FRIDAY MUSIC: Mediaeval Hit Parade, by JD

It's time for 'Pick of the (Mediaeval) Pops!' Some of these sound surprisingly modern and you will notice a certain amount of singing and dancing in taverns: there are some traditions which will never die!

State Power, Home Education and Mission Creep

I suppose two April Fool jokes was felt to be over-egging the pudding. On the first working day after March 29^th we found ourselves still in the EU and Ministers are still laughing about that one; the announcement of a home-schooled children register was held over till April 2nd.

‘Please, I've only got so many ribs, Noel Coward,’ as RikMayall’s Richie said. (Not that your ribs belong to you, either, from April (1st?) nextyear; not unless you have found that opt-out page buried in the NHS Organ Donation Register – and provided the doctors remember to check it.)

This is the big theme of our age: the Power versus the People.

At present, the Education Act 1996 says the same as its 1944 predecessor, except for the addition of the special needs aspect:

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable —

(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and

(b) to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

There are various reasons why the State may feel the need to intervene, but please note the order in which they appear in the announcement:

A register of children not in school will transform a local council’s capacity to identify and intervene where the standard of a child’s education isn’t good enough or, in the rare instances, where they are at risk of harm. It will also help the authorities spot young people who may be receiving a solely religious education, attending an unregistered school or not receiving an education at all.

The word ‘efficient’ has remained undefined for the last 75 years, but it is a hinge on which the great door of officialdom can – and will - turn open.

Yet what if you turn the question round: why would you send your child to school?

One answer is socialisation. But this is exactly why some people have withdrawn their offspring: bullying. Anybody here watch Noel Fitzpatrick, aka TV’s The Supervet ? A rural farmboy with a gift of empathy with animals, here is his treatment at secondary school (p.75):

I remember one time going back into class after a particularly bad and mucky bruising when five boys set on me again, one on each arm, one on each leg, giving me the bumps, throwing me up in the air, while the fifth came down hard with his fists on my stomach as I bounced.

It's left its mental marks, even though he struggled on heroically to become a world-class animal surgeon who has much to teach human medicine too. Would we have heard of Isaac Newton or Michael Faraday if they’d been regularly beaten as swots?

My friends educated their three children at home. Two went on to do second degrees and the third has such personality that he has gone to the other side of the world and found jobs for which he wasn’t technically qualified – but which he soon learned to do, well.

Early on, a man from the LEA came round, but soon withdrew when father adopted the strategy of asking eagerly for materials and financial contributions. It’s funny how Ofsted and Education Ministers issue librariesful of advice and instruction to teachers, yet they never fund for a range of approved coursebooks that deliver the curriculum they are so sure is right for children. Why don’t they put ‘their’ money where their mouth is?

And I must have missed it: which Ministry philosopher has managed to answer the millennia-long question, ‘what exactly is education for?’

FRIDAY MUSIC: Pentangle, by JD

Serendipity brought together five exceptional talents for an all too brief period between 1967 and 1973. After six albums they went their separate ways. Pentangle were a 'supergroup' before that term became fashionable; two of this country's finest guitarists plus, from the world of jazz, a first class drummer with a maestro on double bass and all backing the purest female voice in folk music.

And yet, they are largely and unjustifiably forgotten. They are rarely if ever heard on the radio so you can hear them now and relax into a reverie of musical magic with Jacqui McShee, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson and Terry Cox!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentangle_(band)

The band have continued in various incarnations and currently perform as Jacqui McShee's Pentangle - http://www.pentangle.info/JMPentangle/HOME.html

FINAL EXAMINATION PAPER

In order to exclude the ignorant and stupid people who vote the wrong way, your eligibility to take part in the next local elections and the possible snap General Election depends on your answer to the following question:

"Is Jeremy Corbyn worse than Tony Blair?"

Answer with reference to (a) terrorists and (b) making war on a Middle Eastern country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

You may write on both sides of the paper and, in deference to New Labour "triangulation", on the edges as well.

