A bit of PR orchestrated by Cameron (which everyone knew was going to happen) and an issue which no-one in the public will care about (Galloway) and the leavers on here are in panic mode. Get a grip, leave is in a better position today than yesterday. It's looking like there is a credible and broad spectrum of leave candidates coming forward whilst Cameron has brought back absolutely nothing.
Correct. I think it is more prospective dismay that their campaign will be run by various fringe figures
As someone who has been on the Leaving inclination I do think that Cameron presented his case well at the press conference and replied to the questions clearly and mostly in a straight manner.
The Leavers on here have not put up any significant truthful arguments against the final deal but have been free with personal insults against Cameron which are completely undeserved.
If that does turn out to be the case it will certainly drag things back for LEAVE.
The really infuriating thing about today is that if you ignore the Galloway fiasco (a big ask I know but bear with me) then it has been a fantastic day for LEAVE. Gove coming off the fence in our favour and Cameron's deal turning out to be even worse than advertised. This should have been a day to celebrate.
It can be saved over the weekend if Boris and Priti join Michael, hopefully along with at least a couple more cabinet members. We will have to see.
And still, the Leavers go on with this Tory-centric view of the world, blissfully unaware that Labour voters are essential for a win. Your funeral I suppose.
Labour voters are also essential, however Corbyn can't sway more that 2/3 of his party without pushing the whole of the Tory party in the other direction.
Lets say Corbyn campaigns for Remain, Cameron will never accept Corbyn to share the podium with him because that will push Tories en mass to Leave.
Likewise if Corbyn campaigns for Leave, Cameron will plaster his face to convince Tories to vote Remain.
Best case for Leave is for Corbyn to stay neutral or even better for Corbyn to say publicly that he will abstain, driving Labour turnout down.
a domino effect waiting to go down like the Titanic
Specifically, the dominos are set up around the decks, up and down the stairs, weaving through the first-class and third-class cabins. When the ship starts to tilt, a ball falls from a platform and strikes the first domino...
A Gove Conservative Party might make the next election competitive I have liked him on most of his policy briefs but he enemyises people quickly
Rubbish. Some teachers hated him because he was reforming a highly politicised profession with much of the year as holidays....
Parents think he is great.
There are more parents than teachers.
When I ask teachers I know why they hate Gove the answer is usually something along the lines of because the NUT told them he was a horrible person. God help the children taught by these people.
Quite. It startles me how many of my old school pals who were at best mediocre at certain subjects at school are now teaching them.
It also startles many teachers how many people criticise them for mediocrity when they are unable to control their own children and teach them lots of things that turn out to be wrong.
Incidentally, I am not suggesting that is the case for you, but the huge amount of patronising snobbery we get from people who are genuine mediocrities is one of the more frustrating things we have to put up with.
I had about 10 wonderful teachers in my entire schooling - the rest were tolerable. That said, I only had one really bad teacher; we were taught the wrong syllabus for English A level - pretty unforgivable. Luckily one of the 10 inspirational teachers re-taught us the right texts within about 3 months.
Incidentally, I don't see a problem with criticism against professionals from mediocrities. Parents have a right to criticise under-performing teachers just as patients have a right to criticise under-performing; that is surely the point of professionalism? You don't need to be an expert to identify poor teaching or poor medical care; it is generally done through comparable experience.
Not only are professionals meant to be better than mediocre at their job, they should be demonstrably aiming to be so.
If that does turn out to be the case it will certainly drag things back for LEAVE.
The really infuriating thing about today is that if you ignore the Galloway fiasco (a big ask I know but bear with me) then it has been a fantastic day for LEAVE. Gove coming off the fence in our favour and Cameron's deal turning out to be even worse than advertised. This should have been a day to celebrate.
It can be saved over the weekend if Boris and Priti join Michael, hopefully along with at least a couple more cabinet members. We will have to see.
Ignoring Galloway today was shaping up to be really good for Leave. Galloway is not doubt damaging but he isn't on the front pages tomorrow. Far more people will wake up to see Gove's name across every front page.
If that does turn out to be the case it will certainly drag things back for LEAVE.
The really infuriating thing about today is that if you ignore the Galloway fiasco (a big ask I know but bear with me) then it has been a fantastic day for LEAVE. Gove coming off the fence in our favour and Cameron's deal turning out to be even worse than advertised. This should have been a day to celebrate.
It can be saved over the weekend if Boris and Priti join Michael, hopefully along with at least a couple more cabinet members. We will have to see.
Ignoring Galloway today was shaping up to be really good for Leave. Galloway is not doubt damaging but he isn't on the front pages tomorrow. Far more people will wake up to see Gove's name across every front page.
And the day after - Boris's....
Steady. Just wild rumours at the moment.
"Sources say.." from unreliable unreputed twitterati mean nothing.
Serious question, is Galloway even that well-known (either positively or negatively) among the general public??
I'm not sure personally. He's never had a big government or opposition job after all.
I would guess he is better known than the tenth-best known MP on the left at the moment, maybe the fifth He did have a couple of weeks of Bradford spotlight EDIT: How could I forget he was on CBB
A bit of PR orchestrated by Cameron (which everyone knew was going to happen) and an issue which no-one in the public will care about (Galloway) and the leavers on here are in panic mode. Get a grip, leave is in a better position today than yesterday. It's looking like there is a credible and broad spectrum of leave candidates coming forward whilst Cameron has brought back absolutely nothing.
