DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

I guess it is this bit
"The final rule is that the Speaker, in any division upon a bill, should vote to leave a bill in its existing form. "

which I guess must have trumped this bit
"The Speaker should vote so as not to decide the question - in other words, to give the House the opportunity for further debate on an issue. Therefore, if there is a tie on a division such as a Second Reading vote, where failure would kill the Bill being debated, the Speaker will always vote to continue the Bill"

They're joking with this school 9-6, 45 weeks of the year stuff surely? Christ, I'd never have survived school if it was these hours. 8am-2.15pm was bad enough.

Dunno how Laurence Sterne managed with his 6 am-8 pm, seven days a week hours.

he died in his late 40s iirc

He was 54. That wasn't bad for the 18th century.

I wonder whether zero hours opt-out schooling will be an option.

anyway i don't think historical models of treating children like chattels are useful comparisons to our existing education system

Oh, the irony.

i'm aware of how bad it is now, i just thought you were saying "hey it could be worse" which, while strictly true...

I think it’s coming full circle.

it's worse in many ways, the old model tended to use brutish methods to inculcate knowledge that was considered necessary and improving for civilized adults, the new model uses technocrat methods to turn children into machine tools

i thought this new model is to turn school into baby sitters so that parents can work longer hours

sorry, that too

They're joking with this school 9-6, 45 weeks of the year stuff surely? Christ, I'd never have survived school if it was these hours. 8am-2.15pm was bad enough.

long school hours is v much an ARK schools thing - it goes along with their super rigid focus on discipline, school as controlling influence. Wouldn't be any sort of surprise if Gove wanted to take their academies as a model for all schools.

Don't understand the ARK system at all. How can "high achieving" and "non-selective" not contradict each other?

i suppose they believe that anyone can be made to be "high achieving"

That's dangerous socialist talk is that.

when oh when will the organizations that founded the Labour party stop trying to influence the Labour party?

How about when the Labour party stops standing for the interests of the working man/woman? Oh wait...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BS81PTvIYAAyS6C.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BS81ccHIgAAVmpv.jpg

the guantanamo threads all seem dead, idk where it should go

Someone explain to me what that longer school hours thing is supposed to achieve

At the moment I can only pass it in terms of 'Makes old people vote for them'/'Make people who like school vote for them'

^speaking error in heat of moment

Really though this is all disgusting pro-stratification elitist ideological BS of the most transparently shit order and the sooner Gove is testing 4 year-olds the sooner we may raise a lynch mob

'BS of the most transparently shit order' = another speaking error lol

... parse. Well, if only I'd had longer school hours, eh?

I mean presumably, keeping kids in beyond three o'clock cuts into what is conventionally family time - and this is meant to mean more time in someone's life in which they are disciplined, by school - so what, how does this fit in with not wanting a nanny state?

lol looking for consistency

But idk I guess there are people around who respond in a Pavlovian fashion to any mention of SCHOOL and DISCIPLINE and so on, and will be inclined to vote for anyone who makes the right whistle

in brief tho: Gove has one job which is to troll the fuck out of teachers, who for some reason seem to fucking love it. anything that wd require a major increase in spending is a nonstarter in real life but nobody in the game wants to admit that. and the Nanny State only applies to adults - children shd just shut the fuck up and take what's coming to them.

srsly i have teachy friends whose Facebooks are now never-ending streams of Gove articles and angry anti-Govism, he's a genuine straw man hung out by the Tories for the NUT to clown themselves on

There's a certain cunning involved in a lot of what they do, though. It seems to involve knowing just how to provoke outrage in nice people who are a little bit wooly, so that it looks as though only wooly people would oppose the proposed policy.

That announcement about school hours seems calculated to send people who were brought up by Quakers somewhere in the countryside into hot, stuttering sweats, which is of course perfect PR for soi-disant 'realistic', 'hard working' wankers.

