That was just used as a mechanism to give him some money. It's one of the few times the existence of the war is actually mentioned.
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
As a slight fan of Austen, this is an interesting conversation. A question: would she have sold more books if she had mentioned the war? Did readers at the time want references to it, or would it just have been assumed to be in the background? She was writing for people of her period, not for us, 200 years in the future.
I've got a great book: "All Things Austen: a concise encyclopaedia of Austen's world", by Kirstin Olsen. A quick flick through it reveals much about dances, education, food, and servants, but little about the army. There are long sections on the 'navy' and 'marines', however. So a failure to mention the war appears to extend to modern times.
On you last sentence, Basil Fawlty certainly struggled to not mention the war.
Hush your mouth. @Dura_Ace's wife had a...WHITE CAR. I think it was a Porsche or Hispano Suiza or something. But it was white.
My 993 Carrera Convertible is grandprixweiß too. Speedgelb and Arenarot are the most sought after 993 colours. If you find one with good original paint then buy. I can get you a sick hook up on any mechanical parts.
Unless you regularly clay bar, wax and polish any colour looks like shit.
What work is involved with clay bar? I've heard about this but never tried it. Do you do it yourself or pay someone?
It takes me about 60 minutes to clay a car. As might be expected I have very high standards so it could be done much quicker. I clay my 911s myself and pay somebody else to do the dailies. For cars stored inside and not daily driven then once a year is enough. If a car is kept outside and daily driven you could probably get away with every couple of months if you keep on top of it. The amount of shit that comes out of the paint the first time you do it is astounding.
UK shares land border with EU, but Britain First Brexit government not as smart as Gibraltar government.
Who do you think supplied Gibraltar with the vaccines?
That’s why I am saying it’s UK vaccines in EU arms in first line. Duh.
You are not wiggling off this hook, a mistake has been made that can’t be unmade when the time has passed.
What mistake? We offered Ireland the vaccines and Ireland said no.
Are you suggesting we should force it down their throat against their wishes? Or are you suggesting we should fly people from Europe to the UK in order to vaccinate them then fly them back?
PS many people living in the Republic have been vaccinated in Northern Ireland.
The governments mistake handling this will become increasingly obvious to everyone. With vaccines and virus UK is not a island, lovely eggs, lovely basket, but other things had to be happening simultaneously.
Which is why we're spending billions on donating vaccines around the globe.
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
Don't they get reset after the QFs?
Oh - maybe - not sure
Yes, they do - so impossible to be suspended for the final by picking up a yellow in the semi. Maguire could still miss the semi if he is booked in the quarter final though.
UK shares land border with EU, but Britain First Brexit government not as smart as Gibraltar government.
Who do you think supplied Gibraltar with the vaccines?
That’s why I am saying it’s UK vaccines in EU arms in first line. Duh.
You are not wiggling off this hook, a mistake has been made that can’t be unmade when the time has passed.
What mistake? We offered Ireland the vaccines and Ireland said no.
Are you suggesting we should force it down their throat against their wishes? Or are you suggesting we should fly people from Europe to the UK in order to vaccinate them then fly them back?
PS many people living in the Republic have been vaccinated in Northern Ireland.
Do you have a source for your postscript. All the reporting I have seen on that had residents of the Republic turned away if they didn't have an NHS number. Some had driven all the way from County Kerry only to be turned away.
That was just used as a mechanism to give him some money. It's one of the few times the existence of the war is actually mentioned.
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
As a slight fan of Austen, this is an interesting conversation. A question: would she have sold more books if she had mentioned the war? Did readers at the time want references to it, or would it just have been assumed to be in the background? She was writing for people of her period, not for us, 200 years in the future.
I've got a great book: "All Things Austen: a concise encyclopaedia of Austen's world", by Kirstin Olsen. A quick flick through it reveals much about dances, education, food, and servants, but little about the army. There are long sections on the 'navy' and 'marines', however. So a failure to mention the war appears to extend to modern times.
If I may interject: I recently came across this paper -
The prize money was certainly needed to build up capital for investment or land (which yielded income of course). Captain's salaries weren't really enough for accumulation, esp. if one had a family. Michael Lewis's Social History of the RN 1793-1815 is good on this, though there are more recent studies. The piracy/privateer model of Drake et al lasted for a long time, till 1923 or thereabouts ...
Mr. Al, the best time to address a problem is when it's small.
It's easier to crush an egg than fight a dragon.
Mr. Dancer, the problem is not as construed. I'm an educationalist. 'Subversive', radical or 'woke' teaching was much more of a problem in the the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s than it is now. You could get away with murder in those days - nobody was watching. Now, teachers are under the baleful eye of Ofsted, performance league tables and other forms of accountability. They just can't get away with deviating much from the curriculum, a curriculum designed by the Tories over the last 11 years and unwoke Labour before that. Interestingly, private school teachers have more opportunity to deviate into subversive teaching than state school teachers these days.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
I agree, but the concept of parental responsibility is an interesting one. I agree with it: we should all try to look after our kids. But the other day I mentioned two children my son is friends with. Both have few of the advantages he has, and both have parent/parents who are struggling to cope for varying reasons.
I love the idea of parental responsibility. But what if the parents cannot cope, for whatever reason, even if they really try? Should we allow the kids to suffer, or help both the children and parents? IMV it is a difficult question to answer, and one that should perhaps be led more with an eye to compassion than finance.
(In one case, the school made the decision to allow the boy attend with the children of keyworkers during lockdown. I think it was an excellent idea.)
That was just used as a mechanism to give him some money. It's one of the few times the existence of the war is actually mentioned.
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
As a slight fan of Austen, this is an interesting conversation. A question: would she have sold more books if she had mentioned the war? Did readers at the time want references to it, or would it just have been assumed to be in the background? She was writing for people of her period, not for us, 200 years in the future.
I've got a great book: "All Things Austen: a concise encyclopaedia of Austen's world", by Kirstin Olsen. A quick flick through it reveals much about dances, education, food, and servants, but little about the army. There are long sections on the 'navy' and 'marines', however. So a failure to mention the war appears to extend to modern times.
I think she was selling escapism.
In Austen's world, the Army, Navy and Marines served to provide uniforms for minor gentry to wear to social occasions.
Finding an article in an encyclopaedia of her world containing an article on the benefits of Mr Seppings diagonal bracing method and its application to ships of the line would be a bit weird.
It does have a good section on luncheon, dinner, tea and supper, and how the times of these differed by class, and how they changed as artificial lighting was introduced.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
I agree, but the concept of parental responsibility is an interesting one. I agree with it: we should all try to look after our kids. But the other day I mentioned two children my son is friends with. Both have few of the advantages he has, and both have parent/parents who are struggling to cope for varying reasons.
I love the idea of parental responsibility. But what if the parents cannot cope, for whatever reason, even if they really try? Should we allow the kids to suffer, or help both the children and parents? IMV it is a difficult question to answer, and one that should perhaps be led more with an eye to compassion than finance.
(In one case, the school made the decision to allow the boy attend with the children of keyworkers during lockdown. I think it was an excellent idea.)
'Subversive', radical or 'woke' teaching was much more of a problem in the the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s than it is now. You could get away with murder in those days - nobody was watching.
My maths teacher at boarding school in the early 80s was an unreconstructed Stalinist and spent quite a lot of time telling us about it. I think that's why I only got a B at O level.
I ran into him years later at a hunt sabotage covert operation when he was in his late 70s. Sound bloke.
Completely new lines Liverpool to Manchester and Manchester-Bradford-Leeds does not sound small beer.
If they happen. But the point is that RP said that NPR was already under construction. Which it is, but also rather ignores the fact that the definition of NPR has radically changed (and for the better, IMO).
HS2 is a set project: to build a new high-speed rail line from London to just north of Birmingham (phase1/1a), and to Manchester/Leeds (phase 2). Much other work needs doing, but it's all directed to that core.
NPR is a set of related and unrelated projects to enhance connectivity and services in the north, including electrification schemes, reducing bottlenecks, and adding new lines. Some of that work is ongoing; others are barely specified, let alone been through planning or funded. NPR is a very different, and in many ways more complex, project.
I was being truthful and sarcastic in equal measure. The extension of the knitting from Colton Junction to Church Fenton is absolutely an HS2B/3 scheme. And like so many of the rump motorway stubs left up and down the country I expect that is the last we will see of it.
Lets understand the issue. The Pennines are bloody lumpy and have towns and villages all over their eastern foothills. A ruddy great base tunnel is doable at a price and has been proposed since at least the 1860s. Its where it goes at either end that is the problem.
The brutal problem for HS3/NPR is this: its purpose is to speed people between Manchester and Leeds quickly. For other towns like Huddersfield or even cities like Bradford they can offer as many different route options as they like, serving these places is expensive both in terms of land and construction costs and journey time loss.
The plan is to upgrade the existing route via Standege - and decent time savings can be realised - AND to build the new route via Bradford. I just can't see the latter ever getting through the planning hell to come and then the budgeting hell that follows that. Not when cash has already been spent on upgrades to the existing route - "Isn't that good enough" is an easy cop-out.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
This featured in the much derided and since ignored government report into race earlier this year.
“Black” is too wide a generality. Both Indians and Chinese earn more on average than whites. Other groups do less well. Some of the reasons they do afflict our poor whites too. Disrupted families, poor role models, poor housing etc. This is a broader and more general point that certainly needs a lot more attention than it is getting if we are to maximise the potential of our society but my point was much narrower: the cliche that private schools are bastions of white privilege is simply wrong.
I wonder what happens if you control for British children in private schools.
Private schools are more of a bastion of privilege in our society than ever because they have lifted their game at the same time as general standards in education have declined. Don’t dispute that for a second. It’s just not white privilege, at least not anymore.
I say that (respectfully) I know little about the private school sector. Suspect that not all fee paying schools are the same though. How many of your doctor examples could afford £32k a year? How many local Lairds can?