Correct. I think it is more prospective dismay that their campaign will be run by various fringe figures
It's worth remembering that Grassroots Out have not been designated the official campaign. It could still be the other one. It'll be interesting to see which campaign the Tory outers join
a domino effect waiting to go down like the Titanic
Specifically, the dominos are set up around the decks, up and down the stairs, weaving through the first-class and third-class cabins. When the ship starts to tilt, a ball falls from a platform and strikes the first domino...
Well I hope I'm one of the few first class passengers that can navigate through these choppy waters over the next 4 years or so......but its going to be one hell of a challenge! As for the second and third class passengers..........I fear for that the next 4 years aren't going to be a lot of fun for them to put it mildly.
A bit of PR orchestrated by Cameron (which everyone knew was going to happen) and an issue which no-one in the public will care about (Galloway) and the leavers on here are in panic mode. Get a grip, leave is in a better position today than yesterday. It's looking like there is a credible and broad spectrum of leave candidates coming forward whilst Cameron has brought back absolutely nothing.
Correct. I think it is more prospective dismay that their campaign will be run by various fringe figures
That's correct.
But it's been a long and difficult day. At least we all know where we stand now.
Assuming Galloway is just a blip (gulp) the next 72 hours will shape the campaign as *everyone* is now forced to show their hand.
A bit of PR orchestrated by Cameron (which everyone knew was going to happen) and an issue which no-one in the public will care about (Galloway) and the leavers on here are in panic mode. Get a grip, leave is in a better position today than yesterday. It's looking like there is a credible and broad spectrum of leave candidates coming forward whilst Cameron has brought back absolutely nothing.
Correct. I think it is more prospective dismay that their campaign will be run by various fringe figures
It's worth remembering that Grassroots Out have not been designated the official campaign. It could still be the other one. It'll be interesting to see which campaign the Tory outers join
The other ones are also run by loopers Gove and pals may be spokespeople but they will not be deciding who appears with Nigel on big stages
Boris must be feeling the strain now. Gove has pulled a master-stroke on him. Who is the conviction politician now, ready to lay career down for principles?
The average voter won't give a monkeys whether Galloway appeared at a rally.
Agreed, but the referendum won't be decided by the average voter on his tod. Inviting George Galloway in the first place was perhaps injudicious, given that he's widely viewed as a xenophile, but a campaign needs colour and he's got some, whereas UKIP and the Tories have got little - until Boris arrives anyway. And this particular campaign needs variety, so I can understand the motivation for inviting him. But having part of the audience show their contempt for him was even worse. It suggests the campaign is starting off as a shambles - plenty of passionate nastiness (take benefits away from single mothers, I mean Poles!) but no strategic sense. You don't win if you're divided.
If that does turn out to be the case it will certainly drag things back for LEAVE.
The really infuriating thing about today is that if you ignore the Galloway fiasco (a big ask I know but bear with me) then it has been a fantastic day for LEAVE. Gove coming off the fence in our favour and Cameron's deal turning out to be even worse than advertised. This should have been a day to celebrate.
It can be saved over the weekend if Boris and Priti join Michael, hopefully along with at least a couple more cabinet members. We will have to see.
Ignoring Galloway today was shaping up to be really good for Leave. Galloway is not doubt damaging but he isn't on the front pages tomorrow. Far more people will wake up to see Gove's name across every front page.
And the day after - Boris's....
Steady. Just wild rumours at the moment.
"Sources say.." from unreliable unreputed twitterati mean nothing.
Serious question, is Galloway even that well-known (either positively or negatively) among the general public??
I'm not sure personally. He's never had a big government or opposition job after all.
But he is good at Grassroots and public speaking,thought he did well in the Scottish debates,hardly anyone complained then when he was fighting for the union.
Saying that,I wouldn't have had Galloway the big surprise tonight at the out event ;-)
Rightly so. I do believe this is a calamity for LEAVE.
I'm feeling sad. I wanted a proper, close debate and then to make a proper, tightly contested decision. But it now looks foregone.
Pffff.
I've been burying my head in my hands, angrily, over the past hour.
I don't know who was in on this "surprise" but it'll go down as one of the stupidest decisions in political history.
It's clear: Farage doesn't want to win.
Prick.
The average voter won't give a monkeys whether Galloway appeared at a rally.
Thankfully the big story tomorrow is Gove and not Galloway. Hopefully the GO idiots take note of the reaction and keep him hidden away.
Gove's popularity ratings are almost as bad as Galloway's. Boris would be the only real coup for Leave
Even so I think he would be good for their side. They need senior, well-recognized government ministers. The problem for leave is that all the people the voters recognize as mainstream and serious are backing remain, while the people backing leave are on the fringes. British voters are very deferential: If they're not sure, they'll do what the people in charge tell them to do.
As someone who has been on the Leaving inclination I do think that Cameron presented his case well at the press conference and replied to the questions clearly and mostly in a straight manner.
The Leavers on here have not put up any significant truthful arguments against the final deal but have been free with personal insults against Cameron which are completely undeserved.
Rather difficult to put n argument against it when we haven't seen the text yet. The bits we have seen look bloody awful and do not offer the protection Cameron is claiming. If that is all there is in the final text when we see it then it is indeed a complete failure even on Cameron's original terms.
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
Something for hunchman/ydoethur re the GCSE maths issue.
Heads of maths having nervous breakdowns are doing so for a reason, and my feeling is that the first year of exams of the new syllabus are likely to be a fiasco, with nobody quite sure how to grade things, particularly with the lack of practice material (which is the main thing stuck in the Ofqual logjam).
The syllabus is published, there are textbooks written, schemes of work compiled and so on, which is why plenty of schools are already teaching the new spec... but nobody really knows, hand on heart, how hard it is meant to be.
