The Section That Wasn’t

Don't get smart with me, sonny!

 

 

 

 

 

Cpl Gordon

This is a picture of my Dad taken in 1946. He was in Port Said doing his National Service with the Royal Engineers. Dad was a corporal and later on when John Biffen was in the news (Bernard Ingham described him as a semi-detached member of the cabinet) he used to tell us that Sapper Biffen was in his platoon. After Dad died I wrote to Lord Biffen (as he then was) and although Dad’s name didn’t mean anything to him he did indeed confirm that he served in Port Said with the Royal Engineers in 1946. Dad did a few different jobs but the thing he did most was a driving instructor. He was a good driving instructor if you didn’t mind passive smoking but not a good businessman. His accountant once told my Mum that he was the only person he’d ever met that actually exaggerated how much he earned to the Inland Revenue.

I digress I mentioned Port Said because when later on in life illness (Huntington’s Disease) prevented Dad from working he used to sit for hours on end reading teach yourself Arabic books and listening to Arabic cassettes too. He liked the Palestinians that he met in 1946. In fact he got demoted to Lance corporal for drinking out-of-bounds with them. He suffered a stroke in 1992 and shortly after, his mental health took a turn for the worse. He started talking about moving to France in order to set up a school of Philosophy and he was insisting that various family members help him with the arrangements. You might not realise just how deluded that was but  believe me it was. He was becoming increasingly agitated and was determined to leave hospital and head for Dover. I urged the relevant authorities to consider having him sectioned. A meeting was set up and I wheeled him in with tears streaming down my cheeks feeling worse than Judas Iscariot (Judas betrayed the Son of Man but at least he did not betray his old man, so far as we know). An Australian psychiatrist asked Dad all sorts of questions (Name, Date, Prime Minister) all of which dad breezed through. Then Dad got too confident. “What’s three times thirteen, Mr Gordon?” “37″, Dad snapped back. “Actually it’s 39″ Momentarily,  Dad was defeated and deflated but then he turned the table on the Psychiatrist with a question that the Psychiatrist did not understand (either because of Dad’s native Glaswegian accent or his slurred speech from the stoke or possibly a combination of both. The Psychiatrist looked to me and my Mum for help. We were initially too busy trying to suppress laughter to help because we had heard Dad  clearly say “Okay, you tell me – what’s the Arabic for air traffic control tower?”  The Psychiatrist responded very gracefully “Touche, Mr Gordon!”

In the event Dad agreed to go to the “Vale Unit” (Dingly Dell as he later called it) quietly as he realised there wasn’t much alternative.

Air Traffic Control Tower

It’s time to read this again

This comment came from a commentator on CiF called Peter Guillam in 2008. It’s worth having another look at it:

If all the free-market, private sector cheerleaders on this thread are right then it seems that those in the public sector are parasitical, paid to lounge around doing nothing (that is when not pretending to be sick), incompetent in every respect, overpaid, enjoying gold-plated pension schemes and generally laughing all the way to the bank – and all paid for by the sweat of the heroic efforts of the value-creators. I think that this is cliched, stereotyped, self-congratulatory and economically illiterate BS, and that most of the people saying things of this sort wouldn’t last five minutes as, say, a social worker, a housing officer, a care home worker (or even, dare one say it, a community outreach officer).

But if I am wrong and they are right, then the only conclusion can be that the public sector people have arranged things pretty smartly for themselves and that the private sector drones are suckers and thickies, reduced to bewailing their plight on cif whilst Unison members open yet another bottle of fine claret and put their feet up, laughing merrily at the scam they have pulled off and planning their next skiing trip. And free-marketeers, approving as they are of individuals pursuing their own self-interest, should surely applaud and start looking at the jobs page in the Society section of the Guardian so that they too can join this magnificent and munificent gravy train without further delay

So true.

Why he was wrong to say the strike was wrong

A response to Paul Richards.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Ed really shouldn’t go out of his way to annoy his core support. A lack of support is one thing declarations of ‘wrongness’ quite another.
“Parents know the value of day’s education”. Oh puh-lease! Was Ed complaining about the royal wedding interrupting GCSE and GCE preparation or did he accept the invitation? Sanctimonious double standards, frankly.
Ah yes the British public! Well I can see how nobody who aspires to be PM wants to be on the wrong side of public opinion but surely he could try and shape public opinion from time to time rather than just follow it? The logical conclusion of this strategy is to let MORI write the manifesto.
Public support isn’t that much against the strikers 40:49 – according to The Sun of all papers!
The claim that Ed will not be able to guarantee public sector pensions is just wrong. Public sector pensions are affordable. Their cost as a proportion of GDP is set to fall – as Hutton shows. The argument is about fairness. Cameron’s way of resolving the disparity is to make public sector pensions worse – another possibility is to find a way of making private sector pensions better.
Maybe if secondary action was made legal again we could have more marches rallies and speeches in favour of sacked retail workers. Would Ed want that?  Maybe he could have made a few speeches about them. I didn’t hear any last week. In fact given that no Labour leaders ever support strikes I would have been quite happy if Ed had not made any speeches this week in favour of public sector workers and concentrated on unemployed retail workers instead. But he didn’t, did he?

