Should elections be bought ? If the Conservatives in South Dorset only received £29,000 from their non-dom party vice-chairman billionaire donor Lord Ashcroft in 2005, and as they claim, that was only 2% of their funding, then did they really spend £1.45 million on the last general election campaign here ?
I wonder how much they are planning to spend this time ?
A number of issues arise from this scandal – and it is a scandal in the real sense of the word – because it raises very ugly questions about how politics works in this country, that a political party can promise that its major donor will become resident in the UK in order for him to be given a peerage, and then, once he has become a law-maker he evades complying with the conditions on which the peerage was given, avoiding paying tax as a consequence. An ugly question therefore is – does this mean that the British taxpayer is now bankrolling the Conservative campaign ?
But more alarming even than this is the lack of transparency shown by party leaders. It would appear that William Hague, Shadow Foreign Secretary , the man who might be responsible in a few months for taking us into future wars, firstly avoided asking the relevant questions, then was prepared to give an assurance based merely on supposition, and when he did find out the truth three months ago, persisted in evasive denials in a series of public interviews in which he assured the questioner that there was nothing untoward about Lord Ashcroft’s behaviour. If we thought there were problems about WMD, we have, I fear, far more of a treat in store for us.
His party leader appears to have taken the view that ‘what I don’t know won’t hurt me’ & that it is perfectly acceptable for his party to be in receipt of millions from a non dom resident of Belize, who has also failed to pay tax there & whose income the president of the country estimates is more than its gross domestic product . Someone who is prepared to bankroll a party that claims it cares about the poor in this country, yet who pays nothing towards the upkeep by the state in an impoverished Caribbean tax haven, despite it being in the lowest quartile on the poverty scale of international
Monday, 8 March 2010
I WORRY ABOUT MICHAEL GOVE
The thing that worries me about the Tory shadow education secretary, is how little he appears to understand state education.
Whether it’s suggesting that all secondary teachers have first class degrees or that the most successful schools should ‘opt out’ to become academies, he shows clear misunderstanding of how the system works and how it is experienced by those using it.
He has been rightly pilloried regarding the degrees. Good teachers combine academic knowledge, the ability to enthuse, rapport with and respect for their pupils, with emotional awareness of what is going on in the classroom, for themselves, the class and individual students.
About 4 years into my own teaching career I realised that what inspired my pupils at secondary level was not the subject, but my relationship with them & the fact that my empathy, & understanding of them as individuals was at least as important as my ability to stretch their minds and transmit knowledge. It was this awareness that led me to train as a psychotherapist.
Now many people at the pinnacle of academic achievement do not share the above qualities, and would not therefore prosper in the environment of a state school – where they would also need to establish firm boundaries & a strong sense of order & discipline. Helped always if your charges know that you respect and like them ! You have to be prepared to be tough, to know who the likely miscreants are & you have to be able to second guess the kinds of behaviour that are likely to happen – all the time, every minute of the day, wherever you are in school.
Needless to say, those who go into the profession need to be able to handle stress – and I want to be quite clear that being a parliamentary candidate is much less stressful & onerous than teaching in a modern comprehensive !
The above qualifications cannot be squashed neatly into the box labelled first class degree. They are character based. And it’s usually more accurately the case that the less academic are the more well liked by their charges.
State education will not improve by being modelled in the form of private education in terms of degree level or in terms of school type – because the service users are different. What we do need is the same kind of resourcing, both to employ the best teachers in the hardest to reach schools (funding that will follow the pupil, as in the Lib Dems’ Pupil Premium) and to provide the relevant environments for good quality learning experience.
But with the cuts in real terms currently being proposed by the Conservatives, I can’t see that happening. Neither can I see the currently proposed powers to give parents and charities the opportunity to create their own schools – in many ways an excellent idea – being any more than a way of siphoning off money from the majority, a form of grant maintained foundation trust. We must be very careful of half-baked ideas which are based upon ideology rather than a real knowledge of the facts. As Polly Toynbee has correctly noted (Guardian 6.3.10) “Through social ignorance they assume the newsworthy 2% living profoundly dysfunctional lives, represent all the poor.”
A report which claimed – 3 times - that more than half of teenage girls get pregnant in poor areas (real figure 5.4 %) exposes what Toynbee rightly calls the “social cluelessness among those who would govern a country unknown to them”.
She’s so right I will almost give her the last word – “The chasm yawns between [Cameron’s] critique and his remedies – marriage, a few small schools and volunteers.” The possibility of Michael Gove gaining control of our state education system should set the alarm bells ringing. I welcome the freedom offered to parents and the educational advantages to be offered by small schools – but it is not enough.
Whether it’s suggesting that all secondary teachers have first class degrees or that the most successful schools should ‘opt out’ to become academies, he shows clear misunderstanding of how the system works and how it is experienced by those using it.
He has been rightly pilloried regarding the degrees. Good teachers combine academic knowledge, the ability to enthuse, rapport with and respect for their pupils, with emotional awareness of what is going on in the classroom, for themselves, the class and individual students.
About 4 years into my own teaching career I realised that what inspired my pupils at secondary level was not the subject, but my relationship with them & the fact that my empathy, & understanding of them as individuals was at least as important as my ability to stretch their minds and transmit knowledge. It was this awareness that led me to train as a psychotherapist.
Now many people at the pinnacle of academic achievement do not share the above qualities, and would not therefore prosper in the environment of a state school – where they would also need to establish firm boundaries & a strong sense of order & discipline. Helped always if your charges know that you respect and like them ! You have to be prepared to be tough, to know who the likely miscreants are & you have to be able to second guess the kinds of behaviour that are likely to happen – all the time, every minute of the day, wherever you are in school.
Needless to say, those who go into the profession need to be able to handle stress – and I want to be quite clear that being a parliamentary candidate is much less stressful & onerous than teaching in a modern comprehensive !
The above qualifications cannot be squashed neatly into the box labelled first class degree. They are character based. And it’s usually more accurately the case that the less academic are the more well liked by their charges.
State education will not improve by being modelled in the form of private education in terms of degree level or in terms of school type – because the service users are different. What we do need is the same kind of resourcing, both to employ the best teachers in the hardest to reach schools (funding that will follow the pupil, as in the Lib Dems’ Pupil Premium) and to provide the relevant environments for good quality learning experience.
But with the cuts in real terms currently being proposed by the Conservatives, I can’t see that happening. Neither can I see the currently proposed powers to give parents and charities the opportunity to create their own schools – in many ways an excellent idea – being any more than a way of siphoning off money from the majority, a form of grant maintained foundation trust. We must be very careful of half-baked ideas which are based upon ideology rather than a real knowledge of the facts. As Polly Toynbee has correctly noted (Guardian 6.3.10) “Through social ignorance they assume the newsworthy 2% living profoundly dysfunctional lives, represent all the poor.”
A report which claimed – 3 times - that more than half of teenage girls get pregnant in poor areas (real figure 5.4 %) exposes what Toynbee rightly calls the “social cluelessness among those who would govern a country unknown to them”.
She’s so right I will almost give her the last word – “The chasm yawns between [Cameron’s] critique and his remedies – marriage, a few small schools and volunteers.” The possibility of Michael Gove gaining control of our state education system should set the alarm bells ringing. I welcome the freedom offered to parents and the educational advantages to be offered by small schools – but it is not enough.
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