Vivat academia!

What follows is an article I wrote for a multi-author blog site shortly before this year’s A-level results were published. I’m adding it here for timxwalker2, whose comment today on my Larkin blog (Going down the long slide) touched on declining standards in education, on the forms of academic inflation that have affected our educational system for years. It’s polemical, deliberately so (it was the nature of the site!), but I stand by the essential point: education is the pursuit of excellence, not bogus and harmful notions of social equality.

It’s as predictable as the first cuckoo of spring. For years the publication of A-level results has been followed by lamentations over declining standards. So, let’s do something about it, let’s set the bar even higher, awarding particular merit to the best candidates, those achieving the best possible marks; let’s have a new A* grade. Well, now we have. The first results will be published soon. And what happens? Why, new lamentations, predictions that the independent schools will soar ahead of the state sector, fears about increasing social inequality.

The Observer gave this front page coverage on Sunday, reporting that privately educated pupils are expected to get three times as many of the A* grades at A-level than those in state schools. This means, of course, that the independents will be even more heavily represented in universities, raising concerns about ‘fairness’ and ‘social balance’ in institutions of higher learning.

Some universities are concerned enough by these wholly irrelevant pressures that they have decided not to use the A* this year. Cambridge, I’m delighted to say, will use them, but Oxford will not. Given the political intimidation universities have been subject to in the past, particularly in the illiterate New Labour years, I suppose there is really no great surprise in this.

If there is a wide gulf between fee-paying schools and the state sector that’s because much of the state sector is rubbish (do please note I wrote much). It really is time that we faced up to the simple fact that many comprehensives, particularly in the larger cities, are only good for producing oiks, chavs and gangstas in large numbers. Is there any surprise that Diane Abbott sought a way out for her own son? She did what any decent parent would do: she wanted the best, afraid of the worst. The crime of this hypocrite is that she would condemn everyone else to the worst.

Look, there is no secret about good schooling. Education, education, education, Blair chanted, which seems to have meant experiment, experiment, experiment and money, money, money. And what happened? We all know the answer – decline, decline, decline. As standards got steadily worse, the state sector went into free fall.

I attended a very good boarding school. Yes, a lot of us came from privileged or very privileged backgrounds, apart from the girls, some of the brightest in my cohort, who were there thanks to the former Tory government’s Assisted Places Scheme. Again, yes, a lot of us were highly motivated, which serves to ease the teaching process. Even so, my group was as mixed as any, some bright, others less so, still others positively dense. But the emphasis was on discipline and teaching, focused in the most effective way possible. There was none of the trendiness, drift, uncertainty and poor morale that are such steady features of the bog standard comprehensive.

So, should we be concerned that most university places are taken up by people from the independent sector? In my view, no, not if we really do want the best. I honestly could not care less about ‘reducing inequality.’ For thirteen years Labour tried to ‘reduce inequality’ with miserable results. Damian Hinds, a Tory member of the education select committee, quite rightly said that it’s not a question of money; it’s a question of learning from those who do it best. And it’s the private sector, the independents, the public schools that do it best. They always have; they always will.

It’s such a joke

Ben Lewis’ Hammer and Tickle tells the history of communism through the very thing that deadpan dictators fear the most – humour. There is nothing subtle about the joke, no great intellectual sophistication: it’s simply the most effective measure of popular resistance in the face of propaganda and lies. The joke will never of itself bring down tyranny but by making it look ridiculous it contributes in a small way towards that end.

I was amused to discover last year that the intelligence service of the old Federal Republic of West Germany used to have a section devoted to gathering jokes from across the Wall, a way of monitoring the popular mood in the East. Not only did it have a section dedicated to this end but it was also one of the most popular duties, with section chiefs looking forward to the weekly compilation. The East German jokes were good but not nearly as good as those coming from Big Brother further east, from Soviet Russia, where people had a longer time to practice sallies of satire against the system.

It’s wonderful dry humour with an undercurrent of seriousness. Take this for example;

A judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing. "I just heard the funniest joke in the world!" "Well, go ahead, tell me!" says the other judge. "I can't - I just gave a guy ten years for it!"

