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Charles told the truth about the lies they tell children
Amid last week’s drizzle, it was a relief to be distracted by a new pre-Christmas pantomime, Know Your Place, presented free of charge by Associated Palace Productions (Westminster and St James’s) and starring those two larger-than-life cheeky chappies, Charlie Windsor and Charlie Clarke. It should run and run.
The prime minister must be delighted that something so absurd has appeared at just the right moment to help bury the bad news about the Child Support Agency (shamefully failed), the schools testing agency (shamefully failed), the survey of university standards (shamefully dumbed down) and the foxhunting fiasco (shameful).
One might almost think that Tony Blair had encouraged his education secretary and John Reid, his health secretary, to distract us with a people’s panto.
Of the two principals, Charles Windsor is a whimsical prince of contradictions, torn between seigneurial self-indulgence and a sense of public duty, devoted both to ludicrous fancy dress and genuine good works.
Surrounded by an underpaid entourage of flunkies, most of them maddened by red carpet fever, he was foolish enough to write an indiscreet memo to one employee that, if filched by another, would certainly land him in an employment tribunal — as indeed it was and has.
“What is wrong with everyone nowadays?” he wrote in exasperation. “Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their actual capabilities? This is all to do with the learning culture in schools — the child-centred learning emphasis which admits of no failure and tells people that they can all be pop stars or High Court judges or brilliant TV personalities or even infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work, effort or having natural ability. It is the result of social utopianism.”
Why this overwhelming urge to put inflammatory thought to vulnerable paper? Perhaps, deprived by destiny of the sound of his own voice, Prince Charles has become inebriated with the exuberance of his own handwriting. He is given to maddening ministers with screeds of unsolicited and probably unconstitutional advice in his own hand. Sadly, in failing to understand the limitations of his quaint constitutional role, he risks destroying it altogether.
Enter at this point the other principal, the big-bellied bruiser Charles Clarke, with a supporting chorus of excited headline writers to big him up. Despite his appearance, Clarke is a child of privilege. Like Prince Charles, he was privately educated and went to Cambridge, and he is education secretary in a government supposedly dedicated to education, yet he takes a view of education so anti-elitist that it seems positively anti-education.
It wasn’t on Clarke’s watch that the department produced an education policy document ludicrously called Excellence for All Children but he did, for instance, say: “I don’t mind there being some medievalists about for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them.” His contribution last week to excellence for all was to make all schools take their “fair share” of seriously disruptive pupils.
Given Labour’s abysmal failures with education, I don’t know how any Labour education secretary can look himself in the mirror. Yet Clarke has had the effrontery to break ministerial convention to attack a member of the royal family, saying he doesn’t understand what is going on in education and calling him old-fashioned.
There are few loveable characters in this charade. Elaine Day, the angry young woman who is suing for wrongful dismissal, may well have had a miserable time in the prince’s dysfunctional household. If proven, the “inappropriate touching” of which she complains was probably the least of it. But all the same, she took without permission — the word should be “stole” — a memo written to a senior employee from his in-tray and has now made it public.
In the Croydon tribunal she said artlessly that she kept the document as “memorabilia”. Prince Charles unwisely wrote that she was so politically correct she frightened him rigid. Clearly he wasn’t frightened enough or he might have kept the cap on his fountain pen.
What Prince Charles wrote, however unpleasant in spirit and ill-judged in context, was essentially right. He did not, as many headlines have unfairly suggested, say people should know their place and should not try to rise above their station.
The schoolchildren of this country have been doubly betrayed for decades, both by collapsing standards and by ballooning expectations. It is wicked to teach children that they can all expect the moon; ability varies greatly and competition is fierce.
It is even worse to excite unrealistic expectations when children’s genuine abilities have been smothered at Britain’s disgraceful “bog standard” comprehensives and by simple illiteracy. Even Blair admits that one in four 11-year-olds is illiterate and 25% of school leavers are below standard in English and maths.
Whatever may have been wrong with old-fashioned education, at least it taught almost all children to read and write. Yet, these days, all kinds of barely literate people of average intelligence expect professional status or feel they have a right to do something “creative”, when they lack the most basic skills or any outstanding ability. They have been unforgivably misled.