That’s enough, Ed

Here’s Ed telling me that the strike is wrong (ad infinitum). Here’s Caroline. I took this picture of Caroline on the picket line yesterday

Caroline is my MP. I spent quite a large part of the little spare time I have as a teacher, trade unionist, and school governor trying (unsuccessfully) to make sure that Caroline wasn’t elected as my MP last year. I was desparately keen for the rather splendid Nancy Platts to be elected. Had she been elected I’m sure that Nancy would have visited us on the picket line, listened to our concerns and offered her support.

I’m just saying, Ed

I’ll be working hard for a Labour victory in 2015. Fanciful as it might seem it is my belief (still) that Labour is not the best hope for working people across the UK, it is the only hope for working people across the UK. But, Ed!  Honestly. Not a good day at the office.

 

Yesterday’s strike – an apology

Dear Parents and Carers,

I’d like to start off by apologising for the disruption caused by the strike yesterday. If it’s any consolation, I know how you feel. My son’s school was shut down and the OH had to look after him home in the morning and in the afternoon we relied upon the kindness of a family friend. I also lost a day’s pay. So why did I and so many others do it? Well- it was a last resort – since the government have been eyeing our pensions, I’ve written to our local MPs and visited them in Parliament, I’ve marched round the Level a few times, I’ve organised public meetings to make our case, I’ve even gone on TV a couple of times to make our case but still the Government have not budged an inch on any of the important matters (huge increase in pension contributions – much higher than a day’s pay, a devalued pension based on CPI, and – worst of all – raising the retirement age to 68). As Mark Serwotka demonstrated yesterday, the government is adamant on these issues.

You may have been told that the ballot showed luke warm support for industrial action but here in Brighton and Hove we had the highest turnout of anywhere in the country and a huge majority in favour of strike action we would have comfortably passed Vince Cable’s 50% test.

I am also very keen to thank you for the incredible support you showed yesterday. In my capacity as media-guy I was asked to go on picket line duty outside BHASVIC on the busy junction of Old Shoreham Road and Dyke Road. I was surprised and overwhelmed in equal measure by the encouragement of passers-by. Scaffolders, bus drivers, white van drivers, binmen, postal workers, Year 10 students, cyclists, ambulance drivers – it really was incredible and made me feel quite humbled. It was of course a taste of things to come on the march itself where we (all 4,000 of us)  received the same level of support from shoppers and indeed police officers.

We care passionately about our children’s education, I have devoted my whole working life to that cause. In my spare time I am a school governor. I would not have gone on strike had we been three weeks away from GCSEs – like the royal wedding was. The politicians who had an invitation to that event didn’t seem to care about the disruption to our children’s education then but do so so now – a clear case of double standards – as indeed is their reluctance to reform their own pensions. Personally I was furious – I teach triple Year 11 on a Friday and did not want the students to miss any lessons so close to the exam.

Your support yesterday was magnificent and I am so very grateful – let’s all hope that it serves as a wake up call to the government

Love,

Ron

…and a Union Rep listens to his members

…let’s call him Paul. He’s an NQT and teaches PE (no, really). Paul couldn’t come to the meeting tonight but he came along to see me before. He’s never been on any sort of strike before and certainly does not see himself as militant. He’s reluctant to go on strike as he’s saving up money to get married and for a deposit for a mortgage. He knows that a day off strike will cost him less than the planned increase in pension contributions but he’s inclined to believe that the government will get its way no matter what he does.  He is certain that he couldn’t sit in school on the day of the strike knowing that his mates in the department who have kids are out on strike so he wanted me to know that he definitely will be on strike.

Emily on the other hand, despite her youth is an old school left-wing trade unionist –  even down to the Scouse accent. She’s on a temporary contract (maternity cover) and the woman that she’s covering for returns to work in July. Emily will not be getting any pay over the summer( that always seems so unfair) and despite looking has not yet found work as a teacher in September. Nobody could expect Emily to sacrifice a day’s salary in these circumstances but she is not prepared to contemplate not going on strike -”I couldn’t live with myself” she says.