It's one thing for a document to say "questions on a certain topic are worth a certain grade tariff". But in reality, there are "easy" questions on a topic, and "hard" questions on a topic, both of which theoretically fit the description. With the old spec, everybody had got familiar for every topic with what type of questions counted as a "moderate level of difficulty", and if you had students who were targeting a grade that required them to score marks on that topic, you taught the topic up to whatever standard ensured most of those students would score top marks if the question was asked in an "easy" variant, and probably score the marks if the question was asked in a "medium" variant. You don't necessarily bother teaching students all the ways to deal with a "hard" variant of the question, because
(a) there are loads of ways an examiner can "harden" a question by asking it in an unconventional way or combining it with a question from another topic (which you might not even have taught yet); teaching all the "hard" variants can take a disproportionate amount of time, and time is something every teacher has to compromise on, (b) the sharper kids can generally work out how to do it for themselves (indeed, the point of the examiner asking the question in a "hard" way is to see whether the kid can think for themselves, rather than see if they've been coached in every variant of the question), (c) you can confuse and knock the confidence of weaker students by concentrating too much on harder variants; better to make sure they're confident in how to attack the question in the more moderate forms it's likely to come up in, (d) the confident expectation that examiners will "even things out" throughout a paper - if they ask this question in its "tough" form, other topics will be asked in "easy" or "moderate" form to compensate. They won't make every question a challenge, ... surely? ? ?
Serious question, is Galloway even that well-known (either positively or negatively) among the general public??
I'm not sure personally. He's never had a big government or opposition job after all.
But he is good at Grassroots and public speaking,thought he did well in the Scottish debates,hardly anyone complained then when he was fighting for the union.
Saying that,I wouldn't have had Galloway the big surprise tonight at the out event ;-)
He shouldn't have been the special guest. If he wants to fire up his target voters (whoever they are???), fine, but keep him the hell away from the high profile events.
That point (d) has got the potential to go very, VERY badly wrong. Something similar happened with the rewritten Scottish maths syllabus a little while back: each question clearly within the scope and intended difficulty of the syllabus, but asked on what teachers had presumed would be the "high end" side of difficulty, so the kids were massively underprepared. It was a misjudgment partly of the teachers and partly of the examiners, and one of those things that only mutual familiarity can prevent. Radical changes to syllabus design are always likely to bring this kind of cock-up.
If you're wondering why questions that fit a particular grade descriptor might still be "easy", "medium" or "hard"- or why teachers can't/don't just teach everything to the "hard" standard - it might be worth picking out a few examples.
The volume of a cuboid is length times width times height. That's a basic fact which is taught to pupils, with varying degrees of success, in primary school. As such, it only attracts a minimal grade tariff at GCSE. A question that gives the dimensions of a carton of orange juice, then states how high the carton is filled with juice, and asks the student to find the volume of juice, would be a good example of a question pitched at this level. And marks on it would be worse than for a question that just showed a picture of a cuboid labelled with length, width and height, because of all the textual processing involved (in particular, students must determine that the height of the box is irrelevant and they must instead focus on the depth of the juice). So that would be "medium" difficulty for that tariff, and one would try to ensure students working at that grade level were able to answer this question, and not have to be shown a fully labelled picture before they could calculate the volume.
Now consider the same question again, but instead of asking for the volume of juice, asking what height inside the carton the orange juice would reach if the (sealed!) carton was tipped over so it is resting on its front. This question still only requires knowledge of V = lwh, but is FAR harder. Students working at that tariff grade are generally not proficient at the kind of mental juggling back and forth - realising that from the initial information they must find the volume of juice, and then use the "width" and "length" dimensions of the tipped carton to divide through and obtain the new height - that this question involves. IIRC students working at that nominal grade level only averaged about 20% when the question was posed in that way.
A final post if only to puff up David Herdson's ego in his hour of need.
Similarly, questions about probability trees are nominally GCSE grade B. Yet it is quite easy to make a question about them more fiendish: by requiring more branches to be drawn, by making the dependencies between branches more complex (after taking out a red sweet, there are fewer red sweets in the bag, and fewer sweets overall...), or by making the question more algebraic e.g. by ensuring there are an unknown number of sweets "x" in the bag. As such, they are often asked among the final three questions in a paper - the questions which serve to differentiate A* students from grade A students. Personally I find it disappointing that a question that, according to the official documentation, is really only grade "B" is being used to identify students as "A*" - it strikes me as devaluing the exercise somewhat. Yet I can't argue with the rationale that the question is tough (in absolute terms, it will be one that students score poorly on) and putting it at the back of the paper will stop it sucking up the time (or completely destroying the confidence) of weaker candidates, avoiding them grinding to a halt and missing more accessible marks elsewhere.
Last year there was a twitterstorm about such a question (expertly solved by David H on this site - well done sir!) that had an unknown quantity, and required candidates to set up and solve a quadratic equation. Kids in droves left their exam halls in tears. I believe that the problem was precipitated mostly because that question had appeared relatively early in the paper, given its complexity - rather easier questions have been left as the final question in the past - and kids drilled to look for an "easy" probability tree question found themselves stuck on one really intended to differentiate candidates working at higher target grades.
Strictly speaking, no individual aspect of that question (the tree, the algebraic expressions for the probabilities, the algebraic fractions and quadratic equation that resulted) was really at an A/A* level, but the combination was genuinely taxing for most students. If, in a parallel universe, more tree diagram questions were asked in this vein, then teachers would deliver the topic quite differently - teach it only after the necessary algebra, ask harder questions, more-or-less ignore the topic entirely with grade C students. This is exactly the kind of decision that teachers of the new GCSE maths spec (and the new Scottish spec before them) simply lack sufficient information to make an informed choice on. For that reason, I sense disaster looms.
