The best tory leader we never had?

 

*That* subject...

 Tom Paine is always a recommended read, but his recent post on immigration nails it.  

Politicians talk about people being in favour of immigration, or not (, or racist, or xenophobic...) but it isn't that simple.  Like many groups, immigrants are not an homogenous lump.  Some are a positive benefit to the UK and should be welcomed with open arms.  Others merit our sympathy for the treatment they ave received at home and should also be welcomed.  Some should not.  

So the politician who calls for a lenient approach to immigrants justifies that by reference to those in the first two groups.  And they are right.  Then, the politician who wants immigration to be controlled points to the latter group.  And they are right, too.  Any discussion between them is a waste of time, because they are talking at cross purposes.  

We need an intelligent, discerning, effective and efficient immigration policy of the type that politicians have conspicuously failed to give for the last 25 years or so.  It needs to encourage - and enable - immigrants to arrive via legal routes with their documentation intact as far as possible.  It needs to be understanding if they are unable to do so.  It needs to identify those who will not make a positive contribution to the UK and deny them entry.  It needs to find those who, having arrived, are making a negative contribution and politely escort them home.  

Then, the policy might generate a little respect and understanding.  Oddly, sending selected foreigners home might actually reduce outbreaks of racism...

Where did the Conservatives go wrong? (part 1 of 8,273...)

 This is a huge and many-faceted question, of course.  The choice of possible points to raise is as enormous as, well, the scale of their defeat.  So I'll probably come back to this in future.  But there's one that I want to flag up immediately. 

That's the Truss issue.  No, not her appointment as leader & PM*, I'm referring to her later un-appointment.  The Party had asked its members which of two candidates should be leader, and the membership gave a clear answer; Truss, not Sunak.  The parliamentary party then promptly removed Truss and inserted its choice instead - carefully ensuring that the membership were not consulted in the process.  

That sent a number of messages.  First, it told just over half the membership that their views were not welcome.  Two years out from an election, and you tell half your most committed supporters to **** off.  Not a terribly clever move.  

Second, it must have made the rest of the country think that if that's how they treat their supporters, how are they going to treat us??  Which is not great.

Finally, it was a clear and public display of indecision, mild panic, and - very seriously for a Conservative party - disloyalty.  Not a quality that people look for in a government.  

Before then, I think it was just about possible that the Conservatives could have pulled it together, made the arguments, shown that their opponent was trying to be all things to all men**, and got themselves in shape for a 2024 election.  After then, it was all downhill as their credibility was gone.

 

*I was a Party member at the time and voted for her over Sunak.  Many point to her brief tenure and proclaim that her program of lowering taxes & inviting economic growth was clearly mad, pointing at the swift and decisive response that it provoked from the markets.   Except that it didn't, of course.  What provoked the adverse response was her reluctant agreement that HMG should provide a potentially unlimited underwriting of household energy bills, a policy forced on her by 25 years of energy policy failure by successive governments, finally hitting home. 

** even while unable to clearly define confusing terms like "man" and "woman".

Well hello again...

 I remember someone suggesting in 2010 that the right-wing bloggers would decline, as a political blog really needs a government that the blogger disagrees with in order to generate the material and the motivation to keep the flow of posts going.  I pooh-poohed the idea, but looking back at my stats it is pretty clear they were right and I was wrong.  

But here we are... a new government that (admittedly) hasn't done much yet but which I rather suspect I am going to disagree with.  We also have the small matter of a Conservative Party that completely lost its way and been punished appropriately for it.  That needs gentle nudging (or a hard kicking, I'm relaxed, whatever) back onto a course that might be described as being, well, conservative.  

 So I think I'll be here again once in a while.  More that I have for the last 14 years, anyway.  

This doesn't add up

 So Rishi is looking at plans to make all students study maths all the way up to 18.  As a STEM graduate, you might think I'd be in favour of this, but I have to disappoint you.  I'm not.  

A first problem that I have with this is that it's not even a proper announcement. It's only that he is "looking at" plans of this type.  That's not a policy.  It's not even a promise.  It's just an indication of what is currently wafting around the PM's mind as a possibility.  It's still perfectly possible for him to say that he looked at the plans, and didn't like them, so watched as they slid smoothly into the waste-paper basket.  It's obvious what he's up to - floating the idea to see how well it goes down before deciding whether to drop them without trace or move forward with them.  There are a variety of words (printable and otherwise) to describe that, but "leadership" isn't one of them.