It is simply wrong to say, as Clarke did on Radio 4, that “everyone has a field marshal’s baton in their knapsack”. Everyone does not. It takes a very exceptional person to make a field marshal.
John Reid suffers from the same delusion. Whatever your school or background, he said, “you have it in you, if you use your own endeavours and energies, to be almost anything in this country”. That is quite simply a dangerous lie, because it spreads so much anger and misery, when people are forced to face inexplicable disappointment.
It is a terrible misunderstanding of meritocracy — which is what Clarke and Reid imagine they support — to assume it means everyone is somehow (or could be) of equal merit, with equal success. Innate ability varies, obviously enough. Merit varies. All cannot have prizes, though all can do well in some way.
No one believes these days that anyone should be held back by some long-discredited idea of knowing your place or getting above your station. We do live in a meritocracy, imperfect though it is, and few people would wish to change that.
However, the painful truth is that meritocracy is cruel. It offers no excuses to those who don’t do well. It is even more cruel when teachers and politicians offer false encouragement based on a confusion of meritocracy with socialism.
Socialism is incompatible with meritocracy; even new Labour’s biggest bruisers can’t square that circle, not even by making fun of Prince Charles.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 21, 2004 | Comments (1)
There is an alternative to the chaos of childcare
‘It’s the kiddies, stupid.” That seems to be the exciting new election strategy of both the Conservatives and the government. Last week the leader of the opposition and the prime minister were both energetically chasing the mummy and daddy vote. They spoke deferentially of “hard-working families” and announced lots of complicated new policies. How the heart sinks.
Certainly there is a lot that could be done, or perhaps undone, to help parents with the many and various difficulties of bringing up children.
However, there was something deeply depressing about Tony Blair in his triumphalist daddyness, surrounded by breakfasting kiddies at an early-morning club last week, explaining how schools are going to be open longer now, for all ages, all year round, for the benefit of “hard-working families”.
There was something equally dismal about Michael Howard on his knees in his suit among even younger kiddies, his hands covered in blue paint, to display the Conservatives’ determination to do more too for “hard-working families”.
It would be cheering if, for once, a politician could come up with a vote-catching policy without feeling the need to go through a patronising little pantomime, a sort of ghastly electoral beauty contest with children as unwitting extras.
However, I suppose we must all try to rise above the posturings of politicians and attempt to work out what they are really saying. That is difficult, because both sides’ proposals are complicated, Labour’s much more so.
My own view is that an enormous amount could be achieved for parents of all kinds — rich or poor, working part-time or full-time, in or out of the home — with some radical simplicity instead. That would never interest Labour.
Its future is nailed to the mast of complexity, bureaucracy and state intrusion, and more state-sector jobs. It should interest the Conservatives, but I don’t think they’re really feeling radical enough.
Labour has done a lot for — or at least about — parents during its time in office. It has established the Sure Start scheme to deal with children from conception to the age of 14, providing nursery-school places for all three and four-year-olds and more than 1m childcare places, new children’s centres and the tax credit scheme to help lower earners pay for childcare.
A few weeks ago the education secretary promised schools open from 8am to 6pm, both primary and secondary, with breakfast clubs and after-school clubs as well — the hugely ambitious and much derided “wraparound educare”. And last week, not to be outdone by Howard’s childcare initiatives, Blair announced the same thing all over again.
As Margaret Hodge, Labour’s minister for children, once wrote — with evident regret — “for too long the early years of a child’s life have been seen as the private concern of the parents”.
The Conservatives for once take the opposite approach. The first thing Howard said last week was that families, not government, should decide how to run their lives and bring up their children.
He is proposing less regulation, less red tape, more flexibility, more use of school buildings by the taxpayers who own them, more support for informal carers such as grandparents, and for childminders, and more cash in hand to pay directly for childcare for parents entitled to working tax credit.
Parents are to be in the driving seat, he said. They will choose how to spend this money on the childcare they want — such as family or friends — not the childcare ministers think best.