Serious question, is Galloway even that well-known (either positively or negatively) among the general public??
I'm not sure personally. He's never had a big government or opposition job after all.
But he is good at Grassroots and public speaking,thought he did well in the Scottish debates,hardly anyone complained then when he was fighting for the union.
Saying that,I wouldn't have had Galloway the big surprise tonight at the out event ;-)
He shouldn't have been the special guest. If he wants to fire up his target voters (whoever they are???), fine, but keep him the hell away from the high profile events.
Your proberly right but I'll rather have Galloway on my side at public speaking events than against me.
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
Not always, see Dick Fuld and Andy Hornby!
Teachers have OFSTED, doctors can be sued and the best in both can earn 6 figures
Serious question, is Galloway even that well-known (either positively or negatively) among the general public??
I'm not sure personally. He's never had a big government or opposition job after all.
But he is good at Grassroots and public speaking,thought he did well in the Scottish debates,hardly anyone complained then when he was fighting for the union.
Saying that,I wouldn't have had Galloway the big surprise tonight at the out event ;-)
He shouldn't have been the special guest. If he wants to fire up his target voters (whoever they are???), fine, but keep him the hell away from the high profile events.
The sad thing is, he's probably not much less popular than Farage, or even Gove They each appeal to about ten per cent of the electorate very passionately, with some neutral, and a lot repelled by them
If that does turn out to be the case it will certainly drag things back for LEAVE.
The really infuriating thing about today is that if you ignore the Galloway fiasco (a big ask I know but bear with me) then it has been a fantastic day for LEAVE. Gove coming off the fence in our favour and Cameron's deal turning out to be even worse than advertised. This should have been a day to celebrate.
It can be saved over the weekend if Boris and Priti join Michael, hopefully along with at least a couple more cabinet members. We will have to see.
Ignoring Galloway today was shaping up to be really good for Leave. Galloway is not doubt damaging but he isn't on the front pages tomorrow. Far more people will wake up to see Gove's name across every front page.
And the day after - Boris's....
Steady. Just wild rumours at the moment.
"Sources say.." from unreliable unreputed twitterati mean nothing.
Just trying to cheer you up, buddy!
Thanks. I'm going to sign-off!
I've been getting very sweary, grumpy and irritable. Which isn't good for me, or pb.com
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
How long have you been working in the private sector? I can assure you this is not really how it works in most places
If we get 70/30 which must be possible it's sure to be political suicide for Boris and Gove and knowing this is a likely outcome I suspect most of the cabinet will rally round which makes the chances of a big 'Remain' win all the greater.
Sod this im going to bed. I am glad I didn't go to this shambles of a meeting. The referendum will be won on the pavements and doorsteps of the UK and not in meetings preaching to the converted.
Rightly so. I do believe this is a calamity for LEAVE.
I'm feeling sad. I wanted a proper, close debate and then to make a proper, tightly contested decision. But it now looks foregone.
Pffff.
I've been burying my head in my hands, angrily, over the past hour.
I don't know who was in on this "surprise" but it'll go down as one of the stupidest decisions in political history.
It's clear: Farage doesn't want to win.
Prick.
The average voter won't give a monkeys whether Galloway appeared at a rally.
Thankfully the big story tomorrow is Gove and not Galloway. Hopefully the GO idiots take note of the reaction and keep him hidden away.
Gove's popularity ratings are almost as bad as Galloway's. Boris would be the only real coup for Leave
Even so I think he would be good for their side. They need senior, well-recognized government ministers. The problem for leave is that all the people the voters recognize as mainstream and serious are backing remain, while the people backing leave are on the fringes. British voters are very deferential: If they're not sure, they'll do what the people in charge tell them to do.
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
How long have you been working in the private sector? I can assure you this is not really how it works in most places
Great deflection.
So, why are public sector employees generally so defensive when poor performance is criticised?
I wonder whether one of the Leavie leaders is going to make the point publicly that "all are welcome", "we're a broad church", "we are the people", etc., by apologising to George Galloway. The Monday Club hang-em and flog-em types might go purple with rage if someone does, but they're going to troop out and vote Leave no matter what, so who cares?
Rubio move very curious - only leak I can think of is that Jeb! and/or Kasich are intending to endorse him after SC.
A poll had him at 24, and Trump at 27. The market latches onto anything like that for Rubio to be honest.
I'm wary to bet against it being that wrong after Iowa, mind.
The markets have a real hard-on for Rubio.
Like a face-hugger in Alien looking for the smallest piece of human flesh to jump on.
Well he scores very well in a Clinton head to head, so his implied odds should probably be slightly lower than the others. Trump is made 2-1 at some points !
It will be counter productive for leave to attempt to trash the deal, they need to be able to compete against David Cameron, Nicola Sturgeon, Teresa May, Alan Johnson and others in trying to persuade that they have a realistic proposition which I have not heard from anyone yet
Rubio move very curious - only leak I can think of is that Jeb! and/or Kasich are intending to endorse him after SC.
I don't see Jeb lasting beyond SC unless he gets 2nd or 3rd, which is seeming vanishingly unlikely at this point. He is very much the Establishment man, and they must be at the breaking point re wanting to bash heads together to get one candidate to take on Trump and Cruz.