I’m lucky to work alongside such inspirational people.

A Union Rep Writes to His Members…

This morning I sent this email to my 70 members at work…

Dear All

You will all have heard about the strike by now – please click here. Some points to note

Teachers nearing retirement-  In 2008 we gave advice to members close to retirement not to take strike action because of the adverse effect it would have on pensions. Since then pension rules have changed and that advice no longer applies.

You will be told about how wrong, greedy and irresponsible it is for people to strike. Our Education secretary isn’t  averse to picket line action though as this article describes. We should not listen to lectures about avarice from a man who maxed out on expenses every year he could, flipped homes and moonlighted on The Times (c. £200k p.a) while he was a backbench MP

You will be told how taking a day of strike action will jeopardise the education of a generation by the same government who shut down schools three weeks before the Maths GCSE to celebrate the royal wedding and which plans to close schools next year for two days to celebrate the diamond jubilee.

You may even be told that you can’t afford to take strike action but if that is true then you certainly can’t afford to pay the planned increase in pension contributions.

You may be told that this ballot lacks democratic legitimacy as 92% voted in favour on a 40% turnout ( i.e. 36.8% of NUT members) but in the General election 36.1% voted Tory on a 65% turnout which (if my Maths is correct) is 23.4% of the electorate voting for David Cameron. A government which insists that unions abide by a higher democratic standard than it requires has surely lost the argument if not the plot.

Ignore them and while we should all regret that it has come to this never be ashamed of defending your terms and conditions.

Best wishes,

Ron

Open letter to Vince Cable

Dear Vince
Happy belated birthday – last month wasn’t it? You’ve just turned 68! Do you feel up to teaching a class of rowdy Year 9 students on a rainy Wednesday afternoon? I suspect not. I’ve been a teacher now for 21 years. I never thought I was going to make a huge sum of money but I did expect a half decent pension. I was hoping to retire at 55 – not a full pension but I figured I was only going to lose out if I made it til I was 72 and if I reach 72 I’ll be pleased. Why? In the last five years four of my colleagues have died. Mike was 41, Mandy was 49, Jimmy was 56 and John was 57. It’s all very anecdotal but my teacher friends don’t seem to last very long. I do not want to die from a stress induced heart attack trying to teach/control/entertain a class of teenagers when I’m in my mid sixties. I’m beginning to think if you had your way you would change the name of the film to “Stay exactly where you are, Mr Chips you’ll be working for another 8 years” In the staff room we make jokes about widening the corridors for mobility scooters and installing a stair lift to get to the staff room which will soon resemble a nursing home but it’s really not that funny. Traditionally, I have been more on the Roy Hattersley wing of the Labour Party but I think Bob Crow had it right today when he described your performance at the GMB conference in my home town of Brighton as the coalition’s good cop. It would appear that you don’t want to tighten up strike laws but you’ll be unable to stop your Tory colleagues from doing so if anyone defies your will. Well you can go down the General Jaruzelski route if you want (is that what liberals mean by civil liberties?) but I’ve written to my MP, lobbied my MP, emailed my MP I’ve marched and campaigned and none of that seems to have helped. I’m going to strike because I don’t think I have anything to lose. The teaching unions accepted changes to pension arrangements in 2007. We did not strike then but that seems now to have been seen as a sign of weakness, I’m determined not to make the same mistake twice. Of course you know that the increased retirement age is just one of the changes your government intends to make. Increased pension contributions (£100 per month) the move to career average pension, the move from rpi to cpi, all of these will cost me in the region of £156,000. I’m going to be stuffed if I don’t fight these changes and this makes striking a painful but actually a simple choice. It’s not just about the money though, it’s what Mike, Mandy, Jimmy and John would have wanted me to do.

Love and kisses,

Ron

Uh-oh Birbalsingh strikes again (or not)

Here’s a link to Katharine Birbalsingh’s latest offering for The Telegraph re the teachers’ striking in Darwen Vale.

It get’s off to a bad start.

The teachers who are on strike because their pupils won’t behave

Well at the risk of hair-splitting they aren’t on strike because the pupils won’t behave they’re actually on strike because they believe that the SMT aren’t dealing with the situation. There’s an important difference that we would expect a teacher to understand. As a matter of fact a strike against of unruly pupils would be illegal.