The issue in education is class, not race. The monied class don't want to pay anything to bring up the poorest from their low levels of attainment. That the monied are very largely (though not exclusively) white is a side note.
I can only speak from experience. The only reason to send my son to private school is to get him away from the local criminal underclass. Thats why all the parents I know do it, it is like a £15k per annum tax just for this reason. Looking at the private school parents around this provincial part of England, a lot of them seem like dodgy businesspeople, a lot of inherited property wealth and conspicuous consumption - hardly an elite club that is worth joining.
In terms of educational attainment there is almost nothing in it, the final results etc look to be pretty similar, the university outcomes are not that great for our local private schools, £180k is a lot to spend for your child to end up at a middle ranking ex poly doing some woke degree.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
That was just used as a mechanism to give him some money. It's one of the few times the existence of the war is actually mentioned.
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
As a slight fan of Austen, this is an interesting conversation. A question: would she have sold more books if she had mentioned the war? Did readers at the time want references to it, or would it just have been assumed to be in the background? She was writing for people of her period, not for us, 200 years in the future.
I've got a great book: "All Things Austen: a concise encyclopaedia of Austen's world", by Kirstin Olsen. A quick flick through it reveals much about dances, education, food, and servants, but little about the army. There are long sections on the 'navy' and 'marines', however. So a failure to mention the war appears to extend to modern times.
I think she was selling escapism.
In Austen's world, the Army, Navy and Marines served to provide uniforms for minor gentry to wear to social occasions.
Finding an article in an encyclopaedia of her world containing an article on the benefits of Mr Seppings diagonal bracing method and its application to ships of the line would be a bit weird.
It does have a good section on luncheon, dinner, tea and supper, and how the times of these differed by class, and how they changed as artificial lighting was introduced.
In my most harrowing recurrent nightmare it is 3am and I'm obliged read Pride and Prejudice for the first time for an A-Level exam at 9.30. Such a lifelong legacy of child cruelty.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
This featured in the much derided and since ignored government report into race earlier this year.
But how much of that is for class reasons rather than race reason ?
Working class black graduates vs middle class black graduates vs middle class white graduates vs working class white graduates.
There is a disadvantage that is nothing to do with society and white people. When I lived in Bradford I noticed that as there was a requirement to be close to the mosque the Muslim community was limited in its mobility to be a driving distance from the mosque, and jobs wise they wanted to have a job that allowed them to go to Mosque on Friday. This was quite limiting, and I have seen similar in evangelical black communities being close to a church location, although Sunday meetings tend to be less of a work issue compared to Fridays.
This is why I find simple comparisons ill thought out
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
At what point does a party say it doesn't want votes from a certain demographic and stands tall when people ask them why?
I don't think I want Labour going after Palestinian obsessed, anti-LGBT people, that's not the kind of Labour Party I want to vote for. And I think they should get away from these issues.
I have this conflict too - although for me the main votes I'd really prefer not have are those of white working class leaver bigots* who've gone Tory. It would just spoil the mandate.
Trouble is, to get any mandate at all you have to win an election and this means maximizing the coalition, especially from where we're starting. We can't be too fastidious. The Tories take no prisoners.
* To stress that I'm not saying all (or even most) such voters are bigots. I'm just talking about the ones who are. But it's a bigger number than the sort of Muslims you're talking about.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
Mr. Al, the best time to address a problem is when it's small.
It's easier to crush an egg than fight a dragon.
Mr. Dancer, the problem is not as construed. I'm an educationalist. 'Subversive', radical or 'woke' teaching was much more of a problem in the the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s than it is now. You could get away with murder in those days - nobody was watching. Now, teachers are under the baleful eye of Ofsted, performance league tables and other forms of accountability. They just can't get away with deviating much from the curriculum, a curriculum designed by the Tories over the last 11 years and unwoke Labour before that. Interestingly, private school teachers have more opportunity to deviate into subversive teaching than state school teachers these days.
Certainly tallies with my experience as a parent. My impression is the school goes out of its way to avoid anything too controversial. All the wokeness comes from the kids themselves, while the school if anything leans the other way, without much success. When I was at school my favourite teacher was a dreadful old reactionary (ex army, very strict on discipline but a great teacher with a passion for his subject). So I think the idea that kids will unquestioningly absorb whatever political message their teachers are telling them is implausible anyway.
That was just used as a mechanism to give him some money. It's one of the few times the existence of the war is actually mentioned.
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
As a slight fan of Austen, this is an interesting conversation. A question: would she have sold more books if she had mentioned the war? Did readers at the time want references to it, or would it just have been assumed to be in the background? She was writing for people of her period, not for us, 200 years in the future.
I've got a great book: "All Things Austen: a concise encyclopaedia of Austen's world", by Kirstin Olsen. A quick flick through it reveals much about dances, education, food, and servants, but little about the army. There are long sections on the 'navy' and 'marines', however. So a failure to mention the war appears to extend to modern times.
The novel always was a rather upper middle class art form, but particularly so prior to the Twentieth century, so always been centred on middle class mores and preoccupations. Austen was a fine and witty observer of these things.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
We do. And it absolutely does what it is designed to do in this post-IDS version which keep the poorest grindingly poor. Blaming the parents - or worse their children - for the designed in failings of a system doing what it was supposed to do is grotesque.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
UK shares land border with EU, but Britain First Brexit government not as smart as Gibraltar government.
Who do you think supplied Gibraltar with the vaccines?
That’s why I am saying it’s UK vaccines in EU arms in first line. Duh.
You are not wiggling off this hook, a mistake has been made that can’t be unmade when the time has passed.
What mistake? We offered Ireland the vaccines and Ireland said no.
Are you suggesting we should force it down their throat against their wishes? Or are you suggesting we should fly people from Europe to the UK in order to vaccinate them then fly them back?
PS many people living in the Republic have been vaccinated in Northern Ireland.
Do you have a source for your postscript. All the reporting I have seen on that had residents of the Republic turned away if they didn't have an NHS number. Some had driven all the way from County Kerry only to be turned away.
Many residents of the Republic have an NHS number from previously living in NI or elsewhere in the UK and they're eligible even if they now live in the Republic.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
Who will these Muslims vote for when Labour make it clear they don’t want them? I think I’d rather see Labour keep them on board, win power, Sir Keir become PM and rejoin the EU than risk the consequences of what might happen
Brexit is a total success and everybody who advocated it is delighted at the outcomes...
Kate Hoey and former Brexit party MEP, Ben Habib and TUV's Jim Allistar have arrived at the High Court in Belfast ... Expecting ruling on their attempt (along with DUP and Trimble) to get Northern Ireland protocol judicially reviewed any moment. https://twitter.com/lisaocarroll/status/1410175229813473281
The residents registration is what Theresa May negotiated with the EU of course, its what the EU wanted. When Boris took over it wasn't something disputed like the backstop so had no need to be renegotiated.
Anyway, of the estimated three million* EU citizens living in the EU, five million have applied for the scheme. So looks like everyone should be covered!
Completely new lines Liverpool to Manchester and Manchester-Bradford-Leeds does not sound small beer.
If they happen. But the point is that RP said that NPR was already under construction. Which it is, but also rather ignores the fact that the definition of NPR has radically changed (and for the better, IMO).
HS2 is a set project: to build a new high-speed rail line from London to just north of Birmingham (phase1/1a), and to Manchester/Leeds (phase 2). Much other work needs doing, but it's all directed to that core.
NPR is a set of related and unrelated projects to enhance connectivity and services in the north, including electrification schemes, reducing bottlenecks, and adding new lines. Some of that work is ongoing; others are barely specified, let alone been through planning or funded. NPR is a very different, and in many ways more complex, project.
I was being truthful and sarcastic in equal measure. The extension of the knitting from Colton Junction to Church Fenton is absolutely an HS2B/3 scheme. And like so many of the rump motorway stubs left up and down the country I expect that is the last we will see of it.
Lets understand the issue. The Pennines are bloody lumpy and have towns and villages all over their eastern foothills. A ruddy great base tunnel is doable at a price and has been proposed since at least the 1860s. Its where it goes at either end that is the problem.
The brutal problem for HS3/NPR is this: its purpose is to speed people between Manchester and Leeds quickly. For other towns like Huddersfield or even cities like Bradford they can offer as many different route options as they like, serving these places is expensive both in terms of land and construction costs and journey time loss.
The plan is to upgrade the existing route via Standege - and decent time savings can be realised - AND to build the new route via Bradford. I just can't see the latter ever getting through the planning hell to come and then the budgeting hell that follows that. Not when cash has already been spent on upgrades to the existing route - "Isn't that good enough" is an easy cop-out.
Likewise the Liverpool to Manchester bit is already now good enough.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
The current approach does have a big problem - which is that if you have a tight budget or cannot budget at all the sudden (and yes I know School holidays are scheduled but remember the issue here is potentially dysfunctional parents) need to find £10-20 to pay for breakfast / lunch is something a fair number of people cannot cope with.
Now I haven't a clue what the fix is but there is an issue there regardless of Charle's viewpoint that the parents should be able to manage. The simple fact is that a lot of parents simply can't.
And I've seen degree educated parents (who have then drawn very dire and unlucky hands) who have got themselves into this situation.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
In theory, yes. In practice... The killer is that for 39 weeks a year, school-aged children can be sure of one solid meal a day at school, two once you have breakfast provision as well. Then, during the school holidays, those things stop, but families don't get any extra cash to replace them. And if we're thinking about relatively chaotic lifestyles and households where there isn't huge amounts of spare cash, that is often going to end badly.
And yes, getting decent food into children is a massive benefit for education and society. At the struggling northern WWC school where I was a governor for a while, teachers were buying packets of digestive biscuits for their classes on that basis, and the homework club I helped set up was (in part) about getting fruit and milk into bellies at the end of the day.