Kasich may stay in longer to test the waters without Jeb around. But not beyond Super Tuesday unless he can show he is making ground against Rubio.
The average voter won't give a monkeys whether Galloway appeared at a rally.
Agreed, but the referendum won't be decided by the average voter on his tod. Inviting George Galloway in the first place was perhaps injudicious, given that he's widely viewed as a xenophile, but a campaign needs colour and he's got some, whereas UKIP and the Tories have got little - until Boris arrives anyway. But having part of the audience show contempt for him was even worse. It suggests the campaign is starting off as a shambles - plenty of passionate nastiness but no strategic sense. You don't win if you're divided.
Yes but this can be a self fulfilling prophecy.
The self-confidence of the Leavers needs to improve. Everything is to play for. A couple on here are bottling the race on the starting line after they've seen the competition: a Vauxhall Astra with go faster stripes.
If we get 70/30 which must be possible it's sure to be political suicide for Boris and Gove and knowing this is a likely outcome I suspect most of the cabinet will rally round which makes the chances of a big 'Remain' win all the greater.
A few months back in the first round of the French local elections Le Pen did well. And what happened? In the second round everyone else rallied round to ensure that her party did not win control of regions.
If you pollute a reasonable argument with revolting people, you lose. It's the emotional vs the rational brain, as MTimT explained earlier.
And people generally decide on emotion rather than reason.
Spot on. I am VERY angry about this. Very fucking angry.
Wankers.
Don't rush to judgment, The Galloway thing was given no worse than neutral coverage on the News and Newsnight.
This whole campaign could take on a life of its own and lead to some very unpredictable places. Think of the Corbyn election. Who would have thought it? LEAVE could turn into a great vote against the Establishment and all its works.
Farage was interviewed on RT by Galloway (his Sputnik program) and they seemed very chummy so I think that may have had something to do with tonight's events.
If we get 70/30 which must be possible it's sure to be political suicide for Boris and Gove and knowing this is a likely outcome I suspect most of the cabinet will rally round which makes the chances of a big 'Remain' win all the greater.
It will be counter productive for leave to attempt to trash the deal.
I disagree; it's their best (only?) strategy. Cameron's starting point is that the EU is good but needs reforming. Of course, he probably would have happily stayed in without any reforms, but let's assume he genuinely thought changes were needed. If it is shown that he hasn't actually got anything significant, that will not go down well with the voters.
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
Not always, see Dick Fuld and Andy Hornby!
Teachers have OFSTED, doctors can be sued and the best in both can earn 6 figures
A poor classroom teacher is not really comparable to a CEO.
I'd say a poorly performing classroom teacher is more comparable, to, say, someone in IT ops who simply doesn't resolve the issues in front of him, produces shoddy fixes or bad deployments. From my experience contracts are terminated, or FTEs moved on/to less impact/client facing roles very swiftly.
What I'm getting at is why are the public sector unable to accept criticism. When poor teaching is criticised all teachers seem terribly offended.
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
How long have you been working in the private sector? I can assure you this is not really how it works in most places
It tends to be how things work in world-leading companies and truly successful start-ups, but I'll grant that there are a lot of places of employment in the private sector that do not fall into that category, including all the beneficiaries of state corporatism and many monopolies.
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
How long have you been working in the private sector? I can assure you this is not really how it works in most places
Great deflection.
So, why are public sector employees generally so defensive when poor performance is criticised?
It will be counter productive for leave to attempt to trash the deal.
I disagree; it's their best (only?) strategy. Cameron's starting point is that the EU is good but needs reforming. Of course, he probably would have happily stayed in without any reforms, but let's assume he genuinely thought changes were needed. If it is shown that he hasn't actually got anything significant, that will not go down well with the voters.
They have to have a positive narrative which is absent at present
Rubio move very curious - only leak I can think of is that Jeb! and/or Kasich are intending to endorse him after SC.
I don't see Jeb lasting beyond SC unless he gets 2nd or 3rd, which is seeming vanishingly unlikely at this point. He is very much the Establishment man, and they must be at the breaking point re wanting to bash heads together to get one candidate to take on Trump and Cruz.
Kasich may stay in longer to test the waters without Jeb around. But not beyond Super Tuesday unless he can show he is making ground against Rubio.
Rubio then drops out after losing Florida on March 15th leaving Trump and Cruz to fight it out between them
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
How long have you been working in the private sector? I can assure you this is not really how it works in most places
It tends to be how things work in world-leading companies and truly successful start-ups, but I'll grant that there are a lot of places of employment in the private sector that do not fall into that category, including all the beneficiaries of state corporatism and many monopolies.
It is true - I've maybe been spoiled in my working career: start-up, consultancy, long term contract at leading retailer, founder of start up.
I assume part of it is the lack of an internal market - something which Gove has introduced with PPP. Plumbers will happily say how crap other plumbers are because the good ones will be better remunerated as a result.
If he wants to fire up his target voters (whoever they are???), fine, but keep him the hell away from the high profile events.
George Galloway's target voters are Britain's 2.7 million Muslims - or to be more exact, the 2 million of them with a vote.
As Tissue Price pointed out, didn't gho too well for him in Bradford west this time round.
He's polling 2% in London Mayoral Election. He came third in Poplar in 2010, and only just ahead of of the Conservative in Bradford West. He's a busted flush as a vote winner and definitely a net negative to anything he touches. And the disgusting Naz Shah marriage certificate stuff means he'll get nothing from the left either. Out definitely needs someone who you'd trust with your mortgage or job. At the moment its the woodwork squeaks and out come the freaks.
