds into the ossified, servile social class positions our elitist Masters deem them fit for. 

Many students predicted to achieve A-results have often seen these reduced to Bs or Cs or even Ds,often resulting in the loss of university places for the coming academic year. Perhaps particularly perniciously, the algorithms applied by the regulator Ofqal, using previous school statistics, have decided that some of those due to sit exams would not have turned up in any case and so have applied "Uncertificated" results - as good as simply not having an A level at all. In all, 40% of pupils - about 300,000 people - received lower than predicted grades, with those attending state schools and colleges badly hit.

By contrast, not a single entrant from Eton had a single grade reduced - doubtless on the grounds that none of them would have missed the exams if they were poorly as Nanny would have sat them on their behalf. (This in spite of the fact that many private schools work to the Cambridge International A-Level, a course deemed by this Government as too easy to be valid in state schools...)

With deadlines looming urgently for university admissions, rather than celebrating achivements after years of study and work, life plans are now on hold or being revised drastically downwards for hundreds of thousands of young people, predominantly from poorer backgrounds. The class war waged by the self-entitled rich elite has potentially devastated a generation's life chances .

Given the covid crisis and the closure of schools from mid-March, this was always going to be a difficult year for resolving the academic results of courses where exams due to take place could not happen. An approach combining logic, common sense and compassion was vital given the impact that the results would have on the long-term prospects of the students involved. In previous years, the approach taken by the Education Department has been to compare exam outcomes with predictions based on previous assessments - with the integrity of the exams based on how closely or not they matched the predictions. With much previous work having been marked in the classroom and mock exam results and teachers' assessments available, it should surely have followed that there would not be any need for any radical revision of predicted outcomes. Any competent Education Secretary would have made the decision to go with these.

However, our Education Secretary is one Gavin Williamson, MP, a man who as Defence Secretary backed the Saudi Arabians bombing of Yemen in spite of warnings of war crimes. Then he ridiculously implied that back in the 1980s Jeremy Corbyn was a Czech spy, apparently in an attempt to deflect criticism of his own soliciting of a £30,000 donation from the wife of a former Vladimir Putin Minister. 

So little compassion or common sense there. And as for his competence - before being elected to Parliament, Gavin "ran" a ceramics company that briefly rose to infamy when it produced a range of pottery to celebrate the Royal Wedding of Charles and Camilla - unfortunately firing every last piece with the wrong date!

Nanny will sort it.

Yet now in his rather inappropriate Education role, this moron saw fit to to declare that the algorithms applied to A level students' classroom assessments, which shoehorned individual results into crudely designed national quotas, were in fact perfectly robust and should be left unchanged. The towering Cabinet intellectual claimed that there would be a grave danger that such pupils would run the risk of over-promotion in the workplace were their results to be reviewed and upgraded.

Williamson and his boss Boris Johnson have of course subsequently been running in circles to try to remedy the chaos they have created. With characteristic world-beating bullshittery, they have set up something called a "Gold Command" to sort out the mess: though after publishing the appeals criteria for students to use, they withdrew it hours later, leaving many bewildered and panicking at the rapidly diminishing time left to resolve their grades. Williamson has to time of writing continued to flap and flounder and say he is "very sorry", while the PM, who promised to take personal charge of the crisis, has..erm... gone on holiday.

How could we have ever expected better from this Government? This is after all a group effectively coralled by Dominic Cummings, who believes that ability and achievement is down more to genetic breeding (i.e., of his class) than teaching or effort. The last thing they want is people from other classes to partake of that dangerously intoxicating chalice of education. What ideas might they get in their muddled serf-heads?

  

Johnson - the Eton days

Kafka has nothing on this elitist regime of lazily smug, sleazy sociopaths - the irony that they are literally the most useless group of people from any party assembled around the Cabinet table is sadly lost on their super-sized egos. And yet even now, in spite of all the unprecedented deaths, corruption, sleaze, racism, blatant lies, misogyny and sheer incompetence, the Conservative Party remains pretty much as far ahead as ever in the opinion polls of the largely silent Labour "opposition".

But change will come - younger generations are distinctly more left wing in their outlook and aspirations for future society as the current one increasingly fails them in providing decent employment, affordable education or housing, and now can't even get their exam results right. As the banners waved by demonstrating pupils today made clear, the damage done to them at this crucial moment in their young lives will not be soon forgotten by them or by their friends, families and relatives. Boris may fluster and bluster, but some things can't be explained away or made up as they go along. 

It is a crying shame that Starmer is left staring like a rabbit caught in headlights as the government should be on the ropes over its blatant social elitism, but others outside parliament are already taking up the torch of opposition. With over four years of Tory rule to go, it is outside of Westminster that the new struggles are already being shaped. The 18 year olds at the centre of this storm may play a leading part in shifting the paradigm firmly towards deep-seated social change - not only in education, but across society as a whole.

And as for Gavin, over-promoted and under-performing, perhaps it's time to get back to the pots. Perhaps this time with a calendar.

Riots Revelation - Nick "Nicked" Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, is an Arsonist (Genuine)

As post-riot punitive sentencing carries on apace, with people jailed for stealing ice cream and bottled water, a radio interview with Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister (who wants rioters to do community work in Lib Dem dayglo orange vests), went badly wrong for the would be crime fighter. After condemning youths who rioted, he stumbled with his words when reminded of his own arsonist past - at the age of 16, while in Germany, he set two greenhouses on fire, brutally slaughtering a number of innocent cacti. He received a sentence of community service, though it is not known what colour of vest he had to wear.

