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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Labour seems to have forgotten how to ‘do’ Opposition
Ed Miliband is unfairly maligned. It’s true that he couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich gracefully. It’s also true that he was always a bit of a wonk and, in the testosterone-fuelled world of Westminster and electoral politics, a bit beta. Even now, his brother is shorter odds to be next Labour leader than he is (50/1 and 80/1, respectively), despite his not having been an MP for seven years, while Ed is once again in the Shadow Cabinet, albeit invisibly so.
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Bit unfair to say Ed is invisible. He is the Shadow Business Sec which is hardly a 24/7 frontline role when in Opposition.
Labour will start to make serious inroads from beginning of next year imho. The Greatest Recession will be in full flow by then and ours may well be much worse than anyone else but USA. Throw in the deluded insanity of No Deal WTO Brexit and things could turn downwards for this administration very rapidly.
There will be a reckoning.
Albeit not as shocking as the government's lack of restrictions on entry followed by their encouragement to take foreign holidays.
As i see it the next election has two main options:
1 - this government will be as incompetent as its many critics, including myself, expect. In that case, their incompetence will be obvious enough by 2024 that all Labour needs to do is offer likely competence.
2 - the government is average or better. In that case they win re-election regardless of what Labour do.
So Starmer, boring, grey, quiet may not be traditional opposition but strategically his approach is fine.
But Labour won't making those points AT THE TIME. They have had no smart point to make ahead of events unfolding. They are instead trying to make capital out of looking wise after the event. That will play with some. But for others it looks like the lowest type of political opportunism. For example, the Govt. would have been eviscerated on the crap app - if Labour had been half as smart as a bunch of the commentators on here about that looming fiasco - way ahead of it imploding.
And here is a perfect example of why Labour aren't steaming ahead in the polls on the back of taking down Boris on Covid:
https://order-order.com/2020/08/05/dodds-cant-run-from-her-lockdown-record/
A train wreck complete with a jumbo crash is incoming. It was foreseeable and happened because the government are completely useless, and overlooked obviously preferable alternatives.
If Kate Green can get a handle on that...
This is a bloody scandal.
https://twitter.com/LordCFalconer/status/1291976287188324353
Going with the teachers predictions may have inflated grades, but also would have filled the Universities for the autumn, helping their finances as well as minimising NEETS. Not a perfect solution but a pragmatic one.
Of course, if Gove and Cummings hadn't abolished AS levels, and modular exams a few years back, there would have been a much more solid and objective base for A level results...
Having said they will use teacher grades, OFQUAL have now admitted they are judging by past school performance, as the SQA did.
But it's even better than that, because they don't have as good a data set. All the exams are too new. So according to leaks from yesterday, what is going to happen is:
1) School cohorts of below five - teacher assessment alone
2) Cohorts of five to fifteen - mix of teacher assessment and this discredited algorithm
3) Cohorts of 15+ - algorithm alone.
Which means the following:
1) 40% of grades are not going to match teacher predictions. That's far higher than the 10% gap that was leaked earlier.
2) State schools - with large cohorts - get decided by computer modelling based on at most four comparable sets of data (more usually two or three). Private schools will get based on teacher assessment. Guess which one is going to get clobbered for downgrading? Hint - not the private schools.
3) Appeals were previously not allowed. Now they are being allowed. They will only be allowed via schools. However, that may change again.
4) Expect to see this challenged through the courts
5) Expect the exam system in October to implode due to the huge number of resits, far beyond the system's capacity.
6) Expect Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove to be blamed, as they were responsible for setting up both the new exams and the current iteration of OFQUAL and the exam boards.
7) Expect utter chaos as the government tries to blame teachers for providing evidence they decided to ignore.
8) Expect actual student riots and the unions to ballot their members over strike action.
And all this could have been avoided if that brain dead moron we call our PM had thought to ask schools to send in samples of work they had graded at A, B, C, D etc for each subject so some standardisation could have been done on that basis.
This is going to be bad. You thought the SQA was a shambles? This is worse.
Oh - and GCSEs are going to be worse.
More here:
https://www.tes.com/news/GCSE-results-2020-teacher-grades-ignored
TSE pointed this story out. But the implications are absolutely dire. You could easily see every exam board, OFQUAL and the DfE consumed by this.
Dispelling the impression of being a party of incessant whiners would do their image a world of good. Why don't Labour figures devise actual practical policies - in advance, please, Captain Hindsight! - that would clearly set out what Labour would do differently. For example: 'Instituting effective contact tracing covering the majority of cases would require us to recruit x people and spend y money in z timeframe. This is how we would implement it, and here are the pros and cons of our policy'.
Even I would find it difficult to criticize that approach - so why don't they do it?
The Conservative’s Islands Campaign continued today with Chancellor Sunak avoiding those nasty urban Scots and following the PM’s strategy, to avoid getting shouted at by locals.
Yes Bute were caught off-guard at first but rallied to send him back homeward to think again of becoming PM.