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
How long have you been working in the private sector? I can assure you this is not really how it works in most places
Great deflection.
So, why are public sector employees generally so defensive when poor performance is criticised?
Because they're being criticised?
If people said to me 'some booksellers have week points/could improve their performance/should do better' I think I'd agree with them.....
Why, when the same is said of public sector workers, do we hear wailings from the entire professions?
Something for hunchman/ydoethur re the GCSE maths issue.
Heads of maths having nervous breakdowns are doing so for a reason, and my feeling is that the first year of exams of the new syllabus are likely to be a fiasco, with nobody quite sure how to grade things, particularly with the lack of practice material (which is the main thing stuck in the Ofqual logjam).
The syllabus is published, there are textbooks written, schemes of work compiled and so on, which is why plenty of schools are already teaching the new spec... but nobody really knows, hand on heart, how hard it is meant to be.
It's one thing for a document to say "questions on a certain topic are worth a certain grade tariff". But in reality, there are "easy" questions on a topic, and "hard" questions on a topic, both of which theoretically fit the description. With the old spec, everybody had got familiar for every topic with what type of questions counted as a "moderate level of difficulty", and if you had students who were targeting a grade that required them to score marks on that topic, you taught the topic up to whatever standard ensured most of those students would score top marks if the question was asked in an "easy" variant, and probably score the marks if the question was asked in a "medium" variant. You don't necessarily bother teaching students all the ways to deal with a "hard" variant of the question, because
(a) there are loads of ways an examiner can "harden" a question by asking it in an unconventional way or combining it with a question from another topic (which you might not even have taught yet); teaching all the "hard" variants can take a disproportionate amount of time, and time is something every teacher has to compromise on, (b) the sharper kids can generally work out how to do it for themselves (indeed, the point of the examiner asking the question in a "hard" way is to see whether the kid can think for themselves, rather than see if they've been coached in every variant of the question), .... (d) the confident expectation that examiners will "even things out" throughout a paper - if they ask this question in its "tough" form, other topics will be asked in "easy" or "moderate" form to compensate. They won't make every question a challenge, ... surely? ? ?
Thanks again. I was amused by that GCSE question in June 8 months ago now that was basically to form the equation 6/x * 5/(x-1) = 1/3 that was just a quadratic equation of x^2-x-90 = 0 which factorised as (x-10)(x+9) = 0 take the positive x solution of 10....and it caused absolute uproar which I found astounding! Forming an equation to solve a problem is a core mathematical skill. Why it should have caused so much offence was beyond me!
The BBC is definitely going to be a place to miss if you want independent info on the referendum if tonight is anything to go by. On R5, fat mcfat giving the big "significant" spin, who then talks to as he calls him an "independent observer" John Pienaar, then over to a bod from the most pro EU paper the FT for his "independent" analysis.
I don't really understand public sector resistance to any sort of criticism. Most teachers in private will comment on how so and so is hopeless or never marking work etc. Similarly it must be perfectly apparent on wards that some Junior Doctors are not as good as others.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
Not always, see Dick Fuld and Andy Hornby!
Teachers have OFSTED, doctors can be sued and the best in both can earn 6 figures
A poor classroom teacher is not really comparable to a CEO.
I'd say a poorly performing classroom teacher is more comparable, to, say, someone in IT ops who simply doesn't resolve the issues in front of him, produces shoddy fixes or bad deployments. From my experience contracts are terminated, or FTEs moved on/to less impact/client facing roles very swiftly.
What I'm getting at is why are the public sector unable to accept criticism. When poor teaching is criticised all teachers seem terribly offended.
It is for the pupils they teach. However whether private or public sector, CEO, teacher or janitor, some people are better at some jobs than others and if you are not able to perform effectively in a role I would agree move on to another role which better matches your skills and abilities!
Rubio move very curious - only leak I can think of is that Jeb! and/or Kasich are intending to endorse him after SC.
I don't see Jeb lasting beyond SC unless he gets 2nd or 3rd, which is seeming vanishingly unlikely at this point. He is very much the Establishment man, and they must be at the breaking point re wanting to bash heads together to get one candidate to take on Trump and Cruz.
Kasich may stay in longer to test the waters without Jeb around. But not beyond Super Tuesday unless he can show he is making ground against Rubio.
Rubio then drops out after losing Florida on March 15th leaving Trump and Cruz to fight it out between them
I've actually got a lot of time for Cruz on climate change:
I disliked him for the Carson trick he pulled in Iowa, but at least he talks sense on the climate. And after the record low temperatures and record snowfalls they've had at times in the NE part of the USA this winter, a lot of them can see through the Obama nonsense.
If he wants to fire up his target voters (whoever they are???), fine, but keep him the hell away from the high profile events.
George Galloway's target voters are Britain's 2.7 million Muslims - or to be more exact, the 2 million of them with a vote.
I hate this attitude. Most Muslims no more vote for Galloway than I would vote for Nick Griffin.
Dont agree with that at all.
When Galloway stood in Bradford and Bethnall Green, he achieved huge swings to get elected mainly with Muslim votes.
Obviously Galloway has cherrypicked the constituencies he can appeal to the best but in 2015 he didn't even come close in Bradford West. The notion that all Muslims are Galloway-voters or even sympathetic to him is fallacious.
Comments
The Leavers on here have not put up any significant truthful arguments against the final deal but have been free with personal insults against Cameron which are completely undeserved.
Lets say Corbyn campaigns for Remain, Cameron will never accept Corbyn to share the podium with him because that will push Tories en mass to Leave.
