Back on topic, and many thanks for the usual thought-provoking Saturday piece, @david_herdson.
The journey from Opposition to Government is a multi-layered event with a number of different strands happening contemporaneously.
The first and obvious point is Starmer is not Corbyn - he has not so far attracted or engendered the strength of negativity which Corbyn achieved during his tenure. People may not wish to strew rose petals at Starmer's feet as yet but they certainly don't hate him or fear him.
Without wishing to downplay Corbyn's part in Johnson's victory last December, the fact was that for many voters for whom neither was an attractive option, Johnson was the lesser of the problems and he also offered a resolution to months of chaos, confusion and drift. A Johnson majority would end all that and I suspect that was a powerful motivation which the Opposition parties en masse failed to appreciate throughout the second half of 2019.
Indeed, I'd argue the longer the chaos went on the bigger Johnson's victory was going to be - his poll numbers improved relentlessly through the autumn.
Replacing a failed leader is a start but it's only that - Labour now needs to set out creating a message, a theme, a set of basic principles relevant to mid-2020s Britain.
That work should have started and needs to be the prime activity behind the scenes. The advantage Starmer will have over Johnson by 2024 is a) he won't have a record in Government to defend and b) as he is not Corbyn, people will at least be willing to listen to what he has to say. They may not like it but they will give Starmer a hearing which is more than many were ever prepared to offer Corbyn.
A good leader and sensible policies are important - a bit of luck will play a part as well but there's also that notion of the public believing Labour are "ready" to be the Government. That needs confidence in the leader, the policies, the team, the direction of travel which chimes with what the public wants and a recognition the current Government has failed and has nothing more to offer.
It might mean Labour accepting elements of the Johnson/Sunak programme or taking those and saying where they could do them better. It's not Blairism (however you define that) but a recognition the new Government won't turn back the clock but move forward.
Are they playing this Test in Hawaii? I keep getting a sort of Hawaiian feeling for some reason...
Not from me, I will never eat a Hawaiian pizza, because I'm a good Muslim boy.
The just-opened pizza place down the road (which must have cost a fortune judging by its size) is halal so it's "turkey ham" or "turkey bacon" on its toppings. Real pineapple though!
Are they playing this Test in Hawaii? I keep getting a sort of Hawaiian feeling for some reason...
Not from me, I will never eat a Hawaiian pizza, because I'm a good Muslim boy.
The just-opened pizza place down the road (which must have cost a fortune judging by its size) is halal so it's "turkey ham" or "turkey bacon" on its toppings. Real pineapple though!
Paywalled but I hope they are right because in the past hour I've topped up on the front two, Kamala Harris and Susan Rice. We need to tread carefully because Joe Biden is due to announce his choice in the next few days so no doubt there are several people who already know where his pin has landed.
Basically the piece runs through the top candidates, who we all know now, and then plums for Harris as she has experience running and is gutsy enough to take the fight to Trump in what promises to be the dirtiest election ever. Luce is worried that Rice hasn't been in the crossfire of running for office. She's a gamble. Biden may take the gamble because he doesn't want someone who will be running for 2024 within five minutes of being announced and who he really gets along with.
Encouraging. "Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with in a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly." Swedes ain't no turnips. Or rutabugas even.
Encouraging. "Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with in a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly." Swedes ain't no turnips. Or rutabugas even.
Sweden (like Arizona) has a de facto lockdown. There aren't sick people, because people are choosing not to interact.
This means the economy is still in the toilet (compare Sweden to Denmark), and the virus has not not been eliminated or driven to really low levels.
Paywalled but I hope they are right because in the past hour I've topped up on the front two, Kamala Harris and Susan Rice. We need to tread carefully because Joe Biden is due to announce his choice in the next few days so no doubt there are several people who already know where his pin has landed.
Why would anyone put a single positive bet on in this market, when the rewards for laying are so much greater?
Paywalled but I hope they are right because in the past hour I've topped up on the front two, Kamala Harris and Susan Rice. We need to tread carefully because Joe Biden is due to announce his choice in the next few days so no doubt there are several people who already know where his pin has landed.
Basically the piece runs through the top candidates, who we all know now, and then plums for Harris as she has experience running and is gutsy enough to take the fight to Trump in what promises to be the dirtiest election ever. Luce is worried that Rice hasn't been in the crossfire of running for office. She's a gamble. Biden may take the gamble because he doesn't want someone who will be running for 2024 within five minutes of being announced and who he really gets along with.
We await the result.
Hold on. It's Saturday. Tomorrow is Sunday. Why is the FT publishing now?
Susan Rice has never run for office but she must have learned something about campaigns from her time in the White House under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It's not like she is new to the limelight, so my feeling is this factor is overplayed.
Paywalled but I hope they are right because in the past hour I've topped up on the front two, Kamala Harris and Susan Rice. We need to tread carefully because Joe Biden is due to announce his choice in the next few days so no doubt there are several people who already know where his pin has landed.
Basically the piece runs through the top candidates, who we all know now, and then plums for Harris as she has experience running and is gutsy enough to take the fight to Trump in what promises to be the dirtiest election ever. Luce is worried that Rice hasn't been in the crossfire of running for office. She's a gamble. Biden may take the gamble because he doesn't want someone who will be running for 2024 within five minutes of being announced and who he really gets along with.
We await the result.
Hold on. It's Saturday. Tomorrow is Sunday. Why is the FT publishing now?
Susan Rice has never run for office but she must have learned something about campaigns from her time in the White House under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It's not like she is new to the limelight, so my feeling is this factor is overplayed.
Paywalled but I hope they are right because in the past hour I've topped up on the front two, Kamala Harris and Susan Rice. We need to tread carefully because Joe Biden is due to announce his choice in the next few days so no doubt there are several people who already know where his pin has landed.
Why would anyone put a single positive bet on in this market, when the rewards for laying are so much greater?
Temperament. I am 99 per cent a horseracing punter, and a backer not a layer.
Paywalled but I hope they are right because in the past hour I've topped up on the front two, Kamala Harris and Susan Rice. We need to tread carefully because Joe Biden is due to announce his choice in the next few days so no doubt there are several people who already know where his pin has landed.
