Chaos is come again

The villain of Othello, the captivating and manipulative anti-hero Iago, swears "by Janus"; a typically Shakespearean allusion, even in the most intense period of religious advancement in England for hundreds of years, to the remote past and its gods.

Janus is the god after whom the Romans named the month of January. Usually depicted with two faces - one looking forward to the Spring and the other looking back to the dead of winter - he is used by Shakespeare as a symbol of Iago's duplicity, but is widely regarded as having been the Roman god of transition and change. As such, he is more relevant to Shakespeare's crumbling Othello than first meets the eye - the more so because the play itself was first performed at the beginning of a new, purposefully Protestant, reign, and the end of Elizabeth's. 

The past is a foreign country, of course: they do things differently there. Nevertheless, for all the connotations of his two-faced statues, perhaps Janus needs to be invoked by some of us here. Not because we are coming to the end of a reign - there must be a good few years left in our beloved Brenda yet - but because the pace of change has hit home in some diverse ways this week. 

One of our other beloved institutions, here in the UK, is the BBC. Like the Queen, it is in its ninth decade. This week it finds itself in crisis. It has been caught on the hop by a change it thought it understood and could control. Looking back, it might remind us of the way in which HM The Queen carried on applying the old rules in the face of popular outrage following the death of Diana. She was, of course, technically right in 1997 to say that there should be no state funeral and no lowering of the flag for the death of a commoner. Mild-mannered Brits, whipped up by the print media, watched astonished as they saw they had power, and a dumbstruck Royal Family accepted that the process did not control the reality. The Queen, CEO of the longest established and most stable business in the UK, came out and said she was wrong. In the years that followed, the monarchy modernised relentlessly - and enjoys unprecedented popularity today. 

So, what has all this got to do with this week? Just over a week ago, the BBC ran a piece in its flagship Newsnight programme, flagged up via twitter feeds picked up by the nationals during the day, claiming that it was about to name a senior Tory as a paedophile  linked with a decades old inquiry into child sex abuse in Wales. This is the same Newsnight whose editorial team were half-demolished in the wake of the Savile scandal that had rocked the programme a few weeks previously by failing to broadcast a piece suggesting Savile was a paedophile. 

In the afternoon before the programme, fifteen minutes on my broken smartphone gave me the name of the man widely regarded by the Twitterati as likely to be outed; another hour, rather worryingly, some credible suggestions that the man in question was probably not the culprit. These were mostly ignored: trifles light as air were to Twitter confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ. The story that Newsnight was going to name a prominent Tory paedophile was all over the front pages of every national newspaper website, was trending on Twitter, and was, in short, every editor's dream. 

The programme itself followed process. It punctiliously avoided naming anyone living as a member of the paedophile ring. This avoided the reality: anyone who was interested who had a computer could find out in seconds who was meant, and thereafter put two and two together - and make five. Most already had, as the tweets had clearly intended. 

A few days later, the story unravelled; and those up early enough on Saturday could listen to the thinking woman's crumpet, John Humphrys, gently destroying the BBC's Director General, who admitted that he had had less knowledge of the content of the piece than I did. He hadn't seen the tweets, hadn't seen the programme, and hadn't seen some of the damning press coverage in the days that followed. Nothing extenuated, he laid bare his extraordinary ignorance about his business. It was gripping, squirming, listening. He resigned that evening, claiming honour - and why should honour outlive honesty? He had  fulfilled the process. He had in place "processes that he thought were robust", but - lacking any curiosity, it seems - these had not resulted in anyone bringing this front-page news about a controversial, important, and floundering part of his remit to his attention. Even had it done so, he seemed unable to realise that not naming someone on air does not absolve a broadcaster of moral - and very probably legal - responsibility for implicating an innocent man in the most revolting crimes. 

And there we have it. Lawyers are, basically, backward-looking. They look for precedent. What has happened before, happens again. And sadly, the BBC has proved to be much the same. Old processes remain in place, even against a local backdrop of an editorial team in disarray, and a wider backdrop of a reality of information exchange that is vastly bigger than we could have imagined five years ago. Against that backdrop, looking forward, the BBC must change: it - and the other elements of the media - become custodians rather than guardians of the truth.  By Janus, I hope the BBC survives. 

