Former Speaker John Bercow sought Jeremy Corbyn’s support for a peerage after he was snubbed by Downing Street, it emerged last night. Leaked emails show Mr Bercow wrote his own reference for his nomination and secretly met with the then Labour leader’s team in the week after the 2019 general election.
He wrote to Mr Corbyn’s office boasting of his four honorary degrees, ‘no fewer than five shadow ministerial roles’, a stint as deputy leader of the Tory group on Lambeth council – and experience as a tennis coach, The Times reported.
---
Anybody who boasts about their honorary degrees is a very sad individual.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
You don't think that perhaps he might have latched on to that as a convenient excuse for why he failed to do the job he was paid to do?
"Woke" is a non-issue for 99% of us. It has negligible impact on the day-to-day lives of most people in comparison to education, housing and health policy issues. It's obvious why some people prefer to bang on about it rather than the real issues that affect people's lives.
Anyone who has school age children or is a schoolchild is affected quite significantly by Wokeness. That’s a lot more than “1%” of the country
Only in the fevered imagination of Daily Mail journalists and people such as your good self.
I have kids at British schools
I didn't know any schools looked after young goats.
Somebody asked about Bomber Harris a couple of days ago. I didn’t respond as the topic is very easy to research, and the evidence against Harris is overwhelming. Then happened to spot this story. It’s behind a paywall, but seems indicative of the more balanced way public bodies are going to have to deal with controversial figures, eg blokes who order the mass murder of civilians.
The only way to win WW2 was to be completely ruthless. Our present ease and comfort and freedom depends on the decisions made by Harris, Le May, FDR, Truman, Churchill, and their Soviet counterparts.
Yeah this is a tricky one, but on the whole I think I agree that we had to be ruthless. The bombing campaign by 1944 and into '45 was a terrible, terrible beast. Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force were fearsome agents of death and destruction. But Nazi Germany was still stubbornly resisting. Dresden had probably become a legitimate target due to its proximity to the advancing Russians - IIRC I think a lot of logistics went through Dresden.
War is an evil, but the alternative is sometimes worse.
But not usually.
I think the counterfactual would have been Nazi control of the whole of Europe, including the UK. Which would have been worse.
The mass murder of civilians in Dresden took place when the outcome of the war was not in question, so that defence does not stand up to scrutiny.
It’s vile, isn’t it? We had to kill German civilians en masse, as a brutal side effect of stopping a regime that was killing civilians en masse.
In February 1945 the inmates of concentration and extermination camps in the east that were in danger of falling to the Russians were force marched into Germany proper. Obviously these people were already in a terrible condition physically. They received no food on the March. If they stopped, they were shot. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have died in these death marches.
That’s why we had to do terrible things like bomb Dresden.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
Somebody asked about Bomber Harris a couple of days ago. I didn’t respond as the topic is very easy to research, and the evidence against Harris is overwhelming. Then happened to spot this story. It’s behind a paywall, but seems indicative of the more balanced way public bodies are going to have to deal with controversial figures, eg blokes who order the mass murder of civilians.
The only way to win WW2 was to be completely ruthless. Our present ease and comfort and freedom depends on the decisions made by Harris, Le May, FDR, Truman, Churchill, and their Soviet counterparts.
Dresden had probably become a legitimate target due to its proximity to the advancing Russians - IIRC I think a lot of logistics went through Dresden.
It was - "Dresden was a war crime" was started by Goebbels - and the proportionately higher death toll than the much more heavily bombed Berlin lay partly at the door of the incompetent Dresden Gauleiter
Yep - Goebbels added a zero the death toll of 25,000, and that 250,000 figure has hung around for a long time. Though 25,000 is a terrible number in itself. But in the summer of '44 Auschwitz was killing 10,000 Hungarian Jews a day.
Again, IIRC, there were no bomb shelters in Dresden, because they thought they would never be bombed.
One of my favourite books, an anti-war book, is Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut. As an American POW he was in Dresden when it was bombed. Well worth a read, IMHO.
David Irving repeated the 250,000 number, but Dresden City Council says it was 25 - 30,000. As you say, a terrible number, but Dresden was an entirely legitimate military target.
Was it, by February 45 ? "Entirely legitimate" wasn't even consensus at the time.
In February 1945 it was a transit point for German soldiers heading for the Eastern Front. The Soviets were very keen for Dresden to be hit.
So mass-murderer Stalin asked the UK and US to mass murder civilians… and we helped him out. Shame.
It was war, Mr D. And the Russians were our allies. People used to go about with three flags; British, American and Soviet. You'd see them on lorries and on posters.
And as I may have mentioned before, the Red Flag flew above every city and town hall in the UK to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Red Army, with parades, speeches and everything.
I guess it's the seamless transition, embodied by Churchill, from decrying the Bolshevik menace in the 20s (lathered with a fair dollop of antisemitism) through evil totalitarians making common cause in 1939, then our brave & noble allies in the first half of the 40s and back to the Bolshevik menace until the fall of the SU that's striking. Realpolitik makes such things inevitable, but it's the balls deep, salivating enthusiasm for each position that impresses; Winston didn't do things by halves!
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
You don't think that perhaps he might have latched on to that as a convenient excuse for why he failed to do the job he was paid to do?
"Woke" is a non-issue for 99% of us. It has negligible impact on the day-to-day lives of most people in comparison to education, housing and health policy issues. It's obvious why some people prefer to bang on about it rather than the real issues that affect people's lives.
But I thought structural racism was the cause of many problems. So that line is a pile of sh1t then?
Racism clearly does have a detrimental impact on some people so cannot be trivialised.
Clutching your pearls be cause somebody wants to remove a statute is something entirely different. You can count on one hand the number of people whose lives have been blighted by the removal of a statue. Likewise if you want to be outraged by the sight of footballers taking the knee then be my guest but at the end of the day it's their choice.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
I would back 1/3 that in a random conversation on here where it drifts onto white privilege it is a Tory voter who first uses the phrase here, and be a comfortable winner in the long run.
I would also back at odds on, that if someone starts a conversation about increasing education spending, they did not vote Tory at the last election.
I think the phrase is tactically unhelpful to the point of being counter productive, but does exist to an extent, as do many other privileges especially class and in many societies gender.
If a Tory voter on here quotes someone who uses the term (and means it), like Charles in his example above, then is that a leftwinger initiating that or a right winger?
You seem to think that the far left ought to be able to say whatever they want in a safe space and never be quoted or responded to.
If the phrase is unhelpful to the point of being counter productive then don't use it and condemn those who do.
I would never initiate a conversation about it so only use it when it is already being discussed anyway.
Like most of wokeism, it is a tiny minority on the left who probably do start it, but a much bigger minority on the right who amplify, publicise and politicise it into the mainstream.
In which case its the left that started it, not the right. Publicising what your opponents are up to is just politics and quite right to do.
If you find the left embarrassing then you can join in with the right in rejecting it and criticising it yourself. In which case it loses all potency.
All of which is irrelevant drivel in getting to grips with problems in education, which is the job of the select committee. What you write just confirms that it's engaged in petty politicking.
The original poster's comment on this thread was the irrelevant drivel. The person on Breakfast this morning was Robert Halfon (who I think is the Chair of the committee?) and he is hardly on the right of the Tory Party. His comments were perfectly rational. WWC kids are underperforming compared to their peers.
I went to a very poor ex-secondary modern comprehensive school. I am sure nowadays it would have ended up in special measures. The teachers at that school were almost without exception very left wing and had no problem expressing their far left political views. During the Falklands War one was so "woke" that he referred to the Falklands as "The Malvinas"! Most of these teachers were actually middle class, and some seemed to revel in the fact that most of the kids left with no qualifications, and I am quite sure looked down on them as uneducable. With the exception of one or two most were incompetent and lazy. Most should have been sacked.
There is an essential problem with the middle class educated left: they are often intellectual and cultural snobs and they would like the WWC to know their place. The reason for poor performance in many schools is not just the lack of resources. It is a lack of expectation and ambition. This takes outstanding teachers, many of whom gravitate, understandably, to the better schools, thereby exacerbating the problem. I am not sure what the answer is. As I was fortunate enough to become quite successful I chose to privately educate my kids. It is a decision I have never regretted.
So your analysis of the current state system is based on your experience of four decades back ? No one is arguing that white British kids from poor backgrounds aren't underperforming. And if you think current teachers revel in that fact, then you are a fool.
Indeed. I think it's actually pretty insulting to a lot of hard working teachers that really do want the best for the kids they teach. Unfortunately the problems here start much earlier than that with parental and establishment expectations. Just as the Met sees a black person and sees potential criminal or an Asian person and sees a potential terrorist, the education establishment sees a young white boy or young black boy and sees troublemakers and treats them as such. If anything there are teachers all across the country who are fighting against that system of low expectations.
Your viewpoint is that teachers should never be criticised, either in the past or now? How about the teaching unions? Are they doing their best? In what way? Are they bastions of moderation, or were those folk I saw at various teaching union events on TV behaving like spoilt kids figments of my imagination?
Somebody asked about Bomber Harris a couple of days ago. I didn’t respond as the topic is very easy to research, and the evidence against Harris is overwhelming. Then happened to spot this story. It’s behind a paywall, but seems indicative of the more balanced way public bodies are going to have to deal with controversial figures, eg blokes who order the mass murder of civilians.
The only way to win WW2 was to be completely ruthless. Our present ease and comfort and freedom depends on the decisions made by Harris, Le May, FDR, Truman, Churchill, and their Soviet counterparts.
Yeah this is a tricky one, but on the whole I think I agree that we had to be ruthless. The bombing campaign by 1944 and into '45 was a terrible, terrible beast. Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force were fearsome agents of death and destruction. But Nazi Germany was still stubbornly resisting. Dresden had probably become a legitimate target due to its proximity to the advancing Russians - IIRC I think a lot of logistics went through Dresden.
War is an evil, but the alternative is sometimes worse.
But not usually.
I think the counterfactual would have been Nazi control of the whole of Europe, including the UK. Which would have been worse.
The mass murder of civilians in Dresden took place when the outcome of the war was not in question, so that defence does not stand up to scrutiny.
It’s vile, isn’t it? We had to kill German civilians en masse, as a brutal side effect of stopping a regime that was killing civilians en masse.
In February 1945 the inmates of concentration and extermination camps in the east that were in danger of falling to the Russians were force marched into Germany proper. Obviously these people were already in a terrible condition physically. They received no food on the March. If they stopped, they were shot. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have died in these death marches.