The theatrical, Victorian cruelty of the benefit cuts likewise seems calculated to bring out a kind of sympathy that is correspondingly Victorian and melodramatic and again, your 'realists' are going to have a great time weathering that storm.

Same with the arts funding cuts.

xp but we seem to be saying similar things, NV

yeah i wasn't disagreeing, just pondering how much irl damage Gove will do in a already shitty system

plus i've been holding off on doing my own "plenty of thick bastards are products of private education" spiel

xp to self But it's all very well me calling nice people wooly. Trying to match the tory hard-headedness meanwhile gets me nowhere: people don't want to hear about how money received as benefits goes back into the economy when the benefit claimant spends it, or how it keeps local shops open. They just glaze over because, surprise surprise, tory policy has little to do with what actually works, or how things actually work

haha NV I didn't want to imply that my 'wooly' people are your teacher friends

i know teachers of the superficially wooly and non-wooly varieties. in the end i guess Gove can do this because a huge chunk of people hate teachers and another huge chunk of people hate children so

Feel there's also something to be said in this thread about Louise Mensch, Esther McVey and Katie Hopkins as an emerging 'type'. To me they all look and sound like slightly haphazard shapeshifters, whose training manual for their part in the invasion of earth has been a used copy of Nuts and a Stylist picked up off a bus seat and some crackly pirate editions of some hospital drama where the female lead is always under pressure, and has to make tough decisions.

That is, they're like an uncanny valley version of real-life self-possessed women, in the same way that Cameron is a creaky pastiche of that one line manager you had, who was firm but fair and knew what to do when things were getting difficult.

Gove's just pandering to fear among parents of the right age, he's a journalist, he knows what makes good headlines, but I doubt a lot of this stuff will see the light of day precisely because it costs money.

Obviously he has other terrible policies and talks shit virtually every time he opens his mouth but he knows what plays with the public. Schools policy is the single trickiest issue for any government I think but Gove's just resorting to populism in the hope that people will equate it with Doing Something.

I know someone who goes on holiday to the same place as the Gove family some summers, and apparently both he and his wife literally sit there reading books and drinking and totally ignoring their children (who obviously have a nanny) all day, which is worth bearing in mind next time he says something self-righteous about parenting skillz.

Also, I know I've mentioned this before, but it's an open secret in Notting Hill that Gove & Vine 'got religion' to get their children into the best C of E primary in Kensington. To the point where Vine teaches Sunday school now, at the church in question. I look forward to the juvenile cohort of W8/W11 learning all about supply-side Jesus...

and totally ignoring their children (who obviously have a nanny) all day, which is worth bearing in mind next time he says something self-righteous about parenting skillz.

tbh this is probably best thing for the kids

Sounds like my childhood holidays - except for the nanny of course

... and the reading of books... so drinking and ignoring children basically

It would be interesting to know what percentage of parents would back longer school hours. Clearly there is a Victorian Protestant Work Ethic thing going on but where i live a lot of parents (or more accurately a lot of women) find their employment options limited by the cost of childcare and many not particularly wealthy families, often from immigrant communities, have to pay extra for after-school lessons in English, maths and science to help with homework stuff.

In theory, having properly-resourced (possibly optional) state-funded tutoring / childcare in schools might be an ok idea if it's there's money thrown at it and won't put an intolerable burden on teachers. Which is where theory unfortunately comes crashing into what would actually happen in practice.

- make lazy teachers work longer and harder
- keep kids off the street
- cut childcare time/cost for Hard Working Families

can't see how it doesn't win votes with their key audiences of middle class and middle aged cunts

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2014/03/wendi-deng-note-tony-blair

I met TB once and can confirm he is taller than you would think and his eyes were very blue, clearly didn't pay enough attention to legs and butt though :(

funny i thought the pro-independence campaign (this is independence for scotland to which i refer) was going to lean itself heavily on the emotional appeal but now that's the essence of cameron's plea weird

Is there much else for him to lean on?