Best Of

The Farage claims of all the teachers are indoctorinating our kids and are activists again seems very MAGA and "Online" where the likes of "Libs of TikTok" social media accounts bang on constantly about it.

I don't have kids, but I don't get that the "reds under the beds" scare is something that is part of the UK political discussion around education. Rather behaviour, slipping standards, kids effected by COVID lockdown still not ready to learn are the things that my friends who do have kids bang on about.

It was the sort of thing the Tories used to go on about in the 1970s IIRC. Always been there bobbing around in the stream of discourse, albeiot sometimes mostly submerged.

Gove (or Cummings/Gove) and the blob ring any bells?

That's not quite the same claim. Their criticism was the "blob" stopped innovation and reform and teacher didn't want to change the way they did things. Farage is claiming something different, something very US centric about the Marxists and the trans teachers are indoctrinating the kids. That is straight Libs of TikTok type stuff.

Michael Gove did try to rewrite the history syllabus out of those concerns.

That is a fair point to an extent, but I don't think he was directly accusing all the teachers of being activists, rather he took umbrage with the way the narrative of history was being set out by those who wrote the curriculum. Bridget Phillipson has muttered about the same from the other end of the telescope, haven't followed if she has pulled the trigger on it.

It seems with Gove, the I know history better and what is being taught is missing a load of important stuff I like.

Gove, like so many of us pontificating on education, was just remembering his own schooldays. He liked history and was no good at sport so was happily selling off playing fields. What I will say for Michael Gove is that he did support a liberal arts education as a good thing in itself.

Gove takes a lot of flack on here, not least from @ydoethur, but the progress up the PISA scores shows most of what he did was right and has worked. In contrast, in Scotland, the tumbling down the rankings since the fiasco that is Curriculum for Excellence, shows things have gone seriously wrong.

The Farage claims of all the teachers are indoctorinating our kids and are activists again seems very MAGA and "Online" where the likes of "Libs of TikTok" social media accounts bang on constantly about it.

I don't have kids, but I don't get that the "reds under the beds" scare is something that is part of the UK political discussion around education. Rather behaviour, slipping standards, kids effected by COVID lockdown still not ready to learn are the things that my friends who do have kids bang on about.

I am all in favour of teachers indoctrinating children. FIrst, they could indoctrinate them in the use of the apostrophe, then on the benefits and dangers of compound interest.

The fact that they have not been able to do so to date shows how useless teachers would be at indoctrinating children about anything.

I am starting to wonder if Farage keeps going down the MAGA rabbit hole if that is how he blows up Reforms poll numbers, rather than general talk of anti-immigration, lack of full suite of properly costed policies or talented PPCs and a record of piss poor councillors.

Loads of the MAGA talking points just don't work in the UK.

A lot of people live online. They get their view of the world from algorithmic feeds. The only things they know are what the feeds tell them. When you tell them they're wrong they get huffy and stop believing you. They're American in their heads.

Nikita Khrushchev once said to Nixon: “If people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” Farage is building invisible bridges over imaginary rivers and the people love him for it.

The only way we are ever going to get "normal politics" back is to ban algorithmic feeds and go back to subscription feeds. The inability of people to grasp this genuinely worries me. The country is going insane.

Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened

Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'

She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep

And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage

Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both

The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser

I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance

Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?

Pound shop Liz Truss.

No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut

It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators

She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees

Add in banning doctor strikes

This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform

This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.

Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.

Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.

That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.

Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”

It is worth remembering that a number of competences were repatriated from Brussels, and which require civil servants.

Which competences (if that’s a word you can use for recent governments) would require that many staff?

Negotiating trade deals.

Also all of the functions previously done by or shared with, the EU and its agencies, from customs, trademarks, statistics, food safety, Erasmus, aviation control, ESMA, Euratom (now only an associated state, not a member), medicines, maritime safety, Europol, and about 3 dozen other fields .

We saved a lot of money by being an EU member. If you were serious about improving the UK economy, you would be talking about far more alignment or even Brejoin.