Yes, no joke, as you will know if you’ve read Milan Kundera’s The Joke, a book that was banned after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Communism is really unique here for, unlike other forms of dictatorship, its absurdities and contradictions positively invite ridicule. One of the oldest, originating in the early days of the Soviet experiment, is a simple observation “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work”, which would seem to me to serve as the best epitaph for the whole absurd Marxist project.


The joke as the pulse of the popular mood invariably moved with the times. The twilight years of the Soviet Union were particularly rich in observations about stagnation and the gerontocracy that ruled the land. Leonid Brezhnev was a popular target, with observations both about delusions of grandeur and his stupidity. In one he berates a speech writer: “I asked for a fifteen minute speech and you gave me one lasting forty-five minutes”. “Comrade Brezhnev, I gave you three copies.”

The most popular jokes were always about shortages or non-existent commodities:

What's 300 feet long, grey and eats cabbage?
The queue outside a Russian butcher's shop.

Dad, can I have the car keys?"
Ok, but don't lose them. We will get the car in just seven years!

A man walks into a shop and asks, "Don't you have any fish?", and the shop assistant replies, "You got it wrong - ours is a butcher: we don't have any meat. They don't have any fish in the fish shop that is across the road!"

And then there are those that reflect on aspects of life under communism, including my personal favourites;

When were the first Communist elections held?
When God put Eve in front of Adam and said "Choose yourself a wife"

"What's happened to Ivan, I haven't seen him recently?"
"You mean the Ivan who always told political jokes, you know, the one who lived opposite the prison?"
"Yeah, that's the one."
"He now lives opposite his house."

I just love this sort of thing; it tells just how irrepressible the human spirit is even under the direst of conditions. And I’m delighted to say that the political joke is not quite dead, even in Putin’s new Russia, a system that hasn’t quite escaped the legacy of the old Russia;

Stalin's ghost appears to Putin in a dream, and Putin asks for his help running the country. Stalin says, "Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue." "Why blue?" Putin asks. "Ha!" says Stalin. "I knew you wouldn't ask me about the first part."

England, my England

I’ve been thinking quite closely about issues of national identity, issues that arose from my recent blog (This England). I recall a documentary some years ago made by one Darcus Howe, a black writer and broadcaster (his colour is relevant, as you will see), in which he explored this very question. It was called The White Tribe, a kind of cultural safari in search of England, of what it meant to be English. A great many of the people he asked, people mostly from white working class communities, could not answer his basic questions. One respondent, struggling to come up with something, eventually alighted on line dancing!

In the course of his journey he also managed to have a brief exchange with Lord Tebbit, who admitted that concepts of English identity were indeed problematic. He went on to say that his ancestors were migrants from the Low Countries, and he was glad that they had moved, otherwise he would have been born a Belgian! Then their discussion moved on to Englishness and Britishness. Howe was told that he was not ‘ethnically English’. “Do you mean because of the colour of my skin?”, he asked. “No”, Tebbit replied, seemingly forgetting that he had already defined himself as not ‘ethnically English, “you are not English, but we are both British.”

So, the question clearly has to be, what happens to Darcus and all of his kindred if Britain disappears, as it may very well do anytime within the next fifty years? I’m going to hold off on giving an answer here for a bit, though you might already have arrived at your own.

To a large extent Howe was in pursuit of a chimera, something that even he did not fully understand, something he had not really attempted to define. For example, he thought that a ploughman’s lunch- which he could not track down amidst the curries and burgers- was an example of ‘traditional English fare’, whereas in truth it’s a pure marketing invention, traceable back only to the 1950s. But what about his assertion that England was full of people who don’t want to be English anymore, that we have turned into the cappuccino race, rootless and impossibly cosmopolitan? The short answer is that it’s rubbish.

The thing is the English, the English race, if you prefer, though that’s that seems to me to be an expression devoid of all meaning, has been made up of successive waves of migrants, ancient and modern. My own ancestors are Norman French, though I’m English through and through, ancestry being no more than a distant echo. Yes, there is a vagueness about our national identity, certainly in contrast with more recent migrants, who still carry an attachment to foreign places. But I’m going to go so far as to say that to be vague is to be quintessentially English, to be vague and to be slightly eccentric, beyond the comprehension of outsiders.

