Black holes and the collapse of democracy

Last night I watched a Horizon programme about black holes. Experts don't understand them, and every galaxy has a giant one in the middle, weighing typically 0.1% of the mass of its host. Nothing can escape it as it continually collapses, and at its heart is a singularity where all the normal rules break down. Anything can happen at the centre; nothing is impossible.

And then I saw the ten o'clock news. The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, with the unhappy face of a Neville Chamberlain, had caved in and signed the Lisbon Treaty, the enabling legislation that takes Europe over the event horizon and towards "ever-closer union". Klaus wrote to his country's constitutional court:

“Twenty years after the restoration of our democracy and sovereignty, we are once again dealing with the question whether we should — this time voluntarily — give up the position of a sovereign state and hand over decision-making on our own matters to European institutions outside of the democratic control of our citizens.”

And so the millennarian (it had been planned to be complete by 2000) madness sweeps another into the host. At the centre, now irrecoverably detached from the rest of the universe, the club gathers, surrounded by advisers and servants of every kind, all determined to live as high and as absurd as Marie Antoinette tending her washed sheep, as we career chaotically towards economic breakdown and the loss of law, freedom and security. The transfer of wealth and power without consent - without our consent - is crime and tyranny.

Centripetal forces create centrifugal forces. The overweening power-seeking of the mediaeval Papacy hastened the move towards a Europe of sovereign states and religious fraction. Now, the forced bureaucratic union at the top of our group of societies will lead to greater disunion lower down, of which the BNP's Nick Griffin is merely a small, scruffy symptom.

In the middle ages, the walled towns developed internally; there sprang up strong-walled houses for the wealthy elite, to protect themselves not only from each other, but from the desperate, hungry, half-naked mob outside.

In the dream is denial, and in denial is defeat.

Two to muse on

Comets, life and the unimaginably vast Oort Cloud

Do Smart, Hard-Working People Deserve to Make More Money?

Andrew Neather: social experimentation and education

Correction: when I said New Labour encouraged immigration specifically to spite their political opposition and alter British social identity, the word "specifically" may be inappropriate, if by that you understand it to be the only, or principal, reason.

Certainly Andrew Neather is using the Guardian to deny that it was the main aim. And I don't see the Labour Government as a sort of Doctor Evil, cackling over their latest scheme to ruin the country. It's not that simple, that cartoony.

But Neather has already admitted that:

• Mass migration to the UK was a "deliberate policy"
• It "especially" suited "middle-class Londoners"
• "A driving political purpose" was the fostering of multiculturalism
• He (Neather) had "a clear sense that the policy was intended... to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date", even though he himself thought that was going too far.

From what I've seen, read and heard, the political parties do relish giving each other one in the eye; perhaps that's why they can't clearly see the other consequences of their actions. And we need to be aware that driving motives are often not disclosed, even if they may have appeared in "earlier drafts". Indeed, the unstated motivation is often more important than the overt.

Education has always been a pit for these cockerels to fight in. In the nineteenth century, it was the Board Schools competing with, and seeking to supplant, the Church schools (and abolishing school prayers and hymns within my teaching career); in the twentieth, it was comprehensive versus grammar (since no-one dared go so far as to destroy the private schools). And, like Mao's Red Guard ripping up the bourgeois turf of parks, and Mao's peasants obediently exterminating the crop-eating birds (only to see the crop-eating insect population explode, disastrously), they bring in the reign of destructive ignorance and irrational hatred.

It is especially destructive in teaching, where individuals and society live with the consequences for generations.

When I came to Birmingham to train as a teacher, my first 3-week placement was at the George Dixon Grammar School. The boys' and girls' grammars had just amalgamated, and in the staffroom the women teachers still had their tea expensively served to them, whereas the male staff ran a separate, cheaper tea swindle. Two boys who gave another student teacher a mildly tough time (by the standards of that time) were instantly taken off the entry for English O-level as a punishment.

These decent, hard-working people could not have foreseen that within a few years, the Labour-controlled City Council would first build a new comprehensive smack on their cricket pitch (one of the finest in the Midlands), then amalgamate the grammar school with it, and then generally mismanage it with all sorts of fashionable political initiatives until it went into what is known as "special measures". An old-fashioned grammar-school-and-Cambridge-educated toughie, Robert Dowling (now Sir Robert) was brought in and the climb back began. I was interviewed by him shortly after he took over: the place was all echoes and empty rooms. 200 years of accumulated effort, expertise, tradition and dedication had come to this; for no good reason, and some bad ones.

I'm sure Andrew Neather is a decent chap - but both he and those he has worked with need to recognise that good intentions aren't enough. More and more, I see this government (and some before it) as resembling Homer Simpson, pushing a button on the nuclear generator console just to see what happens, and rewarded by the sight of people suddenly fleeing a wall of flame in the corridor.

You need, not just a good heart, but humility and caution.

Fears of a stockmarket correction

My trader's intuition is flashing warnings that the stock market might drop off a waterfall starting this week. - Charles Hugh Smith

But Marc Faber (htp: Jesse) thinks not - as the dollar weakens, the market adjusts upward. And he is convinced of the "Bernanke put", i.e. money will be thrown into the system to maintain the illusion that all is well. Longer-term, Faber (in that smiling way of his) gives it around 10 years before the dollar simply collapses as public finances run completely out of control.