Basically the piece runs through the top candidates, who we all know now, and then plums for Harris as she has experience running and is gutsy enough to take the fight to Trump in what promises to be the dirtiest election ever. Luce is worried that Rice hasn't been in the crossfire of running for office. She's a gamble. Biden may take the gamble because he doesn't want someone who will be running for 2024 within five minutes of being announced and who he really gets along with.
We await the result.
Hold on. It's Saturday. Tomorrow is Sunday. Why is the FT publishing now?
Susan Rice has never run for office but she must have learned something about campaigns from her time in the White House under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It's not like she is new to the limelight, so my feeling is this factor is overplayed.
Rice would be fine. But Harris is the safe choice:
- black (but not very black) - won't frighten people regarding "defund the police" - skeletons already known
Now, she doesn't bring a state into play, but I'm not convinced that any of the candidates tip a state. (Gretchen would be the best bet if you wanted someone to make Michigan a bit more likely.)
I see John Rentoul is really mincing his words to cover his true feelings.
The problem with Corbyn was never that he was unelectable, but that he would have been a disaster if he had been elected. With this pitiful whine of the sore loser, he has proved it. He has no judgement, and prefers the warm bath of myth to the harsh reality of responsibility
Imperial Master Sunak jumps the queue leaving locals stranded! 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.
Did they have pre booked tickets vs the walk ins/standbys who were queuing?
The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.
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...
The injustice on Thursday will be on an individual level, overall the marks will be the same as previous years, despite missing a term of work. It all depends on how well teachers have predicted and ranked their candidates.
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...
The Universities will fill their places, from the top down... Oxbridge already saying they will lower entry requirements, dressed up as helping pupils from poorer areas... it’ll be the ex-polys and HE colleges without research that will really struggle... of course, a student from England doesn’t pay what a student from China would have done...
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...
But that’s the point. If small cohorts are exempted from the algorithm, private schools will get what they predicted.
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.
I doubt that many private schools have cohorts of less than 5. Many will be in the 5-15 bucket and most in the 15+ bucket
The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.
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...
The injustice on Thursday will be on an individual level, overall the marks will be the same as previous years, despite missing a term of work. It all depends on how well teachers have predicted and ranked their candidates.
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...
The Universities will fill their places, from the top down... Oxbridge already saying they will lower entry requirements, dressed up as helping pupils from poorer areas... it’ll be the ex-polys and HE colleges without research that will really struggle... of course, a student from England doesn’t pay what a student from China would have done...
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...
But that’s the point. If small cohorts are exempted from the algorithm, private schools will get what they predicted.
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.
I doubt that many private schools have cohorts of less than 5. Many will be in the 5-15 bucket and most in the 15+ bucket
The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.
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...
What happens Thursday?
A-level grades come out.
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
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.
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.
You'd better hope that English teachers haven't exposed themselves as cheats and liars by vastly over predicting grades as their Scottish counterparts did.
How will we know, given they haven’t used our data?
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?
I assume there will be three sets of numbers available:
(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.
For fuck’s sake.
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.
But it can. It’s just a bit more complicated.
Exam results of previous years compared to national set of previous years gives a relative performance.
Apply that relative performance to this years results, adjusted to the individual school’s track record.
All that misses is schools that would have had a materially different performance under the new system vs the old one
I see John Rentoul is really mincing his words to cover his true feelings.
The problem with Corbyn was never that he was unelectable, but that he would have been a disaster if he had been elected. With this pitiful whine of the sore loser, he has proved it. He has no judgement, and prefers the warm bath of myth to the harsh reality of responsibility
What do Muslims and Jews want to happen to the pigs?
I want the pigs to teach us how they achieve their 30 minute long orgasms.
I freely admit I do not speak for every Muslim or Jew.
Reminds me of an old joke:
An elderly Rabbi and Priest are sitting on a park bench staring wistfully across the park.
The priest asks the Rabbi, "tell me old friend in confidence, did you ever break the religious rules"
The Rabbi replies: "well, I have to confess, when I was a young man, I did let temptation get the better of me. I had roast pork once, out of curiosity" "tell me, did you ever break your vows?"
The priest "Well once, I did have a young lady infatuated with me. We got to know each other well, and one night, I did break my vow of chastity"
They paused, and stared into the distance. Eventually the priest spoke again "It's much better than pork, isn't it?"
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
What do Muslims and Jews want to happen to the pigs?
I want the pigs to teach us how they achieve their 30 minute long orgasms.
I freely admit I do not speak for every Muslim or Jew.
Reminds me of an old joke:
An elderly Rabbi and Priest are sitting on a park bench staring wistfully across the park.
The priest asks the Rabbi, "tell me old friend in confidence, did you ever break the religious rules"
The Rabbi replies: "well, I have to confess, when I was a young man, I did let temptation get the better of me. I had roast pork once, out of curiosity" "tell me, did you ever break your vows?"
The priest "Well once, I did have a young lady infatuated with me. We got to know each other well, and one night, I did break my vow of chastity"
They paused, and stared into the distance. Eventually the priest spoke again "It's much better than pork, isn't it?"
Hate to spoil the punchline, but I thought it was the rabbi said that.
Wrong then, wrong now. He's just too old, that's all. Not to win - he will - but to be a strong president. I back him for one reason only. The obvious reason.
The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.
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...
What happens Thursday?
A-level grades come out.
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
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.
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.
You'd better hope that English teachers haven't exposed themselves as cheats and liars by vastly over predicting grades as their Scottish counterparts did.
Our local education expert opines that teachers are cheats and liars, you could not make it up. Good old another richardhead
Perhaps you could compare the grades Scottish teachers predicted with what had been achieved in previous years ?
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.
Well I don't support them , why ask teachers to do it and then make them out to be cheats and liars by making up another system to trash the teachers opinions. 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.
Nation 5 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%
Whoever misses out, Foakes or even Bracey comes in.
That would have been a much easier win had Buttler not fluffed so often.
One thing England has, which is massive in today's cricketing world is two world class all rounders. That's huge and means we always have a good chance
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Yup - the one you and so many others voted for just a little time ago. The one who Starmer loyally served year in and year out. And now the British public should trust them?
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
If Corbyn is implicated by the EHRC report - and maybe even expelled from the Party - then the question Starmer has to answer is how could he sit beside him in the Shadow Cabinet for three years whilst this was going on?
Lets see how his numbers hold up against that line of questioning - and his answers. I personally don't see how he has an acceptable answer.
