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Friday 17th May 2013
Gove's illiterate critics (again)Last week, I managed to wind up almost the entire population of Leftie teachers with my blog post about Michael Rosen's elementary grammatical error in his Guardian article attacking the idea that primary school children should be taught elementary grammar. I've never had so much potty-mouthed abuse on Twitter. And to think these people are entrusted with teaching our children how to behave. Today, it's the turn of First News, a weekly newspaper aimed at schoolchildren, to be put in the dunce's corner. To be fair, the paper has got its hands on a decent little scoop. Rebecca Lee, a schoolgirl from Christchurch School in Bristol, has written to Michael Gove to complain about three mistakes in the spelling, punctuation and grammar paper she had to sit last week. (This is the new exam for Year 6 children known as "the SPAG test".) The mistakes consist of three rogue commas, apparently, but she doesn't say what they are so it's impossible to say whether she's right or wrong. (To read more, click here.)
Friday 17th May 2013
The Cameron Battleship is now back on courseTo see the film I made for last night's episode of This Week, click here.
Thursday 16th May 2013
An intruder in my gardenI was in my garden office on Monday afternoon when I heard a loud noise behind me, as if someone had jumped over the back fence. Seconds later, a strange man walked past the window. I emerged gingerly from my office and found myself face to face with a giant. At first glance, he looked like a basketball player: mixed race, about 6ft 5, in his mid- 20s and built like an athlete. “Can I help you?” I asked. Instead of replying, he vaulted on to the roof of my tool shed and dropped down into my neighbour’s garden. I ran up to the house, told my wife to call the police and then went out on to the street to see if I could spot him. The road I live in has suffered a spate of burglaries in recent months – there’s at least one every week – and it looked as if I’d interrupted someone who was definitely up to no good. (To read more, click here.)
Wednesday 15th May 2013
New state boarding school in West Sussex is opposed by unholy alliance of Trots and Tories, but deserves our supportTo paraphrase Shakespeare, politics makes for strange bedfellows. When I was trying to set up the West London Free School, I faced a two-pronged campaign of local opposition. The first prong was led by the shop stewards of the local branches of the NUT, the second by the headmaster of a local independent school. They were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but came together in their opposition to a free school. Greg Martin, the headmaster of Durand Academy, is facing a similar array of strange bedfellows. He already runs a very successful primary school in Lambeth – last year, 90 per cent of the pupils attained level 4 or above in English and maths, compared to a national average of 79 per cent. That's particularly impressive when you consider that 58.9 per cent of the pupils are on free school meals. He's now hoping to duplicate these results at secondary level, but in an innovative and unusual way. Instead of simply opening a secondary academy in Lambeth, he's hoping to set up a state boarding school in West Sussex that won't cost parents a penny. He believes that this is an excellent way of giving inner-city children from poor backgrounds the best possible start in life. (He sets out his argument in detail here.) (To read more, click here.)
Tuesday 14th May 2013
Getting behind a Referendum Bill is a smart move on Cameron's partWell done to David Cameron for getting behind a Bill committing the next Parliament to an EU referendum. If John Baron predicted that this would be the Prime Minister's response to his amendment to the Queen's Speech, then hats off to him. As I blogged last week, this is exactly the move that Cameron should make. Some critics (David Aaronovitch, John Rentoul, etc) have objected that this move is pointless because (a) Cameron won't be able to get it through the House of Commons and (b) no Parliament can bind its successor. That's a tad literal-minded of them. Okay, it might not pass, but in the event of it being defeated the Conservatives will come out smelling of roses. If the Lib Dems vote against it, they'll look like hyprocrites – an EU referendum was in their 2010 manifesto, after all. And if Labour vote against it, they'll look like they don't think the British public should have a say on the most important issue facing the country at the moment. Unlikely to be a vote winner, given that confidence in our elected representatives is at an all time low. (To read more, click here.)
Sunday 12th May 2013
Tory splits on Europe are nothing compared to the deep divisions within the Labour PartyDisagreements within the Conservative Party about Europe dominate the headlines this morning, but it's a storm in a teacup compared to Labour's deep ideological divisions. On the three most important areas of public policy – the economy, welfare and education – the Tories are of one mind, whereas Labour is split down the middle. The Brownites (formerly the Bennites) want to borrow more and spend more, get rid of the welfare cap and bring academies and free schools back under local authority control, whereas the Blairites (formerly the SDP) want to match Coalition spending cuts and preserve and build on the Coalition's public service reforms. Fundamentally, the divide is between hard-line, anti-capitalist egalitarians and social democrats who have no quarrel with capitalism but want the state to intervene to ameliorate some of its more adverse effects. This is a rift that has existed within the Labour Party since its inception, but has come into sharp focus since Ed Miliband became leader because of his abject failure to come down on one side or another. Even on Europe, Labour is more divided than the Tories. Yes, there's disagreement within the Conservative Party about whether to endorse next week's motion regretting the absence of any referendum bill in the Queen's Speech and, yes, there are differences of opinion about whether such a bill should be brought forward in this Parliament. But on the vital issue of whether there should be an In/Out EU referendum, the party is of one mind. (To read more, click here.)