That’s why we had to do terrible things like bomb Dresden.
One thing I only just discovered is that Ingrid Pitt (star of Hammer Horror films) was a survivor of Stutthoff. She and her mother escaped when they were taken into the woods to be shot, on one of those marches.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
You don't think that perhaps he might have latched on to that as a convenient excuse for why he failed to do the job he was paid to do?
"Woke" is a non-issue for 99% of us. It has negligible impact on the day-to-day lives of most people in comparison to education, housing and health policy issues. It's obvious why some people prefer to bang on about it rather than the real issues that affect people's lives.
Anyone who has school age children or is a schoolchild is affected quite significantly by Wokeness. That’s a lot more than “1%” of the country
Only in the fevered imagination of Daily Mail journalists and people such as your good self.
I have kids at British schools
So? You hyper-ventilate at the thought of a statue being removed, I can only assume you don't have much else to concern yourself with.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
Oh my word. Politics Live, some serious grown up debate breaking out with Steve Baker at the absolute heart of it.
I wonder if Steve Baker is a 'controlled opposition' figure who is meant to keep the millions of dubious southern tory voters onside, as Boris spends all their money and taxes the cr*p out of them.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
You don't think that perhaps he might have latched on to that as a convenient excuse for why he failed to do the job he was paid to do?
"Woke" is a non-issue for 99% of us. It has negligible impact on the day-to-day lives of most people in comparison to education, housing and health policy issues. It's obvious why some people prefer to bang on about it rather than the real issues that affect people's lives.
Anyone who has school age children or is a schoolchild is affected quite significantly by Wokeness. That’s a lot more than “1%” of the country
Only in the fevered imagination of Daily Mail journalists and people such as your good self.
I have kids at British schools
An interesting example happened with my own children.
The school arranged trips to various religious institutions - as part of RE.
It was noticeable that various ethnic/religious groups simply din't send their children along to certain ones.
Before the Mosque trip, an email was sent warning all parents that not attending the Mosque trip would be treated as grounds for suspending the child from the school.
One of the mothers didn't send her child - as did the Hindus and the Sikhs.
The school moved to suspend her child - until she pointed out that she was a Hindu (by conversion to her husbands faith) and the Hindus didn't go on the Mosque trip.
There followed an interesting debate. According to the very white deputy head, "White people can't be Hindus" - which caused quite an upset. Finally they treated her (and her child) as Hindu, by ignoring the matter.
My daughter went on the trip and asked the Imam some rather interesting questions (according to the teacher) about his interfaith dialog/outreach with the local Rabbi.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
What about (as my brother, who lived in Helsinki called them) the “Swedish-speaking Swedish bourgeoisie of Finland”.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
It might help the right in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was to read them before commenting so knowledgeably. Have you read it?
Yes, the conclusion part of it with a look over the main body as well. Have you read it? Your comment seems to suggest you have and are coming to different conclusions from what has been reported.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
Ironically, among the not so many dead would have been the security guard.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
Indeed, I did laugh when I typed it. But my point is not that BJ gives a sh1t about the WWC but that he knows he has to do something about it, hence the word 'action'. Cameron et al didn't, so their (not so) latent snobbery, combined with the perceived lack of electoral need, meant they did nothing.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
I would back 1/3 that in a random conversation on here where it drifts onto white privilege it is a Tory voter who first uses the phrase here, and be a comfortable winner in the long run.
I would also back at odds on, that if someone starts a conversation about increasing education spending, they did not vote Tory at the last election.
I think the phrase is tactically unhelpful to the point of being counter productive, but does exist to an extent, as do many other privileges especially class and in many societies gender.
If a Tory voter on here quotes someone who uses the term (and means it), like Charles in his example above, then is that a leftwinger initiating that or a right winger?
You seem to think that the far left ought to be able to say whatever they want in a safe space and never be quoted or responded to.
If the phrase is unhelpful to the point of being counter productive then don't use it and condemn those who do.
I would never initiate a conversation about it so only use it when it is already being discussed anyway.
Like most of wokeism, it is a tiny minority on the left who probably do start it, but a much bigger minority on the right who amplify, publicise and politicise it into the mainstream.
In which case its the left that started it, not the right. Publicising what your opponents are up to is just politics and quite right to do.
If you find the left embarrassing then you can join in with the right in rejecting it and criticising it yourself. In which case it loses all potency.
All of which is irrelevant drivel in getting to grips with problems in education, which is the job of the select committee. What you write just confirms that it's engaged in petty politicking.
The original poster's comment on this thread was the irrelevant drivel. The person on Breakfast this morning was Robert Halfon (who I think is the Chair of the committee?) and he is hardly on the right of the Tory Party. His comments were perfectly rational. WWC kids are underperforming compared to their peers.
I went to a very poor ex-secondary modern comprehensive school. I am sure nowadays it would have ended up in special measures. The teachers at that school were almost without exception very left wing and had no problem expressing their far left political views. During the Falklands War one was so "woke" that he referred to the Falklands as "The Malvinas"! Most of these teachers were actually middle class, and some seemed to revel in the fact that most of the kids left with no qualifications, and I am quite sure looked down on them as uneducable. With the exception of one or two most were incompetent and lazy. Most should have been sacked.
There is an essential problem with the middle class educated left: they are often intellectual and cultural snobs and they would like the WWC to know their place. The reason for poor performance in many schools is not just the lack of resources. It is a lack of expectation and ambition. This takes outstanding teachers, many of whom gravitate, understandably, to the better schools, thereby exacerbating the problem. I am not sure what the answer is. As I was fortunate enough to become quite successful I chose to privately educate my kids. It is a decision I have never regretted.
So your analysis of the current state system is based on your experience of four decades back ? No one is arguing that white British kids from poor backgrounds aren't underperforming. And if you think current teachers revel in that fact, then you are a fool.
Indeed. I think it's actually pretty insulting to a lot of hard working teachers that really do want the best for the kids they teach. Unfortunately the problems here start much earlier than that with parental and establishment expectations. Just as the Met sees a black person and sees potential criminal or an Asian person and sees a potential terrorist, the education establishment sees a young white boy or young black boy and sees troublemakers and treats them as such. If anything there are teachers all across the country who are fighting against that system of low expectations.
Your viewpoint is that teachers should never be criticised, either in the past or now? How about the teaching unions? Are they doing their best? In what way? Are they bastions of moderation, or were those folk I saw at various teaching union events on TV behaving like spoilt kids figments of my imagination?
I haven't said don't criticise teachers, I just don't think you can lay the blame of low expectations on them. That's the DoE and teaching unions, especially the former which has done more to damage education in this country over the last 20 years than any other organisation.
‘In the letter, "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19", published in February, 2020, the authors declared no competing interests. Some readers have questioned the validity of this disclosure.’
‘We invited the 27 authors of the letter to re-evaluate their competing interests. Peter Daszak has expanded on his disclosure statements for this letter and two other pieces relating to COVID-19 that he co-authored or contributed to in The Lancet. See hubs.li/H0QHbrM0.’
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
Ironically, among the not so many dead would have been the security guard.
Possibly. The suicide bomber obviously spent a lot of time teeing himself up. If he had been interrupted, he might have lost his nerve.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
I would back 1/3 that in a random conversation on here where it drifts onto white privilege it is a Tory voter who first uses the phrase here, and be a comfortable winner in the long run.
I would also back at odds on, that if someone starts a conversation about increasing education spending, they did not vote Tory at the last election.
I think the phrase is tactically unhelpful to the point of being counter productive, but does exist to an extent, as do many other privileges especially class and in many societies gender.
If a Tory voter on here quotes someone who uses the term (and means it), like Charles in his example above, then is that a leftwinger initiating that or a right winger?
You seem to think that the far left ought to be able to say whatever they want in a safe space and never be quoted or responded to.
If the phrase is unhelpful to the point of being counter productive then don't use it and condemn those who do.
I would never initiate a conversation about it so only use it when it is already being discussed anyway.
Like most of wokeism, it is a tiny minority on the left who probably do start it, but a much bigger minority on the right who amplify, publicise and politicise it into the mainstream.
In which case its the left that started it, not the right. Publicising what your opponents are up to is just politics and quite right to do.
If you find the left embarrassing then you can join in with the right in rejecting it and criticising it yourself. In which case it loses all potency.
All of which is irrelevant drivel in getting to grips with problems in education, which is the job of the select committee. What you write just confirms that it's engaged in petty politicking.
The original poster's comment on this thread was the irrelevant drivel. The person on Breakfast this morning was Robert Halfon (who I think is the Chair of the committee?) and he is hardly on the right of the Tory Party. His comments were perfectly rational. WWC kids are underperforming compared to their peers.
I went to a very poor ex-secondary modern comprehensive school. I am sure nowadays it would have ended up in special measures. The teachers at that school were almost without exception very left wing and had no problem expressing their far left political views. During the Falklands War one was so "woke" that he referred to the Falklands as "The Malvinas"! Most of these teachers were actually middle class, and some seemed to revel in the fact that most of the kids left with no qualifications, and I am quite sure looked down on them as uneducable. With the exception of one or two most were incompetent and lazy. Most should have been sacked.
There is an essential problem with the middle class educated left: they are often intellectual and cultural snobs and they would like the WWC to know their place. The reason for poor performance in many schools is not just the lack of resources. It is a lack of expectation and ambition. This takes outstanding teachers, many of whom gravitate, understandably, to the better schools, thereby exacerbating the problem. I am not sure what the answer is. As I was fortunate enough to become quite successful I chose to privately educate my kids. It is a decision I have never regretted.
So your analysis of the current state system is based on your experience of four decades back ? No one is arguing that white British kids from poor backgrounds aren't underperforming. And if you think current teachers revel in that fact, then you are a fool.
I've seen similar in the last few years - at a very successful comprehensive in London, full of middle class children, the children from the local estates were always in the bottom groups. Apparently that's just normal and how it is - according to the teachers.
Some of them seemed to regard their presence as a necessary burden.
I've just skimmed through the Education SC Report, and read the conclusions/recommendations (pps 56-64) carefully. It really is all over the place. There are so many recommendations that it will be virtually impossible to check accountability for implementation, and there's a complete lack of focus. Surely a small number of measurable and achievable recommendations would have been better? I'll make two brief comments:
1. If all the recommendations are implemented, it would cost a huge amount of money. So it won't happen.
2. Interestingly, there's a strong focus on the importance of early years, joined-up services, parental involvement and suchlike. It's hilarious, because what the Committee is really advocating is something indistinguishable from Labour's Sure Start programme which, as we all know, the Tories have cut so much since 2010 that it doesn't really exist any more.