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Yup - the one you and so many others voted for just a little time ago. The one who Starmer loyally served year in and year out. And now the British public should trust them?
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
If Corbyn is implicated by the EHRC report - and maybe even expelled from the Party - then the question Starmer has to answer is how could he sit beside him in the Shadow Cabinet for three years whilst this was going on?
Lets see how his numbers hold up against that line of questioning - and his answers. I personally don't see how he has an acceptable answer.
Whether Corbyn is expelled or not - and I severely doubt he will be or that the report will be so blunt as to make that an easy option - Starmer would of course face that question, and it is a fair one.
Nevertheless, he will be judged more on his actions as Leader than anything else. If he does a good job and shows good leadership, people will look past that he served Corbyn faithfully for all that time. If people like you or want to support you they will look past obvious reasons they should not, or reasons they should be more wary.
If Starmer wasn't in the SC he'd never have never become the leader and been able to make any progress at all. I'd say it was a sacrifice worth making.
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
Because there’s nothing I can do about it.
When I see supposed regulators demonstrating a breathtaking contempt for rigour or process, things are a bit different.
I haven not been on site much but so have not seen the usual cricket comments in the last few days about how awful England are. I feel sure SO must have said something to that effect. Well...I hope this magnificent fightback leading to victory makes them think twice before being so ultra critical again of the England Cricket team.
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Expelling Corbyn would be damn stupid. It's not Corbyn or even the Corbynites who are the problem. It's the Scouse SWP tankies Neil Kinnock threw out who were readmitted by Ed Miliband.
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
Nothing to declare? In any case, the real unfairness is height. Tall people are overrepresented in political and commercial leadership roles, as well as consuming more than their fair share of Earth's precious natural resources.
My browser for some reason recommened an article from a website I'd never heard of before, which had a rather peculiar premise about 'How Corbyn unmasked comedy'.
It seems to be saying tha anti-establishmentism is the key to comedy, and because some famous comedians and comedy programmes disliked Corbyn or did such things as 'blamed Corbyn for Johnson’s victory without taking responsibility for helping Johnson establish his harmless clown persona', that means they were on the same side as 'the establisment'. It calls out Charlie Brooker for a bit on the Corbyn-Branson row which apparently included far more time attacking Corbyn than Branson and didn't consider corporate interests (that Corbyn was indeed wrong about what he claimed I guess is not of relevance).
Blaming Corbyn for losing an election? Perish the thought. Apparently comedians are are supposed to be political radicals at all times. It's silly of political conservatives to moan that there's too much left wing comedy out there, without Corbynites also now suggesting the comedy establishment is not doing its job because they mocked the great man. (Ed M didn't get it easy either of course).
Onthe other hand, the article itself was therefore of great comedic value.
As we are seeing with the laughable conspiracies around the 'Labour Report' one of the key problems with Corbynism is that it has no safety valve of self-doubt or ability to admit its own failings, as it is predicated on the man and his supporters being uniquely virtuous. Otherwise, what is the point? If you admit nuance and the validity of different views as reasonably held and having their merits within Labour's tradition, why put forward someone the public hate, who even he would admit isn't exactly a natural in the role of leader? Why put up with the ossuary he hangs his clothes in or evidence of managerial incompetence? It only makes sense if he and you have hit upon something uniquely virtuous and everyone else is a nefarious Blairite/Tory acting out of venality and malice.
So comedians must be to blame, not Corbyn. Or Jews. Or Labour officials. Or Laura Kuenssberg, Countdown hosts, anyone who doesn't see the unique virtues of the man or his words must be a bad actor. It's a cultish creed Labour need to stamp out and quarantine itself from as it's just so dangerous - not initially as they have power over very little and are reduced to attacking minor celebrities - but as it rots the brain and would cause huge problems were it to be over something serious where errors had been made it was impossible to reasonably course correct without blaming some conspiracy.
Thank you for this entertaining mix of projection and amateur psychiatry. Now here is what actually happened and why -
In 2015 in a climate favourable to re-election the party suppressed its radicalism - in both content and messaging - for fear of being rogered by the tory press and (linked) of spooking the denizens of Middle England.
Result - a Conservative majority government. Reaction - Fuck it then. Let's stop poncing around. Let's drop the timidity. It's sterile and it's getting us nowhere in any case. We'll shift left. Elect a properly socialist leader and run on a radical platform. No apologies for it. Give the voters the choice and see what happens.
What did happen? - Another loss but close and a better performance than achieved under the previous 2 leaders. And this despite Jeremy Corbyn being a sub-optimal PM candidate on a personal level (deficiency of brain power).
Moral - The left nearly won a GE with a poor leader. With better packaging we can do so one day soon.
Labour didn't lose the 2015 election, particularly in England. They actually had a net gain IN ENGLAND of 4 seats. It was the collapse of the LD's, significantly, but by no means exclusively to the Tories, that put Cameron back in No 10, albeit with a small overall majority than the Coalition had had. It was the rise in the SNP vote that did for Labour. Milliband should have stayed as leader.
I liked - and like - him but I think he had to go. That 2015 result was such a terrible blow.
EdM's problem was that he never seemed interested beyond the 'ordinary people' of Dartmouth Park. Or as I think Sandy described it 'talking to the top 10% about the bottom 10%'.
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.
lol - as if.
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".
But I think EdM lacked substance as well.
Or perhaps more generally lacked interest in or empathy towards or relevance to the average person in the average constituency.
Nor was he a skilled enough politician (or dishonest enough person) to be able to fake it.
He was, I suspect, someone who had suffered by being given too much and too much too soon without having to learn and experience things himself.
It's possible you arrived at this perception uninfluenced by the barrage of media messaging along exactly these lines but I am skeptical. EM was by any measure less silver-spooned than the man he ran against and the man in number 10 now. Both of them are the epitome of what you describe in the last para.
But Cameron and Boris were more talented/dishonest as politicians
As was Blair before him.
So he lacked the style and he lacked the substance which Thatcher or Brown revelled in.
Nor did he have the 'everyman' appeal which Major had.
Is insipid the best description of EdM ?
Many in Labour must have thought and so the turn to Corbyn.
For example, I think Boris Johnson is a frivolous charlatan out for himself only. But there are millions of suckers out there who think he's a breath of fresh air, a very human politician who is relatable, dynamic, gets things done and tells it like it is. As long as I'm outnumbered by the suckers their perception trumps mine.