Put the kettle on, lads.

I’m going to start by talking about poetry. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but bear with me: it gets better.

One of my favourite poems – one I’ve taught for the last few years, but this year for the last time – begins with the enigmatic lines:

Think, two things on their own and both at once.

The first, that exercise in trust, where those in front

stand with their arms spread wide and free-fall

backwards, blind, and those behind take all the weight.

                                           

The image is from a drama class, but it’s a metaphor – at times we need to know that we can fall and someone will catch us. It’s a metaphor I’ve thought of more lately. About a year ago I remarked to one of my sons that if the Conservatives were elected, we would shortly feel under siege, wary, and as if people like us were no longer safe.

That might have seemed fairly extreme, but I am older than I look – at least, older than I look on the internet – and remember, alongside Malibu, poodle perms and shoulder pads, other features of the eighties: 50% male unemployment in the mining village where I was brought up, the miners’ strike, poll tax riots, and being told that there was no such thing as society. I was in my thirties before I realised that part of that experience was not universal, even among those of my age group. Friends in the South of England experienced a benign period of comfort in the 1980’s, in stark contrast to my own experience of watching my homeland being systematically trampled upon. Whatever the necessity, the ideology was the driver, and those who lucked out and were in the Home Counties were unknowing pawns in a game that wasn’t so much about mating as it was about screwing over.

The next lines of the poem are:

            The second, one canary-yellow cotton jacket

on a cloakroom floor, uncoupled from its hook,

becoming scuffed and blackened underfoot.

The sense of abuse and neglect, and of something being “uncoupled”, cast adrift, and not belonging any more, reflected how I felt as I watched the tuition fees protesters in London on Wednesday being “contained”, or “kettled” (worryingly, a term originally coined by the Wehrmacht in the second world war: let’s hope the similarities end there).

The poem then gets violent: talk of seeing red, blue murder, fists. So, sadly, did the news. In those protests, there were, so it is thought, about 40 troublemakers among around 5,000 people. All 5,000 were forcibly contained by canary-yellow-jacketed police officers, mostly for several hours in sub-zero temperatures. Those detained included diabetics and pregnant women, there were neither food nor lavatories; there were still around 2,000 people detained at 8pm, six hours after the protests should have ended. They were not under arrest. They were not charged with anything (unless you count the police horses that charged at them): indeed, there is no suggestion that they had committed any offence. They have no redress, and the police no accountability.

We should care about an assault on our right to protest. Who will want to protest next time - against this, or anything - if they know that they may be detained for hours in discomfort, with police horses charging at the detained group? The politicisation of the police is not unusual – from Sidney Street  to the Gestapo to the Miners’ Strike, the twentieth century saw the police used as a militia lite. What is unusual, is that it is being done so early in the lifespan of a government that is a coalition of the Liberal Democrats and a new breed of “Social” Conservatives. What on earth was Liberal, Democratic or Social about this?

But I promised two things, both on their own and once. So, in the same week as news of the kettling – sorry, containment – came out, came the news that Vince Cable claims that he didn’t break a manifesto pledge not to vote in favour of raised tuition fees. Here’s the reasoning:

                We promised not to raise tuition fees

                We didn’t win the election

                We then agreed with another party that we would do something else

                So now our promise doesn’t count.

Governments in this country frequently claim a mandate, and we vote for them on the basis that they will do more-or-less what they said. We know that things will arise in the course of a parliament that were beyond the contemplation of the parties during the campaign, and we also vote for people who we think will act consistently with the kind of character that they seemed to bear in earlier years. The list of broken manifesto promises by both Conservatives and LibDems is heart-breaking. What Vince now says, though, is this: "We didn't break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn't win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it's the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I'm trying to honour," going on to say “it’s not an issue of trust.”

Here’s the thing. Those metaphors - falling back in trust into someone’s arms, finding a coat trampled upon on the floor – are metaphors for family; when, years later, the narrator tries on the coat again, despite the neglect, it still fits, and the poem is called “Homecoming”. The message is this: neglect does not have to destroy a family, so long as there are two things, at once: the trust, and the memory of something, even if it is neglected, that fits.