I is a necessary condition of Lab performance in the next GE that they rule out a referendum deal with the SNP.
Labour need to kill the “Vote Lab, get SNP” meme and indeed advance a “Vote SNP, get Tory” argument in Scotland.
This could be a sound argument, but increases the area of results in which no government can coherently be formed enormously. And if the SNP did (impossibly) agree in advance to support a government without a commitment to Ref2 then it hands a lot of votes to the Nationalist Fundamentalists or whatever Salmond's successors will call themselves.
Ken Clarke on BBC R4 Today absolutely destroying de Pfeffel.
My god, Ken’s good. Royal Yacht = populist nonsense.
The timeline for the Carrie Celeste looks absolutely mad on the face of it. It's a one off design of a type of ship that hasn't been built in the UK for 50+ years. The is no fucking way they are going to cut steel on it in 2022. It's one of those schemes that's so ill considered you can't help but assume The Fireplace Salesman was involved somewhere.
As Ken Clarke pointed out, the cost of the royal yacht itself is not going to break the bank, but it is an indication of a profound lack of judgement at No.10.
That she, like Britannia before her, will generate a massive amount of trade and goodwill from countries and companies around the world, far in excess of the cost of building her.
Well, she won't be like Britannia because she is not a royal yacht. Indeed all the indications which have been given is that the Royal Family want nothing to do with it.
Still let's see what Carrie and a load of gold wallpaper do for our trade, eh!
Hopefully, by the time it comes into being, Carrie will be nowhere near being invited onto it.
On the more substantive point, Britannia really did do a great job for UK trade and soft power. Businessmen framed their invitations from HMQ, even if they only ever got to meet Michael Hesetine and AirMiles Andy.
Well, that's all very lovely I'm sure. How much trade that would not otherwise have happened did all this jollity generate?
Does anyone know? Or is it one of those things that we're supposed to believe just because everyone always repeats it?
And since this new yacht is not a royal one why would anyone care two hoots about being invited onto it?
This article has an estimate of £3bn of value from trade missions by Britannia between 1991 & 1995. Not quite what you asked as very difficult to demonstrate how much would have happened without Britannia but enough that it seems there is a positive case to at least investigate
Your last point, about it not being a “royal” yacht is much more important
My view is that of all the things that need spending on, this is way way down the list of priorities. Indeed, should not be on a list of priorities at all.
If it’s £250m to build and £20m a year to run that’s peanuts in the scheme of things. Not going to limit any other spending choices. Provided it generates a positive return on capital then just do it.
The case for your various "ifs" and "provided"s is questionable.
There was a times article from 2017 stating government estimates it would cost £10m a year to run. I doubled it.
A previous estimate was it could cost £100-150m for a new yacht. I added £100m. Although, now that I think about it, it is going to be procured by the MoD….
Neither of us have access to the granular data not the expertise or time to dynamically model the returns.
But there is a prima facie case that it will generate a substantial return. Even only £1bn in extra GBP in aggregate will likely cover the capital cost in incremental taxes.
My point is (I) there is enough evidence to justify doing the work to analyse it properly and (II) £250m is a rounding error in government spending
So no more snide comments from you, missy, unless you want to argue on facts
I've just skimmed through the Education SC Report, and read the conclusions/recommendations (pps 56-64) carefully. It really is all over the place. There are so many recommendations that it will be virtually impossible to check accountability for implementation, and there's a complete lack of focus. Surely a small number of measurable and achievable recommendations would have been better? I'll make two brief comments:
1. If all the recommendations are implemented, it would cost a huge amount of money. So it won't happen.
2. Interestingly, there's a strong focus on the importance of early years, joined-up services, parental involvement and suchlike. It's hilarious, because what the Committee is really advocating is something indistinguishable from Labour's Sure Start programme which, as we all know, the Tories have cut so much since 2010 that it doesn't really exist any more.
Did you read it before or after I asked whether you read it?
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
It always amazes me how we were forever hearing about Cameron and the 'infamous' Bullingdon picture. Yet with Boris - who was not only in the same club but in the same bleeding picture - it's never mentioned. Boris makes you believe about him what you want to believe.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
Indeed, I did laugh when I typed it. But my point is not that BJ gives a sh1t about the WWC but that he knows he has to do something about it, hence the word 'action'. Cameron et al didn't, so their (not so) latent snobbery, combined with the perceived lack of electoral need, meant they did nothing.
Your faith in Mr Johnson and his ability as a man of action is touching . By the way, I don't have a problem with where he went to school, no problem at all. I do have a problem with the fact that he is a lying little c**t.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
It always amazes me how we were forever hearing about Cameron and the 'infamous' Bullingdon picture. Yet with Boris - who was not only in the same club but in the same bleeding picture - it's never mentioned. Boris makes you believe about him what you want to believe.
Oh no, I don't believe BJ cares either. But, as I pointed out to Nigel, he knows his future depends on keeping them happy so he will do something
White working class pupils have fallen back after decades of neglect and the term white privilege is damaging.
Hmmm how much does that term really have to do with wwc pupils falling behind, why is that in the headline?
The term is damaging because it focuses attention on something which is a problem in America but not the primary problem in the UK (which is “no child left behind”)
Somebody asked about Bomber Harris a couple of days ago. I didn’t respond as the topic is very easy to research, and the evidence against Harris is overwhelming. Then happened to spot this story. It’s behind a paywall, but seems indicative of the more balanced way public bodies are going to have to deal with controversial figures, eg blokes who order the mass murder of civilians.
The only way to win WW2 was to be completely ruthless. Our present ease and comfort and freedom depends on the decisions made by Harris, Le May, FDR, Truman, Churchill, and their Soviet counterparts.
Yeah this is a tricky one, but on the whole I think I agree that we had to be ruthless. The bombing campaign by 1944 and into '45 was a terrible, terrible beast. Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force were fearsome agents of death and destruction. But Nazi Germany was still stubbornly resisting. Dresden had probably become a legitimate target due to its proximity to the advancing Russians - IIRC I think a lot of logistics went through Dresden.
War is an evil, but the alternative is sometimes worse.
But not usually.
I think the counterfactual would have been Nazi control of the whole of Europe, including the UK. Which would have been worse.
The mass murder of civilians in Dresden took place when the outcome of the war was not in question, so that defence does not stand up to scrutiny.
It’s vile, isn’t it? We had to kill German civilians en masse, as a brutal side effect of stopping a regime that was killing civilians en masse.
Many more German civilians would have survived the Dresden raid had the Nazi city government bothered to provide enough proper air raid shelters in the city.
Of course they made sure they had them for themselves and their families. The only state of the art shelter in Dresden was beneath Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann’s palatial villa in the Comeniusstrasse. In the southern suburbs, at Lockwitz, there was another shelter for the party leadership, under the party headquarters. But most civilians had just their basements - totally inadequate to deal with the bombs the allies were using by 1945.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
I would back 1/3 that in a random conversation on here where it drifts onto white privilege it is a Tory voter who first uses the phrase here, and be a comfortable winner in the long run.
I would also back at odds on, that if someone starts a conversation about increasing education spending, they did not vote Tory at the last election.
I think the phrase is tactically unhelpful to the point of being counter productive, but does exist to an extent, as do many other privileges especially class and in many societies gender.
If a Tory voter on here quotes someone who uses the term (and means it), like Charles in his example above, then is that a leftwinger initiating that or a right winger?
You seem to think that the far left ought to be able to say whatever they want in a safe space and never be quoted or responded to.
If the phrase is unhelpful to the point of being counter productive then don't use it and condemn those who do.
I would never initiate a conversation about it so only use it when it is already being discussed anyway.
Like most of wokeism, it is a tiny minority on the left who probably do start it, but a much bigger minority on the right who amplify, publicise and politicise it into the mainstream.
In which case its the left that started it, not the right. Publicising what your opponents are up to is just politics and quite right to do.
If you find the left embarrassing then you can join in with the right in rejecting it and criticising it yourself. In which case it loses all potency.
All of which is irrelevant drivel in getting to grips with problems in education, which is the job of the select committee. What you write just confirms that it's engaged in petty politicking.
The original poster's comment on this thread was the irrelevant drivel. The person on Breakfast this morning was Robert Halfon (who I think is the Chair of the committee?) and he is hardly on the right of the Tory Party. His comments were perfectly rational. WWC kids are underperforming compared to their peers.
I went to a very poor ex-secondary modern comprehensive school. I am sure nowadays it would have ended up in special measures. The teachers at that school were almost without exception very left wing and had no problem expressing their far left political views. During the Falklands War one was so "woke" that he referred to the Falklands as "The Malvinas"! Most of these teachers were actually middle class, and some seemed to revel in the fact that most of the kids left with no qualifications, and I am quite sure looked down on them as uneducable. With the exception of one or two most were incompetent and lazy. Most should have been sacked.
There is an essential problem with the middle class educated left: they are often intellectual and cultural snobs and they would like the WWC to know their place. The reason for poor performance in many schools is not just the lack of resources. It is a lack of expectation and ambition. This takes outstanding teachers, many of whom gravitate, understandably, to the better schools, thereby exacerbating the problem. I am not sure what the answer is. As I was fortunate enough to become quite successful I chose to privately educate my kids. It is a decision I have never regretted.
So your analysis of the current state system is based on your experience of four decades back ? No one is arguing that white British kids from poor backgrounds aren't underperforming. And if you think current teachers revel in that fact, then you are a fool.
Indeed. I think it's actually pretty insulting to a lot of hard working teachers that really do want the best for the kids they teach. Unfortunately the problems here start much earlier than that with parental and establishment expectations. Just as the Met sees a black person and sees potential criminal or an Asian person and sees a potential terrorist, the education establishment sees a young white boy or young black boy and sees troublemakers and treats them as such. If anything there are teachers all across the country who are fighting against that system of low expectations.
Your viewpoint is that teachers should never be criticised, either in the past or now? How about the teaching unions? Are they doing their best? In what way? Are they bastions of moderation, or were those folk I saw at various teaching union events on TV behaving like spoilt kids figments of my imagination?
I haven't said don't criticise teachers, I just don't think you can lay the blame of low expectations on them. That's the DoE and teaching unions, especially the former which has done more to damage education in this country over the last 20 years than any other organisation.
