Best Of

Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.

My school had an INSET day yesterday. In times gone by these days would be crammed full of sessions focused on the senior leadership team members' pet projects or fads, which immediately get forgotten because noone has time to implement them.

Yesterday, aside from an hour where we discussed how to respond to the London riots (we have a very diverse student body) we were trusted to use the day to deal with all the backlog of tasks that always arise in September as a result of the new school year.

This was a really conscious choice on the school's part to reduce burnout amongst staff. It is something the headteacher has agency over, and is exactly the sort of thing that will stop our school, and the system as a whole, bleeding staff. I managed to pin down my line manager to meet, meaning that I am now enthusiastic about how I can move my role forward over the next few months.

More importantly, I sorted out an assessment for students that will mean we can make sure they're in the right class to prepare for their GCSEs, and give them and home a month's warning of the assessment, rather than springing it on them. The school's decision to reduce the crap they throw our way will have a tangible positive impact on our students' experience of preparing for their maths GCSE.

I'm impressed.

I went to a junior school yesterday which was a show put on for parents/grandparents. The kids were from 4-10 I think. Each group of about 40 or 50 were introduced and came onto a stage and then sang a few lines of a meaningful (woke) song they'd learnt. As you got to the older groups the hand and body movements became more in time with the song and each other.

I have to say I found it moving. They were all so nice and kind to each other and when they took us round their classrooms they were relaxed and confident and eager to show us what they'd done

But I couldn't help this gnawing question of how these beautiful bright young children without a prejudice in the world could have turned into those flag waving morons that turned out in London two Saturdays ago.

I'm not in sympathy with the themes of the march, but it's possible to be mild 90% of the time and still nurse passionate prejudices and resentment. If we write them all off as flag-waving morons we miss the point. A lot of people are emotional about politics on the rare occasions when they pay attention to it at all. The challenge is to engage that emotion positively without expecting them suddenly to subscribe to the Guardian.

We are a people who've been told we have no culture. To me the march looked like people who are seeking their roots, and remembering (in the visibility of Islam) that those roots are Christian.

I don't think that we have been told that we have no culture. Who on earth gave you that idea?

Not that culture is static, as shown by the flag wavers lining up for curry and pizza at food stalls after the march.

I also find the intolerance of minority cultures by the "fun with flags" brigade as much of a threat as the intolerance of the more extreme strands of Islam, Hinduism and Christianity. Accepting that neighbours live differently and not attempting to force them into line, is the sort of British culture that I am proud of.

We still don’t know what Johnson was up to - when actually serving as British PM - giving his security the slip and going off to meet that Russian oligarch in his Italian villa. I’d imagine MI6 know, and it will all come out one day.

The theory that Boris was in bed with the Russians is a strange one. Among the core powers, he was initially a remarkably lone voice in powerfully fighting Ukraine’s corner. I have directly heard it this month that when the war eventually ends, British contractors will be welcomed with open arms in Ukraine, and that Brits “will never understand just how many lives they saved” in 2022.

Having bring in Ukraine last month, that is very much correct.

Whatever one might have to say about Boris Johnson, Ukrainians absolutely love him. He was the face of the initial Western response to the war as far as they are concerned. And yes, there will be a lot of work in clearing up and rebuilding much of the country after the war, will be a huge opportunity for British companies.

Russia has been trying to cultivate politicians worldwide for years, and in the UK it has been remarkably even-handed with who it approached. In the Conservatives you had the likes of Boris and Osborne; Labour Mandelson, Goldsmith and Brown; the SNP Salmond, and UKIP/Reform has Farage himself and others, as shown in the Gill court case. The Lib Dems had Mike Hancock.

This does not mean any of the above did anything wrong; just that Russia was really trying to cultivate influence. Some of the interactions may have appeared totally benign to the targets. Whether they succeeded in the case of the individuals mentioned is questionable; though in the case of Gill, they definitely did.

Was there not also a Lib Dem fifty-something sex god?

Naah, I was never an MP.

As someone living in a country with ID cards, let’s just say that the big database is entirely the point, and that something intended for very limited use quickly becomes ubiquitous for every interaction with the both the State, and any number of private companies.

Yes, if I lived in the UK I’d be signing the petition opposing them.

I posted this last night.

Good thread on ID cards.
Why don't we have legislators/civil servants who can understand and explain this, and legislate accordingly ?

1/ I don’t instinctively like the idea of ID cards. It offends my liberal sensibilities. But Digital IDs aren’t the privacy catastrophe they would have been in the 2000s...
https://x.com/LawrenceLundy/status/1971543613868998952

7/ “Done right” is doing a lot of heavy lifting yes. Of course, the devil is in design. A “canonical event log” of every check could easily tip into surveillance. Guardrails are needed around logs, retention, transparency reports.