I have no idea at all what it means to be British; I know exactly what it is to be English, to belong to my England. Here is a passage from an essay I wrote dedicated to the question what England means to me;

Britishness? Ah, yes, now there is a problem. I grew up believing simply that Britishness and Englishness were more or less the same thing though I was very well aware that the Celtic nations had a separate and somewhat prickly identity. It’s been their assertiveness, their determination to be ‘themselves’, to govern themselves, that resulted in our present botched constitutional settlement, one that has really forced me to focus more specifically on simple Englishness. I no longer use British to identify myself other than to say that I have a British passport.

Yes, I’m not British; I’m English. I cycle from my rooms to college most days. I go riding just about every Sunday along old bridal paths. I like gymkhanas and country pursuits in general. I go hunting in season. I have a passion for the history of my country, particularly for the England of the seventeenth century, which has done so much to confirm my belief in the importance of monarchy in our constitution. I enjoy such food as roast beef - though I have a preference for venison -, fresh salmon, scones with high tea and stodgy puddings. I like to be taken punting on the Cam on warm spring days. I like May balls and daffodils. I like strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. I love the plays of William Shakespeare, the poetry of John Donne and the novels of Charles Dickens. I like Tudor and Stuart dance music and the orchestral work of Frederick Delius, particularly Brigg Fair and In a Summer Garden. I like old churches and ruined castles. I have a tremendous affection for the Church of England and an even greater affection for old English folkways. I like Christmas carols, the more traditional the better. I distrust alien ideologies, like socialism, communism and scientology, any form of fanaticism, really, in politics or religion. I distrust political enthusiasm and hero worship. Or if I do like heroes it's historic fatties like Sir John Falstaff or Horace Rumpole! I dislike American spellings of English English words. I like to go to Henley for the regatta and I far prefer tea, English Breakfast, to be precise, to cappuccino!

So, this is my England, this is my nation. It may not be yours but we all have our own vision and our own sense of place, where even things like line dancing will be welcome! For that’s the best thing of all about being English – our power to adapt, to turn foreign influences to our own ends.

There will always be an England, even if Britain goes, an England where the descendents of Darcus Howe will be welcome, because Norman Tebbit is wrong: it’s not about ethnicity, or colour, or race, or class, or state – it’s an attitude of mind.

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

Going down the long slide

The Daily Telegraph in England has been serialising the letters of the poet Philip Larkin to Monica Jones, his muse, confidante, sounding-board and occasional lover, often the more deceived! It’s a fascinating insight into the creative process of this quintessentially English poet, the voice of the time, at once pessimistic and perceptive, always with a wonderful undercurrent of delightful irony.

His is the voice of an England in transition, unsure of itself, unsure exactly where it belongs. Yes, there is cynicism, sometimes even the echo of a grumpy old man of letters, but there is also much wry amusement, mischievous observations on the times and the transitions. Take Annus Mirabilis by way of example, a poem that always makes me smile;

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

He manages to be simple, funny and profound all at the same time, rather like John Betjeman, another poet and observer of English life that I hugely admire. Larkin, though, as a discovery was rather late for me (a poet divine in 2009!) It was the 2009 poetry season screened on BBC 2 that really opened me up to the melancholic beauty of his work, to one poem in particular which simply overwhelmed me, something I’ll come on to in a moment. Prior to this I really only knew him from This be the verse, a poem I memorised in my teens to recite to the other girls at school (I was overheard by the games mistress!), more for its shock value than anything else;

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Some do, of that I have not the least doubt; mine didn’t! Yes, there is pessimism here, and he does have a point, but it’s also jolly good fun. There are so many other poems by this most admirable, most English, of post war bards that I love and admire, poems I have read since watching the BBC series. But the one that was introduced to me then for the first time, the one that has remained in my head and my heart is the evocative High Windows. This is my poem, the poem that speaks to me, of present contentment and possible future regrets, of passing time, one that brings an awareness that youth truly is the stuff that will not endure;

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The First World War is finally over!