But you’ll remember what my opposition says about me speaking out: that only 1 per cent of what I say is true, that I have spoken up for personal gain, that all I want to do is sell a book. To Miss with Love, funnily enough, does not record children challenging teachers to fights or threatening them. That’s because for most of my career, I’ve only ever worked in “good” schools. Indeed, I had only ever worked (until my last post of 4 weeks) in schools where some 10 families were competing for every place. So I was only reporting what I’ve seen in the best of our schools, not our worst

The strike is apparently a vindication of what Katharine has been saying all along.

The response from some was to say that my dire opinion of our state secondary schools results from me only ever having worked in the worst inner-city London has to offer. Lancashire doesn’t sound very “inner-city London” to me. I have never gone on strike in my life. And while I have been appalled, during my entire career, of the behaviour in our schools, I have never experienced it so bad that I felt the need to walk out on my job. These teachers in Lancashire are not so lucky

No Katharine has never gone on strike in her life but she has taken a day or two of school to speak at conferences and stuff. The careful reader will note that Katharine is appalled at the behaviour in “our schools”  - all of them. She again misses the point that the teachers are not walking out because of bad behaviour but because of the failure of management to deal with it properly.

I wonder what the unions will say about these teachers? Will they shun them, too? Will they refuse to back anything that they are saying? Chris Keates, general secretary of the Nasuwt, has said that these teachers were left with no other option but to strike. Funny how she didn’t say the same thing about me speaking at the Conservative Party conference!

Here you should notice the side swipe at all the unions before singling out Chris Keates. Chris Keates may not have supported her speaking at Conservative Party conference but Christine Blower defended her right to speak out. But let’s not pretend that teachers striking because of management failings are supporting all your different educational viewpoints.

For months I have been saying that our senior teams across Britain are not leaders, but followers. Time and time again I have said that we need to stop blaming individual teachers (although clearly bad teachers exist) and look to the system that promotes and supports incompetent senior staff, who do nothing to lead the school properly, have no understanding of behaviour and learning/teaching systems that work, and collect salaries of 60+ grand for essentially ticking boxes handed down from the well-meaning politicians from up above

Some good points are made here but she’s handling a double edged sword – the very system which she castigates for promoting incompetent senior staff who collect 60+ grand also promoted her to a 60 + grand job.

A TV news channel just rang me and asked, “How did we get to this position?” My response is, when an alcoholic wants to change his life, he stands up at Alcoholics Anonymous and says, “My name is X, and I’m an alcoholic.” The only way to fix a problem is to first recognise the problem exists. I implore all of you to stand up and demand more from our schools, from our children and from ourselves. Quite literally, our civilisation depends on it.

Notice here that unless Telegraph readers demand more from our schools, children and themselves (what does that actually mean?), civilisation will collapse. A nice rhetorical flourish to end her piece. Wonder if The Telegraph pays her more than 60 grand per year…

Alfie Meadows’ Mum Writes

This comment on Lynne Featherstone’s blog was being discussed on Twitter tonight. I want to share it with as many people as possible:

“30 December 2010 at 9:53 pm
Lynne this is the mother of a student who almost died marching to stop the ideological cuts being introduced {the ones you pledged never to vote for}. I want to see you shouted at in the streets for shame..
The Guardian, Thursday 30 December 2010
Do others feel deeply patronised by the appointment of Simon Hughes to “frame an effective message” about the changes to further and higher education (U-turn hint, 29 December)? The government’s assumption is that those who protest have misunderstood the facts.
But the coalition’s policies are filled with contradictions; one lies in the pervasive rhetoric of choice. Students will take their loans and choose the best university for them, producing a free market in higher education that will lead to the growth of some institutions and academic subjects and the collapse of others. Citizen petitions will select new laws to be debated in parliament.
This rhetoric merely conceals the coalition’s appeal to economic necessity: there is no choice, they tell us. If you oppose our attempts to reshape public services, or higher education, you are being childish, failing to face the facts, disrupting the great work of national recovery. You are part of an almost “feral” mob. This technique is familiar to all parents: if a child resists (going to school etc) offer a small trivial choice which creates the illusion of control. Would you like the Moomin lunch box or the Fireman Sam one? What this tiny area of choice tries to conceal is the child’s lack of autonomy. But, as every parent also knows, there are choices, and they are made by the parent.
Economists disagree over the economic crisis; the coalition’s deeply ideological “reforms” are not driven by economic necessity and it is this knowledge that leads large numbers of citizens, of every age, class and level of education, to take to the streets. The fear of dissent is what drives the violence with which protest is being policed. As a member of that “feral” mob on 9 December – and mother of injured student Alfie Meadows – I know that a party which could not gain a majority at surely the most propitious moment in recent history is trying to use the language of necessity to bring in changes that will reduce equality.
Susan Matthews”