For those who think, like me, that family life and family responsibilities ought to be de-nationalised as soon as possible, this sounds like a step in the right direction.
It even looks like a toe in some clear blue water. But it still looks uncertain whether the Conservatives will be prepared to be even braver and take a real plunge.
The problem with childcare is that it is prohibitively expensive. Obviously enough, if one woman has to pay another woman to look after her young children or her teenagers, it will cost a large part of what she earns elsewhere (net of tax). It cannot be otherwise, except in the relatively unusual cases where the mother is earning hugely more than a childminder or nanny can command.
So as things are today, unless the mother can get care that is in effect subsidised in one way or another — whether by granny or friends or the taxpayer — she won’t really be able to afford it. If childcare were not in fact subsidised most women could not afford to work.
I’ve never quite understood how all this adds up in the economy as a whole, but there it is. Most parents either are forced to work, or want to work, or both, and that is the reality.
The political question is not who subsidises. The question is how the subsidy works. At the moment the state taxes us all quite highly — if you include all new Labour’s new taxes we pay close to German rates of total tax. And then the state hands it back in dribs and drabs for this, that and the other scheme to parents who didn’t choose any of it and may not like it.
It is complicated and confusing and extremely expensive and bureaucratic to run. According to Anne Longfield, the chief executive of the charity 4Children, Labour’s new childcare plans are likely to cost £85 billion over the next 10 years, which would mean spending about 1% of the UK’s gross domestic product on childcare and early years education.
The obvious alternative would be to stop parents paying so much tax. Working parents ought to have extremely generous tax exemptions, transferable if necessary. Parents looking after their own children at home ought to get extremely generous tax credits.
This makes perfect economic sense. We all need children to grow up and pay taxes, after all. It would no doubt at first produce a huge drop in income to the exchequer. But it ought rapidly to become clear that the simplicity of this scheme would mean vast savings in administration. It would also, I believe, make parents and children much happier.
No longer would a working mother (part-time or full-time, low-paid or well-paid) have to be tracked by the men from various ministries to check on her entitlements, problems, options and underpayments.
No longer would armies of schools and minders and outreach workers and health and education apparatchiks have to keep propping up complex care systems and schemes, along with armies of staff and all their demands in flexitime and pensions. Families could simply use their own money to pay for their own solutions.
The taxpayer would still be subsidising families, indirectly, but with much greater simplicity, efficiency and choice. The Tories are thinking about it; Howard mentioned something rather like it, very cautiously, in his speech.
Given the current fortunes of the Conservative party, I should have thought this was a time not for caution, but for conviction.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 14, 2004 | Comments (0)
You really don’t have to be religious to be a bigot
There is a disquieting feeling in the air that times are changing. All kinds of events both major and minor are signs of it. Last week, for instance, Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film-maker, was slaughtered on the street in Amsterdam, apparently by another Dutchman.
Witnesses saw him being repeatedly shot by a bearded man in a jellaba, who then slit his throat and stabbed him in the chest. The suspect is a man of joint Dutch and Moroccan nationality and is an Islamic fundamentalist.
Van Gogh had produced Submission, a flamboyantly outspoken film about Muslim violence against women, and the woman who wrote it, the Somalian-Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, says she is afraid that the film was the direct cause of his death.
This was not the first time the two had attacked Islam. Both have made many extreme criticisms, some of his extremely coarse and unprintable. More soberly he had spoken of a “retrograde and aggressive faith”, and she has called Islam a “backward, 12th-century religion”, “misogynist, incapable of self-criticism and blind to modern science”, and described herself as an “ex-Muslim”.
Fortunately, unlike van Gogh, she lives under 24-hour police protection. The Dutch are horrified: tolerant Holland has been for centuries one of the brightest bulbs of the European enlightenment; now that light is going out.
A different and minor incident, which is nonetheless a straw in the same wind of change, was the proposal of Islington council in north London to change the name of St Mary Magdelene primary school, which opened in 1710. It wants to drop the word “saint” for fear of causing offence to other religions. Needless to say this proposal does not come from local people; parents and local religious leaders — some of them Muslim and Jewish — have expressed outrage at the plan.