There's a genuine dilemma here. One of the positive aims of the IDS benefit reforms was to shift responsibility for life management back to benefit recipients. Admirable, but it doesn't always work. And when parental mistakes or deliberate failures end up harming children...
Mr. Al, the best time to address a problem is when it's small.
It's easier to crush an egg than fight a dragon.
Mr. Dancer, the problem is not as construed. I'm an educationalist. 'Subversive', radical or 'woke' teaching was much more of a problem in the the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s than it is now. You could get away with murder in those days - nobody was watching. Now, teachers are under the baleful eye of Ofsted, performance league tables and other forms of accountability. They just can't get away with deviating much from the curriculum, a curriculum designed by the Tories over the last 11 years and unwoke Labour before that. Interestingly, private school teachers have more opportunity to deviate into subversive teaching than state school teachers these days.
Certainly tallies with my experience as a parent. My impression is the school goes out of its way to avoid anything too controversial. All the wokeness comes from the kids themselves, while the school if anything leans the other way, without much success. When I was at school my favourite teacher was a dreadful old reactionary (ex army, very strict on discipline but a great teacher with a passion for his subject). So I think the idea that kids will unquestioningly absorb whatever political message their teachers are telling them is implausible anyway.
Just before the 2019 election, my son (then five) came back from school saying: "Ooooh, Jeremy Corbyn." Followed by: "Who's Jeremy Corbyn?"
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
The point is when a polititician says that after the savage bombing of Palestine they are implying what Isreal is doing is just fine. "Isreal has a right to defend itself" is polititician speak for we won't criticize Isreal no matter what. As we've heard too many politicians say the same things, people react to what politicians aren't saying as well as what they are.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
It's not just the money, of course. Chaotic family lives are a very significant contributor to educational underperformance, too. It's a bright kid indeed who will escape the effects of that, combined with poverty.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
In case you didn't notice we've had more than a decade of austerity, as a result benefits have been frozen and recipients have to find money for council tax and rent from the payments that should pay for food (and other essentials like electricity), because housing benefit and council tax benefit have been cut.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
The current approach does have a big problem - which is that if you have a tight budget or cannot budget at all the sudden (and yes I know School holidays are scheduled but remember the issue here is potentially dysfunctional parents) need to find £10-20 to pay for breakfast / lunch is something a fair number of people cannot cope with.
Now I haven't a clue what the fix is but there is an issue there regardless of Charle's viewpoint that the parents should be able to manage. The simple fact is that a lot of parents simply can't.
And I've seen degree educated parents (who have then drawn very dire and unlucky hands) who have got themselves into this situation.
A simple expedient would be for child benefit, or the child component of UC, to be higher during school holidays and lower during term time
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
Another nugget is that the Admiralty paid rewards for freeing slaves:
"Between 1807 and 1811, 1,991 slaves were freed through the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, and between 1807 and mid-1815, HM Treasury paid Royal Navy personnel 191,100 pounds in prize money for slaves freed in West Africa. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_money
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
Education is a great leveling up for ethnic minorities, which the UK appears to do well compared with other nations. However, it would appear that employment is still another matter.
Employment disadvantage of minority ethnic groups still, however, persists. Men and women from most ethnic minority groups have lower employment rates among those economically active than their white majority counterparts. This disadvantage is reduced but not eliminated when we account for disadvantaged family origins. For example, taking account of social class origins, the employment gap for second-generation Pakistani men reduces from around 4 percentage points to around 1 percentage point, and for Pakistani women from around 5 percentage points to around 2 percentage points. This would suggest some of the employment gap is driven by the disadvantages faced by their parents that persist across generations and are reduced but not eliminated by educational success.
That is much better news than I expected actually. I expected Muslims (Pakistani Brits must be the biggest Muslim group) to have a massive employment gap even when taking into account social class but a 1-2% gap for the second generation is hardly anything at all.
On the subjects of Jane Austen and the Navy, I’m currently reading Jane Austen and her times by GE Mitton (my family is related to Austen). I thought this page would be of interest:
Completely new lines Liverpool to Manchester and Manchester-Bradford-Leeds does not sound small beer.
If they happen. But the point is that RP said that NPR was already under construction. Which it is, but also rather ignores the fact that the definition of NPR has radically changed (and for the better, IMO).
HS2 is a set project: to build a new high-speed rail line from London to just north of Birmingham (phase1/1a), and to Manchester/Leeds (phase 2). Much other work needs doing, but it's all directed to that core.
NPR is a set of related and unrelated projects to enhance connectivity and services in the north, including electrification schemes, reducing bottlenecks, and adding new lines. Some of that work is ongoing; others are barely specified, let alone been through planning or funded. NPR is a very different, and in many ways more complex, project.
I was being truthful and sarcastic in equal measure. The extension of the knitting from Colton Junction to Church Fenton is absolutely an HS2B/3 scheme. And like so many of the rump motorway stubs left up and down the country I expect that is the last we will see of it.
Lets understand the issue. The Pennines are bloody lumpy and have towns and villages all over their eastern foothills. A ruddy great base tunnel is doable at a price and has been proposed since at least the 1860s. Its where it goes at either end that is the problem.
The brutal problem for HS3/NPR is this: its purpose is to speed people between Manchester and Leeds quickly. For other towns like Huddersfield or even cities like Bradford they can offer as many different route options as they like, serving these places is expensive both in terms of land and construction costs and journey time loss.
The plan is to upgrade the existing route via Standege - and decent time savings can be realised - AND to build the new route via Bradford. I just can't see the latter ever getting through the planning hell to come and then the budgeting hell that follows that. Not when cash has already been spent on upgrades to the existing route - "Isn't that good enough" is an easy cop-out.
Likewise the Liverpool to Manchester bit is already now good enough.
Liverpool to Manchester is fine. But like HS2, the primary issue is not the speed in getting from A to B but the capacity this eats up. A mix of fast and slow trains results in much lower track capacity than simply sending down train after train at the same speed, as a moments' thought will demonstrate. So although we can go reasonably fast between Manchester and Liverpool, doing so inhibits the number of suburban trains we can run to Urmston and Allerton and Eccles and Huyton. And the number of freight trains we can run. That said, the potential upside in speed for Mcr/Lpl in relation to what we already have is rather more significant than that between Manchester and London for HS2, creating a genuine two-city city-region. Also, HS2 will create a much better connection between Liverpool and Manchester Airport, cutting journey times from about an hour to about 15 minutes.
All the above arguments can also be applied to Manchester-Leeds, with the added bonus that we tie Bradford properly into the high speed network. At present, trains to Bradford are a bit pedestrian. By giving a sub-half-hour connection between Bradford and Manchester, we connect a massive labour pool (Bradford's bigger than most people think) with a massive jobs market.
Yes, it's a major engineering challenge to do it. But what we have at present in terms of a whole network isn't good enough.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
I disagree....."very high percentage of Labour seats have large Muslim populations...." I reckon no more than 10-12 seats enter this category.... less 8% of Labour seats IMHO
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
Another nugget is that the Admiralty paid rewards for freeing slaves:
"Between 1807 and 1811, 1,991 slaves were freed through the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, and between 1807 and mid-1815, HM Treasury paid Royal Navy personnel 191,100 pounds in prize money for slaves freed in West Africa. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_money
Every single fictional Naval hero (Hornblower included) was involved with a particular, later treasure fleet capture. Where the prize money was complicated by whether war was declared or not.
They also paid prize money for captured slave ships. Once they realised that the slavers were buying them back at auction, the prizes were broken up or burnt. But the price still paid as prize money.
With the end of the Napoleonic wars, the prize money from fighting slavery was a massive pull for the best and brightest in the RN
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
I disagree....."very high percentage of Labour seats have large Muslim populations...." I reckon no more than 10-12 seats enter this category.... less 8% of Labour seats IMHO
I look forward to Labour telling people with odious views to "do one" then
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
Education is a great leveling up for ethnic minorities, which the UK appears to do well compared with other nations. However, it would appear that employment is still another matter.
Employment disadvantage of minority ethnic groups still, however, persists. Men and women from most ethnic minority groups have lower employment rates among those economically active than their white majority counterparts. This disadvantage is reduced but not eliminated when we account for disadvantaged family origins. For example, taking account of social class origins, the employment gap for second-generation Pakistani men reduces from around 4 percentage points to around 1 percentage point, and for Pakistani women from around 5 percentage points to around 2 percentage points. This would suggest some of the employment gap is driven by the disadvantages faced by their parents that persist across generations and are reduced but not eliminated by educational success.
That is much better news than I expected actually. I expected Muslims (Pakistani Brits must be the biggest Muslim group) to have a massive employment gap even when taking into account social class but a 1-2% gap for the second generation is hardly anything at all.
Without wanting to stereotype, given the prevalence of minorities working in hospitality businesses that can be notorious for paying cash in hand I wonder if even that 1% gap would go away. Ie they are working, but HMRC etc think they're not.
This is a country with full employment, besides those with disabilities almost anyone who doesn't have a job its because they don't want one to be frank.
Hush your mouth. @Dura_Ace's wife had a...WHITE CAR. I think it was a Porsche or Hispano Suiza or something. But it was white.
My 993 Carrera Convertible is grandprixweiß too. Speedgelb and Arenarot are the most sought after 993 colours. If you find one with good original paint then buy. I can get you a sick hook up on any mechanical parts.
Unless you regularly clay bar, wax and polish any colour looks like shit.
Old English White for me. Preferably on an XK. And yes now that we have Brexited and with the virus it's a lot more complicated to get one's car washed.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
In theory, yes. In practice... The killer is that for 39 weeks a year, school-aged children can be sure of one solid meal a day at school, two once you have breakfast provision as well. Then, during the school holidays, those things stop, but families don't get any extra cash to replace them. And if we're thinking about relatively chaotic lifestyles and households where there isn't huge amounts of spare cash, that is often going to end badly.