Just like Trump - or the Kray twins!
The Kray twins comparison has much merit but not so much the Trump. Johnson is not like Trump.
My browser for some reason recommened an article from a website I'd never heard of before, which had a rather peculiar premise about 'How Corbyn unmasked comedy'.
It seems to be saying tha anti-establishmentism is the key to comedy, and because some famous comedians and comedy programmes disliked Corbyn or did such things as 'blamed Corbyn for Johnson’s victory without taking responsibility for helping Johnson establish his harmless clown persona', that means they were on the same side as 'the establisment'. It calls out Charlie Brooker for a bit on the Corbyn-Branson row which apparently included far more time attacking Corbyn than Branson and didn't consider corporate interests (that Corbyn was indeed wrong about what he claimed I guess is not of relevance).
Blaming Corbyn for losing an election? Perish the thought. Apparently comedians are are supposed to be political radicals at all times. It's silly of political conservatives to moan that there's too much left wing comedy out there, without Corbynites also now suggesting the comedy establishment is not doing its job because they mocked the great man. (Ed M didn't get it easy either of course).
Onthe other hand, the article itself was therefore of great comedic value.
As we are seeing with the laughable conspiracies around the 'Labour Report' one of the key problems with Corbynism is that it has no safety valve of self-doubt or ability to admit its own failings, as it is predicated on the man and his supporters being uniquely virtuous. Otherwise, what is the point? If you admit nuance and the validity of different views as reasonably held and having their merits within Labour's tradition, why put forward someone the public hate, who even he would admit isn't exactly a natural in the role of leader? Why put up with the ossuary he hangs his clothes in or evidence of managerial incompetence? It only makes sense if he and you have hit upon something uniquely virtuous and everyone else is a nefarious Blairite/Tory acting out of venality and malice.
So comedians must be to blame, not Corbyn. Or Jews. Or Labour officials. Or Laura Kuenssberg, Countdown hosts, anyone who doesn't see the unique virtues of the man or his words must be a bad actor. It's a cultish creed Labour need to stamp out and quarantine itself from as it's just so dangerous - not initially as they have power over very little and are reduced to attacking minor celebrities - but as it rots the brain and would cause huge problems were it to be over something serious where errors had been made it was impossible to reasonably course correct without blaming some conspiracy.
Thank you for this entertaining mix of projection and amateur psychiatry. Now here is what actually happened and why -
In 2015 in a climate favourable to re-election the party suppressed its radicalism - in both content and messaging - for fear of being rogered by the tory press and (linked) of spooking the denizens of Middle England.
Result - a Conservative majority government. Reaction - Fuck it then. Let's stop poncing around. Let's drop the timidity. It's sterile and it's getting us nowhere in any case. We'll shift left. Elect a properly socialist leader and run on a radical platform. No apologies for it. Give the voters the choice and see what happens.
What did happen? - Another loss but close and a better performance than achieved under the previous 2 leaders. And this despite Jeremy Corbyn being a sub-optimal PM candidate on a personal level (deficiency of brain power).
Moral - The left nearly won a GE with a poor leader. With better packaging we can do so one day soon.
Labour didn't lose the 2015 election, particularly in England. They actually had a net gain IN ENGLAND of 4 seats. It was the collapse of the LD's, significantly, but by no means exclusively to the Tories, that put Cameron back in No 10, albeit with a small overall majority than the Coalition had had. It was the rise in the SNP vote that did for Labour. Milliband should have stayed as leader.
I liked - and like - him but I think he had to go. That 2015 result was such a terrible blow.
EdM's problem was that he never seemed interested beyond the 'ordinary people' of Dartmouth Park. Or as I think Sandy described it 'talking to the top 10% about the bottom 10%'.
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.
lol - as if.
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".
But I think EdM lacked substance as well.
Or perhaps more generally lacked interest in or empathy towards or relevance to the average person in the average constituency.
Nor was he a skilled enough politician (or dishonest enough person) to be able to fake it.
He was, I suspect, someone who had suffered by being given too much and too much too soon without having to learn and experience things himself.
It's possible you arrived at this perception uninfluenced by the barrage of media messaging along exactly these lines but I am skeptical. EM was by any measure less silver-spooned than the man he ran against and the man in number 10 now. Both of them are the epitome of what you describe in the last para.
But Cameron and Boris were more talented/dishonest as politicians
As was Blair before him.
So he lacked the style and he lacked the substance which Thatcher or Brown revelled in.
Nor did he have the 'everyman' appeal which Major had.
Is insipid the best description of EdM ?
Many in Labour must have thought and so the turn to Corbyn.
For example, I think Boris Johnson is a frivolous charlatan out for himself only. But there are millions of suckers out there who think he's a breath of fresh air, a very human politician who is relatable, dynamic, gets things done and tells it like it is. As long as I'm outnumbered by the suckers their perception trumps mine.
Just like Trump - or the Kray twins!
Johnson is not like Trump.
Agreed. It's a comparison people reach to far too easily and lazily, when they are actually quite different in style, background, goals and tactics. Such similarities as do exist distract from the more significant ways they differ, and thus do not help.
The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.
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...
The injustice on Thursday will be on an individual level, overall the marks will be the same as previous years, despite missing a term of work. It all depends on how well teachers have predicted and ranked their candidates.
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...
The Universities will fill their places, from the top down... Oxbridge already saying they will lower entry requirements, dressed up as helping pupils from poorer areas... it’ll be the ex-polys and HE colleges without research that will really struggle... of course, a student from England doesn’t pay what a student from China would have done...
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...
But that’s the point. If small cohorts are exempted from the algorithm, private schools will get what they predicted.
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.
I doubt that many private schools have cohorts of less than 5. Many will be in the 5-15 bucket and most in the 15+ bucket
Five per subject, Charles. Not five in total.
I was at a well known and well funded private school. Albeit one with 260 in a year.
My smallest class size was 8 (theology). Politics was 12 and history 16.
How many private schools really have A level cohorts of less than 5 for an individual subject? I doubt many - the economics just don’t stack up - and in any event it will be a very small number of pupils.
