Tory Party? What Tory Party?

When Tony Blair said “Education, education, education” we all knew it was the beginning of the end. What we didn’t know was that the former Conservative and Unionist Party would turn up to finish the job. Cameron even proclaimed himself the ‘heir to Blair’ without any apparent irony. Then the insipid, chubby-cheeked PR mediocrity set about recruiting the meek and mild, the liberal and wet and he held hands with Nick bloody Clegg.

And so the rot set in, as surely as if the party rules had been written on biodegradable paper and kept in a damp and mouldy cellar. Decades of child-centred education-education-education, putting feelings before achievement and prioritising the popular over the useful has brought us to where we are. Marketing twonks use dishonest phrases like ‘plant-based’, as if the hoi polloi have no grasp of vegetarianism. Jeremy Hunt says he will ‘halve inflation’, apparently believing that people will think that means prices going down rather than increasing a little bit less quickly. Sadly, he’s probably right.

Listening to The Moral Maze last Wednesday, discussing maturity as a moral issue, one of the witnesses was an almost perfect example of Aristotle’s depiction of the young: “[they] have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things - and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning - all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything - they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.”

This modern-day cult of the child is the result, at least partly, of increasingly dire education, leading to under-developed adults possessing warped thinking, short-termism, tunnel vision and an utter inability to connect in any meaningful way with people who actually work. Too busy scratching a living we haven’t the luxury of new-age ideological wishful thinking and have to get by on the stuffy but solid learning we were exposed to, over fifty years ago. But we are dying out; the literate and numerate generations are retiring from the battlefield to be replaced by the schooled but ignorant slaves to woke and all it portends.

Education should ridicule the influencer generation, point out the shallowness and fleeting life of celebrity, shine a brief light on the broken careers and miserable lives of those whose star ascends for a fleeting time before fading. Celebrity, of itself, has no value, and respect must be earned. We need rigour in the hard but essential subjects and should bring back competition, glory in achievement, and most of all, revel in inequality – to the winner the spoils – all need not - must not - win prizes.

Sit them in rows, work them hard, and if they don’t perform back class them, send them down a stream, find out what they CAN achieve. But for pity’s sake return us to a world where adults can read, write, understand numbers and statistics and make informed decisions about their lives. No matter where the future leads us we will always need technicians, tradespeople, and simple labour; the replacement robots aren’t coming any time soon. You do not need a pretend degree to be a plumber, or a nurse. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Caption not required.

And as for the Tories? They died three decades ago and it is about time they recognised it. An actual Conservative Party would have recognised the direction of travel and resisted it. Instead, they aped the New Labour experiment and ended up being indistinguishable from all the other pigs at the Westminster trough. Simple venal corruption is one thing – it is honest dishonesty, at least – but the current crop of members resemble the outcome of Blair’s indoctrination, indoctrination, indoctrination putsch far too closely for comfort. Short of a people’s pitchfork revolution I see no sign of change.

The Oilers are Wrong

 The Just Stop Oilers have been at it again, this time spraying orange paint on a number of government buildings. Blind to the negative attention this attracts, they inconvenience people just trying to go to work, create an unsightly mess, almost certainly incur fossil fuel costs in the clean up and security reactions… and do absolutely nothing to further their aims.

But what are their aims? It doesn’t seem very joined-up to simply demand an end to all new oil and gas contracts without proposing alternatives. Ceasing to use fossil fuel is an impossibility for any civilisation which doesn’t want to return, very quickly, to a scavenging, hand-to-mouth existence. We can’t support a population of our size without energy dense solutions and the capacity and intermittency of so-called green paradigms renders them at best a partial assist.

The Oilers appear to believe we can instantly switch to a low-carbon lifestyle. Maybe the many apparent pensioners involved in their movement have already feathered their nests with solar photovoltaic panels, heat pumps, super-dooper insulation, heat recovery systems and the like, and can boast of excellent climate-healing credentials. But at what cost?

And when I say cost I don’t just mean that they can afford it after a lifetime in the petrochemical age of relative affluence, while others still in work can barely pay their monthly bills, which hypocrisy bodes ill for their ultimate redemption. I also mean at what cost to the environment? Because those technologies built in the East, using coal-fire electricity and shipped here burning millions of barrels of oil, represent a massive carbon footprint which their deployment will almost certainly not offset in their lifetime.