And yes, getting decent food into children is a massive benefit for education and society. At the struggling northern WWC school where I was a governor for a while, teachers were buying packets of digestive biscuits for their classes on that basis, and the homework club I helped set up was (in part) about getting fruit and milk into bellies at the end of the day.
There's a genuine dilemma here. One of the positive aims of the IDS benefit reforms was to shift responsibility for life management back to benefit recipients. Admirable, but it doesn't always work. And when parental mistakes or deliberate failures end up harming children...
I'd go further and point out that IDS was a malevolent bastard seemingly fixated on punishing the poor for their sins just like his Victoria supposedly Christian counterparts. The principle of UC is fine, the deliberate way it is run to further impoverish the poor sods stuck in its clutches is not.
I know that Thatcha comes in for a lot of grief from the left. She was never as wilfully nasty as this lot have been because she came from a different background than the government by toffs we have now.
There is a fundamental distinction between exposing pupils to conflicting ideas versus activists enforcing or promoting a particular viewpoint. Obviously schools and colleges cannot be morally neutral on issues such as race hence the opportunity for somewhat fanatical attitudes to be imposed. The non-negotiable principles that must be upheld are a high degree of freedom of speech, exposure to a variety of viewpoints on contentious subjects and pupils treated equally according to their behaviour and not background.
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Actually lots of reports of empty shelves in Aldi this week. It does seem to be an issue across the sector.
Still big shortage of cement for the building trend too, which is a strange one.
Yes my gardener can't get hold of concrete fence posts. It's Covid related I think, and they are also blaming that ship that got stuck in the Suez canal.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
Who will these Muslims vote for when Labour make it clear they don’t want them? I think I’d rather see Labour keep them on board, win power, Sir Keir become PM and rejoin the EU than risk the consequences of what might happen
If Labour becomes homophobic, anti-Semitic and misogynistic to keep such voters on board, why would that be better? What would be the point of voting Labour then? And wouldn't it risk losing loads of other voters who think that one of the points of Labour is not to display or appease such ghastly views?
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Yes, the Applebaum article you link to is absolutely superb. It gives a really balanced view of the debate about CRC and 'wokeness' that I suspect few could object to.
Agreed. Just read it. She's such an acute pundit on the politics of the USA.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
The point is when a polititician says that after the savage bombing of Palestine they are implying what Isreal is doing is just fine. "Isreal has a right to defend itself" is polititician speak for we won't criticize Isreal no matter what.
is it? I haven't heard a shortage of politicians of all sides criticising Israel.
But nor have I noticed a surfeit of useful suggestions as to how to move it ahead.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
Anything you want to know about the Royal Navy at the time can be found in N A M Rodger's "The Command of the Sea".
Your best chance of getting rich was as a junior captain. Frigates and sloops blockaded inshore, and raided the enemy's commerce. These were rarely big ships, but there was a steady stream of them, and you got rewarded for the goods you captured, as well as the value of the ship.
More senior captains rarely had this opportunity, because they were blockading much further out to sea, commanding Third Rates. There, your opportunity to win prize money depended on capturing an enemy ship in battle, or a Spanish treasure galleion.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
Yes, that's correct, but part of the mix is free school meals, which obviously wasn't available in school hols, so during the hols something else was required to cover this gap. I remember the Tory MP being called out (sotto voce) in parliament in this to his anger. I thought Tory MPs had to have thicker skins in the north! What's the saying? In the north they call a spade a bloody shovel!
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
In case you didn't notice we've had more than a decade of austerity, as a result benefits have been frozen and recipients have to find money for council tax and rent from the payments that should pay for food (and other essentials like electricity), because housing benefit and council tax benefit have been cut.
My son (on benefits) is moving to a bigger place but will be sharing.
The housing benefits people will pay his deposit , the cost of the move and will not be discounting his housing benefits even though he is moving to a 3 bed place with his girlfriend.
I was very surprised by how helpful and accommodating they were - on the other hand other parts of the benefits system have been awful and if mum and dad couldn't have lent a hand I have no idea how he could have got by the last year.
Completely new lines Liverpool to Manchester and Manchester-Bradford-Leeds does not sound small beer.
If they happen. But the point is that RP said that NPR was already under construction. Which it is, but also rather ignores the fact that the definition of NPR has radically changed (and for the better, IMO).
HS2 is a set project: to build a new high-speed rail line from London to just north of Birmingham (phase1/1a), and to Manchester/Leeds (phase 2). Much other work needs doing, but it's all directed to that core.
NPR is a set of related and unrelated projects to enhance connectivity and services in the north, including electrification schemes, reducing bottlenecks, and adding new lines. Some of that work is ongoing; others are barely specified, let alone been through planning or funded. NPR is a very different, and in many ways more complex, project.
I was being truthful and sarcastic in equal measure. The extension of the knitting from Colton Junction to Church Fenton is absolutely an HS2B/3 scheme. And like so many of the rump motorway stubs left up and down the country I expect that is the last we will see of it.
Lets understand the issue. The Pennines are bloody lumpy and have towns and villages all over their eastern foothills. A ruddy great base tunnel is doable at a price and has been proposed since at least the 1860s. Its where it goes at either end that is the problem.
The brutal problem for HS3/NPR is this: its purpose is to speed people between Manchester and Leeds quickly. For other towns like Huddersfield or even cities like Bradford they can offer as many different route options as they like, serving these places is expensive both in terms of land and construction costs and journey time loss.
The plan is to upgrade the existing route via Standege - and decent time savings can be realised - AND to build the new route via Bradford. I just can't see the latter ever getting through the planning hell to come and then the budgeting hell that follows that. Not when cash has already been spent on upgrades to the existing route - "Isn't that good enough" is an easy cop-out.
Likewise the Liverpool to Manchester bit is already now good enough.
Liverpool to Manchester is fine. But like HS2, the primary issue is not the speed in getting from A to B but the capacity this eats up. A mix of fast and slow trains results in much lower track capacity than simply sending down train after train at the same speed, as a moments' thought will demonstrate. So although we can go reasonably fast between Manchester and Liverpool, doing so inhibits the number of suburban trains we can run to Urmston and Allerton and Eccles and Huyton. And the number of freight trains we can run. That said, the potential upside in speed for Mcr/Lpl in relation to what we already have is rather more significant than that between Manchester and London for HS2, creating a genuine two-city city-region. Also, HS2 will create a much better connection between Liverpool and Manchester Airport, cutting journey times from about an hour to about 15 minutes.
All the above arguments can also be applied to Manchester-Leeds, with the added bonus that we tie Bradford properly into the high speed network. At present, trains to Bradford are a bit pedestrian. By giving a sub-half-hour connection between Bradford and Manchester, we connect a massive labour pool (Bradford's bigger than most people think) with a massive jobs market.
Yes, it's a major engineering challenge to do it. But what we have at present in terms of a whole network isn't good enough.
But this is the thing - the story is always about Journey time when the far more important story should really be about capacity. The great unknown for that argument though is what capacity is required in the post Covid world.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
Education is a great leveling up for ethnic minorities, which the UK appears to do well compared with other nations. However, it would appear that employment is still another matter.
Employment disadvantage of minority ethnic groups still, however, persists. Men and women from most ethnic minority groups have lower employment rates among those economically active than their white majority counterparts. This disadvantage is reduced but not eliminated when we account for disadvantaged family origins. For example, taking account of social class origins, the employment gap for second-generation Pakistani men reduces from around 4 percentage points to around 1 percentage point, and for Pakistani women from around 5 percentage points to around 2 percentage points. This would suggest some of the employment gap is driven by the disadvantages faced by their parents that persist across generations and are reduced but not eliminated by educational success.
That is much better news than I expected actually. I expected Muslims (Pakistani Brits must be the biggest Muslim group) to have a massive employment gap even when taking into account social class but a 1-2% gap for the second generation is hardly anything at all.
Without wanting to stereotype, given the prevalence of minorities working in hospitality businesses that can be notorious for paying cash in hand I wonder if even that 1% gap would go away. Ie they are working, but HMRC etc think they're not.
This is a country with full employment, besides those with disabilities almost anyone who doesn't have a job its because they don't want one to be frank.
Unless they are family businesses SECOND generation Pakistani's are not working hospitality/restaurants. They are mostly filled by new immigrants in so called "student" visas.
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Shortages are both patchy and universal. There isn't a blanket "this area has a problem this one doesn't" issue nor a "Waitrose has a problem and Aldi doesn't" issue.
A shortage of drivers hits everyone until more drivers can be either trained or allowed to work again. A big spike in wages has fixed the "driven away by IR35" issue. Which still leaves a big shortage of drivers as (a) not enough Brits want to do the work hence EU drivers and (b) no training during Covid.
Unless we let EU drivers come back in then shortages are going to get worse before they get better. A crash course in HGV driving is 6-8 weeks assuming you have sufficient instructors and testers and candidates to fill all the holes. Which we don't.
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Shortages are both patchy and universal. There isn't a blanket "this area has a problem this one doesn't" issue nor a "Waitrose has a problem and Aldi doesn't" issue.
A shortage of drivers hits everyone until more drivers can be either trained or allowed to work again. A big spike in wages has fixed the "driven away by IR35" issue. Which still leaves a big shortage of drivers as (a) not enough Brits want to do the work hence EU drivers and (b) no training during Covid.
Unless we let EU drivers come back in then shortages are going to get worse before they get better. A crash course in HGV driving is 6-8 weeks assuming you have sufficient instructors and testers and candidates to fill all the holes. Which we don't.
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Actually lots of reports of empty shelves in Aldi this week. It does seem to be an issue across the sector.
Still big shortage of cement for the building trend too, which is a strange one.
Yes my gardener can't get hold of concrete fence posts. It's Covid related I think, and they are also blaming that ship that got stuck in the Suez canal.