The unions are simply collections of teachers, and while they don't thankfully represent *all* teachers, I think we can blame the teachers as a collective for the unions. So if the unions are to blame, then so is their membership.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
Ironically, among the not so many dead would have been the security guard.
Possibly. The suicide bomber obviously spent a lot of time teeing himself up. If he had been interrupted, he might have lost his nerve.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
Ironically, among the not so many dead would have been the security guard.
Possibly. The suicide bomber obviously spent a lot of time teeing himself up. If he had been interrupted, he might have lost his nerve.
Which shows why the security firm is being rightly criticised. To think that a suicide bomber was not a potential threat is preposterous; not to have trained your personnel in actions on a suicide bomber must be borderline criminally negligent.
That that particular security guard a) didn't spot the guy; b) ignored the warnings; and then c) did nothing is the nub of the matter.
Then again, on £X.50 an hour where there is the possibility of death from being on duty I don't wholly blame him.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
Your poor white kids aren't struggling because they're white, they are struggling because they're poor, and the education system is under-funded by the government you vote for, and perhaps in some cases because of aspects of their upbringing, in many cases linked to their poverty. I've just given you two examples of how they don't face some similar barriers that non-White people do. And I'm not sure there are many places where a white kid in a hoodie will get hassled by the police more than a black kid in a hoodie, but please share statistics to the contrary if you have them.
It’s divisive and unhelpful as it perpetrates the perception that people are homogenous blocs based on skin colour.
They’re not. People are people.
So why should it be, that some of them should get along so awfully? - That's the million dollar question.
Some are shits. Others are venal. There are bullies and thugs. The majority of people are none of these things.
Telling people that “you are worse off because you are black” (which is fundamentally what “white privilege” is about) is actively harmful as it creates a reason for people to give up
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
Your poor white kids aren't struggling because they're white, they are struggling because they're poor, and the education system is under-funded by the government you vote for, and perhaps in some cases because of aspects of their upbringing, in many cases linked to their poverty. I've just given you two examples of how they don't face some similar barriers that non-White people do. And I'm not sure there are many places where a white kid in a hoodie will get hassled by the police more than a black kid in a hoodie, but please share statistics to the contrary if you have them.
It’s divisive and unhelpful as it perpetrates the perception that people are homogenous blocs based on skin colour.
They’re not. People are people.
So why should it be, that some of them should get along so awfully? - That's the million dollar question.
Some are shits. Others are venal. There are bullies and thugs. The majority of people are none of these things.
Telling people that “you are worse off because you are black” (which is fundamentally what “white privilege” is about) is actively harmful as it creates a reason for people to give up
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
The Tories have latched onto it because they have figured out that it is a way of stoking resentment and dividing working class people. White Privilege is a term that is used to describe the advantages in many situations that white people enjoy on account of being the majority group. I'm sorry, but it describes something real, something that I personally have observed, and so I am not going to be bullied into not using it in that specific context. Of course, many white people don't feel very privileged, and so the term grates with them. But I doubt they have ever not had their CV looked at on account of their name, or been racially profiled by the police. White Privilege does not mean that all white people are more privileged than all non-White people.
It would only be a way of stoking resentment if there is a reason for resentment to be stoked.
If you believe that "white privilege" is real then stand up loud and proud and explain why poor white kids struggling at school are privileged. Otherwise maybe your term is flawed and you should stop using it and use something else instead.
We aren't America incidentally. I'd imagine many young white teenagers in hoodies have been profiled by the Police here.
All you need to stoke resentment is to convince people that something is a cause of their problems. Whether it actually is the cause or not is largely irrelevant.
Blaming the EU for everything was a classic example - the likes of the Mail , the Telegraph and Farage milked it for years. They now have to find something else to replace it and explain away the continuing problems of the folk in the red wall seats. Attacks on "Woke" will become the new "EU bendy bananas" mantra.
Except the wokeness stuff can also have very tragic real-life consequences. One of the security "guards" interviewed as part of the Manchester Arena bombing inquiry mentioned he didn't challenge the alleged suicide bomber, despite of his behaviour, was because he was afraid of being called racist. The inquiry is clear that, if the bomber had been challenged earlier, not so many people would have died.
Ironically, among the not so many dead would have been the security guard.
Possibly. The suicide bomber obviously spent a lot of time teeing himself up. If he had been interrupted, he might have lost his nerve.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
No-one has flown a plane into a New York skyscraper recently so either the TSA is very effective or the whole thing is unnecessary because no-one is trying to.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
Dutch linguistically isn't a million miles from English. Whilst in it's 'natural form' it certainly isn't mutually intelligible for an English speaker with a few tweaks it can be made so - which is what has happened here I guess.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
That's quite a last sentence. Many have been there.
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
The Israelis don't give a damn about looking politcally correct when it comes to security, and happily target who they want for their interrogators to give a grilling. They learnt the hard way and now probably have the safest airlines and airports as a result.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
It is used here. Extensively. Ever come back on the Eurostar (remember that?) and noticed a dozen customs officers staring at you as you walk down the ramp to get your taxi, for example?
Boris Johnson’s net approval rating: -32 Rishi Sunak’s net approval rating: -3 Government’s Net Competency Rating: -36 Keir Starmer's net approval rating: -16
The cynical nature of Boris Johnson’s relationship with the Conservative Party, and especially with his backbenchers, has been emphasised by the spasm of panic after the debacle of the Chesham and Amersham by-election on 17 June. To lose a heartland seat when the official opposition are on the floor has provoked disquiet among many who thought they had jobs for life.
The excuses came swiftly, and did no credit to the Tory party and to some of its flagship policies, namely HS2, and the proposed relaxation of planning laws. Ministers cannot admit that Johnson is merely tolerated rather than esteemed by many natural Tory voters in seats such as this. He may be regarded as the proverbial breath of fresh air in some Labour areas where intelligent left-of-centre voters feel despair at their own party’s apparent irrelevance, but in seats that have been Conservative forever, he is increasingly regarded as divorced from the party’s values – not just because of his policies, but because of his demeanour.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
It is used here. Extensively. Ever come back on the Eurostar (remember that?) and noticed a dozen customs officers staring at you as you walk down the ramp to get your taxi, for example?
Once, a long time ago, while still in the FCO and travelling on official business from Geneva to New York via Heathrow, I decided to see what would happen if I acted shifty walking through the Customs green channel. I got pulled over. The fact that I laughed did not help my case much when I told the officer what I was doing.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
That's quite a last sentence. Many have been there.
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
Boris Johnson’s net approval rating: -32 Rishi Sunak’s net approval rating: -3 Government’s Net Competency Rating: -36 Keir Starmer's net approval rating: -16
If you lot want better scores then the solution is hardly beyond the wit of man: offer Scottish voters some intelligent, pleasant, hard-working, competent and sympathetic politicians. Boris, Rishi, Keir, Anas and Douglas just don’t cut it.
Wouldn't make a difference to anything. The fundamental problem with Scotland is that it simultaneously wants to break away but a crucial group of middle class voters won't vote for it because they're afraid it will be expensive. That leaves the more committed nationalists feeling permanently thwarted and angry, and the waverers loathing their choices because, deep down, they know that they are dependent on handouts for being kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
Selling the Union and being popular are, therefore, two mutually exclusive propositions. How could it be otherwise?
You really are an ignorant arse, you know nothing about Scotland but constantly pontificate your trash opinions on it, no doubt foaming at the mouth as you punch it out on the keyboard. Go and take a good look at your sorry jingoistic right wing nutjob attitude. Methinks you are projecting your own thwarted and angry nationalistic tendencies on Scotland.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
Somebody asked about Bomber Harris a couple of days ago. I didn’t respond as the topic is very easy to research, and the evidence against Harris is overwhelming. Then happened to spot this story. It’s behind a paywall, but seems indicative of the more balanced way public bodies are going to have to deal with controversial figures, eg blokes who order the mass murder of civilians.
The only way to win WW2 was to be completely ruthless. Our present ease and comfort and freedom depends on the decisions made by Harris, Le May, FDR, Truman, Churchill, and their Soviet counterparts.
Yeah this is a tricky one, but on the whole I think I agree that we had to be ruthless. The bombing campaign by 1944 and into '45 was a terrible, terrible beast. Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force were fearsome agents of death and destruction. But Nazi Germany was still stubbornly resisting. Dresden had probably become a legitimate target due to its proximity to the advancing Russians - IIRC I think a lot of logistics went through Dresden.
War is an evil, but the alternative is sometimes worse.
But not usually.
I think the counterfactual would have been Nazi control of the whole of Europe, including the UK. Which would have been worse.
The mass murder of civilians in Dresden took place when the outcome of the war was not in question, so that defence does not stand up to scrutiny.
It’s vile, isn’t it? We had to kill German civilians en masse, as a brutal side effect of stopping a regime that was killing civilians en masse.
Many more German civilians would have survived the Dresden raid had the Nazi city government bothered to provide enough proper air raid shelters in the city.
Of course they made sure they had them for themselves and their families. The only state of the art shelter in Dresden was beneath Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann’s palatial villa in the Comeniusstrasse. In the southern suburbs, at Lockwitz, there was another shelter for the party leadership, under the party headquarters. But most civilians had just their basements - totally inadequate to deal with the bombs the allies were using by 1945.
Domestic shelters would have been useless against a firestorm. The temperatures reached 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. They consumed the oxygen.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
The Israelis don't give a damn about looking politcally correct when it comes to security, and happily target who they want for their interrogators to give a grilling. They learnt the hard way and now probably have the safest airlines and airports as a result.
I don't think we'd want to police the UK like that.
Somebody asked about Bomber Harris a couple of days ago. I didn’t respond as the topic is very easy to research, and the evidence against Harris is overwhelming. Then happened to spot this story. It’s behind a paywall, but seems indicative of the more balanced way public bodies are going to have to deal with controversial figures, eg blokes who order the mass murder of civilians.
The only way to win WW2 was to be completely ruthless. Our present ease and comfort and freedom depends on the decisions made by Harris, Le May, FDR, Truman, Churchill, and their Soviet counterparts.
Yeah this is a tricky one, but on the whole I think I agree that we had to be ruthless. The bombing campaign by 1944 and into '45 was a terrible, terrible beast. Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force were fearsome agents of death and destruction. But Nazi Germany was still stubbornly resisting. Dresden had probably become a legitimate target due to its proximity to the advancing Russians - IIRC I think a lot of logistics went through Dresden.
War is an evil, but the alternative is sometimes worse.
