"We're all in this together..."

[Neil Foxlee]

... the very rich, that is.

Unashamedly cobbled together from pieces in ***'s favourite newspaper:

"Cutting benefit fraud is a no-brainer. That's why benefit fraud is the first and the deepest cut we will make." (David Cameron, this week's Sun)

Annual cost of benefit and tax-credit fraud: £1.5bn (0.7% of the benefit bill)

Estimated annual cost of tax evasion: £70bn (according to Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK: the IMF puts it higher)

Annual cost of tax avoidance, evasion and non-payment identified in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs 'Protecting Tax Revenues' report: £17bn (go figure the discrepancy with the figure above)

Cut in numbers of HM Revenue and Customs staff: !2.5%, with more to come.

Fortune of Cameron-appointed government spending-review czar and retail magnate Sir Philip Green: £4.1bn (estimate).

Amount of tax avoided (in 2005-6 tax year) by Green by having his company registered in the name of his Monaco-resident and hence non-taxpaying wife: £300m.

Amount of tax paid by Green's company over the last five years: £300-400m (Green's estimate).

[Adam Blake]

Social Darwinism demands that the strong and powerful gain more strength and power by preying on the weak and vulnerable. I wouldn't mind so much if they were honest about it.

[Neil Foxlee]

Vince Cable, who had sharply criticized Labour's previous appointment of Green as an adviser precisely because of his tax situation*, was not informed of Green's appointment this time round. He's not best pleased:

http://www.cityam.com/news-and-analysis/cable-requests-green-showdown-meeting.

There's speculation he'll be the first LibDem cabinet member to resign. I hope he does.

PS The 2005 saving of £300m made by Green and mentioned above relates to a £1.2 billion dividend paid to his non-taxpaying wife by his retail company Arcadia. She's the registered owner of another company which holds most of the shares in Arcadia.

* "I have no time for billionaire tax dodgers who step off the plane from their tax havens into the country where they make their money and have the effrontery to tell us how to vote and how to run our tax policies. If some of them came onshore and paid their taxes it would make a useful dent in the budget deficit."

[jackdaw version]

This story from you-know-who's favorite newspaper is the story I'm surprised no one has pointed to in this general context:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/201 ... te-schools

A-level results: Public schools expected to take lion's share of new A* grades

Talk about ensuring that the class/money divide and its attendant privileges are cemented into place for a few more generations! I'd have thought that even the Bristolian would have a problem with that.

[Hugh Weldon]

It's not so much about exam results as the blistering sense of confidence and entitlement (cushioned by money of course) that the public school ethos instils. But if you did want to bring about more social mobility through educational policy, you just bring back grammar schools and selection. Ideologically unsound I guess, but I would imagine there's more than one or two of us here that benefited from them.

[NormanD]

Ideologically unsound I guess, but I would imagine there's more than one or two of us here that benefited from them.

I did. I'm the youngest of three sons. The eldest failed the 11+ and went to a secondary modern school (a real dump, in all senses, named after the town's great C19th poet). The middle brother was a 'borderline' pass, so went to a technical high school, which was not-quite-the-grammar-school. I was the grammar grub, and spent the first three years or so in fear of bullying, anti-semitism, organised sports, sexual abuse, and being ashamed of coming from a less well-off family.

We were streamed within the school from the age of 12: A (science or language), B, C and D, on the basis of the end of the first year's exams. D was for dunce. I was B.

The school was a single-sex boys' school, with links to old universities, and the smarter kids would be accelerated for Oxford/Cambridge entrance, and the results were good.

I started this school as a complete naif - it was run by a tyrannical headteacher (who later shot himself, during one summer break - sadly not in morning assembly), with a house system, senior and junior prefects, teachers with gowns, heavy emphasis on active sports, a Cadet Force with an armoury in the playground (honestly). It had been fee-paying until the mid-1940s, then open to Eleven + selection. Most of the kids I was close to at primary school went to other schools, and I had no friends when I started.

I hated the experience completely, but won't deny I came through, and did all right (getting to one of the new universities). I can't and won't be objective about the school, I can't see it as a good part of my life as it was very alienating. It became a comprehensive school later on. Both my nephews went there, and got much more out of it than I may have done. And the latest Doctor Who went there (he may have possibly been there when I was a student, in a previous incarnation) so something must have gone right.

[Neil Foxlee]

I went to a grammar school too. The main objections to them were that the eleven-plus exam stigmatized those who failed it and that the standard of education in many secondary modern schools was poor, creating a two-tier state system.

The main problem with doing away with grammar schools (apart from the fact that most of them provided a decent education) is that it's sharpened the divide in what is a two-tier education system as a whole - the other tier, of course, being fee-paying (independent or "public", ie private) schools.

So-called "academies" seem to be an attempt to reintroduce grammar schools under another name.