The revelation about Clegg comes hot (literally) on the heels of the vast number of reminders of how Conservative leader David Cameron was a member of Oxford University's Bullingdon Club in his younger days, along with the current London Mayor, Boris Johnson. The Bullingdon was a sort of Hells-Angels-for-Bankers, except that the Angels would probably object to being compared to such badly behaved people. As Cameron himself gleefully recounted in 1986, as well as their regular routine of smashing up restaurants and pulling the trousers off of people they took a dislike to, on one infamous occasion with these oiks "Things got out of hand and we'd been drinking a bit much. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets."

It is difficult to see which is worst - that people with such attitudes should now be running our country; or that, having done the things they did when they were youths, they are so utterly condemnatory of young people, mostly from rather less privileged backgrounds than their own, for acts which in many cases are not as serious as their own past crimes and misdemeanors. It's almost like one law for them and another for...

But of course, perhaps that is the entire point.

Go to 4 mins 44 seconds to hear Nicked Nick challenged about his fiery youth.

From Bullingdon to Brixton: Rulers & Rioters, and Broken Glass

The feral elite and London rioters - how our rich have built a society defined by greed and loot.

There have been many unsurprising commentaries written about the riots engulfing English cities since the weekend - the rightwing press and politicians have predictably trotted out their condemnation of "scum", "riff raff", "feckless" rioters. There have been calls for water cannon to be deployed and the police have menacingly "refused to rule out" the use of baton rounds.

There is no doubt that social tensions sparked the round of violence: the police, having shot a Tottenham man dead in unclear circumstances , refused to talk with his family or a crowd who went to a police station to stage a silent protest on Saturday evening. As tempers flared, a young girl was allegedly attacked by six policemen and from there the rest, as they say, is history. Tottenham town centre was in flames by the early hours of Sunday and from there disturbances have spread around the country, reaching Salford in Greater Manchester this evening and Leeds last night.

And yet, this is no Tahrir Square, nor is it an echo or amplification of the student demonstrations in London last autumn. Whilst undoubtedly many who have taken part in the riots and looting are socially excluded, others are clearly not - and obtaining goods such as X-Boxes, perfume, rucksacks and designer clothing appears much higher up the agenda than protesting about cuts in social care and eduction services. Likewise, some incidents, including forcing passers-by to strip naked, go far beyond any political protest. Small, local shops have been destroyed alongside the chain stores in clearly indiscriminate attacks. So is there anything more than criminal greed?

The BBC interviewed two girls this morning, drinking stolen wine at 9.30 am, laughing about the fun they had had and eagerly anticipating another night "showing the rich" they could do what they wanted. As one commentator noted, "Where we used to be defined by what we did, now we are defined by what we buy. These big stores are in the business of tempting [the consumer] and then suddenly these people find they can just walk into the shop and have it all."

Our society has shaped the pent up desires for the luxury goods being targeted - jewellery shops and electrical stores are prime targets. With the recession making many of these out of bounds for so many, the denial being expected of generations raised on aspirational acquisition is simply too great to be sustainable, especially in a society as characterised by extremes of wealth as ours. As "The Spirit Level" by Wilkinson and Pickett so powerfully explained last year, unequal societies are not only less happy ones, they are also more troubled, crime-ridden and violent. The actors do not personally need social or political objectives for such a drama to unfold.

But more than just stoking the demand for these possessions, our society has now also created the permission required to take what you can. We live in a country with a ruling elite now exposed as being utterly mired in greed and corruption - and rewarded for being so. It is a genie that once out the bottle is returned with great difficulty.

Our Members of Parliament have been exposed for their greed and gluttony over the expenses scandal. With Government leaders claiming for cleaning septic tanks, the Deputy Prime Minister getting his lawn cut at taxpayers expense and MPs "forgetting" to stop claiming for redeemed mortgages, our representatives punished barely a handful of scapegoats and are now back to claiming more than they were before the scandal erupted in 2008.

Our bankers, exposed for their ineptitude and greedy speculation, have been bailed out to the tune of nearly £40,000,000,000 of taxpayers' money - over £1,000 per British adult - yet continue to receive tens of billions in bonuses. The richest dodge their taxes, with the authorities writing off billions, like Vodaphone (£6 billions excused). Public services are being closed to keep our rich elite in champers.

Some of our police, the London Met most of all, have been shown to be riddled with corrupt practices - with cops receiving payments from newspapers for confidential information; investigations tainted by officers receiving gifts, lunches and even jobs from the people under suspicion; and just last week a Chief Constable and his deputy suspended for alleged fraud.

And of course, we have our Prime Minister, David Cameron. In his own youth, Cameron was, along with London Mayor Boris Johnson, a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University (see picture on left above; Cameron is second from left at back; Johnson is on the right, sitting). This society of toffs was known for its practices of pot-smoking, drinking and eating to excess before carrying out some "robust" redecoration of the restaurants they used for their revelry, the main difference with this week's rioters being that Mr Cameron's associates had their Daddies' money to pay for the damage they wrecked. Indeed, Boris Johnson's biographer notes:

"I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men."  And Cameron himself has reminisced fondly that,“Things got out of hand and we'd had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets.”

And so, as we fumble forward to find the motives for the riots - so presciently predicted last year and then helped along by the policies of Nick Clegg and his confederates - there is no doubt that we live in a country where any moral compass is gone. Our "feral elite", as Green Party leader Caroline Lucas has described them, are out of control.

What is the real difference between our grasping rich, ripping off employees and consumers and dodging tens of billions in tax, and the kids nicking £300 sound systems from Currys? Perhaps not even a sheet of broken glass...