There are also obvious problems with implementation, as it will direct a substantial part of our limited maths teaching resources on students who don't want to study it and have spent the previous 11 years demonstrating their inability to learn much of it. 

However, I think the main problem that I have with the suggestion is that it demonstrates a mode of thinking that is itself deeply problematic.  If I might be permitted a brief diversion, I recall an Economist article from long, long ago which argued against the proposition that hosting the Olympics was a good idea for a city - the perceived wisdom was that hosting the games meant lots of useful infrastructure would be built, and that would remain for the city to benefit from long after the games were finished.  Ah, argued the Economist, but if that infrastructure is useful and justified, then there will be a case for spending the necessary money regardless of whether the Olympics are in town or not - so if it is needed, build it anyway and in a form dictated by the needs of the city rather than in a form that suits the short-term needs of the games.  Then you have your lovely venue (or whatever) without having to cough up all the other Olympic-related overhead.  

I think there's something similar going on here.  If maths teaching up to 18 is useful but is not being provided by schools, why not?  One would have thought that if this was such a good idea, then a good school, staffed by skilled and conscientious teachers, would provide that useful teaching somewhere in the curiculum, entirely of their own volition?  It is valid to ask why that isn't happening - why it seemingly requires an instruction from the Prime Minister himself to make it so?

Perhaps they're not doing this because they don't think it's a good idea.  If so, then there would appear to be a difference of opinion between (on the one hand) Rishi, brandishing his experience as a former waiter, PPE graduate, and investment banker, and (on the other hand) experienced and conscientious educators.  I think I know who I'll side with on that one.

Perhaps they're not doing it because, although it's a good idea, there are better uses of the limited time available to the staff and students.  Again, I think I know who to side with.

Maybe they're not doing it because the staff are neither skilled nor conscientious.  If so, I think we may have more important issues to deal with that the exact date at which maths becomes optional.

Maybe (and I think this is probably the one), it isn't happening at the moment because the Department of Education lays down curricula for the schools (via the National Curriculum) which leave the schools with very little room for manoeuvre - and no incentive to be creative.  Maybe HMG is already meddling so much in school timetables that teachers simply don't have the freedom or flexibility to identify the students who might benefit from an initiative such as this and construct a course of lessons for them.  

Of course, that would mean that the plans Rishi is "looking at" are the governmental equivalent of swallowing a spider to eat the fly.  It has meddled and intervened so thoroughly that further meddling is needed in order to counteract the malign effects of previous meddles.  In fact, I think we're beyond the spider here, we're looking hungrily at the cow, and the horse behind it. 

No-one in government ever seems to ask "would it actually be better if we just STFU and went home?".  Not even in a nominally "Conservative" government.  And that, really, is what has irritated me enough about the announcement to actually sit down and write this. 

Is it time to close the Internet?

Obviously not, it has huge benefits.  I'm not even sure we could.  The title is deliberately written in order to invoke Betteridge's Law (which states that any headline written in the form of a question can be reliably answered "no").  It's also an odd suggestion to make in a blog post published on... oh...  

But... (and I do hope you knew that word was coming) it's still valid and possible to think about why we might want to close it, even if we know closing it would be overkill and we can't think of a better solution.  Which is pretty well where I am at the moment. Hence this blogpost.

I was born in the early 1970s.  Yes, I had an orange tank top. No, there are no surviving photos, mysteriously.  That meant the Web surfaced while I was at university.  It was still a curiosity at that stage - I remember seeing an early Netscape install on an lab Mac just before I graduated, but that was as far as it had reached.  My first Pipex Dial account was in 1997, in my late 20s, opened because my wife was on a business trip and we had the bright idea of using that "email" thing to keep in touch despite the time zone differences.  I remember buying that PC - I suggested it and she asked what would be the point of having a PC at home.  I didn't have a terribly secure answer, but thought we would probably find some use for it.

Anyway, the point of that is that I was already grown up, educated and at work before being introduced to the delights of the Internet.  And boy, they were great.  Discussion forums where you could talk endlessly about the subjects of interest to you?  I spent a long time there.  I started on Honest John's car forum, from that I found Sniff Petrol, and from that discovered Tyresmoke.net, all of which seem to still exist in some form or another.  The opportunity to talk about a genuinely interesting* subject with others who have an equal interest was great, especially for a socially inept introvert like (say) me.  Of course, from time to time there was the odd idiot or teenager making a self-evidently moronic argument based on a complete lack of knowledge, insight or thought, but they were all self-evident, we would all realise (apart from the moron/teenager concerned), and we had a good laugh at what was in fact the 21^st century incarnation of the village idiot.  