The people who install much of this technology are poorly equipped to explain the benefits, or do the holistic calculus, but they don’t need to. The media – equally ignorant of the full facts – merrily trots out the green is good mantra, oblivious to the harm they may be doing. I would absolutely love to live off-grid, sustainably, self-sufficiently, with a minimal carbon footprint, but I will never be able to afford it. And likely, neither can you.

So, once again I ask, what do they really want? Most rational people, when bumping against reality, learn to adapt their ambitions. Only fools keep on doing the same wrong thing over and over again, rolling the dice, in the hope that this time the house doesn’t win. But the house always wins, no matter how much orange paint you spray.

What does he think he's achieving?

For what it’s worth I think we need a massive education programme. Not ‘re-education’, instilling doctrinal soundbites, but actual education. If people understood the physics, the nature of energy itself they may be able to make better, more informed choices about how they manage their lives. The same could apply to financial decisions, health, and voting in elections. Education, education, education? Dream on.

Thankless

If a lorry driver fails to show up for work a consignment doesn’t get delivered, shops fall short of stock, people are disappointed, inconvenienced and possibly, put in peril; what if the load was medical supplies? A small army of logistics personnel seeks to make sure this never happens, or to mitigate the damage if it can’t be averted. In contrast, should a professor of race grievances take a whole year of sabbatical, not one person on the planet will suffer. The sum total of human existence will not be affected in the slightest

Likewise, economic forecasters, who only exist to give astrology a veneer of credibility. Then there is the emerging field of gender studies – if every person in the country who genuinely suffers from gender dysphoria were to be publicly funded to research it, there would probably be fewer than there are now engaged in actively promoting it.  And what of those committees engaged in renaming streets, demounting statues and placing tributes to unknown people of colour whose actual significance pales in comparison with the fabricated legends written about them? All utterly pointless.

Please feel free to add worthless occupations of your own, because, across the western world – those parts of the world not struggling with the basics of survival - there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who are handsomely rewarded for 'work' which adds nothing useful to society. If we lost them all tomorrow, nobody would notice. Nobody, of course, except the benefits office.

Contrast the value of these non-jobs, every single one no doubt requiring a degree (degree requirements may be waived for applicant with the correct ethnic credentials) with the really vital jobs without which our society could not survive. Those thankless jobs the highly educated may look down upon but could not get by without. These are the jobs that society should value and reward.

Who stacks the shelves? Those faceless, busy beavers who pack and pick stock and keep supermarkets and ‘fulfilment centres’ operating. I can just see the dismay on the faces of the commentariat when they can’t find their favourite brand of organic pesto foot balm where they expect to find it. And, checking out, cashless and automated is fine until you need the human with the cardkey to validate your purchases.

And who makes the products those shelves are filled with? Machines are still a long way away from being able to do everything. Until that day – which will be beyond most of your lifetimes – those clothes, that food, those gadgets have required the input of human labour, paid far less than the children who writes articles for the Guardian about the nobility of toil and the struggle of the masses, yet have never picked up a tool in their lives.

Then there are all the trades. Those grubby little people in vans whose sole purpose in life is to keep your world up and running. They build your houses, they fix your central heating, they install, for you, gadgetry they could never afford for themselves. So what, your paper on free expression in the age of Trump can wait forever; nobody will miss it. But how long will you survive without your dishwasher?

And have you ever noticed that those who ‘suffer with mental health’ as the phrase now seems to put it, are rarely those who actually work for a living, in the conventional sense. Mental health issues are far more prevalent among those who have the luxury and the time for such indulgences. So it seems clear to me that there is a way of making the world a better place.

Think less, think better.

It is not by writing about it, by pontificating on the cerebral, by espousing ignoble causes, or by going on perpetual marches in support of one grievance or another, but by putting aside the chatter and getting on with it. Education, education, education, Tony Blair famously spouted, but look where it has led. The same advice is true now as it was a hundred years ago; if you want your kids to have a secure future, turn them on to honest work, and tell them to be good at it.