Friday 10th May 2013
Are all Michael Gove's critics illiterate?Last week, the inaugural Bad Grammar Award was won by the 100 academics who wrote a letter to the Guardian objecting to the new National Curriculum. According to them, it places far too much emphasis on learning "endless lists of spellings, facts and rules" and, as a result, will stifle children's natural creativity. Unfortunately, these "educationalists" committed so many grammatical errors in their letter they inadvertently made an argument for precisely the sort of traditional education they were objecting to. (Full disclosure: I was one of the judges of the Bad Grammar Awards. You can read more about the mistakes in the letter here.) You'd think that anyone criticising Michael Gove for wanting children to spend more time on "spellings, facts and rules" would take the trouble to get these sorts of things right, but no. In today's Guardian, Michael Rosen has launched a spirited attack on the new emphasis on grammar in the SATs and – surprise, surprise – commits a howling grammatical error. (To read more, click here.)
Friday 10th May 2013
Why I won't be joining UKIP, in spite of its very likeable leaderI had an interesting discussion with Nigel Farage earlier today for the Telegraph's weekly podcast. It’s always nice to see Nigel. He's got an expansive, avuncular quality that isn't always a characteristic of UKIP's supporters. There's nothing defensive or small about him – he's less like the leader of a political insurgency than an affable publican. I can testify that he makes an excellent drinking companion (see my piece in the Spectator about getting drunk with him at James Delingpole's book launch). We clashed over a number of issues – principally gay marriage – but the central point of disagreement was over whether an Ed Miliband-led government is a price worth paying to give Dave a bloody nose. Farage doesn't come right out and say it, but he more or less accepts that it is. He claimed there's so little difference between Miliband and Cameron that if the split on the Right does lead to a Labour government it won't be a great catastrophe. I don't accept this. In critical policy areas – public borrowing, welfare, education – there's clear blue water between the two main parties. In particular, Cameron has promised an In/Out EU referendum in the next Parliament – a promise I believe he'd keep – whereas Miliband hasn't. This, to my mind, is the toughest question for Farage: Is your loathing of Cameron so great that you’re prepared to risk what may well be our last chance to get out of the EU? By the time Miliband leaves office in 2020, it may well be too late to extricate ourselves from the EU, such is the ever-expanding, octopus-like grip of Brussels. (To read more, click here.)
Thursday 9th May 2013
Sorry, AA Gill, but grammar does matterLast week saw the launch of the Bad Grammar Awards, an annual contest in which prizes are handed out for poor English. Actually, “prizes” is probably the wrong word since no one wants to win them. No one, that is, apart from AA Gill. He entered himself and submitted a badly written email that he’d composed specifically. The judges, of which I was one, considered this but ruled it out on the grounds that Gill would never write as badly as that for the Sunday Times. He may hate grammarians and their pedantic tribe – a point he was trying to make – but his newspaper columns are grammatically sound. A journalist we spent longer on was Isabel Oakeshott, the Sunday Times political editor. In one of several emails she sent to Vicky Pryce entreating her to give her story about Chris Huhne’s speeding points to her paper, Oakeshott spelt “jeopardising” and “licence” as “jeapardising” and “license”. But we concluded that these were fairly minor mistakes in a private correspondence. (To read more, click here.)
Thursday 9th May 2013
My lunch with Julie BurchillSeeing Julie Burchill sitting at the back of the restaurant near Victoria Station, I feel a surge of affection. Chin up, sunglasses on, lips fixed in a pout, she is presenting her usual defiant face to the world. In the past, I’ve always thought of her as being like a screen goddess from Hollywood’s golden age – Marlene Dietrich, for instance. Now, she seems more like a fading Broadway diva and I half expect her to break into a rendition of ‘I’m Still Here’ by Stephen Sondheim. The one time [itals] enfant terrible [itals] of Fleet Street is now 53 and lives in Brighton, but she is very much still here. Earlier this year, a column she wrote for the Observer in which she referred to transsexuals as “bed wetters in bad wigs” caused no end of trouble and this month sees the re-release of Ambition, her 1989 bonkbuster about a female newspaper editor with a penchant for sado-masochism. This seems like a blatant attempt on the part of her publisher to cash in on the success of 50 Shades of Grey, a book Julie says she hasn’t read. “Remember how Gore Vidal said television’s for appearing on not for watching?” she says. “I feel a bit like that about porn. It’s for writing, not for reading.” (To read more, click here.)
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