8/ Citizens need three guarantees:
– Share less, prove more.
– No new central database.
– Errors are visible and appealable...

That means NOT giving the contract to Palantir, of course.

I don't have much confidence that we'll follow those principles.

Agreed, but if those guarantees were in place I would accept ID cards. That's why I won't sign the petition - it's too blanket anti.

I suspect that the government is trying to do too many things at once with this (dead cat, performative action on the boats, backroom deals with Palantir to try to curry favour on AI) and that's why they won't put these guarantees in place.

If ID cards really were about the right to work, it would be easy to put guardrails in place to stop them being just another way that our data gets forcibly transferred into the hands of billionaires.

They don't want to put the guardrails in place because they want to access all the data and share it and be able to transfer it to whoever the hell they like and they like the idea that they will be able to control the population more easily.

The argument about ID cards is an argument between (a) those who believe governments and bureaucracies are essentially benevolent, get things wrong by mistake and will try to correct their mistakes and (b) those who look at the reality and believe that governments and bureaucracies are much more capable of malice and much less benevolent than we like to believe and do not much care about making mistakes or the harm they will cause because they calculate, rightly, that they can get away with this.

There is lots of evidence for the latter and, frankly, not much evidence for the former. Digital ID should be voluntary so that the trusting and naive (group a) can take their chances. If they work without the downsides that others fear they will be adopted soon enough.

I don't agree. I am in group (a) but oppose ID cards. I think the government is a bit like a bumbling uncle. Means well, but farts a lot and sometimes sits on the Lego model you've spent all week building.

My real issue is that governments of all stripes (with our willing cheerleading) have got themselves so deep into the muck and mire economically that any big project has to made more affordable by being stuffed full of economic incentives for private enterprise to profit from it.

My conjecture: Palantir will make millions from our data, and (in theory) prostrating ourselves at their door will make the initial setup and ongoing administration of an ID cards system cheaper for our cash-strapped government.

And what exactly do we get out of this? Nothing.

Nonsense

Less than nothing, obviously.

Already, the scuttlebutt is that instead of starting with the passport database and maybe reconciling with the driving license, they will use “AI” to mash together all the government data they can find.

Complete with promises of 95% of the population covered in one go.

So the initial data set will be a disaster.

On the up side, the government will be handing a complete copy of everything to Peter Thiel & chums.

I wouldn't touch Reform with a barge pole. The Tory party's schmoozing of dubious Russians and some dubious Ukrainians (long before the war) was a disgrace. The cosying up to China - not our friend - by politicians of all parties is disgraceful. And now we have Starmer cosying up to Trump and his backers who are less than robust on Putin and Russia, a threat to us all.

Barely a fag paper between all of them frankly.

Yes, it shows the folly of Brexit.

We used to have friends.

No we didn't. This is the mistake made by all you fantasists whether pro EU or pro US. There are no friends. There are only overlapping spheres of mutual interest. And it is vested self interest. The job of a Government is to do what is best for their citizens and if that means screwing over another country they will do it like a shot.

It is the error we have made for decades in our dealings with both sides of the Atlantic. We thought that when push came to shove our 'allies' would be there for us even at a cost to themselves. That is a myth.

We should not be 'cosying up' to any other country. We can have coridal and mutiually beneficial relations with them but we should never lose sight of that vested self interest. It is what drives all diplomatic relationships the world over.

Off topic: I'm not averse to a good moan on here about the state of the education system, so thought I should balance that out with a bit of praise.

My school had an INSET day yesterday. In times gone by these days would be crammed full of sessions focused on the senior leadership team members' pet projects or fads, which immediately get forgotten because noone has time to implement them.

Yesterday, aside from an hour where we discussed how to respond to the London riots (we have a very diverse student body) we were trusted to use the day to deal with all the backlog of tasks that always arise in September as a result of the new school year.

This was a really conscious choice on the school's part to reduce burnout amongst staff. It is something the headteacher has agency over, and is exactly the sort of thing that will stop our school, and the system as a whole, bleeding staff. I managed to pin down my line manager to meet, meaning that I am now enthusiastic about how I can move my role forward over the next few months.

More importantly, I sorted out an assessment for students that will mean we can make sure they're in the right class to prepare for their GCSEs, and give them and home a month's warning of the assessment, rather than springing it on them. The school's decision to reduce the crap they throw our way will have a tangible positive impact on our students' experience of preparing for their maths GCSE.

I'm impressed.