Westministers: May Shares the Cake

[RedToothBrush]

May's Speech Abbreviated:

We still have nfi how we are going to do this. EU this is your fault. You sort it out. We are too lazy, workshy and fighting like high school children to work it out ourselves. Be our whipping boy.

I support democracy as long as I get to do whatever I like
I support human rights as long as I can ignore them when I like.
I support the rule of law except when it doesn't suit my agenda.

Waffle waffle.

"Creative", "Dynamic" PR for my Premiership.

Waffle waffle

We really need policing cooperation, PLEASE keep it with us. I know I threatened to withdraw this, but I'm sorry, I was wrong and a bit of a dick about this.

Gets to the point FINALLY.

"2 year transition period"

(With another time bomb lock which is still too short for IT departments. Nothing to do with the next general election, honest).

RULE BRITANNIA!

Polite Applause.

We have more fear of the Afd because of what our gov is doing, is so similar to them.

In reality, they are useless politicians, and it's up to the non fascists here and Europe to keep showing that, and work together to do so.

I must say I'm a bit hazy on the status of a labour conference debate. Doesn't the outcome become policy? If so, then these two statements are incompatible. If not, then what's the point of conference?
AFAIK the point is to give party members the opportunity to influence policy in large.
My point was more that as opposition Labour don't even need a coherant policy on anything. They could, it they wanted, have completely contradictory policies on the same thing. They aren't as beholden to anything as the Tories. There isn't the need for them to fall within defined EEA lines for instance on Brexit. Doesn't stop them having a debate and agreeing their own red lines though as a party in their entirity.

amp.ft.com/content/f08ce586-a118-11e7-9e4f-7f5e6a7c98a2
Northern Ireland farmers call for five-year transition after Brexit
Livestock and Meat Commission finds WTO rules would have heavy impact on trade

Keep your eyes on this gem.

Many of Northern Ireland’s beef and sheep farmers are DUP supporters and fear major upheaval to their annual £1.1bn of combined revenues if Brexit is botched.

Five years. Already seeing talk of wanting to stay as long as possible in the CAP in England.

Can DUP rely on these voters if they don't get the transition deal they need. NI politics is so tribal but does Brexit have the power to break that?

I think it has the ability to in the perfect storm.

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-britain-must-accept-ambiguity-to-survive-brexit-1.3230569?mode=amp
Fintan O’Toole: Britain must accept ambiguity to survive Brexit
Theresa May and Brexiteers both insist on a damaging binary view of the UK and Europe

This from the Irish times is cracking.

I am not so sanguine about the fizzling out of the AfD. The CSU is clearly attracting support in Bavaria and elsewhere - More than 70% said that it would be good if you could vote for CSU outside Bavaria (from the Guardian link). I think there is a little shift to the right that nobody should ignore.

When people vote for a party like AfD, especially in Germany, certain lines have to be crossed, certain concepts ditched and others embraced. I don't think a Rubicon has been crossed yet, but I think a battle for hearts and minds is now upon Germany, and the AfD are not idiots.
.......
I think the farming pressure on the DUP will be very significant in determining their approach. While many of the farmers are never going to vote for SF or the SDLP or Alliance, some might go UUP if they thought the DUP were not responsive to their concerns and that would be bad news for the DUP.

@faisalislam
CCHQ has also issued a release criticising Labour's lack of Brexit debate in Brighton - so might we get one in Manchester next week....?

‏ @cyclingkev
Wow! Relaunched schoolcuts.org.uk website - shows 88% of schools still facing real terms cuts.

All the mnetters scrambling to find tutors or teach their own kids because teachers are leaving in droves, might like this one again.

woman11017 re schoolcuts. It's really depressing. Any funding stuff re schools was stopped the day after the Referendum. Literally the day after. I'm a school governor and we're in dire straights. I can only see that it's going to get worse as the economy struggles. I'm getting near to the point of thinking actually what is the point and chucking it all in.

I'm a school governor and we're in dire straights

But strangely matched funding is found for Pearson's ( Murdoch) primary school phonics scheme.

It seems to be the bane of so many mnetters and their kids' lives, along with the awful KS1 and 2 tests.

Figures obtained under Freedom of Information by Professor Margaret Clark, visiting professor in early years education at Newman University, show that £25,593,109 funding has been provided under the Government’s match-funding scheme for buying phonics materials from a Department for Education (DfE) approved list. £22m was spent on materials and £1.3m for training

Read, Write Inc is produced by Ruth Miskin, an enthusiastic proponent of synthetic phonics, a method of teaching reading endorsed by school ministers. She is director of Ruth Miskin Literacy Limited which received £546,614 in matched funding for training from the DfE.

Ruth Miskin was also an adviser to the DfE on the primary curriculum. When the primary curriculum review was announced and the names of advisers, TES reported concerns about a possible conflict of interest between Miskin’s role as adviser and a producer of teaching materials

www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2014/02/phonics-the-sounds-that-letters-make-kerching

Are you sure Pearson is owned by Murdoch? I know he bought a stake in the 1980s but he sold that off fairly quickly.

I've lurked on and much admired these threads for ages but WTF?

woman
Matched funding ran for a couple of years. It no longer exists.
Phonics is generally approved of by mnetters; I post on Primary, so do know.
What was the point of the extract you posted, the programme mentioned in it has nothing to do with Pearsons & what does it have to do with the topic of this thread?

Going back to lurking now but with diminished trust in the knowledge of some posters.