Now here’s a thing: the Germans have finally paid off the reparations bill from the First World War; the Versailles diktat is no more! The odd thing is that I was under the impression that this was over and done with years ago, that no further mention was made of it after Hitler repudiated the Young Plan, a repayment schedule devised by an American banker in 1929, when he became Chancellor in 1933. It wasn’t; it was merely placed on permanent hold, as I discovered on reading a report in The Times.

Victory in 1945 left the Allies with a huge dilemma. Germany, in a state of ruin, had debts amounting to 400 billion Reichmarks, and that’s before the outstanding bill from the First World War was added. Western politicians sensibly realised that a demand for fresh reparations would only create new forms of instability in a sensitive region, unlike Stalin, who continued to plunder his own zone of control.

At a London conference in 1953 creditors agreed to write off a great many of the more recent debts of the new Federal Republic, created out of the British, American and French zones of occupation. Principal on the First World War debt still had to be paid but it was agreed that no interest payments should be made until such time as the country was completely reunified. As the Soviet Zone had by now become the German Democratic Republic, and as communist control across the whole of Eastern Europe looked permanent, this was no more than a pious hope, an obligation quietly exported to Never Land.

When it comes to history one should never say never. Germany was reunified. While the nation was celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, civil servants realised that a forgotten obligation had come back home! In 1990 interest payments started anew after a gap of almost sixty years.

In case you’re wondering this went not to nations, not to the victors of the Great War, but to individual bondholders. Ironically before 1989 these bonds, like currency from the inflation of the 1920s, could be bought in flea markets for a few pennies, just an historical curio, because nobody believed that Germany would ever be reunited or further payments made. Practically worthless at one moment, the bonds suddenly acquired real value. I love Clio; I love her ironic sense of humour.

Anyway, if you are a bondholder look to a last windfall. On Sunday the final instalment, a cheque for almost sixty-one million euros, was handed over. For Germany the First World War is finally over.

Twenty-ones, under and over

I bought the Times on Saturday specifically because the Review section carried a feature headed The books you must read before you’re 21, a title guaranteed to excite my curiosity. Don’t you just love the imperative, the use of the word must? If I’m told I must do something I invariably go in the opposite direction. Oh! Ever thus from childhood's hour. :-)

Actually, the title was rather misleading. It was just a collection of authors detailing the book that they had found most influential, or those, so the sub-heading went, that made them grown-ups. I honestly don’t believe any book has that power, no matter how influential.

Still, there were some interesting choices, a number that I also read before I was twenty-one. I was pleasantly surprised by Nigella Lawson’s selection of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, because- and I have to be completely honest here – I did not think a sleb cook and all round telly person would have such good taste! In a nutshell you have my snobbish sense of intellectual superiority combined with my condescension towards celebrity chefs, no matter in what guise they come! I dare say they all have tastes as elevated and as impressive as Nigella. Actually, no; I simply can’t see Gordon Ramsay reading Thomas Mann!

OK, the other under twenty-oners that I managed to bag are Selected Essays by George Orwell (Sebastian Faulks), the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Tom Stoppard), the Collected Shorter Poems by W. H Auden (Alexander McCall Smith), Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (Val McDermid), Hamlet by absolutely no need to mention the author (Barry Humphries), The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (Phillipa Gregory), Matilda by Roald Dahl (Philip Ardagh), Emma by Jane Austen (P. D. James), Madam Bovary by Gustav Flaubert (Alistair Campbell), The Diary of Anne Frank (Lynne Reid Banks), The Last of the Just by Andre Schwartz-Bart (Steven Berkoff), and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Fergal Keane).

The first thing I have to say here is slightly put out that I favour any kind of book that Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s thuggish and foul-mouthed former press secretary, also favours. But Madame Bovary is such a great novel, arguably the greatest French novel of the nineteenth century, that will just have to live with the annoyance! I'm more than happy to identify with P. D. James, though. Emma is a sublime novel, Austen’s best, about a character I simply adore. Emma resembles me in so many ways!