From recollection our smallest subjects were Japanese (2), Russian (3) and Mandarin (4). In each case we teamed up with the local girls’ school which lifted Russian and Mandarin to the 5-15 bucket
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Expelling Corbyn would be damn stupid. It's not Corbyn or even the Corbynites who are the problem. It's the Scouse SWP tankies Neil Kinnock threw out who were readmitted by Ed Miliband.
Corbyn is 100% the problem. A political mantra that is based on 19th century ideas isn't going to work.
Blair's New Labour is the only future Labour have. Not because of him or anyone else, but simply that they can't bang on with the ideas of well over a hundred years ago. They weren't good ideas then, and they're rubbish now.
Starmer has, I think, worked this out. He's trying to stop Labour being crap, and is biding his time with regards to positive moves.
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
Because there’s nothing I can do about it.
When I see supposed regulators demonstrating a breathtaking contempt for rigour or process, things are a bit different.
Our chairman was very rigorous and process driven in interviewing all the candidates. And then ignored the output in favour of primogeniture
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
If Corbyn is implicated by the EHRC report - and maybe even expelled from the Party - then the question Starmer has to answer is how could he sit beside him in the Shadow Cabinet for three years whilst this was going on?
Lets see how his numbers hold up against that line of questioning - and his answers. I personally don't see how he has an acceptable answer.
Whether Corbyn is expelled or not - and I severely doubt he will be or that the report will be so blunt as to make that an easy option - Starmer would of course face that question, and it is a fair one.
Nevertheless, he will be judged more on his actions as Leader than anything else. If he does a good job and shows good leadership, people will look past that he served Corbyn faithfully for all that time. If people like you or want to support you they will look past obvious reasons they should not, or reasons they should be more wary.
A guy prepared to overlook anti-semitism for three years in order to be in pole position to get the top job has some serious questions to answer in my book. They shouldn't get a pass.
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
Nothing to declare? In any case, the real unfairness is height. Tall people are overrepresented in political and commercial leadership roles, as well as consuming more than their fair share of Earth's precious natural resources.
Sure - I’ve had a successful and well paid career. My expected lifetime earnings are the square root of my older brother’s inheritance.
Wrong then, wrong now. He's just too old, that's all. Not to win - he will - but to be a strong president. I back him for one reason only. The obvious reason.
You’re going to make money?
☺ - that too.
But in this case - just this one time - I'm thinking of the general good rather than my wallet.
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Expelling Corbyn would be damn stupid. It's not Corbyn or even the Corbynites who are the problem. It's the Scouse SWP tankies Neil Kinnock threw out who were readmitted by Ed Miliband.
Corbyn is 100% the problem. A political mantra that is based on 19th century ideas isn't going to work.
Blair's New Labour is the only future Labour have. Not because of him or anyone else, but simply that they can't bang on with the ideas of well over a hundred years ago. They weren't good ideas then, and they're rubbish now.
Starmer has, I think, worked this out. He's trying to stop Labour being crap, and is biding his time with regards to positive moves.
Being Tory Lite is no longer a vote winner, ask the LDs
The reason Corbyn got 41% of the GB vote in 2017 was the radical agenda
SKS is a Tory Lite Remoaner in the eyes of many former Labour voters IMO
You’re having a larf. England will never chase over 170 on this wicket against these bowlers.
I‘m quite happy to postpone until the pandemic is over. Solitary pineapple pizza is just too depressing.
Well - I went to an artisan chocolate shop today and bought a full house.
Unfortunately there's no one here except me and the paperwork and the coffee, so I'll have to eat the lot over the next month. Minus a few for visitors.
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
Nothing to declare? In any case, the real unfairness is height. Tall people are overrepresented in political and commercial leadership roles, as well as consuming more than their fair share of Earth's precious natural resources.
Sure - I’ve had a successful and well paid career. My expected lifetime earnings are the square root of my older brother’s inheritance.
I think that's one of the big differences between the middle class and the upper class/aristocracy. If your family was more middle class you'd get ~half
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Expelling Corbyn would be damn stupid. It's not Corbyn or even the Corbynites who are the problem. It's the Scouse SWP tankies Neil Kinnock threw out who were readmitted by Ed Miliband.
Corbyn is 100% the problem. A political mantra that is based on 19th century ideas isn't going to work.
Blair's New Labour is the only future Labour have. Not because of him or anyone else, but simply that they can't bang on with the ideas of well over a hundred years ago. They weren't good ideas then, and they're rubbish now.
Starmer has, I think, worked this out. He's trying to stop Labour being crap, and is biding his time with regards to positive moves.
Labour's immediate problem is that Boris shot so many of their foxes, when he won in 2019 on Labour's 2017 platform. Boris won by being a better Corbyn, not by being a better Cameron or May.
The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.
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...
What happens Thursday?
A-level grades come out.
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.
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.
Thank you.
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.
How about, ‘if the government had come up with a sensible process at first, rather than through random press releases based on a lack of understanding of what was involved, we wouldn’t have this clusterfuck?’
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.
Would a sensible process have involved teacher grade expectations? If it had, how should we seek to make sure the grades awarded this year were broadly similar to those awarded in previous years?
Teachers´ forecasts are useful for getting the pupils in the right order within the class, or even witin the school.
You then need a criterion to establish how well one school compares with all the rest. Obviously you turn to previous results. It won´t matter all that much if the syllabus has changed (thinks to the general incompetence of Grove and Cummings). In general the quality of the pupil intake and the quality of the teaching will be much as before.
In the good old days, so it was said, exam boards allocated a pre-specified percentage to students to each grade (then expressed as percentages). These were constant over the years.
I think there is some special pleading going on...
To come up with my grades, I had to do the following.
1) Collate them from the subject heads.
2) Check them against mocks.
3) Check the mocks against the exams from last year
4) if that was all in order, check against baseline grades to see if they were widely out and whether there might be reasons for that
5) Feed back to the relevant SLT member
6) Discuss the materials with her, including going over papers.
7) Meet with her and the principal to agree final grades.
And yes, changes did get made, some up, some down.
Obviously this will have varied from school to school.
But I am happy that my grades were realistic. Yes, they were better than last year, when I had a weak cohort, because I had a strong one. And that was confirmed by baseline data.
I now find that some fat lazy twit in London doesn’t agree and so my students, whom I have worked with for years, will be graded on the basis of a computer model using data that isn’t valid. So that process lasting six weeks when I was also trying to teach online lessons was so much wasted effort.