But not usually.
I think the counterfactual would have been Nazi control of the whole of Europe, including the UK. Which would have been worse.
The mass murder of civilians in Dresden took place when the outcome of the war was not in question, so that defence does not stand up to scrutiny.
It’s vile, isn’t it? We had to kill German civilians en masse, as a brutal side effect of stopping a regime that was killing civilians en masse.
In February 1945 the inmates of concentration and extermination camps in the east that were in danger of falling to the Russians were force marched into Germany proper. Obviously these people were already in a terrible condition physically. They received no food on the March. If they stopped, they were shot. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have died in these death marches.
That’s why we had to do terrible things like bomb Dresden.
Keep placating yourself with sorry excuses. Perhaps if they had not pissed about and left it to the Russians to take the heat out of the Germans they would have got there a bit sooner. Better option than mass killing of civilians.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
It is used here. Extensively. Ever come back on the Eurostar (remember that?) and noticed a dozen customs officers staring at you as you walk down the ramp to get your taxi, for example?
Once, a long time ago, while still in the FCO and travelling on official business from Geneva to New York via Heathrow, I decided to see what would happen if I acted shifty walking through the Customs green channel. I got pulled over. The fact that I laughed did not help my case much when I told the officer what I was doing.
I'm sure the subsequent five hours including strip search was a barrel of laughs.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
That's quite a last sentence. Many have been there.
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
(3) all the way.
We shall see - I hope not. Because as it stands it is impossible for a white working class lad to work hard, excel, get a great job (several of them, in fact), finally leave behind his white working class surroundings, and make good.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
It always amazes me how we were forever hearing about Cameron and the 'infamous' Bullingdon picture. Yet with Boris - who was not only in the same club but in the same bleeding picture - it's never mentioned. Boris makes you believe about him what you want to believe.
Another factor I believe is that permission to reproduce the famous Bullingdon photo has been withdrawn by the copyright holder, under pressure from some of the people in it, presumably. So you won't see it in the press. Apologies if this is fake news, but I remember reading that somewhere.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
It is used here. Extensively. Ever come back on the Eurostar (remember that?) and noticed a dozen customs officers staring at you as you walk down the ramp to get your taxi, for example?
Once, a long time ago, while still in the FCO and travelling on official business from Geneva to New York via Heathrow, I decided to see what would happen if I acted shifty walking through the Customs green channel. I got pulled over. The fact that I laughed did not help my case much when I told the officer what I was doing.
I'm sure the subsequent five hours including strip search was a barrel of laughs.
Colleague of mine used to deliberately go through airports with a face like thunder. "Just you fucking DARE stop me...."
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
The Israelis don't give a damn about looking politcally correct when it comes to security, and happily target who they want for their interrogators to give a grilling. They learnt the hard way and now probably have the safest airlines and airports as a result.
I don't think we'd want to police the UK like that.
It works though. Israel suffered a spate of bombings, hijackings, and terrorist attacks at airports, but they got on top of the problem by taking strong security measures, rather than the "security theatre" nonsense that the likes of the TSA engages in.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
I would back 1/3 that in a random conversation on here where it drifts onto white privilege it is a Tory voter who first uses the phrase here, and be a comfortable winner in the long run.
I would also back at odds on, that if someone starts a conversation about increasing education spending, they did not vote Tory at the last election.
I think the phrase is tactically unhelpful to the point of being counter productive, but does exist to an extent, as do many other privileges especially class and in many societies gender.
If a Tory voter on here quotes someone who uses the term (and means it), like Charles in his example above, then is that a leftwinger initiating that or a right winger?
You seem to think that the far left ought to be able to say whatever they want in a safe space and never be quoted or responded to.
If the phrase is unhelpful to the point of being counter productive then don't use it and condemn those who do.
I would never initiate a conversation about it so only use it when it is already being discussed anyway.
Like most of wokeism, it is a tiny minority on the left who probably do start it, but a much bigger minority on the right who amplify, publicise and politicise it into the mainstream.
In which case its the left that started it, not the right. Publicising what your opponents are up to is just politics and quite right to do.
If you find the left embarrassing then you can join in with the right in rejecting it and criticising it yourself. In which case it loses all potency.
All of which is irrelevant drivel in getting to grips with problems in education, which is the job of the select committee. What you write just confirms that it's engaged in petty politicking.
The original poster's comment on this thread was the irrelevant drivel. The person on Breakfast this morning was Robert Halfon (who I think is the Chair of the committee?) and he is hardly on the right of the Tory Party. His comments were perfectly rational. WWC kids are underperforming compared to their peers.
I went to a very poor ex-secondary modern comprehensive school. I am sure nowadays it would have ended up in special measures. The teachers at that school were almost without exception very left wing and had no problem expressing their far left political views. During the Falklands War one was so "woke" that he referred to the Falklands as "The Malvinas"! Most of these teachers were actually middle class, and some seemed to revel in the fact that most of the kids left with no qualifications, and I am quite sure looked down on them as uneducable. With the exception of one or two most were incompetent and lazy. Most should have been sacked.
There is an essential problem with the middle class educated left: they are often intellectual and cultural snobs and they would like the WWC to know their place. The reason for poor performance in many schools is not just the lack of resources. It is a lack of expectation and ambition. This takes outstanding teachers, many of whom gravitate, understandably, to the better schools, thereby exacerbating the problem. I am not sure what the answer is. As I was fortunate enough to become quite successful I chose to privately educate my kids. It is a decision I have never regretted.
So your analysis of the current state system is based on your experience of four decades back ? No one is arguing that white British kids from poor backgrounds aren't underperforming. And if you think current teachers revel in that fact, then you are a fool.
Indeed. I think it's actually pretty insulting to a lot of hard working teachers that really do want the best for the kids they teach. Unfortunately the problems here start much earlier than that with parental and establishment expectations. Just as the Met sees a black person and sees potential criminal or an Asian person and sees a potential terrorist, the education establishment sees a young white boy or young black boy and sees troublemakers and treats them as such. If anything there are teachers all across the country who are fighting against that system of low expectations.
You're right, but that's a battle that's been fought for at least twenty years now, and the 'goodies' are winning. There's very few teachers now who stereotype pupils as black = troublemaker, or white disadvantaged = no hoper, and those who do are older and on their way out.
How many teachers will push a bright black kid to go to a Russell Group university?
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
That's quite a last sentence. Many have been there.
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
(3) all the way.
We shall see - I hope not. Because as it stands it is impossible for a white working class lad to work hard, excel, get a great job (several of them, in fact), finally leave behind his white working class surroundings, and make good.
It's hard for working class people of all colours, which is a tragedy for them and for the country. Far too often the job goes to some well-spoken non-entity. But it would also be nice if working class life wasn't something that had to be escaped.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
I would back 1/3 that in a random conversation on here where it drifts onto white privilege it is a Tory voter who first uses the phrase here, and be a comfortable winner in the long run.
I would also back at odds on, that if someone starts a conversation about increasing education spending, they did not vote Tory at the last election.
I think the phrase is tactically unhelpful to the point of being counter productive, but does exist to an extent, as do many other privileges especially class and in many societies gender.
If a Tory voter on here quotes someone who uses the term (and means it), like Charles in his example above, then is that a leftwinger initiating that or a right winger?
You seem to think that the far left ought to be able to say whatever they want in a safe space and never be quoted or responded to.
If the phrase is unhelpful to the point of being counter productive then don't use it and condemn those who do.
I would never initiate a conversation about it so only use it when it is already being discussed anyway.
Like most of wokeism, it is a tiny minority on the left who probably do start it, but a much bigger minority on the right who amplify, publicise and politicise it into the mainstream.
In which case its the left that started it, not the right. Publicising what your opponents are up to is just politics and quite right to do.
If you find the left embarrassing then you can join in with the right in rejecting it and criticising it yourself. In which case it loses all potency.
All of which is irrelevant drivel in getting to grips with problems in education, which is the job of the select committee. What you write just confirms that it's engaged in petty politicking.
The original poster's comment on this thread was the irrelevant drivel. The person on Breakfast this morning was Robert Halfon (who I think is the Chair of the committee?) and he is hardly on the right of the Tory Party. His comments were perfectly rational. WWC kids are underperforming compared to their peers.
I went to a very poor ex-secondary modern comprehensive school. I am sure nowadays it would have ended up in special measures. The teachers at that school were almost without exception very left wing and had no problem expressing their far left political views. During the Falklands War one was so "woke" that he referred to the Falklands as "The Malvinas"! Most of these teachers were actually middle class, and some seemed to revel in the fact that most of the kids left with no qualifications, and I am quite sure looked down on them as uneducable. With the exception of one or two most were incompetent and lazy. Most should have been sacked.
There is an essential problem with the middle class educated left: they are often intellectual and cultural snobs and they would like the WWC to know their place. The reason for poor performance in many schools is not just the lack of resources. It is a lack of expectation and ambition. This takes outstanding teachers, many of whom gravitate, understandably, to the better schools, thereby exacerbating the problem. I am not sure what the answer is. As I was fortunate enough to become quite successful I chose to privately educate my kids. It is a decision I have never regretted.
So your analysis of the current state system is based on your experience of four decades back ? No one is arguing that white British kids from poor backgrounds aren't underperforming. And if you think current teachers revel in that fact, then you are a fool.
Indeed. I think it's actually pretty insulting to a lot of hard working teachers that really do want the best for the kids they teach. Unfortunately the problems here start much earlier than that with parental and establishment expectations. Just as the Met sees a black person and sees potential criminal or an Asian person and sees a potential terrorist, the education establishment sees a young white boy or young black boy and sees troublemakers and treats them as such. If anything there are teachers all across the country who are fighting against that system of low expectations.
You're right, but that's a battle that's been fought for at least twenty years now, and the 'goodies' are winning. There's very few teachers now who stereotype pupils as black = troublemaker, or white disadvantaged = no hoper, and those who do are older and on their way out.
How many teachers will push a bright black kid to go to a Russell Group university?
Plenty of bright black kids go to Russell Group universities from my kids' school every year.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
It is used here. Extensively. Ever come back on the Eurostar (remember that?) and noticed a dozen customs officers staring at you as you walk down the ramp to get your taxi, for example?
Once, a long time ago, while still in the FCO and travelling on official business from Geneva to New York via Heathrow, I decided to see what would happen if I acted shifty walking through the Customs green channel. I got pulled over. The fact that I laughed did not help my case much when I told the officer what I was doing.