It is particularly striking that both Jewish and Muslim spokesmen and women have made it plain that this is simply not an issue and they have no objection at all to the word saint, but recognise the history and traditions of this country.
The vicar of St Mary Magdalene says parents feel that Islington council has “been running an anti-Christian agenda, consistently, on ideological grounds, rejecting Christianity”. If it has, it is not alone; there are countless examples across the country of secularist attempts to edit out Christian and post-Christian traditions, with bogus excuses about giving offence.
Then there was the major event of the American election and the decisive victory of the Christian conservatives — the defeat of nuance by conviction. What struck me above all was the fear and loathing that so many people expressed, both over there and here, for the victors.
All the official talk about healing has impressed nobody. Sophisticated liberals felt rage and contempt and astonishment that their country could have been taken over by a bunch of redneck religious fundamentalists and moral majority bigots, who have the nerve to despise them. The response was mirrored over here. The Guardian, for instance, printed the cover of one section funereal black, with only two tiny words in white: “Oh, God”.
All these different events point to the same alarming thing — a new division in western culture along religious lines.
It is not a division within Christianity, although Christians do have their squabbles, absurd though they may seem to outsiders. It is a division along the lines of religiosity. Oddly enough this was a word I heard American commentators using quite neutrally during the election, describing voting patterns. To me it is not neutral. It is pejorative, having to do with extreme excesses of religious zeal.
The division across the western world is between those of any faith or none who are prepared to tolerate everyone else, and those whose faith rejects tolerance. It is a division between the godly and the worldly, as Simon Schama has put it.
On the same side as the godly are to be found a large number of secularistas — militant secularists quite unaware of their own religiosity whose dogmatic intolerance seeks to stamp out religion altogether. It is a divide between triumphalism and tolerance. We are now suddenly being forced to confront that divide, right across the western world and even in the most orderly, prosperous parts of the richest country in history. Bigotry is not only for impoverished peasants.
Some British conservatives have been looking rather wistfully at the political power of American Christians, as if perhaps there could be some sort of moral majority here, too, or at least a usefully large minority, which is silenced and disenfranchised for now. I hope that they abandon such thoughts very soon. While I am not a secularista, I am an agnostic and I fear the spirit described in The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic American novel about intolerant puritanical religion. It is not something to conjure with here.
I was born American and have ties and connections there. My encounters with people of the moral majority there have been genuinely frightening. Highly educated, kind, admirable and neighbourly people believe things which are shocking to educated Europeans.
They believe that homosexuals are evil and should not be allowed to teach in schools. Some look forward to a second coming in Israel or to a kind of apocalyptic rapture. They reject not only Darwin and evolution, but also scientific thinking in general. But it is scientific thinking — not science itself, but its provisional, evidence-based approach to knowledge — that will set us free and keep us free.
Admittedly it is true that religion tends to make people good and useful citizens up to a point — up to the point where they feel driven by a higher father to slaughter an infidel in the street or to persecute homosexuals or to stop scientific research or to force unwanted babies upon unwilling mothers.
Everyone must have some sympathy with Bible Belters and Muslims who point to the slaggy decadence of secular western culture — its teenage mothers and fatherless children, its shabby sexualisation and mindless consumerism. But the well worn idea that people would behave better if only they could get religion is not only impractical and cynical — it is also dangerous.
The real challenge that tolerant, post-enlightenment westerners face as they stare at everyone else across the gulf of religiosity is not religion. It is tolerance. Tolerance is the problem because is cursed with a paradoxical nature; the tolerant are vulnerable to the intolerant and not least in multi-cultural democracies.
In some Midlands towns today for example, where British Muslims are in the majority, some are calling for the recognition of sharia above British law. How can tolerance coupled with respect for local wishes and majority voting respond to that? During the American election people talked of culture wars. I feel that we are in the middle of the beginning of new conflicts, but they are wars not of culture or religion but of religiosity.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, November 07, 2004 | Comments (1)