The Happiest Days of Your Life

Another year, another obstacle to believing that western education actually achieves very much. And, just as throughout history, the adults of today are suspicious of the stuffing that teachers are using to fill the heads of their current charges. Actually, on second thoughts, the historical tendency is not to blame the teachers so much as the pupils themselves. A moment’s consideration, however, of the master-apprentice system and honest reflection of our own past will reveal that callow youth has never been fully-formed clay.

What was always expected of school was that they would turn out literate, numerate, sentient, learning-enabled rough-casts which could be further refined into worthwhile citizens. Young people who knew their true place in society as half-adults, who would then learn a trade, earn their spurs and go on to take their full place in the national convocation. It worked for centuries and teachers were an important, but expectedly neutral cog in the wheel.

But today the locus of concern is the teaching profession, and in particular the teaching unions, with their avowedly Marxist leanings and their certain intent on social engineering. Let society do the engineering, I say, and relieve the teachers of their assumed duties as the guardians of moral propriety. Teach ABC, not LGBT and let those kids form their own opinions. When they are ready.

So what are we to make of the decision to let teachers determine the future prospects of pupils not by exam results, but by opinion? For – let there be no doubt – no matter what safeguards are in place, no matter what evidence is required, pupils with the right ‘attitudes’ will benefit from appraisal by teachers who know them and approve. This isn’t even corruption; it is normal human behaviour.

One outcome might be that students with the most malleable personalities, those who seek favour, will become the beneficiaries of inflated grades. And if those biddable sheep enter higher education, perhaps persuaded to go into politics, economics, social studies and the like, maybe we will see yet more ideologues wedded to leftist programmes, eventually influencing public policy. Maybe this is what you want?

But before you give it the thumbs up, whatever happened to simple merit? Given that exam grades are a poor predictor of future ability – exam grades are merely the entry requirement to the next stage – why not, instead, look at what employers want? Instead of ramping up qualification requirements – qualifications only poorly correlate with competence anyway – let employees take on whoever they wish but lower the tests for dismissal.

Employers know what they want, but they are hampered by labour laws, burgeoning human rights and the fear of cancel culture should they make the wrong personnel decisions. If the company culture does not easily accommodate diversity, then remove that burden from them. Any decent employer will take on those who best fit their ethos and advance the mission. Let them. And if it doesn’t work out, allow them to fire without fear of reprisal and with minimal financial penalty.

Who cares what exam grades their teachers wish to bestow on them today? How many prominent high-fliers actually boast of low academic achievement? And forget about schooling for individual fulfilment; there is little enough time for the basics, let alone life goals. We expect adults to comprehend difficult issues, to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then make voting decisions based on their analysis and informed preferences.

Education, education, education...

That is the least likely outcome from the right-on, full woke, protest-everything, kiddy-power institutions of academe. Give me the child till seven, said the Jesuits, and I will show you the man. Yes, but give me the child till eighteen and I will fill his head with my ideals, say the educators of today. It is little wonder to me that the western world is currently so riddled with strife and uncertainty; the child lunatics, made mad by their schooling, are running the asylum. This isn’t just about education; this is about the future of democracy.

Goody Goody

Welcome to another edition of The World Has Gone Utterly Mad. We often bemoan the rarity of a certain valuable human quality. No, not mercy, we have bags of that stuff; we have mercy coming out of our ears; its quality is not strained at all in comparison with the quality, or quantity of common sense. It is often said that such sense is as common as rocking horse shit. Given that a recent study found that 7% of graduates could not read a fuel gauge properly and 3.4% of them struggled to understand medicine labels it’s hardly surprising. In fact I imagine a good percentage of them don’t really understand the concept of percentages.

Education, education, oh I give up; what’s the point? In a statement neatly capturing the bleeding obvious, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said an undergraduate degree was too expensive and unsuitable for people with poor literacy and numeracy. No shit, Sherlock? Hmm, I wonder who the government could have asked who could have told them that their logic in herding all the sheep into the degree pens was fundamentally flawed. Oh, that’s right, everybody who had nothing to gain by telling the truth.

You don’t ask the wolf to come to dinner, so why would you trust ‘educationalists’ to offer ‘solutions’ for non-problems which would hugely benefit their industry? It’s like asking the opinion of a door-knocking Pikey about whether your drive needs Tarmacking or your roof needs fixing. We are short of builders not because our young are too busy building business empires but because when they deign to get out of bed at all their soft, white, graduate hands are ‘too good’ for simple honest hard graft.

