"Go to work on an egg" - a slogan that was run well before my time, yet I am very familiar with it such is its impact on the social conscience. And good advice too, in my book - if I had the patience to boil an egg every morning in between making up for lost time in order to catch the bus, the I too would go to work on an egg. But of course, I'd be stupid to - according to the government at least.
The Department for Education and Skills are interfering again. This time they are handing out one size fits all advice on how to teach our young children. They have produced a whopping 208 page document telling professional teachers how to teach. Unsurprisingly the NUT has described it as insulting and criticised it as another attempt to micro-manage classroom practice. The report, called the Rose Review (conducted by Sir Jim Rose, a former director of inspection at Ofsted) recommends that reading be taught through the use of synthetic phonics, which involves children learning individua
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That's it, I've had enough. You want to be moderate. You want to excuse the imbecility as the words and actions of an extremist minority. You fear that you may come to regret any sweeping statements of condemnation in response to the latest example of intolerance, and that by overreacting to their overreactions, you are sinking to their level.
But I can't stand the self-imposed equivocation any more. I don't believe it, and neither, I suspect, do many of their apologists. It is time to stop fooling ourselves.
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Is the government right to impose a smoking ban rather than let the premises owners (e.g. places of work, public houses) decide? Is this not setting a worrying precedent or should the government intervene where it sees fit?
Last weeks poll was about the HIPs fiasco - should the government admit they have messed up, cut and run and scrap HIPs; or having taken it this far, should they steam ahead? 57% of you were in favour of scrapping the whole shambles (a position I agree with). 27% of you felt that just the information pack element should be scrapped but the EPCs should still go ahead. A tiny 16% of you wanted the government to steam on ahead.
In less than two weeks the English smoking ban will come in to force. Anyone who lights up in an enclosed public space will likely to be jumped on by a health and safety "officer" and fined £50. I am a little torn by this policy - on the one hand those who wish to be free of smoke can have it forced on them in pubs, but on the other hand who is the government to tell us whether we can smoke or not? If there was a demand to ban smoking, wouldn't the pubs already have banned it themselves
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Government
Richard Granger has resigned. Never heard of him? You will know his work. He is was Britain's top paid civil servant (£290,000 a year no less) and was responsible for upgrading information technology (IT) systems and introducing electronic patient records within the NHS. Yes, that £12bn upgrade system that has run well over budget, is two years late, is littered with problems and will not have that much benefit to actual patient care at all.
I get a distinct feeling that the Tories are rapidly moving back to square one at the moment. It may well be too early to say with any conviction that they are back in Hague/IDS/Howard territory, but the signs are there. They have had a miserable month with the grammar schools debate, the rise of Gordon and ever bubbling worry that no one wants to be a Tory Mayor (and that includes Greg Dyke, as we all found out much to the red faces at CCHQ).
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Iain Dale has demolished in a few short words Ming Campbell's proposal to abuse local-authority powers to get more social housing built, so effectively that even the LibDem NorfolkBlogger agrees with him. This has provoked an unintentionally funny response on NorfolkBlogger's site from Tim Leunig, Lecturer in Economic History at the LSE, and original author of Ming's proposal:
"In what sense are CLAs illiberal?
They:
1) Allow local authorities total control over how many houses are built in their area
2) Allow local authorities total control over what proportion are social houses
3) Will lead to lower house price inflation, so that hopefully your child and mine can afford to leave home in 2030
Freedom and social justice: a good combination, surely?"
In what sense is "total control" by the authorities "illiberal"? If you need to ask, Tim, you are probably beyond help.
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And so to the BMA's annual conference where GPs voted on various issues. There were unanimous votes to carry the following motions:
This conference has no confidence in
1) the UK government's handling of the National Health Service,
2) the Secretary of State for Health in England
So after all the fuss, u-turns, backtracking, re-packaging, delays, spin and farce it seems that HIPs may not be enforceable after all! That is right, even if the government does go ahead with its pseudo-implementation on 1st August, there are loopholes which will mean houses can still go on the market with that all important information pack. According to the FT:
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JG pointed out Boris Johnson's comments on Blair's speech about the modern media. It deserves a post of its own.
Boris wants to characterize Blair's comments as being mainly about the media's treatment of him. If you read Blair's speech, very little of it was about his treatment at the hands of the media. And he acknowledged his complicity.
Boris must be assuming that most people will not bother to read Blair's actual words, and will instead rely on what they hear about it through the media. Would that be the same "media-literate" public who he claims "can almost always see behind the hysteria and the hyperbole, and work out what is really going on", who "find it relatively easy to blow the froth off a story and get to the nub"? Would you like any cream with your disingenuity, Boris?
Misrepresenting Blair's argument is not enough. He must also recast the media as poor, set-upon creatures, deserving of our sympathy, as they struggle in the glare of the public spotlight against the harsh criticisms of the blogosphere. A mistake, that. It is so over-egged that most readers, however credulous, will smell a rat. A "new and terrifying threat"? "Hordes of lynx-eyed brainboxes out there in cyberspace"? Journalists "increasingly accountable, increasingly vulnerable to the pithy rejoinders of the man or woman on the net"?
I don't know if this counts to you as a pithy rejoinder, Boris. But let's see what difference it makes. Are you feeling threatened? Are you taking account? Do you think this post will make the slightest difference to your journalistic career? You, and most of your readers, probably won't even know it exists. You wrote your piece because you knew you could get away with it, not because you feared that you couldn't.
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