Likewise if Corbyn campaigns for Leave, Cameron will plaster his face to convince Tories to vote Remain.
Best case for Leave is for Corbyn to stay neutral or even better for Corbyn to say publicly that he will abstain, driving Labour turnout down.
I'm not sure personally. He's never had a big government or opposition job after all.
Incidentally, I don't see a problem with criticism against professionals from mediocrities. Parents have a right to criticise under-performing teachers just as patients have a right to criticise under-performing; that is surely the point of professionalism? You don't need to be an expert to identify poor teaching or poor medical care; it is generally done through comparable experience.
Not only are professionals meant to be better than mediocre at their job, they should be demonstrably aiming to be so.
“Though you look like a tramp / You’re a hit with the ladies / And I’d love to have / Your little Corbabies.”
A later stanza is a thing to behold: “So get on your bike / And pedal me home / You’re all that I like / My sweet garden gnome.” How adorable! There is also a response from an imagined (and perhaps more erotic than we would like to imagine) Corbyn: “The words I shall use / Are clear with no maybes / You share my core values / Please have my Corbabies!”
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/londoners-diary-cleggs-get-set-to-battle-it-out-on-the-books-front-a3184406.html
Other than Abu Hamza, Jihadi John, or Nick Griffin.
And I seriously thought it might be Boris.
They have ZERO judgement.
Leave desperately needs sensible moderate leaders. Carswell/Gove/Boris/Patel/Wollaston and the pb.com panel, please.
"Sources say.." from unreliable unreputed twitterati mean nothing.
He did have a couple of weeks of Bradford spotlight
EDIT: How could I forget he was on CBB
Only when you have snippets from the exit polls.
In 20 hours the Nevada results will be up.
In 24 hours the S.C results will be up.
That's not enough time for flexibility, unless you get inside info.
But it's been a long and difficult day. At least we all know where we stand now.
Assuming Galloway is just a blip (gulp) the next 72 hours will shape the campaign as *everyone* is now forced to show their hand.
Gove and pals may be spokespeople but they will not be deciding who appears with Nigel on big stages
Public outcry will force another referendum and we will overwhelmingly vote out, my guess is 2022 which fits nicely around the 1922 club.
That's if the whole corrupt dictatorship lasts that long.
Boris must be feeling the strain now. Gove has pulled a master-stroke on him. Who is the conviction politician now, ready to lay career down for principles?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQA2X4yvK_g
Saying that,I wouldn't have had Galloway the big surprise tonight at the out event ;-)
I'm wary to bet against it being that wrong after Iowa, mind.
Is the fact of public employment such that it encourages collaboration, rushing to mutual aid and the protection of poor performance? I wonder how we can harness the private sector ambition/promotion ladder that means poor performers tend to be identified and improved or axed.
Trump 34 0
Cruz 19 +1
Rubio 18 +2
Bush 12 -2
Kasich 8 -1
Carson 5 0
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4lhKxf9pMitS2lQdjNTMTVFQjQ/view?pref=2&pli=1
Heads of maths having nervous breakdowns are doing so for a reason, and my feeling is that the first year of exams of the new syllabus are likely to be a fiasco, with nobody quite sure how to grade things, particularly with the lack of practice material (which is the main thing stuck in the Ofqual logjam).
The syllabus is published, there are textbooks written, schemes of work compiled and so on, which is why plenty of schools are already teaching the new spec... but nobody really knows, hand on heart, how hard it is meant to be.
It's one thing for a document to say "questions on a certain topic are worth a certain grade tariff". But in reality, there are "easy" questions on a topic, and "hard" questions on a topic, both of which theoretically fit the description. With the old spec, everybody had got familiar for every topic with what type of questions counted as a "moderate level of difficulty", and if you had students who were targeting a grade that required them to score marks on that topic, you taught the topic up to whatever standard ensured most of those students would score top marks if the question was asked in an "easy" variant, and probably score the marks if the question was asked in a "medium" variant. You don't necessarily bother teaching students all the ways to deal with a "hard" variant of the question, because
(a) there are loads of ways an examiner can "harden" a question by asking it in an unconventional way or combining it with a question from another topic (which you might not even have taught yet); teaching all the "hard" variants can take a disproportionate amount of time, and time is something every teacher has to compromise on,
(b) the sharper kids can generally work out how to do it for themselves (indeed, the point of the examiner asking the question in a "hard" way is to see whether the kid can think for themselves, rather than see if they've been coached in every variant of the question),
(c) you can confuse and knock the confidence of weaker students by concentrating too much on harder variants; better to make sure they're confident in how to attack the question in the more moderate forms it's likely to come up in,
(d) the confident expectation that examiners will "even things out" throughout a paper - if they ask this question in its "tough" form, other topics will be asked in "easy" or "moderate" form to compensate. They won't make every question a challenge, ... surely? ? ?
That point (d) has got the potential to go very, VERY badly wrong. Something similar happened with the rewritten Scottish maths syllabus a little while back: each question clearly within the scope and intended difficulty of the syllabus, but asked on what teachers had presumed would be the "high end" side of difficulty, so the kids were massively underprepared. It was a misjudgment partly of the teachers and partly of the examiners, and one of those things that only mutual familiarity can prevent. Radical changes to syllabus design are always likely to bring this kind of cock-up.
If you're wondering why questions that fit a particular grade descriptor might still be "easy", "medium" or "hard"- or why teachers can't/don't just teach everything to the "hard" standard - it might be worth picking out a few examples.
