Gary Monro’s blog

Having done a bit of jiggery-pokery before the election with his capital expenditure figures, Gordon Brown is at it again.

He outlined his plans Tuesday to the House of Commons Treasury select committee. First, he’s going to set the spending levels for each and every government department for the next 5 years meaning that whoever succeeds him as Chancellor is going to have had the job’s biggest decisions already taken for them.

But the second is the really devious one. According to Gordon ‘Prudence’ Brown sound financial management means that, over an economic cycle, the sum of all the deficits and surpluses should cancel each other out. Now, the economy he inherited from the last Conservative government has been doing pretty well but, obviously, nothing can keep up forever with the Labour tax-and-spend machine. We’re running out of money and taxes must rise. So Brown is going to convince himself (and only himself because the rest of us aren’t likely to fall for it) that the cycle he’s been referring to all this time is actually not the one he first thought it was. He’s convinced himself it’s a different - better - one:

He said he now believes the cycle started in 1997-98, not 1999-2000 - a move which gives another £13 billion of leeway. The cycle is due to end in 2006, and economists predicted that he would miss his target.

Well he won’t be missing it now, will he? The move was greeted with seething fury on the select committee:

Susan Kramer, a Liberal Democrat, said there is a “perception that the government is marking its own exam papers”.

Okay, not quite seething…

Independent commentators in The Guardian put it a little more starkly:

“The change in the cycle makes it slightly easier to meet the rule but as soon as you fiddle around with the rules, the credibility benefits of having those rules is rather less,” said John Hawkworth, fiscal expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The CBI’s chief economist, Ian McCafferty, said: “The announcement only serves to highlight the sharp contrast between monetary policy, which is well-understood and appears genuinely free of political involvement, and fiscal policy, where the Treasury is able to act as both judge and jury.”

Which means really we’re not solving our problems; rather, we’re simply storing them for a slightly later date. And when the economy falters - as it appears to be doing - these problems will come home to roost and then we’ll have to deal with them at a time when we’re least able to.

Always nice to have something to look forward to, eh?

It is more or less common knowledge amongst the British public that school standards are in free-fall. As a result of their insane fantasy to put 50% of British children through the university system this Labour government has undetaken a frenzy of educational dumbing down in order to meet that target. The failings of the system are legion - I had a bit of a rant about this here.

The level of bureaucratic control exhibited by Big Brother this government of ours has also become a matter of concern to those of us that are, well, concerned about such things. You can never get bored with criticising government interference and control freakery because there’s always something more to keep you awake.

The latest is this: the government has done away with hand-written student reports and has replaced them with a computer package. Perhaps not such a heinious crime but they have also decided what comments are available ot the teacher when making his/her assessment. So instead of reading the personally considered thoughts of the assessing teacher the parent reads the cut-and-paste remarks of a government-inspired computer package.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “A report should be a direct communication from teacher to parent and any weakening of that is going to spoil the effect of comments that can make pupils and parents take notice.

“This cut-and-paste idea is a very backward step. Parents and children should get the teachers to change their ways. If they use computerised phrases, it will stop them from making their typical pithy comments.”

The excuses for this kind of thing are, as usual, as ridiculous as the change itself:

Daryl King, of Simple Logic, the company behind Report Assist, said: “If you have 30 reports to do, it is hard to write original stuff if 20 of them are on the same level. We offer 12,000-plus possibilities.”

He added that Report Assist “also removes worries about spelling and grammar“.

A National Union of Teachers spokeswoman said: “Think about how many reports teachers have to write. This is about efficiency. It also helps parents who struggle with teachers’ handwriting.”

Simple Logic - how well that name mirrors its representative’s remark - miss the point; just because 20 students perform at the same standard does not mean the 20 comments will be the same. A clever student performing at average will require different comments to a student with learning difficulties who also performs at average. Each has achieved entirely differently. Only the teacher’s own thoughts can express the reality of these situations.

And as for removing ‘worries about spelling and grammar’… Well, these are teachers, aren’t they? Is it being uncharitable to expect them to know how to write in proper English?

And the NUT - another aptly named outfit - might consider that a teaching workforce freed of government shackles and ‘initiatives’ would be more than able to write their reports - as they have done for decades - and that its energies might be better focussed on getting the state out of our education.

Ah. But that requires faith in the teaching profession to be able to do a good job without government fatwas every three minutes. Only some of us have such faith…

The BBC this morning seems to be quite impressed with a school in England that has introduced random drug testing. Personally, I think it’s tragic that we’ve reached a stage where this has become necessary. But what do I know?

The chatter in the article is about dealing with destructive drug behaviour through ‘better’ drug education, ‘more’ drug education and so on. It’s the same thing we hear about sex education. Kids have sex, get pregnant and diseased so we teach them more about the very thing they’re already doing. The more we ‘educate’ them, the more they do it. So, on ITV’s news - also this morning - kids who realise that wearing a bicycle helmet could prevent terrible injury or even death refuse to wear them because it doesn’t look ‘cool’. The risks of not wearing are remote; the risk of wearing is terminal uncoolness. No contest then and stick your education where the sun doesn’t shine.

Anyway, the intro piece on the BBC’s story on drug testing in the school talks about ‘educating’ children to the dangers of drugs. Trying desperately - and failing - to avoid mild feelings of irritation that nobody has yet learnt that education about dangers does little to dissuade those that are intent on drug taking (or having sex, or smoking, or drinking or riding a bicycle without a crash helmet, or stealing cars etc) I just wondered why the biggest danger of drug taking isn’t that posed by the police who will arrest and imprison you if you’re caught even thinking about the stuff.

We are still mired in this ridiculous notion that drug-takers are innocents and only the drug-sellers (because they’re capitalists, perhaps?) are evil. The users have ‘issues’ caused by ‘poverty’ (newsflash: there is no poverty in the UK) or ’society’ or ‘exclusion’ or ‘alienation’. And so on. Hence the crime of drug-taking involves two sides, one whose criminality is met with ‘education’ while the other’s is met with prosecution.

But it seems that the ingenuity of the customs officials trying to prevent the stuff coming in is matched - or exceeded - by the ingenuity of those with other ideas. This must be a ‘war’ that our authorities expect to lose. If they focus on supply they know they’ll never do better than disrupt it. And if they focus on education they know they’ll forever be competing with a culture that has great PR - glamorous pop stars, ‘cool’ screen idols, the lure of easy money, a culture that long ago lost the distinction between right and wrong personal behaviour and, of course, an endless supply of ‘experts’ and social liberals saying that, hey, actually drugs aren’t so bad. To combat it we have: an educational establishment that’s got a few teachers and a class room of kids desperate not to be there.

Yet one of the most effective weapons in the arsenal against drugs would be simple prohibition against their possession in any quantity regardless of whether you’re using or dealing - backed up by meaningful prison sentences. Is it too simplistic to point out that there is no drugs supply where there is no demand?

Our government is deeply soaked in the need to be seen to be doing something. Style is indeed the new substance and, as with their illegal imprisonments of British citizens, religious hatred laws and the proposed ID cards, the appearance of meaningful activity is the facade behind which Blair, Brown, Prescott and the rest of this lousy government hide earnestly hoping they’ve created enough of a stir with their anti-British diktats to be able to blame everybody else when the doo-doo hits the fan.

It has taken the slaughter of more than 50 human beings in our capital city to make the Labour government finally take action against the inhabitants of that shadow-city called Londonistan. What kind of drugs carnage will our youth bring upon itself before that government decides it will also get tough on them?