It's actually a fairly deliberate refusal to increase supply from the manufacturers of cement. Who are in the UK.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
Who will these Muslims vote for when Labour make it clear they don’t want them? I think I’d rather see Labour keep them on board, win power, Sir Keir become PM and rejoin the EU than risk the consequences of what might happen
What might happen that's so bad as to be worse in your eyes than SKS PM and reversal of Brexit?
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Shortages are both patchy and universal. There isn't a blanket "this area has a problem this one doesn't" issue nor a "Waitrose has a problem and Aldi doesn't" issue.
A shortage of drivers hits everyone until more drivers can be either trained or allowed to work again. A big spike in wages has fixed the "driven away by IR35" issue. Which still leaves a big shortage of drivers as (a) not enough Brits want to do the work hence EU drivers and (b) no training during Covid.
Unless we let EU drivers come back in then shortages are going to get worse before they get better. A crash course in HGV driving is 6-8 weeks assuming you have sufficient instructors and testers and candidates to fill all the holes. Which we don't.
An option for smaller trucks would be to allow people to drive 7.5 tonners on a car licence again.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
Education is a great leveling up for ethnic minorities, which the UK appears to do well compared with other nations. However, it would appear that employment is still another matter.
Employment disadvantage of minority ethnic groups still, however, persists. Men and women from most ethnic minority groups have lower employment rates among those economically active than their white majority counterparts. This disadvantage is reduced but not eliminated when we account for disadvantaged family origins. For example, taking account of social class origins, the employment gap for second-generation Pakistani men reduces from around 4 percentage points to around 1 percentage point, and for Pakistani women from around 5 percentage points to around 2 percentage points. This would suggest some of the employment gap is driven by the disadvantages faced by their parents that persist across generations and are reduced but not eliminated by educational success.
That is much better news than I expected actually. I expected Muslims (Pakistani Brits must be the biggest Muslim group) to have a massive employment gap even when taking into account social class but a 1-2% gap for the second generation is hardly anything at all.
Without wanting to stereotype, given the prevalence of minorities working in hospitality businesses that can be notorious for paying cash in hand I wonder if even that 1% gap would go away. Ie they are working, but HMRC etc think they're not.
This is a country with full employment, besides those with disabilities almost anyone who doesn't have a job its because they don't want one to be frank.
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Shortages are both patchy and universal. There isn't a blanket "this area has a problem this one doesn't" issue nor a "Waitrose has a problem and Aldi doesn't" issue.
A shortage of drivers hits everyone until more drivers can be either trained or allowed to work again. A big spike in wages has fixed the "driven away by IR35" issue. Which still leaves a big shortage of drivers as (a) not enough Brits want to do the work hence EU drivers and (b) no training during Covid.
Unless we let EU drivers come back in then shortages are going to get worse before they get better. A crash course in HGV driving is 6-8 weeks assuming you have sufficient instructors and testers and candidates to fill all the holes. Which we don't.
6 to 8 weeks isn't very long.
Its not like saying you need to spend 3+ years at University being charged £9k per year to do so.
Pay people enough and they'll take 6 weeks to train. I'm pretty sure you and eek were complaining about this more than 8 weeks ago so the training could have been done by now.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
In theory, yes. In practice... The killer is that for 39 weeks a year, school-aged children can be sure of one solid meal a day at school, two once you have breakfast provision as well. Then, during the school holidays, those things stop, but families don't get any extra cash to replace them. And if we're thinking about relatively chaotic lifestyles and households where there isn't huge amounts of spare cash, that is often going to end badly.
And yes, getting decent food into children is a massive benefit for education and society. At the struggling northern WWC school where I was a governor for a while, teachers were buying packets of digestive biscuits for their classes on that basis, and the homework club I helped set up was (in part) about getting fruit and milk into bellies at the end of the day.
There's a genuine dilemma here. One of the positive aims of the IDS benefit reforms was to shift responsibility for life management back to benefit recipients. Admirable, but it doesn't always work. And when parental mistakes or deliberate failures end up harming children...
I'd go further and point out that IDS was a malevolent bastard seemingly fixated on punishing the poor for their sins just like his Victoria supposedly Christian counterparts. The principle of UC is fine, the deliberate way it is run to further impoverish the poor sods stuck in its clutches is not.
I know that Thatcha comes in for a lot of grief from the left. She was never as wilfully nasty as this lot have been because she came from a different background than the government by toffs we have now.
I think you are being unfair on IDS there. The worst parts of UC have little to do with IDS but were imposed by Osbourne and co as they didn't want to spend the money necessary for UC to work correctly.
Completely new lines Liverpool to Manchester and Manchester-Bradford-Leeds does not sound small beer.
If they happen. But the point is that RP said that NPR was already under construction. Which it is, but also rather ignores the fact that the definition of NPR has radically changed (and for the better, IMO).
HS2 is a set project: to build a new high-speed rail line from London to just north of Birmingham (phase1/1a), and to Manchester/Leeds (phase 2). Much other work needs doing, but it's all directed to that core.
NPR is a set of related and unrelated projects to enhance connectivity and services in the north, including electrification schemes, reducing bottlenecks, and adding new lines. Some of that work is ongoing; others are barely specified, let alone been through planning or funded. NPR is a very different, and in many ways more complex, project.
I was being truthful and sarcastic in equal measure. The extension of the knitting from Colton Junction to Church Fenton is absolutely an HS2B/3 scheme. And like so many of the rump motorway stubs left up and down the country I expect that is the last we will see of it.
Lets understand the issue. The Pennines are bloody lumpy and have towns and villages all over their eastern foothills. A ruddy great base tunnel is doable at a price and has been proposed since at least the 1860s. Its where it goes at either end that is the problem.
The brutal problem for HS3/NPR is this: its purpose is to speed people between Manchester and Leeds quickly. For other towns like Huddersfield or even cities like Bradford they can offer as many different route options as they like, serving these places is expensive both in terms of land and construction costs and journey time loss.
The plan is to upgrade the existing route via Standege - and decent time savings can be realised - AND to build the new route via Bradford. I just can't see the latter ever getting through the planning hell to come and then the budgeting hell that follows that. Not when cash has already been spent on upgrades to the existing route - "Isn't that good enough" is an easy cop-out.
Likewise the Liverpool to Manchester bit is already now good enough.
Liverpool to Manchester is fine. But like HS2, the primary issue is not the speed in getting from A to B but the capacity this eats up. A mix of fast and slow trains results in much lower track capacity than simply sending down train after train at the same speed, as a moments' thought will demonstrate. So although we can go reasonably fast between Manchester and Liverpool, doing so inhibits the number of suburban trains we can run to Urmston and Allerton and Eccles and Huyton. And the number of freight trains we can run. That said, the potential upside in speed for Mcr/Lpl in relation to what we already have is rather more significant than that between Manchester and London for HS2, creating a genuine two-city city-region. Also, HS2 will create a much better connection between Liverpool and Manchester Airport, cutting journey times from about an hour to about 15 minutes.
All the above arguments can also be applied to Manchester-Leeds, with the added bonus that we tie Bradford properly into the high speed network. At present, trains to Bradford are a bit pedestrian. By giving a sub-half-hour connection between Bradford and Manchester, we connect a massive labour pool (Bradford's bigger than most people think) with a massive jobs market.
Yes, it's a major engineering challenge to do it. But what we have at present in terms of a whole network isn't good enough.
But this is the thing - the story is always about Journey time when the far more important story should really be about capacity. The great unknown for that argument though is what capacity is required in the post Covid world.
If we want fast journey times, we should consider building a MagLev system that runs alongside the motorways. For example London to Birmingham in 20 minutes along the M40.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
R. Hill The Prizes of War. The naval prize system ... 1998, Royal Naval Museum/Sutton.
What is fascimating is the differential between ranks ...
Serving under a commander like Cochrane, even the ratings could make a hefty amount of money from prizes. And, you might get odd situations, where say, an officer and a handful of ratings would take a merchant vessel and its cargo, and those ratings would split 25% between them. In Flying Colours, Hornblower, Bush, and Brown capture the Witch of Endor, which is sold for £3,000, Brown, as the sole rating got £750.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Looks like being an interesting argument. One benefit of the Mail "ultra-long screed to attract Google" technique is that a lot of information is laid out.
Including this:
The scale of the problem was laid bare in an extraordinary dossier sent in April to the Department for Education by Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel to the Free Speech Union [FSU], which campaigns against cancel culture.
It contained a collection of teaching materials obtained from the concerned parents of children at no fewer than 15 English schools where the FSU alleges that teachers have 'failed to comply with their duties to forbid the promotion of partisan political views and to secure balanced treatment of political issues'.
It would be interesting to see that litigated. FSU have been a bit of a Rottweiler on this particular issue, and had a certain amount of success.
(Rottweiler joke: what has 4 legs and an arm?)
The quotation you include from the Mail is revealing. Toby Young's FSU did their best to get parents to whistle blow and found the promotion of partisan political views in "no fewer than 15 English schools"! Fifteen? Relatively, that's a miniscule number - is that the best they can do? So, a tiny problem rather than a huge issue.
Going by this, and from my own extensive professional experience, you are more likely to die from Covid than to find a state school that focuses on white privilege/wokeness/partisan political views.
Perhaps Charles and others who want to avoid the woke stuff should save their money and support their local state schools. Seems to me to be more of a problem in private schools, like ASL (and Eton apparently), than state schools.
For clarity, there are 32,770 schools in the UK. So this represents 0.046% of schools.
ETA: Or 24,372 in England. So 0.062% of schools in England.
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Actually lots of reports of empty shelves in Aldi this week. It does seem to be an issue across the sector.
Still big shortage of cement for the building trend too, which is a strange one.
Building trade is aiui mainly about lower production during the lockdown, and pressures of reopening. It will all need several months to find a level. I know various people who have switched to doing different parts of their project, or put it on hold.