Roald Dahl was among my favourite childhood writers. I think I read, or had read to me, everything he wrote, not just Matilda - by far the best - but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mister Fox ( great to read about; even better to hunt!) and Witches ( slanderously inaccurate!) I later turned to Dahl’s adult fiction, his short stories, which I found incredibly disappointing, a great many of them being completely anti-climatic.

They are all good, the books selected, the books these people have read and I have read. I did enjoy The Female Eunuch ,though the message was somewhat lost on me in that I had never in any way been made to feel that my life choices were restricted.

I have to make special mention of The Last of the Just, an astonishing novel I read when I was eighteen. I’ve mentioned it in previous blogs as a book that deserves to be far better known. As Steven Berkoff says in his notes, it’s a powerful retelling of an ancient Hebrew myth about a select band of just men who carry the burden of the world’s pain and sorrows, men who are the ultimate scapegoats. It’s a parable of the suffering of the Jewish people, from tenth century England to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, where Ernie Levy, the last of the just, died in 1943. The final pages tore my heart out, leaving me numb for hours afterwards.


Now, what about those that I did not read, those that are now ‘too late’ for me? It’s too, too boring for me to go over them all. Some I’d never heard of, like On Having No Head by D. E. Harding (Simon Callow), The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns (Helen Oyeyemi) and Puckoon by Spike Milligan (Dawn French), so no great loss, I expect. I’m a little alarmed, though, to discover The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (Aravind Adiga) and Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (Antonia Fraser) are also minus twenty-ones. I have both in my collection – I bought Strachey quite recently –though as yet unread. Should I risk bringing to bear a more ‘mature’, a more ‘cynical’ eye, a view from the heights of the mid-twenties? Yes, I rather think I should; I rather think I shall. The thing is a new boundary has been established which I will simply have to break. It’s my nature. :-)

I’d rather have the Borg

I had a jolly good laugh last week with a friend of mine, an individual with some inside knowledge of the way politics work in this country. We were lunching together and in the course of our conversation happened to touch on the Labour Party, whose annual conference was still in progress, specifically on the leadership contest, in which Comrade Miliband beat Comrade Miliband, with some oddballs there for padding.

He’d seen my blog about the victor (Ed Miliband – Union Man) and said there was one thing that I had overlooked: that none of the contenders for the leadership seemed altogether human. I thought about it for a moment; yes, he had a point; what exactly are we dealing with here, I asked? They might be shaped from alien plant pods, he replied, the premise of an old movie called Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And so the speculation went on, becoming jollier by rapid stages. We finally agreed that David Miliband, the comrade brother who lost to brother comrade, was a Vulcan; that he would fit well within a Star Trek script. Look at him closely; he has that air about him, an appearance at once human and at twice not! The only trouble is Vulcans are such jolly people, with an irrepressible sense of humour; they don’t speak and act like robots. Perhaps the Milibands along with Ed Balls, Diane Abbott and Andy Burnham, the also rans, might do better as the Borg. I can certainly see the Labour Party having a hive mind. Resistance is futile, the call goes out, we are the Borg; you will be assimilated.

It was such fun to watch them all in shades of red. In the 1830s, after the passing of the Reform Act, the duke of Wellington remarked of the new members in the House of Commons that he had never seen so many shocking bad hats in his life. Looking at the delegates of the Labour Party Conference, this assembly of the undead, there were not too many hats to be see but everything else was bad: I’ve never seen so many ugly fashions and shocking fat men in my life!

Red Ed the Borg came on stage, the new leader giving his inaugural address. What can one say, other than that a real Borg, not a pretend one, not a phony like this, would have done it so much better. Cometh the hour cometh the man; cometh the hour cometh Red Ed (actually I think Pink Ed suits him better), ready with a tiresome speech, cliché laid upon cliché, desperately trying to distance himself from his union puppet masters, trying to pretend that he is not Trilby to their Svengali.

Pink Ed is the leader this party deserves, a man with a common law wife, a man who hasn’t even the time or the decency to put his name on his own son’s birth certificate. Borg? No, he’s not a Borg or even a Vulcan; just a badly dressed chav, a chav leader for a chav party. Just imagine him as prime minister; no, don’t, the thought is far too ghastly. I think I’d rather have the Borg.