Andrew Neather: privilege and principle

Andrew Neather is the subject of some fuss at the moment, since he revealed that New Labour encouraged immigration specifically to spite their political opposition and alter British social identity (Melanie Phillips is the latest prominent journalist to splutter a response).

To give the man his due, he is aware of the contradictions in his position. In the first article linked above, he argues for immigration, boasting of the mix in his children's school - but he does qualify it very briefly by a reference (my highlight) to the social exclusiveness:

"... in my children's primary school, the international influence is primarily the large numbers of (mostly middle-class) bilingual children, usually with one parent married to a Brit."

As it happens, I used to live in London - a flat in Mount Nod Road, Streatham - and I don't think Neather would want to send his children to the school opposite us, the way it was in the 1970s at least. My dad would regularly drift over to the bow window to check that his Morris Marina wasn't being vandalised. But maybe it's "middle class" now, what with the property bubble.

However, Neather doesn't live in that London, of course. He lives in a part where, according to nethouseprices.com, semi-detached houses have sold for between £400,000 and £900,000 this year. Melanie Phillips' comment seems justified: "In Neather's hermetically sealed bubble, the benefits of mass immigration were so overwhelming he couldn't understand why ministers had been so nervous about it."

I think the way that so-so socialists square the circle is to admit the contradictions cheerfully (brazenly) and ask you to concentrate on how things will be when they've finished. But what you do now, and its effects, are far more certain than a rosy, fuzzy future Golden Age. One might have hoped that a Cambridge education would have taught Neather not to think in that Johnny Head-in-air sort of way.

Alabamageddon

"People want to kill somebody, but they don't know who to shoot at" ...

Should I send this?

General Teaching Council for England

Whittington House

19-30 Alfred Place

London

WC1E 7EA

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Dear Sirs

GTC Registration Card

Thank you for my GTC registration card, received yesterday by post, which I return herewith.

The card appears to have no useful official function, other than to thrill the issuer, for I note its caveat that possessing it certifies nothing except the historic and now irrelevant fact of my registration with you at the date of the card’s issue. It serves no purpose for me personally, either: fortunately, despite advancing age, I still know who I am, who I work for and my teacher’s reference number.

For an English teacher, to be associated with this card is something of a liability. The motto on the obverse (“for children, through teachers”) is very modern in both literary and political styles, in that it conveys a fuzzy sense of generalized good intent and lacks verb, subject and any hint of how the undefined objective is to be attained (other than by treating teachers as instruments rather than as autonomous agents). I suppose we must be seen to keep up with the fashionable flight from literacy and from any disputable basis of fact or principle.

The reverse is embellished with a quotation from the “Code for teachers” (which, according to your media release dated 1 July 2009, has been created with reference to “an extensive process of public and professional consultation,” an exercise which had hitherto – and, I suspect, despite strenuous and costly effort on your behalf - escaped my notice). The excerpt reads, “Teachers’ knowledge, skill, judgement, creativity and commitment play a vital role in society.” As an example of stating the obvious it could scarcely be bettered. It is also infuriatingly patronising: I am forced to infer that my motivation is improved by jejune bureaucratic praise and recognition such as this. Its presumed intended effect is undermined by the fact that it is printed in two colours, as though, like my primary age pupils, I have such a short attention span that I cannot complete reading a sentence unless it changes its hue partway through.

Or is this chameleon-like transformation from maroon to blue intended as a political metaphor? In which case, the order of the colours should be reversed, for as you know, the GTCs were set up under an earlier Conservative government’s Teaching and Higher Education Act (1988), itself in part a response to the teachers’ industrial action of 1985, which in turn was a protest against the way in which the profession’s remuneration relative to that of other workers as established by the 1974 Houghton pay award slipped rapidly in succeeding years, to the extent that an article in Punch magazine in the 1980s, comparing workers’ pay, felt able to call teachers “dowdy underachievers” . A medical acquaintance told me years ago that the unstated purpose of the General Medical Council is to suppress and bully doctors, and some may think that the similarly-named General Teaching Councils have an analogous hidden agenda.

It is also regrettable that you should put yourselves (or should I say, us?) to such unnecessary expense when the country is running short of money. The minutes of the GTC for England’s meeting on 27 January 2009 reveal that, despite a registration fee of £37 per member and an expected total income of £21.44 million, your budget will be in deficit to the tune of £354,000. Surely it would assist your finances to desist from glossy, self-aggrandising mass mailings.

I think one could go further, in these straitened times: according to http://www.nethouseprices.com/ residential properties in Alfred Place have sold for an average £561,583 each in recent years, so if you happen to own your offices, the fast-recovering London property market should allow you to sell numbers 19-30, retain a healthy cash reserve and find a new location that would cost far less in staff pay, travel allowances and other perquisites. If you wish to be in closer touch with your unconsenting membership, you should know that the geographical centre of England is Meriden; but doubtless the Economic and Social Research Council could guide you to areas where wage levels are more competitive still. In the latter context, it is also worth remembering that there are some 200 million English speakers in India, where the average entry salary for a graduate is US$300 – 500 per month (E. Wayne Nafziger, “Economic Development”, 4th Edition, March 2006).

In short, while I must perforce acknowledge that I am obliged to be registered with you, please exclude me from every mailing possible, other than the one asking me for a cheque once a year; and please do what you can to be less of a burden on my, and my colleagues’, time and money.

Yours faithfully