In true nasty party style, his motorcade jumped the queue leaving locals stranded. A source told us that his car had a bumper sticker reading: ‘Eat my dust, peasants!‘
There is of course irony in his visiting Rothesay, a placed which welcomed more Syrian refugees than his constituents would have allowed.
I think this is a very important point. While I think they actually will blame the government to some degree, in so doing it does not automatically follow that they will reward Labour, or at least reward then enough.
No matter how bad things get, the government could still eke out a win if the alternative does not make a good case both for why the government is at fault, and why they would do a better job - and merely stating you would is not enough, you need that simple messaging David talks about, if possible which implies you have an idea how to fix things without being specific.
People like yourself. You voted to put an anti-semite in Number 10 rather than Boris. And Covid wasn't an argument you can cling to as validation of that decision.
Sixth forms will use teacher grades when deciding entries, suspect Colleges will too...
The big losers will be the Tabatha and the Tarquins who were expecting a full set of nines or A*s, their parents having spent £££££££ school and/or tuition fees... denied by the wicked algorithm, Daddy and the School Headmaster have already instructed lawyers according to the Times this morning...
The point is, in the absence of a significant past dataset, the ‘statistical modelling’ they have used will be utterly meaningless. These grades will have as much validity as a Cummings press release.
And that will not only cause a furore this year, but will undermine exams going forward. Because how can you have confidence in a system run by people as mind-bendingly stupid and ignorant as this?
It’s bright children in weaker state schools who will be punished by this system. Like, for example, the children of voters in the so called Red Wall.
If the teachers' grades had been accepted, would the headlines instead have been "Massive Grade Inflation"?
At least OFQUAL have published their methodology before the results come out, unlike the SQA who did it after.
As @ydoethur pointed out, it will be the private school kids who get the teachers grade predictions as marks because of class sizes. It will be the state school kids that are downgraded and tend to be under predicted at the top end too, as I see from Medical School Entrance.
Worth noting that it isn't just kids and parents that are up in arms, but also very many proud doting grandparents, of a Tory demographic.
Gove and Cummings set this heffalump trap, then walked onto it anyway.
Like more than a few LibDems Mike has been upset since the 2015 election.
He really believed in LibDem incumbency votes and that tripling student fees was going to be a vote winner for the LibDems.
The raised hopes of the summer of 2019 then being smashed made things worse.
It was blindingly obvious at thetime to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that there were better alternatives. The government deliberately chose one that was always bound to lead to this problem, and then appear to have discarded it in favour of a much worse one.
And if you'd thought instead of switching automatically into abuse you would see I have backed the action of the Scottish government in lowering those predicted grades.
Surely not...
(1) The grades from previous years
(2) The teacher predicted grades
(3) The grades awarded this year
If (3) is higher than or close to (1) then complaints will look stupid.
If (2) is much higher than (1) then teachers will have exposed themselves as cheats and liars.
If the specific request is laughable that's one thing, but the implication seems to be that cooperation among sovereign entities is either weak or cause for hilarity. Nonsense designed to make people feel superior in other words.
But the incessant self-serving whine ** from teachers does not impress.
Especially after they have exposed themselves as cheats and liars by massively over predicting grades.
Now I'm sure that you will say that you personally do not over-predict grades.
In which case that should make you direct your abuse at the many teachers who do.
** Reminiscent of the incessant self-serving whine in 2012 when 20+ years of grade inflation was brought to an end.
And then missed the imbecility of the government encouraging foreign holidays during a global pandemic.
THERE ARE NO GRADES FROM PREVIOUS YEARS. DUE TO EXAM REFORMS ANY GRADES FROM BEFORE LAST YEAR ARE NOT COMPARABLE.
I am sure I have said this before.
Which means statistical modelling cannot be used.
But it has been.
So if I submit my ranking, I also submit evidence of work graded at A, B, C, D etc? So they know whether I’m getting it about right? And if not, adjustments can be made.
And that could be marked by, well, by examiners maybe? You know, those people who mark literally millions of fecking script every year?
Actually, I think the biggest mistake was to make too early a call on cancelling exams. But that’s another story.
How very revealing.
Again, though, you miss the point, possibly wilfully, that they have only used data from teachers in a small minority of cases. So your criticism doesn’t even work.
The proportion of students achieving the top grades at A-level has fallen to its lowest level for more than a decade, this year's results show.
This year some 25.5% got an A grade or higher - the lowest level since 2007 when it was 25.3%.
Girls narrowly reclaimed the lead from boys, with 25.5% achieving A* and A grades compared with 25.4% of boys.
The overall pass rate remains the same as last year at 97.6% for students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-49290421
So what we'll be able to do next week is compare the grades awarded with what happened in previous years.
And then compare the grades awarded with the teacher predicted grades.
Now which do you think will be the closest:
2019 grades compared with 2020 grades or 2019 grades versus 2020 teacher predicted grades ?
Unfortunately this story means that whatever happens the results this year are completely discredited.
Which means there will be huge pressure on the system in the resits in October. Possibly fatal pressure. Markers will have full timetables and facilities will be at full stretch.
The longest stretch you could have for A-level is History, at four years. Some subjects, for example, Economics, only one.