We can’t employ our own young because they are not up to it – at least that is the excuse often trotted out – so we import others to do it instead. All those years in education but what do they have to show for it? Possessing poor social skills, under-developed working skills and, as this report shows, as thick as mince, we have coddled the minds of a whole generation with the connivance of politicians and effectively rendered them unemployable. So what a brilliant idea it is to consider consigning paper rounds and holiday jobs to history as well; cut off the development of that work ethic at every turn.

Equal education = equally unprepared for the world.

This latest interference from Brussels comes as people of my generation stare aghast at the inanities pouring from the open mouths of the establishment gargoyles around David Cameron’s supposed renegotiation of our relationship with the EU. Social engineering might be a good thing if it produced, you know, engineers, but all it ever seems to do is weaken resolve, blur boundaries, create yet more dependency, criminalise more of us for plain speaking and cost ever more opportunities for generating real wealth. Sure, your precious offspring might become human rights lawyers, or gender identity councillors, or race relations advisors... but who is going to pay for all that do goody good bullshit?

The cost of education

Much chatter on the airwaves about the news – honestly, it’s like they think this just happened – that it may not be necessary to hold a degree in order to chuck coffee in a mug and scribble a doodle in the foam. No shit, Sherlock. A CIPD report, no doubt costing millions and conducted by ‘experts’, reveals a truth know to everybody with a brain ever since Tony Blair repeatedly recited that holy word Edjumakayshun. It turns out - and I can scarcely believe this wasn’t as blindingly obvious to government as it was to me and every educated adult in the country that this would happen - that over half of UK graduates are in shit jobs that require no such level of learning. (That’s right, ‘over half’. I’d use the percentage value reported, but there is a good chance it would sail right over their heads and we ought at least try to engage them in this conversation.)

During the time we have had this massive increase in the number of plastic graduates it is shameful that we are also suffering exactly the sort of skills shortage an education programme is expressly intended to alleviate. But of course, there was no programme so much as a political agenda to prevent children maturing into responsible adults by pandering to their already pampered expectations of instant fame, wealth, success and happiness. A graduate of some vague discipline for which there is no real demand and no overall worth is no more likely than a bin man to possess the work skills of punctuality and hard graft ... in fact the opposite is almost certainly the truth; the school of hard knocks and the university of life are still more relevant in preparing most people for life after mum and dad.

But maybe New Labour’s expectation was that, contrary to the general way in which the world actually works, a raft of new skills might create its own demand? Because there has certainly been a massive increase in ‘studies’ and as any fule kno, without studies we know nothing. Rent-seeking competencies such as analysing the synergistic equality outcomes of trans-women within the framework of a multicultural, multi-faith, tie-dye society via social media are valuable means of diverting public funds that would otherwise only be wasted on, say, healthcare for the elderly, who are hardly worth studying at all.

The rise of such social commentators – for which read professional offence-whores and perpetual moaning machines – as the vacuous and irrelevant Laurie Penny has an uncanny correlation with the rise in the number of people who want to study such self-centred obsessions. It’s surprising here isn’t a whole curriculum based on totting up the many ways in which you can be angry about the world not being all about you. Degrees in aggressive feminism, angry race relations, jealous politics and almost anything that can be followed by the word ‘studies’ or end in an ‘ism’ instead of an ‘ology’ are highly suspect ways of creating a generation fit to take on the challenges of the modern world, but they are near-perfect vehicles for increasing the sum total of malcontent.

The report says graduates are ‘too qualified’ for their job roles; it doesn’t conclude that they are ‘too competent’. In the rush to inflate everybody’s grades the world of education has forgotten that qualifications do not a competent person make. This includes members of the highly ‘qualified’ teaching industry and its advisors. It must register with profound disappointment as well as a sense of bafflement that the explosion in university degrees has not resulted in an explosion in intellect. In fact one could almost argue the opposite; as a direct result of handing out degrees for all, the country as a whole is a bit more stupid. “The CIPD called on the Government to carry out a thorough review...” Well, here’s your thorough review, pal: It’s a fucking disgrace.