Blairite education: the gift that keeps on giving.

[fpb]

Four years and two months ago I argued that the catastrophic failure of contemporary British schools, and especially Tony Blair's utter unwillingness to deal with the real problems, was pouring out enormous numbers of young people (I estimated one twelfth of the whole generation) who were functionally illiterate, utterly unable to function in any significant manner in a modern society, excluded by nature... but very clever with computers. I underestimated this last issue, but I did point out that the stupid computer classes so eagerly championed by Blair were nothing but free periods with internet, in which each child played with the machine as they saw fit. They could not spell or count, but man could they play with graphics and surf the net. Then, one year and eleven months ago, I singled out a Harriet Sergeant article that told the same story and defended its importance and significance against inverarity, who managed, like many liberals faced with unwelcome messages, to find a "racist tinge" in it.

Now we see the results of everyone's chronic incapacity to deal with reality and facts on the ground. The police, paralyzed by PC, have nearly forgotten that their place in life is to use force - any force necessary - to maintain or restore order: in the face of viciously destructive rioting carried out mostly by black boys, they see the skin colour and fall back. From one end of England to the other, the story is the same: rioters loot at will, almost unhampered by any show of force. The police brag of having arrested a few hundred looters and charged a few dozen. That noise you hear is the laughter of thousands upon thousands of rioters.

What happens when hundreds of thousands of young men find that they are wholly excluded from national life - since they are too ignorant to read the papers, too innumerate to be gainfully employed, and carry a chip on their shoulder to boot - and effectively have no future? Now we have the answer. I have never been less happy to have been proved right. There is only one possible upside to this: we shall no longer hear from smug, out-of-touch ministers bragging how Britain is a "happy exception" in the landscape of international turmoil and crisis. When I heard Vincent Cable of all people saying that, I felt like tearing his throat out.

Comments

BOTH LINKS GO TO THE SAME PAGE

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

Surely the second should be

http://fpb.livejournal.com/418833.html

Re: BOTH LINKS GO TO THE SAME PAGE

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are exactly right. Can't imagine what happened - and well done for managing to find the second link. Thanks. I'll leave things as they are so that anyone who comes along in future will know that you were the smart guy who fixed things.

Re: BOTH LINKS GO TO THE SAME PAGE

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

1 year 11 months = Sept 2009 and a quick search of that month in your archive found the Seargeant article

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

What do you think of this blog post:
http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html

I was struck by the lines, "Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out" since "judgmental handwringing about 'lack of parenting'" was brought up in the comments on your link to the Sergeant article two years ago.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

She is mostly right, but wrong in the essential. A riot is an admission of defeat. It is the declaration that the excluded minority of functional illiterates and lifelong unemployed has no relation with the country. It is a declaration of war without a hope of victory and without a program. And all it will achieve in the long term will be to harden the position of the majority. Even the let's-all-talk-and-solve-this-together that she seems to be advocating will not work, because the gang culture is incapable of talking constructively - all it can say is "give!" It has never been brought up to express itself, think constructively and work with long-term purpose. It has been spat out of the schools without any ability to deal with the world as it is except in a parasitic way. But the majority, which belongs to the middle-class culture, which does know how to work the system, how to set themselves long-term goals and achieve them, will use any let's-talk structures for its own advantage; at best to discipline the minority, at worst to deepen their exclusion. The minority know just enough to know that they are excluded, but not enough to do anything about it. And their rage is mostly visited against their own immediate neighbours and colleagues; thus grinding them even further in the dust. There is, in short, NOTHING constructive to be got out of this situation. I say this without joy and without pleasure, but the only thing that can be done immediately is to use force to suppress the riots and punish as many rioters as possible. Unfortunately, even that will be difficult, because the smug idiots who claim to be governing this country have cut the number of police and soldiers, and have not done anything at all to understand the constant growth in jail population except stop building new jails - which means that the jails are overfilled as they are - Britain already has the highest jail population per total population in Europe - and that if a suitably large number of rioters are punished, they will explode. The smug, self-regarding BASTARDS who have polluted this country for decades have made it monstrously difficult to deal with the very issue they have ultimately caused, by allowing the unchecked growth of an uneducated underclass whose sole relationship with the country is parasitic.

I hope you are personally all right

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

I am getting alarmed at the reports of the scale and extnt of the rioting.

When I checked Stormy Petrel this AM my recent comments and the entire Mussolini entry wre not there. Then I noticed I was not logged in. Everything is now back but it was disconcerting because never before had being logged in had anything to do with what you could actually see on the screen.

Re: I hope you are personally all right

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I limited access to that one to friends, because it is potentially valuable material. The internet is worse than the Wild West.

South Ruislip is very distant from any area of rioting. If, however, I had not been thrown out of my flat last year, I would live a couple of miles from the centre of Lewisham, where things had got noisy last night.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

[avus.livejournal.com]

May you and all your hold dear stay safe. I'm happy, too, that you have family nearby. It's hard to know what's happening from this side of the pond, but in our experience, in the States, too often violence provokes more violence. May you be spared that.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think it's dying down. There are only so many computers and Ipods you can steal, and this was all about stealing things. Plus, it is possible that people will start to set up citizen's guards to work instead of the police. The Sikhs of Southall, West London, have done just that, and you don't mess with the Sikhs. TV showed a few dozens hefty young Sikhs stationed around their temple with very large sticks, which, if true, would be highly conducive to peace in the Southall streets. But in the long term, the issue is the existence of a large underclass that is for all practical purposes unemployable, that has no stake in the community and feels no loyalty to anyone except possibly a gang, and that is in spite of that very clever with computers. Britain has been building up this underclass for decades - unlike wemyss, I blame all parties equally - and I see no way of dealing with it except one - recruit them by force into the Army and let the toughest sergeant-majors in it sort them out - that would be legally impossible and would cause an outcry. Jailing them does no good at all - they're used to it.

Unfortunately - or fortunately - I no longer live near my sister. (I have also come across another sister - a half-sister to be precise, my father's daughter - who also lives in England, but she's outside London altogether.) But from the point of view that's not bad: I now live in a sleepy middle-class commuter suburb with few shops, many miles away from the nearest area of unrest, while if I'd stayed in Brockley I would now be a couple of miles from Lewisham, where things have been getting kinda noisy. Anyway my sister is away on holiday.

However, may I say again that your reappearance makes this a good day. May you and Jane live long and happily, and please do stop by from time to time.