This is a snapshot of recent lumber prices:
Everything has been off. At times last year Heating Oil could be purchased at 30-50% off the previous price.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
Who will these Muslims vote for when Labour make it clear they don’t want them? I think I’d rather see Labour keep them on board, win power, Sir Keir become PM and rejoin the EU than risk the consequences of what might happen
If Labour becomes homophobic, anti-Semitic and misogynistic to keep such voters on board, why would that be better? What would be the point of voting Labour then? And wouldn't it risk losing loads of other voters who think that one of the points of Labour is not to display or appease such ghastly views?
It's the same challenge as we have for white working class leavers with reactionary social views.
There's a respectable way to appeal to them - a clear, left of centre economic vision centred on devolving wealth and power (to them). And an unrespectable way - pander to the reactionary social views.
Ditto here. Respectable way to court Muslim voters - pro Palestine, serious about islamophobia. Unrespectable way - dog whistle antisemitism, pull punches on homophobia and misogyny.
There's more risk of us pandering to the 1st group than to the 2nd imo.
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Shortages are both patchy and universal. There isn't a blanket "this area has a problem this one doesn't" issue nor a "Waitrose has a problem and Aldi doesn't" issue.
A shortage of drivers hits everyone until more drivers can be either trained or allowed to work again. A big spike in wages has fixed the "driven away by IR35" issue. Which still leaves a big shortage of drivers as (a) not enough Brits want to do the work hence EU drivers and (b) no training during Covid.
Unless we let EU drivers come back in then shortages are going to get worse before they get better. A crash course in HGV driving is 6-8 weeks assuming you have sufficient instructors and testers and candidates to fill all the holes. Which we don't.
I wonder how big a pool there is of former drivers?
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
In theory, yes. In practice... The killer is that for 39 weeks a year, school-aged children can be sure of one solid meal a day at school, two once you have breakfast provision as well. Then, during the school holidays, those things stop, but families don't get any extra cash to replace them. And if we're thinking about relatively chaotic lifestyles and households where there isn't huge amounts of spare cash, that is often going to end badly.
And yes, getting decent food into children is a massive benefit for education and society. At the struggling northern WWC school where I was a governor for a while, teachers were buying packets of digestive biscuits for their classes on that basis, and the homework club I helped set up was (in part) about getting fruit and milk into bellies at the end of the day.
There's a genuine dilemma here. One of the positive aims of the IDS benefit reforms was to shift responsibility for life management back to benefit recipients. Admirable, but it doesn't always work. And when parental mistakes or deliberate failures end up harming children...
I'd go further and point out that IDS was a malevolent bastard seemingly fixated on punishing the poor for their sins just like his Victoria supposedly Christian counterparts. The principle of UC is fine, the deliberate way it is run to further impoverish the poor sods stuck in its clutches is not.
I know that Thatcha comes in for a lot of grief from the left. She was never as wilfully nasty as this lot have been because she came from a different background than the government by toffs we have now.
One problem is that in the past attitudes were either you got married and had kids "when you could afford it" or you accepted that if poor people had kids, the family would be poor. Now it's seen as some sort of human right, to be paid for by the State. Of course accidents happen, but I really don't understand why more people don't look at their income and circumstances and just decide they can't afford it.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
R. Hill The Prizes of War. The naval prize system ... 1998, Royal Naval Museum/Sutton.
What is fascimating is the differential between ranks ...
Serving under a commander like Cochrane, even the ratings could make a hefty amount of money from prizes. And, you might get odd situations, where say, an officer and a handful of ratings would take a merchant vessel and its cargo, and those ratings would split 25% between them. In Flying Colours, Hornblower, Bush, and Brown capture the Witch of Endor, which is sold for £3,000, Brown, as the sole rating got £750.
On the subject of prizes, looting the enemy has always been considered the soldiers' and sailors' legitimate reward for victory. Zhukov took about 20 railway cars' worth of valuables out of Germany. The Hermitage has thousands of paintings that were "liberated" at the end of WWII - they had the chutzpah to organise an exhibition of looted art from Berlin, a few years ago.
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
I disagree....."very high percentage of Labour seats have large Muslim populations...." I reckon no more than 10-12 seats enter this category.... less 8% of Labour seats IMHO
I look forward to Labour telling people with odious views to "do one" then
There were empty shelves in the one I was in, but the staff said that was due to driver shortages which will affect all branches to some degree
Maybe you should see if Aldi are better at paying their drivers and have stock in their shelves, if Waitrose don't?
Shortages are both patchy and universal. There isn't a blanket "this area has a problem this one doesn't" issue nor a "Waitrose has a problem and Aldi doesn't" issue.
A shortage of drivers hits everyone until more drivers can be either trained or allowed to work again. A big spike in wages has fixed the "driven away by IR35" issue. Which still leaves a big shortage of drivers as (a) not enough Brits want to do the work hence EU drivers and (b) no training during Covid.
Unless we let EU drivers come back in then shortages are going to get worse before they get better. A crash course in HGV driving is 6-8 weeks assuming you have sufficient instructors and testers and candidates to fill all the holes. Which we don't.
Crash Course???
I don't need training to crash a lorry
I thought that. The A12's risky enough already......
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
If the parents had the money they would feed their kids. They don't. And thats not because they are are crackheads as that Tory MP suggested. So the choice is either direct application of service provision or they go hungry.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
I thought we had a welfare state to help people with things like money for children's food?
In theory, yes. In practice... The killer is that for 39 weeks a year, school-aged children can be sure of one solid meal a day at school, two once you have breakfast provision as well. Then, during the school holidays, those things stop, but families don't get any extra cash to replace them. And if we're thinking about relatively chaotic lifestyles and households where there isn't huge amounts of spare cash, that is often going to end badly.
And yes, getting decent food into children is a massive benefit for education and society. At the struggling northern WWC school where I was a governor for a while, teachers were buying packets of digestive biscuits for their classes on that basis, and the homework club I helped set up was (in part) about getting fruit and milk into bellies at the end of the day.
There's a genuine dilemma here. One of the positive aims of the IDS benefit reforms was to shift responsibility for life management back to benefit recipients. Admirable, but it doesn't always work. And when parental mistakes or deliberate failures end up harming children...
I'd go further and point out that IDS was a malevolent bastard seemingly fixated on punishing the poor for their sins just like his Victoria supposedly Christian counterparts. The principle of UC is fine, the deliberate way it is run to further impoverish the poor sods stuck in its clutches is not.
I know that Thatcha comes in for a lot of grief from the left. She was never as wilfully nasty as this lot have been because she came from a different background than the government by toffs we have now.
One problem is that in the past attitudes were either you got married and had kids "when you could afford it" or you accepted that if poor people had kids, the family would be poor. Now it's seen as some sort of human right, to be paid for by the State. Of course accidents happen, but I really don't understand why more people don't look at their income and circumstances and just decide they can't afford it.
One of the best reforms of UC was the two child cap for child benefits.
Interestingly I believe that's now showing up in reduced school registrations. Almost as if people who couldn't afford more kids are now deciding not to have a third or more, quite rightly.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
Another nugget is that the Admiralty paid rewards for freeing slaves:
"Between 1807 and 1811, 1,991 slaves were freed through the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, and between 1807 and mid-1815, HM Treasury paid Royal Navy personnel 191,100 pounds in prize money for slaves freed in West Africa. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_money
Every single fictional Naval hero (Hornblower included) was involved with a particular, later treasure fleet capture. Where the prize money was complicated by whether war was declared or not.
They also paid prize money for captured slave ships. Once they realised that the slavers were buying them back at auction, the prizes were broken up or burnt. But the price still paid as prize money.
With the end of the Napoleonic wars, the prize money from fighting slavery was a massive pull for the best and brightest in the RN
I have just read a biography of Pellew and come away thinking how closely the fiction matches the reality. Pellew did very very nicely as a frigate captain out of prize money but really cleaned up as admiral with the Indian ocean command, coming home with the equivalent of #30m gained as far as I can tell from corrupt practices.
Completely new lines Liverpool to Manchester and Manchester-Bradford-Leeds does not sound small beer.
If they happen. But the point is that RP said that NPR was already under construction. Which it is, but also rather ignores the fact that the definition of NPR has radically changed (and for the better, IMO).
HS2 is a set project: to build a new high-speed rail line from London to just north of Birmingham (phase1/1a), and to Manchester/Leeds (phase 2). Much other work needs doing, but it's all directed to that core.
NPR is a set of related and unrelated projects to enhance connectivity and services in the north, including electrification schemes, reducing bottlenecks, and adding new lines. Some of that work is ongoing; others are barely specified, let alone been through planning or funded. NPR is a very different, and in many ways more complex, project.
I was being truthful and sarcastic in equal measure. The extension of the knitting from Colton Junction to Church Fenton is absolutely an HS2B/3 scheme. And like so many of the rump motorway stubs left up and down the country I expect that is the last we will see of it.
Lets understand the issue. The Pennines are bloody lumpy and have towns and villages all over their eastern foothills. A ruddy great base tunnel is doable at a price and has been proposed since at least the 1860s. Its where it goes at either end that is the problem.
The brutal problem for HS3/NPR is this: its purpose is to speed people between Manchester and Leeds quickly. For other towns like Huddersfield or even cities like Bradford they can offer as many different route options as they like, serving these places is expensive both in terms of land and construction costs and journey time loss.
The plan is to upgrade the existing route via Standege - and decent time savings can be realised - AND to build the new route via Bradford. I just can't see the latter ever getting through the planning hell to come and then the budgeting hell that follows that. Not when cash has already been spent on upgrades to the existing route - "Isn't that good enough" is an easy cop-out.
Likewise the Liverpool to Manchester bit is already now good enough.