Anyone who thinks I have no reason to be angry can go fuck themselves. These people making these decisions care only about their worthless careers, and are ruining children’s lives to protect them.
And that is still not to deny it was a stupid process to start, as I have said so many times. At the very least, I should have been asked to submit part of my evidence base. But the mere fact these mindless twats screwed up ab initio and are now screwing up further doesn’t let them off the fact that they have demonstrated total unfitness for office and need to be sacked.
You certainly have my sympathy if you had to go through all that!
But a question, if I may. Did you ever take part in the CSE exams? These were abolished by the Government of the day, in order to make way for the GCSE.
How could I, given I was born in 1983 and they were abolished in 1987?
Of course.... I keep forgetting that some people are very young....
The point is, of course, that the CSEs were a teacher controlled examination, unlike the GCE which tended to be run by university types.
The syllabus could be the one agreed by teacher reps in the region, or it could be designed within the school and assessed (before and after) by the teachers´ panel.
Each teacher marked and ordered his own papers, and these were then compared - by the teachers - on a school basis. There was then a consortium of schools which compared a sample from the schools and it finally went for confirmation to a chief examiner. The original order for the pupils (based on their exams) was not changed.
Senior managers within the schools had nothing to do with all this (apart from programming the exams), still less any politicians.
It would not have been beyond the wit of any decent government to set up such a scheme, whereby the evidence of each pupil´s level of achievement could have been given independent external validation, while yet leaving the class teacher with a good measure of input.
But I suppose the cronies in Johnson´s government never had anything to do with practical issues, like running examinations fairly.
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
Nothing to declare? In any case, the real unfairness is height. Tall people are overrepresented in political and commercial leadership roles, as well as consuming more than their fair share of Earth's precious natural resources.
Sure - I’ve had a successful and well paid career. My expected lifetime earnings are the square root of my older brother’s inheritance.
I think that's one of the big differences between the middle class and the upper class/aristocracy. If your family was more middle class you'd get ~half
When my great grandmother snuffed it In 1963 my grandfather got the house and his younger brother got the contents. That wasn’t as bad a deal for the younger brother as it would be today. I’ll kick off royally if I get the contents when the time comes!
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
Nothing to declare? In any case, the real unfairness is height. Tall people are overrepresented in political and commercial leadership roles, as well as consuming more than their fair share of Earth's precious natural resources.
Sure - I’ve had a successful and well paid career. My expected lifetime earnings are the square root of my older brother’s inheritance.
I think that's one of the big differences between the middle class and the upper class/aristocracy. If your family was more middle class you'd get ~half
If the upper class had ever cared about fairness, they wouldn’t be the upper class.
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Expelling Corbyn would be damn stupid. It's not Corbyn or even the Corbynites who are the problem. It's the Scouse SWP tankies Neil Kinnock threw out who were readmitted by Ed Miliband.
Corbyn is 100% the problem. A political mantra that is based on 19th century ideas isn't going to work.
Blair's New Labour is the only future Labour have. Not because of him or anyone else, but simply that they can't bang on with the ideas of well over a hundred years ago. They weren't good ideas then, and they're rubbish now.
Starmer has, I think, worked this out. He's trying to stop Labour being crap, and is biding his time with regards to positive moves.
Labour's immediate problem is that Boris shot so many of their foxes, when he won in 2019 on Labour's 2017 platform. Boris won by being a better Corbyn, not by being a better Cameron or May.
He was perhaps a better EdM. Boris is not and I don't imagine can be anything like Corbyn.
If he'd become the leader now he'd likely have done better.
He didn't "become" leader, he actively went up against his own brother, when he could have waited.
Spare me any violins.
I don't think primogeniture an appropriate reason to chose a party leader, or indeed anything else. Speaking as a second child!
You were second.
Suck it up, loser.
I’m surprised that @ydoethur doesnt post about the inherent unfairness of primogeniture more. It can have a material impact on an individual’s opportunities and range of potential outcomes
Nothing to declare? In any case, the real unfairness is height. Tall people are overrepresented in political and commercial leadership roles, as well as consuming more than their fair share of Earth's precious natural resources.
Sure - I’ve had a successful and well paid career. My expected lifetime earnings are the square root of my older brother’s inheritance.
I think that's one of the big differences between the middle class and the upper class/aristocracy. If your family was more middle class you'd get ~half
I’ll get a third (I have a little sister) of everything except the main asset which we don’t want to fragment ownership of.
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Expelling Corbyn would be damn stupid. It's not Corbyn or even the Corbynites who are the problem. It's the Scouse SWP tankies Neil Kinnock threw out who were readmitted by Ed Miliband.
Corbyn is 100% the problem. A political mantra that is based on 19th century ideas isn't going to work.
Blair's New Labour is the only future Labour have. Not because of him or anyone else, but simply that they can't bang on with the ideas of well over a hundred years ago. They weren't good ideas then, and they're rubbish now.
Starmer has, I think, worked this out. He's trying to stop Labour being crap, and is biding his time with regards to positive moves.
Labour's immediate problem is that Boris shot so many of their foxes, when he won in 2019 on Labour's 2017 platform. Boris won by being a better Corbyn, not by being a better Cameron or May.
He was perhaps a better EdM. Boris is not and I don't imagine can be anything like Corbyn.
Write down all the things you do not like about Corbyn, and then see how easy it is to apply the same criticisms of Boris.
The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.
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...
What happens Thursday?
A-level grades come out.
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.
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.
Thank you.
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.
How about, ‘if the government had come up with a sensible process at first, rather than through random press releases based on a lack of understanding of what was involved, we wouldn’t have this clusterfuck?’
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.
Would a sensible process have involved teacher grade expectations? If it had, how should we seek to make sure the grades awarded this year were broadly similar to those awarded in previous years?
Teachers´ forecasts are useful for getting the pupils in the right order within the class, or even witin the school.
You then need a criterion to establish how well one school compares with all the rest. Obviously you turn to previous results. It won´t matter all that much if the syllabus has changed (thinks to the general incompetence of Grove and Cummings). In general the quality of the pupil intake and the quality of the teaching will be much as before.
In the good old days, so it was said, exam boards allocated a pre-specified percentage to students to each grade (then expressed as percentages). These were constant over the years.
I think there is some special pleading going on...
To come up with my grades, I had to do the following.