The volume of a cuboid is length times width times height. That's a basic fact which is taught to pupils, with varying degrees of success, in primary school. As such, it only attracts a minimal grade tariff at GCSE. A question that gives the dimensions of a carton of orange juice, then states how high the carton is filled with juice, and asks the student to find the volume of juice, would be a good example of a question pitched at this level. And marks on it would be worse than for a question that just showed a picture of a cuboid labelled with length, width and height, because of all the textual processing involved (in particular, students must determine that the height of the box is irrelevant and they must instead focus on the depth of the juice). So that would be "medium" difficulty for that tariff, and one would try to ensure students working at that grade level were able to answer this question, and not have to be shown a fully labelled picture before they could calculate the volume.
Now consider the same question again, but instead of asking for the volume of juice, asking what height inside the carton the orange juice would reach if the (sealed!) carton was tipped over so it is resting on its front. This question still only requires knowledge of V = lwh, but is FAR harder. Students working at that tariff grade are generally not proficient at the kind of mental juggling back and forth - realising that from the initial information they must find the volume of juice, and then use the "width" and "length" dimensions of the tipped carton to divide through and obtain the new height - that this question involves. IIRC students working at that nominal grade level only averaged about 20% when the question was posed in that way.
Rubio quite close, to a very clear win for Trump.
Hmm..
A final post if only to puff up David Herdson's ego in his hour of need.
Similarly, questions about probability trees are nominally GCSE grade B. Yet it is quite easy to make a question about them more fiendish: by requiring more branches to be drawn, by making the dependencies between branches more complex (after taking out a red sweet, there are fewer red sweets in the bag, and fewer sweets overall...), or by making the question more algebraic e.g. by ensuring there are an unknown number of sweets "x" in the bag. As such, they are often asked among the final three questions in a paper - the questions which serve to differentiate A* students from grade A students. Personally I find it disappointing that a question that, according to the official documentation, is really only grade "B" is being used to identify students as "A*" - it strikes me as devaluing the exercise somewhat. Yet I can't argue with the rationale that the question is tough (in absolute terms, it will be one that students score poorly on) and putting it at the back of the paper will stop it sucking up the time (or completely destroying the confidence) of weaker candidates, avoiding them grinding to a halt and missing more accessible marks elsewhere.
Last year there was a twitterstorm about such a question (expertly solved by David H on this site - well done sir!) that had an unknown quantity, and required candidates to set up and solve a quadratic equation. Kids in droves left their exam halls in tears. I believe that the problem was precipitated mostly because that question had appeared relatively early in the paper, given its complexity - rather easier questions have been left as the final question in the past - and kids drilled to look for an "easy" probability tree question found themselves stuck on one really intended to differentiate candidates working at higher target grades.
Strictly speaking, no individual aspect of that question (the tree, the algebraic expressions for the probabilities, the algebraic fractions and quadratic equation that resulted) was really at an A/A* level, but the combination was genuinely taxing for most students. If, in a parallel universe, more tree diagram questions were asked in this vein, then teachers would deliver the topic quite differently - teach it only after the necessary algebra, ask harder questions, more-or-less ignore the topic entirely with grade C students. This is exactly the kind of decision that teachers of the new GCSE maths spec (and the new Scottish spec before them) simply lack sufficient information to make an informed choice on. For that reason, I sense disaster looms.
Teachers have OFSTED, doctors can be sued and the best in both can earn 6 figures
Like a face-hugger in Alien looking for the smallest piece of human flesh to jump on.
They each appeal to about ten per cent of the electorate very passionately, with some neutral, and a lot repelled by them
I've been getting very sweary, grumpy and irritable. Which isn't good for me, or pb.com
Goodnight all!
I can assure you this is not really how it works in most places
GALLOWAY did disastrously in the big Scottish debate with thousands of 16-17 year olds deriding him as "Guy Fawkes" in a live debate.
So, why are public sector employees generally so defensive when poor performance is criticised?
Thats why I'm not including them in any polling average.
http://www.businessinsider.com/mitt-romney-intrade-bets-trader-millions-2013-9?IR=T
Kasich may stay in longer to test the waters without Jeb around. But not beyond Super Tuesday unless he can show he is making ground against Rubio.
The self-confidence of the Leavers needs to improve. Everything is to play for. A couple on here are bottling the race on the starting line after they've seen the competition: a Vauxhall Astra with go faster stripes.
I'd say a poorly performing classroom teacher is more comparable, to, say, someone in IT ops who simply doesn't resolve the issues in front of him, produces shoddy fixes or bad deployments. From my experience contracts are terminated, or FTEs moved on/to less impact/client facing roles very swiftly.
What I'm getting at is why are the public sector unable to accept criticism. When poor teaching is criticised all teachers seem terribly offended.
I assume part of it is the lack of an internal market - something which Gove has introduced with PPP. Plumbers will happily say how crap other plumbers are because the good ones will be better remunerated as a result.
Why, when the same is said of public sector workers, do we hear wailings from the entire professions?
The last one barring an ARG poll is from SurveyMonkey (you heard of them), it's an online poll though:
http://wspa.com/2016/02/19/7news-primary-poll-results/
Trump 44
Rubio 22
Cruz 15
Carson 9
Kasich 7
Bush 4
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/09/459026242/scientific-evidence-doesn-t-support-global-warming-sen-ted-cruz-says
I disliked him for the Carson trick he pulled in Iowa, but at least he talks sense on the climate. And after the record low temperatures and record snowfalls they've had at times in the NE part of the USA this winter, a lot of them can see through the Obama nonsense.
When Galloway stood in Bradford and Bethnall Green, he achieved huge swings to get elected mainly with Muslim votes.