Liverpool to Manchester is fine. But like HS2, the primary issue is not the speed in getting from A to B but the capacity this eats up. A mix of fast and slow trains results in much lower track capacity than simply sending down train after train at the same speed, as a moments' thought will demonstrate. So although we can go reasonably fast between Manchester and Liverpool, doing so inhibits the number of suburban trains we can run to Urmston and Allerton and Eccles and Huyton. And the number of freight trains we can run. That said, the potential upside in speed for Mcr/Lpl in relation to what we already have is rather more significant than that between Manchester and London for HS2, creating a genuine two-city city-region. Also, HS2 will create a much better connection between Liverpool and Manchester Airport, cutting journey times from about an hour to about 15 minutes.
All the above arguments can also be applied to Manchester-Leeds, with the added bonus that we tie Bradford properly into the high speed network. At present, trains to Bradford are a bit pedestrian. By giving a sub-half-hour connection between Bradford and Manchester, we connect a massive labour pool (Bradford's bigger than most people think) with a massive jobs market.
Yes, it's a major engineering challenge to do it. But what we have at present in terms of a whole network isn't good enough.
But this is the thing - the story is always about Journey time when the far more important story should really be about capacity. The great unknown for that argument though is what capacity is required in the post Covid world.
If we want fast journey times, we should consider building a MagLev system that runs alongside the motorways. For example London to Birmingham in 20 minutes along the M40.
The problem you will find there is that it needs to be a dead straight line.
{Lib Dems to the orange courtesy phone, Lib Dems to the orange courtesy phone.....}
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
I disagree....."very high percentage of Labour seats have large Muslim populations...." I reckon no more than 10-12 seats enter this category.... less 8% of Labour seats IMHO
I look forward to Labour telling people with odious views to "do one" then
Do the Tories?
I think you have to take your support where you find it, without going too far in pandering. I think it's more a problem for Labour than the Conservatives as the views of their supporters are more heterogeneous.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
Can I pick a Nugget out of this - the impact of the Naval Prize System?
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
Another nugget is that the Admiralty paid rewards for freeing slaves:
"Between 1807 and 1811, 1,991 slaves were freed through the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, and between 1807 and mid-1815, HM Treasury paid Royal Navy personnel 191,100 pounds in prize money for slaves freed in West Africa. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_money
Every single fictional Naval hero (Hornblower included) was involved with a particular, later treasure fleet capture. Where the prize money was complicated by whether war was declared or not.
They also paid prize money for captured slave ships. Once they realised that the slavers were buying them back at auction, the prizes were broken up or burnt. But the price still paid as prize money.
With the end of the Napoleonic wars, the prize money from fighting slavery was a massive pull for the best and brightest in the RN
I have just read a biography of Pellew and come away thinking how closely the fiction matches the reality. Pellew did very very nicely as a frigate captain out of prize money but really cleaned up as admiral with the Indian ocean command, coming home with the equivalent of #30m gained as far as I can tell from corrupt practices.
Funnily enough, I'll be reading through a bundle of his letters tomorrow as part of my MA.
"Wearing face masks and social distancing should continue after July 19, a World Health Organisation (WHO) expert has warned.
Dr David Nabarro, Special Envoy on Covid-19 for the WHO, said while he accepts keeping the restrictions will make people angry, his advice is to keep restrictions in place.
He told the BBC's Radio 4 PM programme: "We do have to be prepared for the inevitability that viruses will continue to be a problem for us. We're going to have to really seriously contemplate continuing to practise some degree of physical distancing, some degree of mask wearing, some degree of hygiene, some degree of protecting those who are most at risk, as long as there are these nasty viruses around, whether or not we're vaccinated.
"It makes people very angry because they want to be able to stop being careful but it's my advice, and it's just based on studying these things over the years, is that it is not a cool thing just to ditch our preventative measures on a particular date because we hope that's going to be associated with less risks - the risks are going to stay."
The issue is likely to split politicians and scientists. The experts have said it will ultimately be a political decision, and many ministers have pointed out that they cannot wait to ditch their masks."
Watching a Telegraph piece on YouTube about Bately and Spen
A Muslim says to camera "Starmer lost Muslim votes when he said Israel had a right to defend itself"
"to defend itself" .......
How can Labour keep its disparate wings together ....
Labour have taken its BAME voters for granted, and part of that issue is not engaging with (as an example) the British Pakistani communities that such attitudes are not acceptable. The other observations that get hurled as abuse of Labour like voter fraud often come out of practices such as a family patriarch voting for the whole family.
Anti-semitism is the acceptable form of racism apparently. We need to stamp it out wherever it comes from, and that means Labour expelling the anti-semites still riddling their ranks and telling certain BAME voters that their views are reprehensible.
Better for Labour to have told it straight to this group of voters and lose with dignity than crawl in Galloway's gutter and still lose.
The problem is a very high percentage of Labour seats today have large Muslim populations, so it would be difficult for the party to use that sort of blunt language without risking maybe 20% of their constituencies.
That's what having principles and values mean. Sometimes using blunt language to those who don't share them or are opposed to them.
I disagree....."very high percentage of Labour seats have large Muslim populations...." I reckon no more than 10-12 seats enter this category.... less 8% of Labour seats IMHO
I look forward to Labour telling people with odious views to "do one" then
Do the Tories?
I think you have to take your support where you find it, without going too far in pandering. I think it's more a problem for Labour than the Conservatives as the views of their supporters are more heterogeneous.
A certain candidate for Mayor of London told BNP supporters not to vote for him and that they were odious and unBritish.
If we want fast journey times, we should consider building a MagLev system that runs alongside the motorways. For example London to Birmingham in 20 minutes along the M40.
Maglev's a dead technology. Even the Chinese are not progressing it after their initial line.
At least for the German-style system. The Japanese one *may* be better, but that's a long way from having a real, as opposed to test, system.
As an aside, (1) is an interesting historical document. It claimed: "Collisions between (the) vehicles are also ruled out due to the technical layout of the system and the section-wise switching of the ”guideway motor“."
The document was produced for the Transrapid system, and was released before 23 people were killed in a collision on a test Transrapid.
One thing any proposer of a new transport system has to consider is safety. Safety should not be assumed, or tacked on later: it has to be integral to the system. This goes for Maglev, Starship point-to-point, Hyperloop or any other proposed system. In part, rail systems cost a lot because there are layers of expensive safety systems to keep them safe, each part introduced after a 'learning incident'. All too often, these new systems hand-wave away these lessons and say that 'their' system won't be affected because ... reasons.
It's all rubbish. You cannot hand-wave away safety, and safety costs.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
This featured in the much derided and since ignored government report into race earlier this year.
“Black” is too wide a generality. Both Indians and Chinese earn more on average than whites. Other groups do less well. Some of the reasons they do afflict our poor whites too. Disrupted families, poor role models, poor housing etc. This is a broader and more general point that certainly needs a lot more attention than it is getting if we are to maximise the potential of our society but my point was much narrower: the cliche that private schools are bastions of white privilege is simply wrong.
I wonder what happens if you control for British children in private schools.
Private schools are more of a bastion of privilege in our society than ever because they have lifted their game at the same time as general standards in education have declined. Don’t dispute that for a second. It’s just not white privilege, at least not anymore.
I say that (respectfully) I know little about the private school sector. Suspect that not all fee paying schools are the same though. How many of your doctor examples could afford £32k a year? How many local Lairds can?
The issue in education is class, not race. The monied class don't want to pay anything to bring up the poorest from their low levels of attainment. That the monied are very largely (though not exclusively) white is a side note.
I can only speak from experience. The only reason to send my son to private school is to get him away from the local criminal underclass. Thats why all the parents I know do it, it is like a £15k per annum tax just for this reason. Looking at the private school parents around this provincial part of England, a lot of them seem like dodgy businesspeople, a lot of inherited property wealth and conspicuous consumption - hardly an elite club that is worth joining.
In terms of educational attainment there is almost nothing in it, the final results etc look to be pretty similar, the university outcomes are not that great for our local private schools, £180k is a lot to spend for your child to end up at a middle ranking ex poly doing some woke degree.
So join the criminal overclass rather than the underclass?
One of the many advantages of comprehensive education is being exposed to the "local criminal underclass" to use your terms. Being able to deal with these people is essential learning for life.
Comments
What mistake?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42003625
Very interesting on the unspoken assumptions.
The prize money was certainly needed to build up capital for investment or land (which yielded income of course). Captain's salaries weren't really enough for accumulation, esp. if one had a family. Michael Lewis's Social History of the RN 1793-1815 is good on this, though there are more recent studies. The piracy/privateer model of Drake et al lasted for a long time, till 1923 or thereabouts ...
I love the idea of parental responsibility. But what if the parents cannot cope, for whatever reason, even if they really try? Should we allow the kids to suffer, or help both the children and parents? IMV it is a difficult question to answer, and one that should perhaps be led more with an eye to compassion than finance.
(In one case, the school made the decision to allow the boy attend with the children of keyworkers during lockdown. I think it was an excellent idea.)
I ran into him years later at a hunt sabotage covert operation when he was in his late 70s. Sound bloke.
Lets understand the issue. The Pennines are bloody lumpy and have towns and villages all over their eastern foothills. A ruddy great base tunnel is doable at a price and has been proposed since at least the 1860s. Its where it goes at either end that is the problem.
The brutal problem for HS3/NPR is this: its purpose is to speed people between Manchester and Leeds quickly. For other towns like Huddersfield or even cities like Bradford they can offer as many different route options as they like, serving these places is expensive both in terms of land and construction costs and journey time loss.
The plan is to upgrade the existing route via Standege - and decent time savings can be realised - AND to build the new route via Bradford. I just can't see the latter ever getting through the planning hell to come and then the budgeting hell that follows that. Not when cash has already been spent on upgrades to the existing route - "Isn't that good enough" is an easy cop-out.