I'm sure the subsequent five hours including strip search was a barrel of laughs.
Colleague of mine used to deliberately go through airports with a face like thunder. "Just you fucking DARE stop me...."
They never did.
As they marked down on their notepads: "twat".
There is of course a lot in what you say but I would relate that more to "the street". As in an outward display of confidence can help a very great deal in warding off unwelcome attention. Of course ideally there would be some competence/training/experience, but if nothing else then the attitude you describe will see you through very often.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
Indeed, I did laugh when I typed it. But my point is not that BJ gives a sh1t about the WWC but that he knows he has to do something about it, hence the word 'action'. Cameron et al didn't, so their (not so) latent snobbery, combined with the perceived lack of electoral need, meant they did nothing.
Your faith in Mr Johnson and his ability as a man of action is touching . By the way, I don't have a problem with where he went to school, no problem at all. I do have a problem with the fact that he is a lying little c**t.
He may be a lying little c**t, but he's our lying little c**t, to paraphrase FDR.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
I would back 1/3 that in a random conversation on here where it drifts onto white privilege it is a Tory voter who first uses the phrase here, and be a comfortable winner in the long run.
I would also back at odds on, that if someone starts a conversation about increasing education spending, they did not vote Tory at the last election.
I think the phrase is tactically unhelpful to the point of being counter productive, but does exist to an extent, as do many other privileges especially class and in many societies gender.
If a Tory voter on here quotes someone who uses the term (and means it), like Charles in his example above, then is that a leftwinger initiating that or a right winger?
You seem to think that the far left ought to be able to say whatever they want in a safe space and never be quoted or responded to.
If the phrase is unhelpful to the point of being counter productive then don't use it and condemn those who do.
I would never initiate a conversation about it so only use it when it is already being discussed anyway.
Like most of wokeism, it is a tiny minority on the left who probably do start it, but a much bigger minority on the right who amplify, publicise and politicise it into the mainstream.
In which case its the left that started it, not the right. Publicising what your opponents are up to is just politics and quite right to do.
If you find the left embarrassing then you can join in with the right in rejecting it and criticising it yourself. In which case it loses all potency.
All of which is irrelevant drivel in getting to grips with problems in education, which is the job of the select committee. What you write just confirms that it's engaged in petty politicking.
The original poster's comment on this thread was the irrelevant drivel. The person on Breakfast this morning was Robert Halfon (who I think is the Chair of the committee?) and he is hardly on the right of the Tory Party. His comments were perfectly rational. WWC kids are underperforming compared to their peers.
I went to a very poor ex-secondary modern comprehensive school. I am sure nowadays it would have ended up in special measures. The teachers at that school were almost without exception very left wing and had no problem expressing their far left political views. During the Falklands War one was so "woke" that he referred to the Falklands as "The Malvinas"! Most of these teachers were actually middle class, and some seemed to revel in the fact that most of the kids left with no qualifications, and I am quite sure looked down on them as uneducable. With the exception of one or two most were incompetent and lazy. Most should have been sacked.
There is an essential problem with the middle class educated left: they are often intellectual and cultural snobs and they would like the WWC to know their place. The reason for poor performance in many schools is not just the lack of resources. It is a lack of expectation and ambition. This takes outstanding teachers, many of whom gravitate, understandably, to the better schools, thereby exacerbating the problem. I am not sure what the answer is. As I was fortunate enough to become quite successful I chose to privately educate my kids. It is a decision I have never regretted.
So your analysis of the current state system is based on your experience of four decades back ? No one is arguing that white British kids from poor backgrounds aren't underperforming. And if you think current teachers revel in that fact, then you are a fool.
Indeed. I think it's actually pretty insulting to a lot of hard working teachers that really do want the best for the kids they teach. Unfortunately the problems here start much earlier than that with parental and establishment expectations. Just as the Met sees a black person and sees potential criminal or an Asian person and sees a potential terrorist, the education establishment sees a young white boy or young black boy and sees troublemakers and treats them as such. If anything there are teachers all across the country who are fighting against that system of low expectations.
Your viewpoint is that teachers should never be criticised, either in the past or now? How about the teaching unions? Are they doing their best? In what way? Are they bastions of moderation, or were those folk I saw at various teaching union events on TV behaving like spoilt kids figments of my imagination?
I haven't said don't criticise teachers, I just don't think you can lay the blame of low expectations on them. That's the DoE and teaching unions, especially the former which has done more to damage education in this country over the last 20 years than any other organisation.
The unions are simply collections of teachers, and while they don't thankfully represent *all* teachers, I think we can blame the teachers as a collective for the unions. So if the unions are to blame, then so is their membership.
In what way do unions determine what happens in individual classrooms? That is surely steered by over-paid academy admiinistrators and tin-pot ignoramuses in OFSTED - and to some extent perhaps by head teachers. And over all the useless incompetents who are put in a ministers in charge of education.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
I would back 1/3 that in a random conversation on here where it drifts onto white privilege it is a Tory voter who first uses the phrase here, and be a comfortable winner in the long run.
I would also back at odds on, that if someone starts a conversation about increasing education spending, they did not vote Tory at the last election.
I think the phrase is tactically unhelpful to the point of being counter productive, but does exist to an extent, as do many other privileges especially class and in many societies gender.
If a Tory voter on here quotes someone who uses the term (and means it), like Charles in his example above, then is that a leftwinger initiating that or a right winger?
You seem to think that the far left ought to be able to say whatever they want in a safe space and never be quoted or responded to.
If the phrase is unhelpful to the point of being counter productive then don't use it and condemn those who do.
I would never initiate a conversation about it so only use it when it is already being discussed anyway.
Like most of wokeism, it is a tiny minority on the left who probably do start it, but a much bigger minority on the right who amplify, publicise and politicise it into the mainstream.
In which case its the left that started it, not the right. Publicising what your opponents are up to is just politics and quite right to do.
If you find the left embarrassing then you can join in with the right in rejecting it and criticising it yourself. In which case it loses all potency.
All of which is irrelevant drivel in getting to grips with problems in education, which is the job of the select committee. What you write just confirms that it's engaged in petty politicking.
The original poster's comment on this thread was the irrelevant drivel. The person on Breakfast this morning was Robert Halfon (who I think is the Chair of the committee?) and he is hardly on the right of the Tory Party. His comments were perfectly rational. WWC kids are underperforming compared to their peers.
I went to a very poor ex-secondary modern comprehensive school. I am sure nowadays it would have ended up in special measures. The teachers at that school were almost without exception very left wing and had no problem expressing their far left political views. During the Falklands War one was so "woke" that he referred to the Falklands as "The Malvinas"! Most of these teachers were actually middle class, and some seemed to revel in the fact that most of the kids left with no qualifications, and I am quite sure looked down on them as uneducable. With the exception of one or two most were incompetent and lazy. Most should have been sacked.
There is an essential problem with the middle class educated left: they are often intellectual and cultural snobs and they would like the WWC to know their place. The reason for poor performance in many schools is not just the lack of resources. It is a lack of expectation and ambition. This takes outstanding teachers, many of whom gravitate, understandably, to the better schools, thereby exacerbating the problem. I am not sure what the answer is. As I was fortunate enough to become quite successful I chose to privately educate my kids. It is a decision I have never regretted.
So your analysis of the current state system is based on your experience of four decades back ? No one is arguing that white British kids from poor backgrounds aren't underperforming. And if you think current teachers revel in that fact, then you are a fool.
Indeed. I think it's actually pretty insulting to a lot of hard working teachers that really do want the best for the kids they teach. Unfortunately the problems here start much earlier than that with parental and establishment expectations. Just as the Met sees a black person and sees potential criminal or an Asian person and sees a potential terrorist, the education establishment sees a young white boy or young black boy and sees troublemakers and treats them as such. If anything there are teachers all across the country who are fighting against that system of low expectations.
You're right, but that's a battle that's been fought for at least twenty years now, and the 'goodies' are winning. There's very few teachers now who stereotype pupils as black = troublemaker, or white disadvantaged = no hoper, and those who do are older and on their way out.
How many teachers will push a bright black kid to go to a Russell Group university?
I hope you're asking that question because the answer is all of them?
Boris Johnson’s net approval rating: -32 Rishi Sunak’s net approval rating: -3 Government’s Net Competency Rating: -36 Keir Starmer's net approval rating: -16
If you lot want better scores then the solution is hardly beyond the wit of man: offer Scottish voters some intelligent, pleasant, hard-working, competent and sympathetic politicians. Boris, Rishi, Keir, Anas and Douglas just don’t cut it.
Wouldn't make a difference to anything. The fundamental problem with Scotland is that it simultaneously wants to break away but a crucial group of middle class voters won't vote for it because they're afraid it will be expensive. That leaves the more committed nationalists feeling permanently thwarted and angry, and the waverers loathing their choices because, deep down, they know that they are dependent on handouts for being kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
Selling the Union and being popular are, therefore, two mutually exclusive propositions. How could it be otherwise?
You really are an ignorant arse, you know nothing about Scotland but constantly pontificate your trash opinions on it, no doubt foaming at the mouth as you punch it out on the keyboard. Go and take a good look at your sorry jingoistic right wing nutjob attitude. Methinks you are projecting your own thwarted and angry nationalistic tendencies on Scotland.
I've just skimmed through the Education SC Report, and read the conclusions/recommendations (pps 56-64) carefully. It really is all over the place. There are so many recommendations that it will be virtually impossible to check accountability for implementation, and there's a complete lack of focus. Surely a small number of measurable and achievable recommendations would have been better? I'll make two brief comments:
1. If all the recommendations are implemented, it would cost a huge amount of money. So it won't happen.
2. Interestingly, there's a strong focus on the importance of early years, joined-up services, parental involvement and suchlike. It's hilarious, because what the Committee is really advocating is something indistinguishable from Labour's Sure Start programme which, as we all know, the Tories have cut so much since 2010 that it doesn't really exist any more.
Did you read it before or after I asked whether you read it?
Before. As you've read it yourself, I'm sure you'll have noticed that the reference to "white privilege" is completely out of kilter with everything else in the report and is utterly irrelevant. It's almost as if a few SC members were determined to get this red herring in for culture war reasons. A pity, because of course this is what hits the headlines and distracts from the report and its findings.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
The future is Chinglish. English with Mandarin grammar basically.
There is no such thing as Mandarin grammar.
All languages have grammar and syntax. Some have simpler grammars and syntaxes. It does not mean they are absent.