1) Collate them from the subject heads.
2) Check them against mocks.
3) Check the mocks against the exams from last year
4) if that was all in order, check against baseline grades to see if they were widely out and whether there might be reasons for that
5) Feed back to the relevant SLT member
6) Discuss the materials with her, including going over papers.
7) Meet with her and the principal to agree final grades.
And yes, changes did get made, some up, some down.
Obviously this will have varied from school to school.
But I am happy that my grades were realistic. Yes, they were better than last year, when I had a weak cohort, because I had a strong one. And that was confirmed by baseline data.
I now find that some fat lazy twit in London doesn’t agree and so my students, whom I have worked with for years, will be graded on the basis of a computer model using data that isn’t valid. So that process lasting six weeks when I was also trying to teach online lessons was so much wasted effort.
Anyone who thinks I have no reason to be angry can go fuck themselves. These people making these decisions care only about their worthless careers, and are ruining children’s lives to protect them.
And that is still not to deny it was a stupid process to start, as I have said so many times. At the very least, I should have been asked to submit part of my evidence base. But the mere fact these mindless twats screwed up ab initio and are now screwing up further doesn’t let them off the fact that they have demonstrated total unfitness for office and need to be sacked.
You certainly have my sympathy if you had to go through all that!
But a question, if I may. Did you ever take part in the CSE exams? These were abolished by the Government of the day, in order to make way for the GCSE.
How could I, given I was born in 1983 and they were abolished in 1987?
Of course.... I keep forgetting that some people are very young....
The point is, of course, that the CSEs were a teacher controlled examination, unlike the GCE which tended to be run by university types.
The syllabus could be the one agreed by teacher reps in the region, or it could be designed within the school and assessed (before and after) by the teachers´ panel.
Each teacher marked and ordered his own papers, and these were then compared - by the teachers - on a school basis. There was then a consortium of schools which compared a sample from the schools and it finally went for confirmation to a chief examiner. The original order for the pupils (based on their exams) was not changed.
Senior managers within the schools had nothing to do with all this (apart from programming the exams), still less any politicians.
It would not have been beyond the wit of any decent government to set up such a scheme, whereby the evidence of each pupil´s level of achievement could have been given independent external validation, while yet leaving the class teacher with a good measure of input.
But I suppose the cronies in Johnson´s government never had anything to do with practical issues, like running examinations fairly.
Good shout. The only thing to say against it is I think it would have taken a long time to set up, and time was not on anyone’s side. However, time is not on our side now given the unfolding disaster.
The first major test of Labour as an opposition seems likely to hit on Thursday.
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...
The injustice on Thursday will be on an individual level, overall the marks will be the same as previous years, despite missing a term of work. It all depends on how well teachers have predicted and ranked their candidates.
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...
The Universities will fill their places, from the top down... Oxbridge already saying they will lower entry requirements, dressed up as helping pupils from poorer areas... it’ll be the ex-polys and HE colleges without research that will really struggle... of course, a student from England doesn’t pay what a student from China would have done...
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...
But that’s the point. If small cohorts are exempted from the algorithm, private schools will get what they predicted.
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.
I doubt that many private schools have cohorts of less than 5. Many will be in the 5-15 bucket and most in the 15+ bucket
Five per subject, Charles. Not five in total.
I was at a well known and well funded private school. Albeit one with 260 in a year.
My smallest class size was 8 (theology). Politics was 12 and history 16.
How many private schools really have A level cohorts of less than 5 for an individual subject? I doubt many - the economics just don’t stack up - and in any event it will be a very small number of pupils.
From recollection our smallest subjects were Japanese (2), Russian (3) and Mandarin (4). In each case we teamed up with the local girls’ school which lifted Russian and Mandarin to the 5-15 bucket
In my Boys' Grammar School at the beginning of the 1970s some A Level classes were very small. French had 9 pupils - German 3 - Music 2.
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
Expelling Corbyn would be damn stupid. It's not Corbyn or even the Corbynites who are the problem. It's the Scouse SWP tankies Neil Kinnock threw out who were readmitted by Ed Miliband.
Corbyn is 100% the problem. A political mantra that is based on 19th century ideas isn't going to work.
Blair's New Labour is the only future Labour have. Not because of him or anyone else, but simply that they can't bang on with the ideas of well over a hundred years ago. They weren't good ideas then, and they're rubbish now.
Starmer has, I think, worked this out. He's trying to stop Labour being crap, and is biding his time with regards to positive moves.
Labour's immediate problem is that Boris shot so many of their foxes, when he won in 2019 on Labour's 2017 platform. Boris won by being a better Corbyn, not by being a better Cameron or May.
He was perhaps a better EdM. Boris is not and I don't imagine can be anything like Corbyn.
Write down all the things you do not like about Corbyn, and then see how easy it is to apply the same criticisms of Boris.
Just read your comment from yesterday re- experience of the cane as a result of the cricket ball incident. Rather amusing! Corporal punishment remained lawful in state schools until Autumn 1987 - in private schools it was permitted until Autumn 1999.
Comments
"if herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people? "
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/08/04/how-bad-is-covid-really-a-swedish-doctors-perspective/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
Edit - good gracious, Buttler survives.
Back on topic, and many thanks for the usual thought-provoking Saturday piece, @david_herdson.
The journey from Opposition to Government is a multi-layered event with a number of different strands happening contemporaneously.
The first and obvious point is Starmer is not Corbyn - he has not so far attracted or engendered the strength of negativity which Corbyn achieved during his tenure. People may not wish to strew rose petals at Starmer's feet as yet but they certainly don't hate him or fear him.
Without wishing to downplay Corbyn's part in Johnson's victory last December, the fact was that for many voters for whom neither was an attractive option, Johnson was the lesser of the problems and he also offered a resolution to months of chaos, confusion and drift. A Johnson majority would end all that and I suspect that was a powerful motivation which the Opposition parties en masse failed to appreciate throughout the second half of 2019.
Indeed, I'd argue the longer the chaos went on the bigger Johnson's victory was going to be - his poll numbers improved relentlessly through the autumn.
Replacing a failed leader is a start but it's only that - Labour now needs to set out creating a message, a theme, a set of basic principles relevant to mid-2020s Britain.