In terms of educational attainment there is almost nothing in it, the final results etc look to be pretty similar, the university outcomes are not that great for our local private schools, £180k is a lot to spend for your child to end up at a middle ranking ex poly doing some woke degree.
Either way they are going to do shit at school because you don't want to pay. Hence the need to spin it as anything other than what it is.
This is why I find simple comparisons ill thought out
Trouble is, to get any mandate at all you have to win an election and this means maximizing the coalition, especially from where we're starting. We can't be too fastidious. The Tories take no prisoners.
* To stress that I'm not saying all (or even most) such voters are bigots. I'm just talking about the ones who are. But it's a bigger number than the sort of Muslims you're talking about.
When I was at school my favourite teacher was a dreadful old reactionary (ex army, very strict on discipline but a great teacher with a passion for his subject). So I think the idea that kids will unquestioningly absorb whatever political message their teachers are telling them is implausible anyway.
See this from months ago:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/north-waives-sanctions-on-eligible-republic-residents-seeking-covid-vaccine-1.4515924
Does anyone know of any books / research material on this?
I wonder how many country mansions were built on the back of it? I've had an itch about that for a time.
Quite significant sums involved eg here it mentions an extreme case of capturing a Spanish frigate (with treasure) in 1762, where all crew members received at least £485. The average wage in 1762 was around £12-15 afaics.
The two captains involved got £65k each, or about 4000x the average wage. Which is nice to have.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080621024038/http://www.hms.org.uk/nelsonsnavyprize.htm
https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/ukearncpi/earnstudyx.pdf
I look forward to an equally interesting discussion about male privilege.
At some point.
Until then the day beckons .....
Kate Hoey and former Brexit party MEP, Ben Habib and TUV's Jim Allistar have arrived at the High Court in Belfast ...
Expecting ruling on their attempt (along with DUP and Trimble) to get Northern Ireland protocol judicially reviewed any moment.
https://twitter.com/lisaocarroll/status/1410175229813473281
Anyway, of the estimated three million* EU citizens living in the EU, five million have applied for the scheme. So looks like everyone should be covered!
* The campaign group even calls itself the 3 million. https://www.the3million.org.uk/
R. Hill The Prizes of War. The naval prize system ... 1998, Royal Naval Museum/Sutton.
What is fascimating is the differential between ranks ...
Now I haven't a clue what the fix is but there is an issue there regardless of Charle's viewpoint that the parents should be able to manage. The simple fact is that a lot of parents simply can't.
And I've seen degree educated parents (who have then drawn very dire and unlucky hands) who have got themselves into this situation.
The killer is that for 39 weeks a year, school-aged children can be sure of one solid meal a day at school, two once you have breakfast provision as well. Then, during the school holidays, those things stop, but families don't get any extra cash to replace them. And if we're thinking about relatively chaotic lifestyles and households where there isn't huge amounts of spare cash, that is often going to end badly.
And yes, getting decent food into children is a massive benefit for education and society. At the struggling northern WWC school where I was a governor for a while, teachers were buying packets of digestive biscuits for their classes on that basis, and the homework club I helped set up was (in part) about getting fruit and milk into bellies at the end of the day.
There's a genuine dilemma here. One of the positive aims of the IDS benefit reforms was to shift responsibility for life management back to benefit recipients. Admirable, but it doesn't always work. And when parental mistakes or deliberate failures end up harming children...
It made us laugh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwIuA2kh3eE
Chaotic family lives are a very significant contributor to educational underperformance, too. It's a bright kid indeed who will escape the effects of that, combined with poverty.
"Between 1807 and 1811, 1,991 slaves were freed through the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, and between 1807 and mid-1815, HM Treasury paid Royal Navy personnel 191,100 pounds in prize money for slaves freed in West Africa. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_money
That said, the potential upside in speed for Mcr/Lpl in relation to what we already have is rather more significant than that between Manchester and London for HS2, creating a genuine two-city city-region.
Also, HS2 will create a much better connection between Liverpool and Manchester Airport, cutting journey times from about an hour to about 15 minutes.
All the above arguments can also be applied to Manchester-Leeds, with the added bonus that we tie Bradford properly into the high speed network. At present, trains to Bradford are a bit pedestrian. By giving a sub-half-hour connection between Bradford and Manchester, we connect a massive labour pool (Bradford's bigger than most people think) with a massive jobs market.
Yes, it's a major engineering challenge to do it. But what we have at present in terms of a whole network isn't good enough.
https://news.sky.com/story/labour-keir-starmers-leadership-in-turmoil-as-poll-finds-69-of-members-would-prefer-andy-burnham-in-charge-12345377
They also paid prize money for captured slave ships. Once they realised that the slavers were buying them back at auction, the prizes were broken up or burnt. But the price still paid as prize money.
With the end of the Napoleonic wars, the prize money from fighting slavery was a massive pull for the best and brightest in the RN
This is a country with full employment, besides those with disabilities almost anyone who doesn't have a job its because they don't want one to be frank.
Still big shortage of cement for the building trend too, which is a strange one.
I know that Thatcha comes in for a lot of grief from the left. She was never as wilfully nasty as this lot have been because she came from a different background than the government by toffs we have now.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/matt-hancock-step-down-mp-affair-gina-coladangelo-ian-houlder-b943377.html
Those are the only two I go to (they're my local ones and I'm not a snob), can't speak for Waitrose.
But nor have I noticed a surfeit of useful suggestions as to how to move it ahead.
Your best chance of getting rich was as a junior captain. Frigates and sloops blockaded inshore, and raided the enemy's commerce. These were rarely big ships, but there was a steady stream of them, and you got rewarded for the goods you captured, as well as the value of the ship.
More senior captains rarely had this opportunity, because they were blockading much further out to sea, commanding Third Rates. There, your opportunity to win prize money depended on capturing an enemy ship in battle, or a Spanish treasure galleion.
The housing benefits people will pay his deposit , the cost of the move and will not be discounting his housing benefits even though he is moving to a 3 bed place with his girlfriend.
I was very surprised by how helpful and accommodating they were - on the other hand other parts of the benefits system have been awful and if mum and dad couldn't have lent a hand I have no idea how he could have got by the last year.
A shortage of drivers hits everyone until more drivers can be either trained or allowed to work again. A big spike in wages has fixed the "driven away by IR35" issue. Which still leaves a big shortage of drivers as (a) not enough Brits want to do the work hence EU drivers and (b) no training during Covid.
Unless we let EU drivers come back in then shortages are going to get worse before they get better. A crash course in HGV driving is 6-8 weeks assuming you have sufficient instructors and testers and candidates to fill all the holes. Which we don't.
What more do they want?
I don't need training to crash a lorry
Its not like saying you need to spend 3+ years at University being charged £9k per year to do so.
Pay people enough and they'll take 6 weeks to train. I'm pretty sure you and eek were complaining about this more than 8 weeks ago so the training could have been done by now.
ETA: Or 24,372 in England. So 0.062% of schools in England.
This is a snapshot of recent lumber prices:
Everything has been off. At times last year Heating Oil could be purchased at 30-50% off the previous price.
There's a respectable way to appeal to them - a clear, left of centre economic vision centred on devolving wealth and power (to them). And an unrespectable way - pander to the reactionary social views.
Ditto here. Respectable way to court Muslim voters - pro Palestine, serious about islamophobia. Unrespectable way - dog whistle antisemitism, pull punches on homophobia and misogyny.
There's more risk of us pandering to the 1st group than to the 2nd imo.
Interestingly I believe that's now showing up in reduced school registrations. Almost as if people who couldn't afford more kids are now deciding not to have a third or more, quite rightly.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57658479
{Lib Dems to the orange courtesy phone, Lib Dems to the orange courtesy phone.....}
Perhaps give the Boring Company a call?
Dr David Nabarro, Special Envoy on Covid-19 for the WHO, said while he accepts keeping the restrictions will make people angry, his advice is to keep restrictions in place.
He told the BBC's Radio 4 PM programme: "We do have to be prepared for the inevitability that viruses will continue to be a problem for us. We're going to have to really seriously contemplate continuing to practise some degree of physical distancing, some degree of mask wearing, some degree of hygiene, some degree of protecting those who are most at risk, as long as there are these nasty viruses around, whether or not we're vaccinated.
"It makes people very angry because they want to be able to stop being careful but it's my advice, and it's just based on studying these things over the years, is that it is not a cool thing just to ditch our preventative measures on a particular date because we hope that's going to be associated with less risks - the risks are going to stay."
The issue is likely to split politicians and scientists. The experts have said it will ultimately be a political decision, and many ministers have pointed out that they cannot wait to ditch their masks."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-news-covid-vaccine-lockdown-scotland-school-cases/
Anyone remember the chap?
At least for the German-style system. The Japanese one *may* be better, but that's a long way from having a real, as opposed to test, system.
As an aside, (1) is an interesting historical document. It claimed: "Collisions between (the) vehicles are also ruled out due to the technical layout of the system and the section-wise switching of the ”guideway motor“."
The document was produced for the Transrapid system, and was released before 23 people were killed in a collision on a test Transrapid.
One thing any proposer of a new transport system has to consider is safety. Safety should not be assumed, or tacked on later: it has to be integral to the system. This goes for Maglev, Starship point-to-point, Hyperloop or any other proposed system. In part, rail systems cost a lot because there are layers of expensive safety systems to keep them safe, each part introduced after a 'learning incident'. All too often, these new systems hand-wave away these lessons and say that 'their' system won't be affected because ... reasons.
It's all rubbish. You cannot hand-wave away safety, and safety costs.
(Gets off high horse)
(1): https://www.ncl.ac.uk/media/wwwnclacuk/pressoffice/files/pressreleaseslegacy/TRI_Flug_Hoehe_e_5_021.pdf
One of the many advantages of comprehensive education is being exposed to the "local criminal underclass" to use your terms. Being able to deal with these people is essential learning for life.