Length: 500 - 1,500 words. NO CARTOONS.

Noises From The Echo Chamber

Last night's vote on the Cooper-Letwin Bill, evaluated according to Remainer logic: 1. It's not valid, because the majority won 2. Oh all right, majorities can win but this was by only one person's vote so it's too close and is void for that reason 3. OK it's not void because of the margin, but because somebody probably told a LIE at some point so the vote would have been different if only everybody knew all the details of everything and only told the truth 4. Okay, okay, (3) above happens all the time but those who voted for the Bill are probably nasty people who support things good people don't like so their votes shouldn't count 5 Look, here are cartoons to prove I'm right - ships falling off the edge of the Earth, lemmings jumping off cliffs, effigies of populist politicians shooting themselves in the head 6 Oliver Letwin is posh, need I say more? 7 You're blocked, you troll.

BREXIT: Power To The People

Right then: things keep moving on, and in a bad direction. Only a couple of weeks ago, Angela Eagle was complaining of the Government’s bullying towards the Opposition; now Mrs May says goodbye to collective Cabinet responsibility (a majority havecome round to No-Deal) and reaches out to Mr Corbyn, prompting Welsh Minister Nigel Adams’ resignation (good man: his letter is worth reading.)

On and on goes the Prime Minister, despite one smashing defeat in the Commons after another. She clings to power like a limpet; or perhaps, more like a limpet mine, primed to sink the ship of State.

This is autocracy.

Perhaps, if all else fails, her last card, the one that loses the stately pile and rolling acres, will be the use somehow of an Order in Council (such a favoured tool of Blair, ACL.)

Fanciful? Is there anybody who predicted what we have seen so far?

When all this Brexit business is done one way or another, the work of reassessing the British Constitution must begin. Perhaps we could start with a motion similar to John Dunning’s in 1780, altered to say: ‘The power of the Prime Minister has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’

What is the point of the 2002 High Court ruling that ‘The British Parliament .. being sovereign… cannot abandon its sovereignty’ if it simply delegates away most of its power, either to the EU under the 1972 ECA, or to Ministers via ‘Henry VIII’ clauses that allow them to issue secondary legislation, or to the Privy Council so that the occupant of No. 10 can govern by fiat?

What is the point of having extended the franchise to 47 million voters, under a First Past The Post system that regularly sees some two-thirds of MPs elected on a minority of votes cast? Of ‘safe seats’ that turn some MPs into complacent, negligent absentee landlords?

Or of a Fourth Estate that suppresses and twists the information the voter needs? – even (this is the one that for me exploded Jon Snow’s credibility, I can cope with his infantile remarks about white people) allowing Blair’s right-hand man to take over one’s currentaffairs TV show without warning, to spin the ‘Iraq WMD’ controversy and then shaking his hand in fraternal thanks at the end (oddly, not shown here, but I cannot forget.)

What is at stake here – what greater theme of history is there? - is overweening Power. We thought we’d settled that in the 1640s and 1680s and the political reforms in the 150 years after 1789. But the barrack-room grumblings of the people today could eventually become something worse, if democratic checks and balances fail to stop Power becoming once again arbitrary and absolute.

Is the EU prepared to reform? Oh yes – in exactly the wrong way. Only last November, the enthusiast Mr Verhofstadt was calling for the abolition of member nations’ individual veto: ‘You cannot manage a continent of that magnitude with such a system.’

Even as it is, AfD leader Alice Weidel’s much-circulated 21 March speech to the Bundestag worried that the UK’s departure threatens Germans’ ability to muster a blocking minority EU veto (min. 35% of EU population.) Already, she says, Merkel and Macron’s Aachen Treaty stands to jam open Germany’s wallet for the depredations of French profligacy and the free movement of eastern Europeans per Schengen rights have led to growing strains on the German economy under Hartz IV socialsecurity arrangements.