At GCSE, almost all subjects will have only one or two years of data. You cannot use that as a dataset. Not with any credibility, anyway.
Honestly, do you work for the DfE?
But then again Brexit really did send a lot of people over the edge of sanity. When you can find a tangential reason to make a snide and superior comment about Brexit who cares about the crimes of people traffickers.
I'm no more a supporter of the education bureaucracy than I am of other government bureaucracies.
But let me ask you a question.
Given that last year over 97% of A levels were passes and over 25% were A grades what do you think this year's results should and will be.
What do you think this year's results should and will be ?
The cause for hilarity is that we had the cooperation.
Priti Patel campaigned to abandon that cooperation.
She is now whining about needing cooperation.
The hilarity is that the Brexiteers fucked up. Again.
My very distinct impression, and this impression is backed by a number of conversations I have had, is that this year‘s cohort were rather abler than last year’s. Last year, I had around 25% at 7+. Given the quality of the students I had, and the quality of my own teaching, that would normally be nearer 50%. Anecdotal I know, but there was reason to expect a rise before the pandemic hit.
That is compounded by the fact that teachers have now a little time to get used to the new exams, and the marking criteria has finally stabilised. So the delivery of the courses has improved substantially.
So it doesn’t surprise me that grades were up 10% on teacher predictions than on last year. In fact, it suggests that probably they were quite realistic.
Unless we had ten to fifteen years of data to draw on, it’s not possible to model out background noise. That’s what they’ve tried to do and that’s what’s going to get them into trouble.
You might argue, with some justice, that DfE requirements and the cowardice of Gove mean that grades are normally standardised from year to year anyway. True to an extent. But that would only be valid if you could expect the school cohorts to be exactly consistent from year to year, which is clearly a nonsense. Otherwise, you would expect abler students in the cohort to attend different schools so there could be very wide variation from year to year. This method has put in place a wallet lottery.
Does that answer your question?
Labour stayed at about 40% in the polls from GE17 until well into 2019.
Johnson and Get Brexit Done were (sadly) a potent electoral combination. I dislike both but one has to face facts.
That’s a fact you have to face, but although Starmer is facing it I’m not sure a Labour are.
Now if only there had been some intelligent lefty who had come from the North but now lived in Hampstead who could have taken EdM to the restaurant in BHS Doncaster then things might have been different.
I would be less than happy if I was a teacher for sure and you calling Scottish teachers liars and cheats deserves abuse that I would get banned for.
The dying sounds of the fringe are shouting loudly on Twitter, they've lost and they know it
England need 196 with 9 wickets left.....
So what I'm saying is we can win from the left with the right leader. I think this is a perfectly reasonable belief.
That said, my sense is that Starmer will tack to the centre and try to win from there. And I wish him well. It would be nice to win an election even if the platform does not thrill me.
https://twitter.com/MrMcEnaney/status/1290698389710151680
Unless Darwin has kicked up a couple of gears then an 'abler cohort' should change things by about 0.1%.
Some schools will do much better than that while others do the opposite.
Amazing though that this 'abler cohort' came through this year.
Perhaps you can inform us which other years had a 10% increase in grades because of an 'abler cohort' or a 10% fall in grades because of a less able cohort.
I'd sure love to know which years were those of genius or stupidity.
People get this wrong, Attlee was where the country was, he wasn't massively to the left as Corbyn was in 2019.
What 2017 proved was that the centre now is a lot more left wing than it's been since 1997. And any sensible leader would look at that and go forward.
That's why Johnson tacked to the left
https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/status/1292093849553207297
Do you honestly think that’s acceptable?
As for numbers, I would have tested my belief against the results. But we don’t get any, because these idiots (whom despite your denials you are clearly a supporter of) are not giving us meaningful data to work with. So how can I give you them? All I can tell you is that anecdotally I think this was a strong cohort, and last year’s was not.
I think the real problem is you don’t understand what you’re talking about, but you’re convinced you are.
Are you sure your name is Richard and not Dominic?
Edit - incidentally my belief the students in my classes this year were abler were borne out by baseline tests, notably their CAT4. But OFQUAL haven’t used those either.
But seriously, he was demonized as "geeky" and "red ed" and "wimpy" and all of that, total nonsense, but it seeped in - as your comment testifies. A shame. Would have been a good PM probably. But all substance no style is the very opposite of what we seem to value these days - e.g. the ghastly "Boris".
https://twitter.com/Gabriel_Pogrund/status/1292093847753957376?s=20
2016-2019 average 78.6%
2020 actual after lowering 81.1%
2020 teacher predicted 88.6%
Higher
2016-2019 average 76.5%
2020 actual after lowering 78.9%
2020 teacher predicted 88.8%
Advanced Higher
2016-2019 average 80.4%
2020 actual after lowering 84.9%
2020 teacher predicted 92.8%
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53636296
Its the Scottish government who has done a better job than the teachers.
Admittedly, they’ve got further than I expected. But one more wicket and they’re through to the tail.
And these bowlers are looking very dangerous.