In France, I think I'm right in saying that most private schools are religious (Catholic).

[Adam Blake]

Wow, that sounds just like my school, Norman! It did me a power of good being bullied and kicked around for three years before I learned that playing the guitar and being knowledgeable about music gave me an 'in'. Not much changed there then, eh?

But seriously, if I hadn't been so damn miserable at St Marylebone Grammar School, I wouldn't have sought such desperate refuge in music and the whole course of my life would have been different. My school was doomed anyway, it was closed by the ILEA in 1981. Looking back on it, I can see they gave me a much better education than I would have got if I'd gone to a local comp. It was the strangest social mix: rich brats from St John's Wood coming to school by cab every morning, smart thugs from the Lisson Green estate. We didn't mindlessly vandalise, we stole chemicals from the chemistry labs and made bombs to explode things with. THAT was the difference. They taught you to think fast. The teachers would whack you round the head for gratuitous ignorance and stupidity. Ritual humiliation, the cruelty of smart boys with big chips on their shoulders. Face it, I'd have probably been better off at public school. Grammar school kids never really fit. Too well educated for the common touch, too much yob to be in with the nobs. You get to sit at the table but you're never quite sure if you're Upstairs or Downstairs.

[Adam Blake]

Ha ha! So that's me, Norman and Neil all grammar school brats. I think Charlie was too (ah, but he was good at games! That makes ALL the difference in the world!!)

I bet there's more of ya.

My illustrious friend and partner from across the pond was trying to get a handle on the UK education system one time when she clicked after spending an evening with me and Norman:
"Ah! Grammar school's where they send the smart-ass's."
Sadly, I had to tell her that it was they used to send the smart-ass's.

[Hugh Weldon]

Yes Norman, the benefits in my case were more on the academic side, I don't deny they could be pretty awful in many other respects. They made you play rugby, for one. Though I did join the RAF cadet force because you got the chance to fly.

Neil

In France, I think I'm right in saying that most private schools are religious (Catholic

True, I taught in one for a while. But the fees were relatively modest compared to English public schools, and there was none of the snobbery or stuffy traditions (uniforms, house system, hymn singing religiosity etc) associated with the English system.

[jackdaw version]

The point is that every student should get an education appropriate to his or her academic skills, the best education for that particular child, and that there shouldn't be an apartheid system ('cos that's what it is) between children and their education based on class and money.

Yes, I'm a bloody idealist — and I went to a bloody public school, actually two of them, and a horrible boarding prep school at the age of eight. All run by Jesuits, the Pope's Gestapo. And, I say, sod the whole fucking system! It's vile and abusive whether you're on the inside supposedly getting the benefits or outside being shat upon.

[Adam Blake]

I went to a bloody public school, actually two of them, and a horrible boarding prep school at the age of eight. All run by Jesuits, the Pope's Gestapo. And, I say, sod the whole fucking system!

ha ha hah hahhahahahahaha!!!!! Jon, I'd never have guessed in a million years...!

[jackdaw version]

What? You'd never have guessed I'd say, "sod the whole fucking system!" No, I'm serious. Read my PM and you'll see that I sort of did.

[Hugh Weldon]

Adam

Grammar school kids never really fit. Too well educated for the common touch, too much yob to be in with the nobs. You get to sit at the table but you're never quite sure if you're Upstairs or Downstairs.

Perfectly put.

As for Jon's 'sodding the whole fucking system', it is a viewpoint I am sometimes tempted by, though I see no need to utterly damn and denigrate a system in which I evidently did learn something, only possible it seems in the postcode lottery posh area 'good' comps these days. But then again perhaps the only lesson you ultimately learn is that knowledge is so very very not power.

Apropos I think, some of you will already be familiar with this George Carlin rant. On my darker days it sounds like a fairly moderate and restrained account of the way things are:

There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got... because the owners of this country don’t want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

[Con Murphy]

It's not so much about exam results as the blistering sense of confidence and entitlement (cushioned by money of course) that the public school ethos instils. But if you did want to bring about more social mobility through educational policy, you just bring back grammar schools and selection. Ideologically unsound I guess, but I would imagine there's more than one or two of us here that benefited from them.

...and some who arguably suffered for their demise. I'm enjoying the accounts of how horrible grammar school life was, but have yet to see how it was any different than that in comprehensive schools. Not so much in the way of ad-hoc metalwork weaponry, glue-sniffing or teenage pregnancies, perhaps...(mumble mumble how did that Monty Python 'you think you had it bad' sketch go again...?)

Neil's right; how counter-intuitive it was to (all but) abolish grammar schools whilst leaving the private school system in place - let's keep it multi-tier, but take away the one that most helps poor kids with brains get a decent education. And a supposedly socialist Labour Party has to take much of the blame for that - for shame!