By the way, I'm reading that there is no Brexit debate in the Labour conference. This is not true, there are debates today with Keir Starmer. There is not going to be that vote on FoM and the single market but this doesn't mean Brexit is not going to be addressed.

IMO the real scandal with school funding is the obscene salaries that heads of Multi Academy Trusts pay themselves. At a meeting I went to earlier this year, the figure of a £150,000 salary for an LA's Director of Education with 200 schools to look after, was quoted. A head of an MAT with 9 schools was getting c. £350,000.

I appreciate that school funding isn't part of Brexit, so we were off topic. But, in the sunlit uplands outside the EU there was going to be more money for everything.

Read Write Inc is a good and effective phonics scheme. Ironically, however, it is based on teaching small groups of children all working at the same level, which requires a lot of support staff. Guess which posts are the first to be cut when funding is short?

And I think education funding is relevant to the topic in the same way the NHS is. Brexit costs = less money for everything else.

the programme mentioned in it has nothing to do with Pearsons & what does it have to do with the topic of this thread?

The three most popular resources were (in ascending order):

1 Floppy’s Phonics, published by Oxford University Press (OUP) received approximately £3m in DfE funding;
2 Phonics Bug, published by Pearson, nearly £4m;
3 Read, Write Inc, also published by OUP, received over £4m^.

www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jul/16/pearson-multinational-influence-education-poliy

2012 article, but there have been a lot of educational initiatives of late in which they are involved.

Won't disrupt the thread further, but I have noticed that the phonics programme seems to promote lively and frank discussions in SM.

www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/chris-johns-brexit-now-a-problem-without-a-solution-for-uk-1.3232179
Chris Johns: Brexit now a problem without a solution for UK
European Union can offer only options that Britain has already ruled out

Another cracking article from the Irish Times.

It really does play into the idea that the UK is making an 'offer' that they 'expect the EU to response to' knowing full well that the EU can not offer it, in order to win domestic support for a no deal crash out exit.

The British still don’t get it: appealing for “partnership and creative solutions” sounds warm and fuzzy but ignores the fact that the only types of relationships the EU can offer the UK are Norway-style European Economic Area membership, Canada-style free-trade agreements or Turkey-style customs union arrangements. That’s it. May referenced by name these exact deals and explicitly and definitively rejected all of them. No number of appeals to imagination or partnership can get around the fact that the EU can offer only options that the British have already ruled out.

The trouble with this strategy is that it also assumes the same thing that people assumed when May appointed Johnson to Foreign Secretary. That it was some kind of deliberately Machiavellian plan. The reality is that pretty much every decision May has made hasn't been Machiavellian, its been misguided and incompetent and more concerned about holding on to her job and keeping the Conservative Party together than achieving Brexit or doing whats in the best interest of the country.

I think that there are people driving things to the cliff edge deliberately. But May isn't one of them. She is just clueless and gullible and weak and selfish in her interests.

So to the cliff edge we go.

The article also states:
According to the OECD, Britain will be one of the weakest economies in the world in 2018, growing at about half the rate of the euro area. May claimed in Florence that the British economy had been and always would be “strong”. She should pay more attention to history. The UK joined the EU in 1973 to arrest a century-long economic decline. That strategy worked.

Rees-Moog will be tweeting this later. Honest.

Conflicts of interest are definitely within the remit of this thread.

It is possible for people to be advising on something - which is the BEST thing ever - but in order for there to be trust in the system and transparency, anyone who has a financial vested interest in giving the advice they do, should be under scrutiny and questions raised. EVEN IF THEY ARE RIGHT.

I completely agree with their assessment of Teresa May.

I'd add in limited vision and stubbornness as two extraordinarily un-Machiavellian personality traits too.

Conflicts of interest are definitely within the remit of this thread

Cheers.
Michael Rosen is doing a lot of work on this. So his blog's worth a look.
I've noticed that those who have pedagogical differences with off the shelf and very expensive phonics programmes are called 'phonics deniers'.

But.........if anyone's interested.
www.mumsnet.com/bloggers/guest-blog-phonics-debate
The limits of phonics teaching - Imaginative Minds Library
www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/education-committee/dfe-evidence-check-forum/phonics/

Many very nuanced views on the effectiveness of this strategy at parliamentary evidence forum.^

Final thought:
Why close public libraries and diminish school library provision on an industrial scale, but promote lucrative 'phonics' schemes?

End of thread de rail but with school cuts like they are...........................

Another delurker. Nothing intelligent to add, except for many many thanks for the threads which I have followed from the start. And this, which made me laugh a lot this morning. Dating app for Remainers, called Single Market 😀😀

www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/business/new-dating-app-launched-for-remainers-incapable-of-discussing-anything-else-20170925136411

For whoever it was (I think it was someone who de-lurked briefly) who predicted that "Florence and the Machine" would be a headline - you were right

I'm sure there are others, but I liked this one I would, wouldn't I

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2017/09/23/florence-and-the-machine-politician/

It starts off with something that dh immediately picked up in her speech as she gave it: that she was stating the case for Scottish independence

The strength of feeling that the UK Scottish people have about this need for control and the direct accountability of their politicians is one reason why, throughout its membership the UK Scotland has never totally felt at home being in the European British Union. And perhaps because of our history and geography, the European British Union never felt to us like an integral part of our national story in the way it does to so many elsewhere in Europe England…

The UK joined the EU in 1973 to arrest a century-long economic decline.

....and that was during the time we still had an Empire

I think that there are people driving things to the cliff edge deliberately.
Where is Gove?