That work should have started and needs to be the prime activity behind the scenes. The advantage Starmer will have over Johnson by 2024 is a) he won't have a record in Government to defend and b) as he is not Corbyn, people will at least be willing to listen to what he has to say. They may not like it but they will give Starmer a hearing which is more than many were ever prepared to offer Corbyn.
A good leader and sensible policies are important - a bit of luck will play a part as well but there's also that notion of the public believing Labour are "ready" to be the Government. That needs confidence in the leader, the policies, the team, the direction of travel which chimes with what the public wants and a recognition the current Government has failed and has nothing more to offer.
It might mean Labour accepting elements of the Johnson/Sunak programme or taking those and saying where they could do them better. It's not Blairism (however you define that) but a recognition the new Government won't turn back the clock but move forward.
And I always had you down as such a classy bloke.
We await the result.
"Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with in a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly."
Swedes ain't no turnips. Or rutabugas even.
This time I might go for a seafood delight pizza with pineapple.
I freely admit I do not speak for every Muslim or Jew.
Oh...do you mean actual pigs, sus domesticus? Not OFQUAL?
Until I removed the rest of the pineapple slices from the pizza and ate the pineapples afterwards.
They really haven't got the hang of the tantric thing.....
I think I said I'd eat a pizza with pineapple on it if Biden wins Texas.
This means the economy is still in the toilet (compare Sweden to Denmark), and the virus has not not been eliminated or driven to really low levels.
Why couldn’t you keep quiet?!!!
Susan Rice has never run for office but she must have learned something about campaigns from her time in the White House under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It's not like she is new to the limelight, so my feeling is this factor is overplayed.
Broad, then Bess, then defeat.
- black (but not very black)
- won't frighten people regarding "defund the police"
- skeletons already known
Now, she doesn't bring a state into play, but I'm not convinced that any of the candidates tip a state. (Gretchen would be the best bet if you wanted someone to make Michigan a bit more likely.)
The problem with Corbyn was never that he was unelectable, but that he would have been a disaster if he had been elected. With this pitiful whine of the sore loser, he has proved it. He has no judgement, and prefers the warm bath of myth to the harsh reality of responsibility
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-general-election-2017-blairites-labour-party-staff-sabotage-a9660946.html
There’s no point worrying about tomorrow.
From 147/4 to 150 all out, thanks largely due to a gritty single from Devon Malcolm.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2016/10/30/11-worst-england-test-batting-collapses/1990-v-australia/
It was a thing of pure beauty.
The dying gasps
Yuck
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-claims-hes-picked-running-mate-then-cracks-joke
After all, the corpse of Hoover will do no harm.
I could almost taste the pineapple.
Exam results of previous years compared to national set of previous years gives a relative performance.
Apply that relative performance to this years results, adjusted to the individual school’s track record.
All that misses is schools that would have had a materially different performance under the new system vs the old one
An elderly Rabbi and Priest are sitting on a park bench staring wistfully across the park.
The priest asks the Rabbi, "tell me old friend in confidence, did you ever break the religious rules"
The Rabbi replies: "well, I have to confess, when I was a young man, I did let temptation get the better of me. I had roast pork once, out of curiosity" "tell me, did you ever break your vows?"
The priest "Well once, I did have a young lady infatuated with me. We got to know each other well, and one night, I did break my vow of chastity"
They paused, and stared into the distance. Eventually the priest spoke again "It's much better than pork, isn't it?"
Very good.
The country is watching and Starmer has an absolute open goal to make Labour electable again and show the public it has really changed. Expelling Corbyn and others would frankly be the best thing to do, if indeed they are implicated by the EHRC.
And this is why I do not bet
Or eat pizzas
So @Nigelb @TSE where do we meet for our socially distanced dish of pineapple pizza?
@Big_G_NorthWales thank you for the opportunity you offered yesterday for me to positively hex England. I’ve still got it...
That would have been a much easier win had Buttler not fluffed so often.
Lets see how his numbers hold up against that line of questioning - and his answers. I personally don't see how he has an acceptable answer.
Nevertheless, he will be judged more on his actions as Leader than anything else. If he does a good job and shows good leadership, people will look past that he served Corbyn faithfully for all that time. If people like you or want to support you they will look past obvious reasons they should not, or reasons they should be more wary.
When I see supposed regulators demonstrating a breathtaking contempt for rigour or process, things are a bit different.
Well...I hope this magnificent fightback leading to victory makes them think twice before being so ultra critical again of the England Cricket team.
Solitary pineapple pizza is just too depressing.
My smallest class size was 8 (theology). Politics was 12 and history 16.
How many private schools really have A level cohorts of less than 5 for an individual subject? I doubt many - the economics just don’t stack up - and in any event it will be a very small number of pupils.
From recollection our smallest subjects were Japanese (2), Russian (3) and Mandarin (4). In each case we teamed up with the local girls’ school which lifted Russian and Mandarin to the 5-15 bucket
Blair's New Labour is the only future Labour have. Not because of him or anyone else, but simply that they can't bang on with the ideas of well over a hundred years ago. They weren't good ideas then, and they're rubbish now.
Starmer has, I think, worked this out. He's trying to stop Labour being crap, and is biding his time with regards to positive moves.
But in this case - just this one time - I'm thinking of the general good rather than my wallet.
The reason Corbyn got 41% of the GB vote in 2017 was the radical agenda
SKS is a Tory Lite Remoaner in the eyes of many former Labour voters IMO
Unfortunately there's no one here except me and the paperwork and the coffee, so I'll have to eat the lot over the next month. Minus a few for visitors.
Tragedy.
The point is, of course, that the CSEs were a teacher controlled examination, unlike the GCE which tended to be run by university types.
The syllabus could be the one agreed by teacher reps in the region, or it could be designed within the school and assessed (before and after) by the teachers´ panel.
Each teacher marked and ordered his own papers, and these were then compared - by the teachers - on a school basis. There was then a consortium of schools which compared a sample from the schools and it finally went for confirmation to a chief examiner. The original order for the pupils (based on their exams) was not changed.
Senior managers within the schools had nothing to do with all this (apart from programming the exams), still less any politicians.
It would not have been beyond the wit of any decent government to set up such a scheme, whereby the evidence of each pupil´s level of achievement could have been given independent external validation, while yet leaving the class teacher with a good measure of input.
But I suppose the cronies in Johnson´s government never had anything to do with practical issues, like running examinations fairly.