Then along came Blogger et al, and the chance to write what I thought and let the world come and talk about it (apparently, I wrote a moderately successful blog back in the days when blogs could be moderately successful).  Twitter came along and made it much more convenient to blog, so long as your point was short enough to express without any nuance. Facebook meant that you could actually keep in touch with people you knew in real life, if you were feeling brave enough.  And if you knew anyone in real life, of course. 

This gave me a very positive view of the Internet and social media.  From my perspective, it was all good.  OK, there were some morons who debated like teenagers, but they were an amusing side-show and once they had got bored (or their Mum told them it was bedtime) the intelligent debate could start.  

I've come to realise (slowly...) that while this may have been true 20 years ago, in the intervening 20 years an entire generation has grown up who thinks that this is actually the way to debate.  After all, they spent their teens, their twenties and now their thirties on Reddit, Pistonheads & Twitter, and that is all they have seen.  It turns out that the simple step of making an argument in person, face to face, and watching the other person burst out laughing at your blatant fallacy was an essential step in developing a sense of how to make a point properly and convincingly.  So "angry teenager" is now the principal form of debate - riddled with straw man attacks, whataboutery and undistributed middles.  

And the Internet, in its wonderful way, presents all of this idiocy in full, in detail, for everyone to read.  Whereas in 2001, the Internet was a wonderful thing because it allowed anyone to express their view without filtering out those without connections, funding, or status, it is now a terrible thing because it allows anyone to express their view without filtering out those with the actual ability to think those views through and express them coherently.  Which means that politicians and pressure groups see all this, and pander to it.  After all, why not... their votes count just as much as those of the thoughtful. 

 All of that is before we even touch the subject of the titillatory possibilities offered by the Internet and the subsequent decline in the treatment of women online.  I sense an entire separate blogpost could be written on that subject.

I don't know where we go from here, I admit.  I have no idea how we solve this.

They say that nothing is ever really new (which is a very upsetting thing to say to a patent attorney), but the Pythons did seem to get there a bit ahead of me.  Just over 45 years ahead of me.  Ah well.  

*interesting to me, ymmv.

A Hamiltonian Solution

 It seems that the time has come once again to discuss the role of an MP and whether/how/how much they should be paid.  

It's a subject that seems to keep popping up; the entire week seems to have been spent thinking about little else, ironically due to concern that a second job might distract an MP from the real issues at play in the country.  The fact that this has displaced any discussion of the fact that on Sunday someone tried to blow up a Remembrance Day service seems to have been wholly lost on those obsessed with scoring political points out of it. 

Simon Cooke has set out why MPs should have second jobs, and I can't put that argument better so won't.  My interest in the issue in piqued by the details of the process that Kier Starmer is calling for.  What he wants is an official to be put in post with the power to look into MPs' affairs, decide whether something is too distracting, or unnecessary, or unsuitable, and discipline the MP accordingly.  I really could not disagree more strongly.  

First, it's a classic Labour solution to an issue - identify a problem, propose a bureaucracy, allocate a budget, and then sit back and wait for the inevitable argument that the budget is too small and the headcount is inadequate because here are a host of other non-problems that it should deal with as well.  But that's not the real problem here.  

More seriously, our MP is our representative in Parliament.  Their job is to consider and pass laws, to provide oversight of Government, and to call it to account.  In the battle between the People and the System, they are there to argue on behalf of the People.  They are there to watch over the System, ensure that it operates fairly, and to reform it if not.  

Labour's solution would place MPs under the scrutiny of officialdom, subject to its punishments.  An unelected official would tell an MP whether or not they were being a Good Boy or a Good Girl and would give them a sweetie salary if they were.  This is infantilising of our MPs, and it is a fundamental reversal of the proper order.  The MPs are there to do that to officialdom, not the other way round.  

But what would keep MPs from being Naughty?  Simple; we would.  What we need is clarity and transparency - the Register of Members' Interests combined with responsible reporting of what MPs are doing and a robust recall process that is under the control of constituents.  Then, we can decide whether we want that MP to continue in post.  If the MP does neglect their work, or decides to represent someone or something else instead, they get the sack.  

Does it work in an (essentially) two-party state?  Can that possibly work?

Yes, it can.

It can indeed.