In Mandarin there is no grammar. Of course there is syntax.
"The syntax is that part of grammar which deals with the order of words and phrases to form a proper sentence in a particular language". If there's syntax, there's grammar.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
That's quite a last sentence. Many have been there.
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
(3) all the way.
We shall see - I hope not. Because as it stands it is impossible for a white working class lad to work hard, excel, get a great job (several of them, in fact), finally leave behind his white working class surroundings, and make good.
Things people will do to satisfy their pecadillo's
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
The future is Chinglish. English with Mandarin grammar basically.
There is no such thing as Mandarin grammar.
All languages have grammar and syntax. Some have simpler grammars and syntaxes. It does not mean they are absent.
In Mandarin there is no grammar. Of course there is syntax.
"The syntax is that part of grammar which deals with the order of words and phrases to form a proper sentence in a particular language". If there's syntax, there's grammar.
Ah I see. Soz. I meant there is no grammar as in cases, etc.
Yes well if syntax is a subset of grammar then there is grammar.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
The Israelis don't give a damn about looking politcally correct when it comes to security, and happily target who they want for their interrogators to give a grilling. They learnt the hard way and now probably have the safest airlines and airports as a result.
I don't think we'd want to police the UK like that.
Yes I quite agree. The last thing we’d want to do is use policing tactics that improve public safety.
Boris Johnson’s net approval rating: -32 Rishi Sunak’s net approval rating: -3 Government’s Net Competency Rating: -36 Keir Starmer's net approval rating: -16
If you lot want better scores then the solution is hardly beyond the wit of man: offer Scottish voters some intelligent, pleasant, hard-working, competent and sympathetic politicians. Boris, Rishi, Keir, Anas and Douglas just don’t cut it.
Wouldn't make a difference to anything. The fundamental problem with Scotland is that it simultaneously wants to break away but a crucial group of middle class voters won't vote for it because they're afraid it will be expensive. That leaves the more committed nationalists feeling permanently thwarted and angry, and the waverers loathing their choices because, deep down, they know that they are dependent on handouts for being kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
Selling the Union and being popular are, therefore, two mutually exclusive propositions. How could it be otherwise?
You really are an ignorant arse, you know nothing about Scotland but constantly pontificate your trash opinions on it, no doubt foaming at the mouth as you punch it out on the keyboard. Go and take a good look at your sorry jingoistic right wing nutjob attitude. Methinks you are projecting your own thwarted and angry nationalistic tendencies on Scotland.
You must be the nice Scot Nat that @Stuart_Dickson was talking about earlier
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
That's quite a last sentence. Many have been there.
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
(3) all the way.
We shall see - I hope not. Because as it stands it is impossible for a white working class lad to work hard, excel, get a great job (several of them, in fact), finally leave behind his white working class surroundings, and make good.
It's hard for working class people of all colours, which is a tragedy for them and for the country. Far too often the job goes to some well-spoken non-entity. But it would also be nice if working class life wasn't something that had to be escaped.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. It would be nice if people didn't feel they had to escape, come to London, make good, etc.
But sadly and sadly for them of course, they so often do.
Boris Johnson’s net approval rating: -32 Rishi Sunak’s net approval rating: -3 Government’s Net Competency Rating: -36 Keir Starmer's net approval rating: -16
If you lot want better scores then the solution is hardly beyond the wit of man: offer Scottish voters some intelligent, pleasant, hard-working, competent and sympathetic politicians. Boris, Rishi, Keir, Anas and Douglas just don’t cut it.
Wouldn't make a difference to anything. The fundamental problem with Scotland is that it simultaneously wants to break away but a crucial group of middle class voters won't vote for it because they're afraid it will be expensive. That leaves the more committed nationalists feeling permanently thwarted and angry, and the waverers loathing their choices because, deep down, they know that they are dependent on handouts for being kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
Selling the Union and being popular are, therefore, two mutually exclusive propositions. How could it be otherwise?
You really are an ignorant arse, you know nothing about Scotland but constantly pontificate your trash opinions on it, no doubt foaming at the mouth as you punch it out on the keyboard. Go and take a good look at your sorry jingoistic right wing nutjob attitude. Methinks you are projecting your own thwarted and angry nationalistic tendencies on Scotland.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
That's quite a last sentence. Many have been there.
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
(3) all the way.
We shall see - I hope not. Because as it stands it is impossible for a white working class lad to work hard, excel, get a great job (several of them, in fact), finally leave behind his white working class surroundings, and make good.
Things people will do to satisfy their pecadillo's
As we're also talking about grammar, Malc, what's that apostrophe doing there?
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
It always amazes me how we were forever hearing about Cameron and the 'infamous' Bullingdon picture. Yet with Boris - who was not only in the same club but in the same bleeding picture - it's never mentioned. Boris makes you believe about him what you want to believe.
Another factor I believe is that permission to reproduce the famous Bullingdon photo has been withdrawn by the copyright holder, under pressure from some of the people in it, presumably. So you won't see it in the press. Apologies if this is fake news, but I remember reading that somewhere.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
It always amazes me how we were forever hearing about Cameron and the 'infamous' Bullingdon picture. Yet with Boris - who was not only in the same club but in the same bleeding picture - it's never mentioned. Boris makes you believe about him what you want to believe.
Another factor I believe is that permission to reproduce the famous Bullingdon photo has been withdrawn by the copyright holder, under pressure from some of the people in it, presumably. So you won't see it in the press. Apologies if this is fake news, but I remember reading that somewhere.
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
BJ, as you call him, went to what kind of school? Titter.
Indeed, I did laugh when I typed it. But my point is not that BJ gives a sh1t about the WWC but that he knows he has to do something about it, hence the word 'action'. Cameron et al didn't, so their (not so) latent snobbery, combined with the perceived lack of electoral need, meant they did nothing.
Your faith in Mr Johnson and his ability as a man of action is touching . By the way, I don't have a problem with where he went to school, no problem at all. I do have a problem with the fact that he is a lying little c**t.
He may be a lying little c**t, but he's our lying little c**t, to paraphrase FDR.
Perhaps. Or perhaps he's lying to you and yours as well. Perhaps he's even lying to himself.
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
The future is Chinglish. English with Mandarin grammar basically.
There is no such thing as Mandarin grammar.
All languages have grammar and syntax. Some have simpler grammars and syntaxes. It does not mean they are absent.
In Mandarin there is no grammar. Of course there is syntax.
So how do they distinguish between 'dog bites man' and 'man bites dog'?
It does have grammar ("syntactic and morphological constraints") - it's just that the syntax and morphology aren't really very much like that those of western languages, and they typically apply at a different granularity in the written form than those of western languages (i.e. series of graphemes v. individual graphemes).
After reading the thread here I bet on Labour holding Batley and Spen, but I pulled out of the market after I woke up this morning to the headline news that the Education Select Committee believes schools have long neglected white children. This is how the Tories win - by playing the race card. The race card is a trump card. (See what I did there.) Most likely the Tories will gain Batley and Spen and they are value at 1.45. Thumping away with this kind of story - what is essentially a call for "white rights" - could increase the Tories' Commons majority at the next GE too.
Time to emigrate?
What rubbish. There is clearly an issue with underachievement in this demographic, and there has been for a while, and addressing it is exactly what is needed to stop people playing the race card.
Or would you prefer this sector of society was allowed to keep falling behind as long as your comfy worldview wasn’t challenged ?
I just don't understand what their race has to do with this. They're not getting treated badly at school because they're white. In fact I doubt they're getting treated badly at school at all, except to the extent that all state school kids in this country are let down by a lack of money and focus from the government and the establishment, who mostly go private and so have very little skin in the game. Their problems come from a lack of engagement in education, often rooted in their parents' experiences of school, sometimes compounded by other issues that their parents have. Plus poverty, which makes everything harder. (BTW before anyone accuses me of being an out of touch elitist, I went to a comprehensive school that was almost entirely white so the so-called white working class is not some kind of unknown exotic species to me).
I disagree with that and I think a lot has to do with the attitude of teachers. As @RochdalePioneers so helpfully demonstrated a few days back, there is a view on the left, especially amongst let's say the more educated parts including the teaching profession, that WWC kids are essentially thick, racist and therefore not worth saving, and the problems they have in their lives are the faults of them and their ghastly parents. Therefore, why bother trying to do anything with them. That then leads to teachers who view their place as going through the motions rather than trying to inspire or change.
That is the Right's view of the view of the Left. The real one is that our education system is elitist and old fashioned and underfunded and warped by the propensity of the affluent to opt out and purchase advantage via the private sector.
We demand better. We want a more egalitarian approach that will deliver a similar (and high) quality education to everyone regardless of parental bank balance. Increase participation in state schools, proper funding, a real prioritizing of disadvantaged areas.
The biggest beneficiary of such an approach? Yep - white working class children.
But oh no, too difficult. Too disruptive of the status quo that so many are secretly comfortable with. So let's produce this report instead. Let's avoid the hard choices about class and money and push some culture war buttons. Let's waffle on about the term "white privilege". Has sweet FA to do with the problem but let's pretend that it does. Let's stoke some grievance!
I see you, Tories, and Middle England. I see you.
So are you saying Tories invented the term "white privilege"?
No course not. What I'm saying is that it looks like a tag on here to generate some culture war spat and divert the responsibility for a problem in schools to that oh so convenient amorphous blob which is to blame for all the defects of 11 years of Tory government - the woke left.
It's getting stale. It's getting very stale indeed.
1. It’s only just begun
2. It works
Probably correct. In which case the relative economic prospects of the white working class will not improve.
It will if more focus is placed into those areas.
Blair's education policies focused very much on improving the performance of state schools in London in particular and, 20 years on, huge progress has been made there. However, the rest of the country was relegated in importance, with the possible exception of some of the cities.
It might help the left in general if their reaction to reports such as the Education Committee was a bit more introspection and a lot less lashing out and blaming everyone else for how you are perceived. The left's behaviour when anyone brings up issues such as the WWC in schools is starting to look very Trumpian in its manner.
Let's see some real focus on improving the schools in disadvantaged white working class areas then. It's been eleven long years but there's still time.
Actually, I would argue you have to split the Tory years into groups. Cameron didn't give a f*ck about the WWC, and neither did the likes of Clegg and Osborne, all coming from well-off backgrounds, going to the best private schools and caring most about what the Notting Hill set thought. Theresa May was much better but, in her usual way, stumbling along. With BJ, I would expect action.
That's quite a last sentence. Many have been there.