This is my country, and I love it; I would love to come home, and to feel I belonged here, but until there are two things – the trust, as well as the memories and neglect – I can’t. So, as long as we have a party in government that disregards all honour and all promises, that homecoming is a long way off.

Put the kettle on, lads. I think it might be a while. 

Could do better, Mr Gove.

It's not often I read the Torygraph, having an eye to my blood pressure, but I wandered over to the website today, said something reasonable and found I was in a parallel universe occupied by bigots - which at least partly explains the passivity with which much of the Coalition's demolition derby on our services is being met. 


What drew me in was this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8148093/Education-pupils-will-lose-marks-for-poor-grammar-and-spelling.html.


The paper headlined: "

Education: pupils will lose marks for poor grammar and spelling

Pupils will be penalised in exams for poor spelling, punctuation and grammar under a sweeping overhaul of the education system."

Needless to say this prompted a torrent of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells correspondence, lamenting that teachers cannot teach and that standards have slipped. 


Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are important for English, and are graded, and I (along with tens of thousands of others) teach them. Whether or not a student has a good grade in English enables an employer or university to make an accurate judgement about the student's ability to read, write, and speak. Why should students hampered in that area be also unable to achieve a top grade in Biology, or History?


The simple fact is, there are students out there who have non-verbal CATS of 120+ and verbal CATS of 80-ish. They are bright - very bright - and able to talk. They can't spell. Big deal: I can't read music. Does it block success in every area? It so happens that we live currently in an age where spelling is more on view than ever, because more of us type and write every day than ever before, and manufacturing and skilled manual work was abolished by a powerful combo of Mrs T and the Chinese. In the past, these people found jobs; they still can, and the future for them is brighter than ever. 


Spell check will help many, although a few Luddites insist that it is somehow bad for us all; I assume that they also eschew penicillin, and write using a quill pen or a shark's tooth on a clay tablet.  In a few years we will all be using speech-to-text anyway, and spelling will be as relevant as the ability to write in Latin. Oh, wait. I expect Mr Gove and some of his fans think that we should all be judged on that, too.


If we ignore a large cohort of the brightest students because they cannot spell, we will end up with a less able workforce. That can't be a good thing. To those who say you cannot be bright and yet unable to spell (in the words of one Telegraph reader, "dyslexia is an excuse for the stupid and lazy") I would refer you to Winston Churchill and Richard Branson, two prominently successful dyslexics who would have suffered under the system proposed. 


The English curriculum is far from perfect. Maybe what is needed, though, is to drop the obsession that developed over the last 20 years with a metalanguage - what is the point in a 14 year old evaluating how effective Shakespeare's writing is, and analysing how he achieved the effects that he did? We all know Shakespeare is great - but if you want to put people off it, make them write an essay about the techniques that are used to build tension in Act 3 scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet. I have probably been the instrument through which the government has convinced hundreds of young people that Shakespeare is dull. 

The curriculum is cluttered with pointless exercises, asking students to write magazine articles and speeches, when it should focus on the things that really matter: speaking clearly and well, taking turns, writing, with the aid of a computer with spell check, a good letter applying for a job, and most important of all, reading and enjoying stories, and writing for your own pleasure.

The debate would be a lot easier and better informed had the journalism in the original piece been more accurate and less "spun". The fact is, to get a C in English at GCSE, you have to be able to punctuate accurately (though not with flair: colons are for the higher grades); and you have to be able to spell most common words accurately. That's always been the case. What changed in 2003 is that there were no longer 5% of the marks reserved for spelling and punctuation in all other exams. However, it is still the case that for, say, History, around 5% of the marks are available for "Quality of Written Communication". This is a minute change. 

As usual with politicians, everyone's an expert in education because everyone's been to school. As usual, there is a brave-sounding policy that is flung to the twitterati, promising a brave new world in the sunlit uplands where all children will be the happy Jennings and Darbyshire of the 1950's, learning Latin, buying tuck, and carrying a leather satchel. And as usual, as then, as now, and as in the future, as usual, the change is more apparent than real.