Westminster: Brexit is the hard right's weapon of mass distraction

[BigChocFrenzy]

The fervour and divisions over Brexit have suspended normal party politics.

The staggering incompetence & unsuitability of Corbyn as a leader, together with the resulting impotence of Labour has removed the normal checks & balances in UK politics.
There is a vaccum where the Official Opposition should be, so Theresa May is under pressure only from her right.

I fear Thereas May and the Tory rightwing are taking advantage of Brexit to complete the destruction of the post-WW2 social contract and the welfare state.

Meanwhile, the constraints of civilised discourse have been loosened and those with racist or social Darwinist views now feel free to spout their poison openly.

Putin is pouring petrol on all the fires and Arron Banks is lurking < sinister emoticons required >

Zoe Williams:
"Behind a smokescreen of bogus patriotism, ideologically driven cuts to the NHS and all our public services are unpicking the bonds of nationhood"

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/05/brexit-theresa-may-falklands-war-nhs-cuts

"We should be marching against the crisis in adult social care, the closure of care homes, the systematic exploitation of carers, the £4.6bn cut from social care budgets this decade.
We should be .... asking:

“What exactly is the plan, if we’ve decided we can no longer afford to care for the elderly and the disabled?
What do we do with them instead?”

"We should be marching against cuts in education funding"

"Every morning we wake up to someone on the radio explaining, despairingly, that you can’t fix the hospital bed crisis until social care is fixed, and you can’t fix that until council tax brings in more, and it can’t bring in more because wages are too low."

"But when everything breaks at the same time, that is not a coincidence: it is a plan.

As surely as Margaret Thatcher had an economic plan on employment, rights, industry and wages,
this century’s Conservatives have a plan on public services, which is to smash them beyond all recognition."

ron
I'm not an expert in admissions procedure exams, but at GCSE and A level,
marking schemes, old papers, grading boundaries and results, thus far have to be transparent, and are available on websites for students and teachers.
Up till now those exams were fair and transparent.

11+ admissions, on the other hand, are not. They don't provide the above information and in that report it said:
"the adjudicator is saying that some schools are cheating on admissions in order to boost the ability of their intake"

It's simply not a transparent system and prone therefore to problems.
Here's another piece about it:
www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2016/04/why-grammar-schools-want-to-keep-shtum-about-the-11

The 'tutor proof' thing is a red herring. Students are tutored from KS1 to degree level these days!

Misti - I am 100% certain that the same would happen here.

At one time we had a range of schools called 'Central Schools'. They were a step down from the grammars, which were a bit rarified with their Latin and Greek and lack of practical skills. Both my grandfather, FIL and post war, SIL went to such schools - they taught Science, as well as French and or German, plus practical skills such as shorthand and typing - so they offered a broad based education which equipped people well for a good range of jobs. It's a pity that we didn't develop this post the 1944 Act.

Wrt grammars....
My dad and his siblings all passed the 11+
Only his oldest brother went....they could only afford to send one of their 5 children.
Then there are people like my fils cousin who think they are one of the "chosen" because he went to a GS. He is knob. Although to be fair he would have been a knob whatever school he went to 😒

Oh dear - don't get me started on how if there was only money for one to go to the Grammar it would be the boy - because the girl would only wast an education by getting married.

Badders I will not mix irn bru and Jamiesons. not

Woman!!!! You don't mix good whiskey with ANYTHING!!!! 😱

Peregrina...or not sending girls to university....if you've read testament of youth it is eye opening in parental attitudes to women and FE 😮
X

I had a chocolate cortado this morning.
It was lovely

I have read Testament of Youth - very good too.

Mind you, few people went to University - but the lads at least did get good apprenticeships on which they could build a career. Apart from Hairdressing, there weren't apprenticeships for girls.

And Grammar School girls going into Hairdressing? My Headmistress had a fit at that. As it happened one person I know who did, quickly got established with her own Salon and made a very successful career out of it.

Marking place. Thanks BigChoc.

I'm DYING to try a chocolate cortado!

Thanks for starting a new thread, Chox. Hope to see Red back soon.

Nearly 90 posts in one morning

Thanks for the thread BigChoc

I totally read I'm DYING to try a chocolate cortado! as cortodol. Why would you want a chocolate painkiller? Actually why wouldn't you want a chocolate painkiller?

Interesting if depressing read
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-hate-crime-eu-referendum-london-racist-religious-faith-victims-figures-statistics-a7615356.html

It was VERY yummy!
Quite small though....

My PIL went to a grammar school.
My FIL still talks about the fact they had to learn Latin and really why on earth did you need to do that!

PIL are farmers, they've made a lot of money BUT they are both very interesting and able to hold an argument in a way that I haven't found that many people able to do. I've always wondered if that was the 'effect' of grammar school....
They had this attitude re girls vs boys though. DH was encouraged heavily to go to Uni but his Dsis wasnt.
I still see that with DSIL and her dcs. The boys are clearly encouraged to do very well at school whereas the girl isn't (her academic achievements are never mentioned for example, even though she is doing just as well as the other two iyswim). It makes me sad TBH.

Sorry it should have been my PIL NEVER made a lot of money ....

My df is like that red. He's very invested in what I will do with ds sport and academia wise. Every time I pointedly say 'if he's interested then we will pursue it, as we will do with dd'. Ds is my youngest. It's almost like he forgot he had 3 girls and no boys himself

I was fortunate in that regard
My late father and my mum (despite both leaving school at 15) were very pro education and we were members of the library (remember those!!?) before we could read...
I still remember the raised eyebrows from some classmates when the sets were given out at the start of the school year....poor
Kids like me weren't supposed to be in the
Top sets...

poor Kids like me weren't supposed to be in the Top sets...

No, and so the middle class parents went up to the school to make a fuss about why little Johnny wasn't in the top set. The fact that he was bright enough but a lazy arse seemed to pass them by.

woman I completely agree with that article and the fallacy of claiming that a few hours of testing (it is four here) can discriminate the top 2% of 2000 11 year olds. It certainly is not borne out by their subsequent academic results. I think the schools have hidden behind the legal arguments because a proper rigorous selection process would be too time consuming and expensive to administer and why bother when you get nice compliant middle class motivated pupils? However my point was that you could not have any other sort of selection process that could actually be even 90% effective in discriminating the most able - teachers are not respected, parents are more pushy and there is a legal framework . Private Schools that select on ability have a much wider selection process that gathers evidence from a range of sources and they can and do go on their judgement of ability, not a spurious test. So it really is not possible to claim that Grammar Schools could now ever, whatever system they implement, give opportunities to bright working class children.

The tutor issue is not a red herring though. Tutors have to be paid for, so and there is an arms race that puts some sort of moral duty on the schools to stop parents subjecting their children to years of tutoring amounting to child abuse, simply directed at passing their tests

Plus we now have plenty of evidence that good community comprehensive schools do a good job of giving all their pupils the chance to achieve their potential. the energy should go on making all of them that good .

New grammar school funding=
Dodgy entrance exams + dodgy funding and accountability+guanxi( is that the Chinese word? ron?) for academy chains.

While Hammond cuts benefits for the bereaved:
www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/07/philip-hammond-urged-to-pause-cut-in-benefits-for-widowed-parents

You seemed to have had an eventful morning based on the earlier thread.

Thank you BigChoc for the new thread.