It’s not about us ‘crashing out’ of the EU; it’s about the EU crashing around like a bull in a china shop. If no-one will put a ring through its nose, we have to leave the premises. If we mess about, the Germans may get out ahead of us!

And if we do finally manage it, we then have to face the other systemic wreckers closer to home: the ones at the top of our country.

BREXIT: French Leave

Our schools are now required to teach British values. But what are they? Certainly not Empire, the White Man’s Burden and so on. My researches indicate that there are only two:

1. Animism – not just pagan ritual leftovers like the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance but our deep empathy with pets and farm animals
2. A deep distrust of the French (remember Hartlepool’s monkey-hangers)

The second is re-justified by the intransigence of M. Barnier, whose task under Article 50 (2) it is  to secure a satisfactory divorce agreement but who has dug in his heels since last Autumn.

And now we discover – by a leaked secret memo, of course, G-d forbid we be told anything openly – that there are three EU preconditions for even beginning to discuss alterations to the draft Withdrawal Agreement; conditions that are for us a surrender in advance of the battle.

But though we are divided at home, the EU itself is not united:

After chiding Ms Merkel for her many expensive policy errors, German AfD leader Alice Weidel’s speech to the Bundestag on 21 March went on to accuse her of “blind loyalty” (3:01) to the French, who want to deny Britain access to the single market. January’s Aachen Treaty on Franco-Germancooperation “had France’s fingerprints all over it” (3:40), benefitting the latter’s inefficient economy but sending much of the bill to the German taxpayer who, once Britain has left, will not be able to command a blocking minority in the Council to prevent fresh fiscal assaults on the biggest remaining economy.

Weidel quoted M. Barnier (5:26) as confiding to a colleague, “My mission will have been a success when the terms are so brutal for the British that they prefer to stay in the Union.”

We are not the only ones with national traits. The Germans love tribal unity and have a lethal penchant for abstract theorising (from Luther to Karl Marx to the Frankfurt School), but the French combine theatricality with sharp dealing and calculating selfishness. Think of William the Conqueror, turning his pratfall on the shore into symbolic seizure of the land, then ordering the Domesday Book to count exactly how much he’d grabbed; the 1789 windy Tennis Court Oath that blew off so many of the Revolutionaries’ heads in the factious struggles that ensued; and Clemenceau’s vindictive 1919 Versailles Treaty that ruined Germany and so set Europe ablaze a generation later.

Don’t expect anything but gaseous difficulties from a French lawyer. Frankly, anything that our hapless Government tries to agree now can be negotiated separately afterwards, when the costs of M. Barnier’s failure begin to bite the Continent. Let’s go now, without permission – let’s take “French leave.”

For all we wanted – what we were sold in the 1970s – was honest dealing and fair trading. What we have had ever since has been money-twisting and empire-building.

And that’s not new. It was a Frenchman who said it best, 670 years ago: 

"Un Po Apres Le Temps d'Autonne"

From “Le Jugement du roy de Navarre” by Guillaume de Machaut (1349)

Translation by "Sackerson"

A little after autumn time

When those who cultivate the vine

Pick their grapes and fill the tun

And with work that’s lightly done

Each man offers to his fellow

Pears and grapes and peaches mellow

When in the soil the corn-seeds grow

And the leaf falls from the bough

By Nature’s or the wind’s design

In thirteen hundred forty-nine

On the ninth day of November

I was closed up in my chamber.

Had the sky been bright and clear

I should have gone to take the air

But the mountains and the meadows

Were hid in fog and deepest shadows

So I was taken by the gloom

Thinking in my lonely room

How all men everywhere are governed

By cronies meeting in the tavern

How truth and justice in the land

Are dead, slain by the hand

Of greed, who over them holds reign

As if she were a sovereign queen

How the rulers rob the ruled

Sack, plunder and assault the world

Crushing them in their distress

Merciless and pitiless

Great mischief seems it to my mind

When vice and power are combined