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
(3) all the way.
We shall see - I hope not. Because as it stands it is impossible for a white working class lad to work hard, excel, get a great job (several of them, in fact), finally leave behind his white working class surroundings, and make good.
Things people will do to satisfy their pecadillo's
As we're also talking about grammar, Malc, what's that apostrophe doing there?
It is there to annoy grammar pedants, you are first in the trap. PS: However technically he could have only had the one and so could be considered correct!
Besides the content, check the language on this Dutch tweet. There is so much English in it, she is basically speaking English
I’ve seen the same in Sweden and Denmark. I wonder if these smaller European languages will survive for much longer. The urge to talk - certainly online - in plain English, and finally abandon Dutch, must be intense. You instantly get a vastly bigger audience, and you’re already halfway there
‘Peter Daszak, lid vh WHO-team dat in China herkomst coronavirus onderzocht, heeft nu fuller disclosure gegeven over financiering door non-profit waarvan hij president is en dat eerder onderzoek van het Wuhanlab financieerde, recent onthuld door Vanity Fair.’
Swedish will extinct within a hundred years. The propensity to gleefully abandon perfectly good Swedish words and phrases for English (sometimes pseudo-English) ones is astonishing. Anyone who objects is ridiculed as a fuddy duddy who’s not down with the kids. It is part of the infamous “opinion corridor”.
I read an article a while back saying that in Italian not just English words but actually English grammar is starting to make an appearance. Quite bizarre.
Rich young Arabs - from the Lebanon or UAE - also speak a kind of ‘Arablish’. They move seamlessly between the two languages, Arabic and English, sometimes in the same sentence. It must drive linguistic purists mad, especially as Arabic is such a beautiful, liquid language, if spoken well (it can also be harsh)
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
The future is Chinglish. English with Mandarin grammar basically.
There is no such thing as Mandarin grammar.
All languages have grammar and syntax. Some have simpler grammars and syntaxes. It does not mean they are absent.
In Mandarin there is no grammar. Of course there is syntax.
Which is why it will be the eventual world language. It is already true that if you can speak Mandarin and English you can communicate with over half the human race. SVO. Like English. Most aren't. Head final. Modifiers before the noun. Like English. Almost totally uninflected. Leading to no tenses.
You get the almost total absence of grammar of Chinese, but without the restricted vocabulary. Much easier to learn than either of the root languages.
I think it was Bruce Schneier who pointed out, that for all the security theatre at airports, the one method not used (in the US - and it isn't used here) was the profiling techniques used by the Israelis. Essentially, spot likely individuals, engaged them in a conversation, and rapidly determine the probability of their mental state using carefully designed questions.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
It is used here. Extensively. Ever come back on the Eurostar (remember that?) and noticed a dozen customs officers staring at you as you walk down the ramp to get your taxi, for example?
Once, a long time ago, while still in the FCO and travelling on official business from Geneva to New York via Heathrow, I decided to see what would happen if I acted shifty walking through the Customs green channel. I got pulled over. The fact that I laughed did not help my case much when I told the officer what I was doing.
Comments
He wrote to Mr Corbyn’s office boasting of his four honorary degrees, ‘no fewer than five shadow ministerial roles’, a stint as deputy leader of the Tory group on Lambeth council – and experience as a tennis coach, The Times reported.
---
Anybody who boasts about their honorary degrees is a very sad individual.
It's more controversial questions where you'll have the problems.
In February 1945 the inmates of concentration and extermination camps in the east that were in danger of falling to the Russians were force marched into Germany proper. Obviously these people were already in a terrible condition physically. They received no food on the March. If they stopped, they were shot. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have died in these death marches.
That’s why we had to do terrible things like bomb Dresden.
I guess it's the seamless transition, embodied by Churchill, from decrying the Bolshevik menace in the 20s (lathered with a fair dollop of antisemitism) through evil totalitarians making common cause in 1939, then our brave & noble allies in the first half of the 40s and back to the Bolshevik menace until the fall of the SU that's striking. Realpolitik makes such things inevitable, but it's the balls deep, salivating enthusiasm for each position that impresses; Winston didn't do things by halves!
Racism clearly does have a detrimental impact on some people so cannot be trivialised.
Clutching your pearls be cause somebody wants to remove a statute is something entirely different. You can count on one hand the number of people whose lives have been blighted by the removal of a statue. Likewise if you want to be outraged by the sight of footballers taking the knee then be my guest but at the end of the day it's their choice.
https://twitter.com/GaryLineker/status/1407288094714380292
The school arranged trips to various religious institutions - as part of RE.
It was noticeable that various ethnic/religious groups simply din't send their children along to certain ones.
Before the Mosque trip, an email was sent warning all parents that not attending the Mosque trip would be treated as grounds for suspending the child from the school.
One of the mothers didn't send her child - as did the Hindus and the Sikhs.
The school moved to suspend her child - until she pointed out that she was a Hindu (by conversion to her husbands faith) and the Hindus didn't go on the Mosque trip.
There followed an interesting debate. According to the very white deputy head, "White people can't be Hindus" - which caused quite an upset. Finally they treated her (and her child) as Hindu, by ignoring the matter.
My daughter went on the trip and asked the Imam some rather interesting questions (according to the teacher) about his interfaith dialog/outreach with the local Rabbi.
He lied about funding from China
‘Daszak to Lancet: "we have recieved no funding from China"
Daszak on CGTN : "we are supported by federal funding from China."’
https://twitter.com/whereisyanling/status/1407141977678876674?s=21
He lied about bats at the lab
‘Peter Daszak: "No BATS were sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analyses of viruses collected in the field.'"
He added, "That's not how this science works. We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!"’
‘Video shows bats kept at #China's Wuhan lab before COVID pandemic
#WHO investigator Peter Daszak contradicts own claim about no experiments on bats at Wuhan lab’
https://twitter.com/indopac_info/status/1407300085742899202?s=21
He lied in his letter to The Lancet
‘In the letter, "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19", published in February, 2020, the authors declared no competing interests. Some readers have questioned the validity of this disclosure.’
‘We invited the 27 authors of the letter to re-evaluate their competing interests. Peter Daszak has expanded on his disclosure statements for this letter and two other pieces relating to COVID-19 that he co-authored or contributed to in The Lancet. See hubs.li/H0QHbrM0.’
https://twitter.com/thelancet/status/1406975640205725698?s=21
Hilariously, in his 40,000 words of ‘fuller disclosure’ in The Lancet, Daszak still manages to avoid using the word ‘Wuhan’
Some of them seemed to regard their presence as a necessary burden.
1. If all the recommendations are implemented, it would cost a huge amount of money. So it won't happen.
2. Interestingly, there's a strong focus on the importance of early years, joined-up services, parental involvement and suchlike. It's hilarious, because what the Committee is really advocating is something indistinguishable from Labour's Sure Start programme which, as we all know, the Tories have cut so much since 2010 that it doesn't really exist any more.
A previous estimate was it could cost £100-150m for a new yacht. I added £100m. Although, now that I think about it, it is going to be procured by the MoD….
Neither of us have access to the granular data not the expertise or time to dynamically model the returns.
But there is a prima facie case that it will generate a substantial return. Even only £1bn in extra GBP in aggregate will likely cover the capital cost in incremental taxes.
My point is (I) there is enough evidence to justify doing the work to analyse it properly and (II) £250m is a rounding error in government spending
So no more snide comments from you, missy, unless you want to argue on facts
Of course they made sure they had them for themselves and their families. The only state of the art shelter in Dresden was beneath Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann’s palatial villa in the Comeniusstrasse. In the southern suburbs, at Lockwitz, there was another shelter for the party leadership, under the party headquarters. But most civilians had just their basements - totally inadequate to deal with the bombs the allies were using by 1945.
This was rejected. Because it would be racist. By the TSA. Who instead strip search black people lots......
That that particular security guard a) didn't spot the guy; b) ignored the warnings; and then c) did nothing is the nub of the matter.
Then again, on £X.50 an hour where there is the possibility of death from being on duty I don't wholly blame him.
Ditto Germany. Maybe even German will disappear eventually
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denglisch
Telling people that “you are worse off because you are black” (which is fundamentally what “white privilege” is about) is actively harmful as it creates a reason for people to give up
Telling people that “you are worse off because you are black” (which is fundamentally what “white privilege” is about) is actively harmful as it creates a reason for people to give up
https://mobile.twitter.com/RobHarris/status/1407287623392038912
But, ok, so I have 2 hopes:
(1) That you're right. Johnson demonstrates he's deadly serious about reducing class inequality in England.
(2) When it turns out he's not, the Cons shed English working class votes by the truckload.
What I really hope doesn't happen is a number (3). He and his government do nothing of substance to improve the relative economic condition of the white working class but continue to successfully deflect people from this onto bogeymen targets such as the "antiracism industry" and "middle class wokery" and "metropolitan elites".
English with Mandarin grammar basically.
The excuses came swiftly, and did no credit to the Tory party and to some of its flagship policies, namely HS2, and the proposed relaxation of planning laws. Ministers cannot admit that Johnson is merely tolerated rather than esteemed by many natural Tory voters in seats such as this. He may be regarded as the proverbial breath of fresh air in some Labour areas where intelligent left-of-centre voters feel despair at their own party’s apparent irrelevance, but in seats that have been Conservative forever, he is increasingly regarded as divorced from the party’s values – not just because of his policies, but because of his demeanour.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/06/even-tory-brexiteers-are-repulsed-boris-johnson-s-conduct
They never did.
There is of course a lot in what you say but I would relate that more to "the street". As in an outward display of confidence can help a very great deal in warding off unwelcome attention. Of course ideally there would be some competence/training/experience, but if nothing else then the attitude you describe will see you through very often.
But as I said there is syntax. Dog bites man would be dog bites man. Man bites dog would be man bites dog (the latter bits in Chinese, obvs).
Yes well if syntax is a subset of grammar then there is grammar.
But sadly and sadly for them of course, they so often do.
All these English tourists bringing it up here David
Or perhaps he's lying to you and yours as well.
Perhaps he's even lying to himself.
PS: However technically he could have only had the one and so could be considered correct!
It is already true that if you can speak Mandarin and English you can communicate with over half the human race.
SVO. Like English. Most aren't.
Head final. Modifiers before the noun. Like English.
Almost totally uninflected.
Leading to no tenses.
You get the almost total absence of grammar of Chinese, but without the restricted vocabulary. Much easier to learn than either of the root languages.