Back in the game

Blogging has slipped onto the back burner this month.

It's the point in the year when my teaching training got to crunch time - not quite qualified yet but on the last home straight - and the scramble to get a job for September before the recruitment window closes. Happily, after a stressful few weeks I've managed to do this. 

After my redundancy two years ago and dodging about as a member of the precariat and as a born-again student,  I will finally be back in the ranks of the PAYE wage slaves again. And it feels good. Doing something after all those years that I actually give a toss about, and with the added bonus of doing it locally and for the first time in thirty years working in the same community as the one I live in rather than commuting.

But yet again, I feel a twinge of resentment when I hear teaching contrasted with the 'real world' - or when I hear Gove whinging about the standard of recruits to the teaching profession. Because over the past few weeks I've felt on several occasions that getting an entry level teaching job is on a par with joining the SAS. 

In the real world that I once inhabited interviews consisted of a quick phone call and a twenty minute chat with a manager - or if you were a manager and going for a job paying twice the salary of a teacher, maybe sending a CV and a half hour chat in a bar. 

On the other hand for the past few weeks I've been going to interviews where I had to teach lessons on subjects I had no previous knowledge of to kids I have never met, which were then deconstructed by a panel under an Ofsted-shaped microscope lens. Followed by a panel interview and if I was really unlucky, a student panel too. And that circus typically lasted the whole day as the candidates were kept hanging around like X-factor wannabes awaiting a final decision from Simon Cowell.

But it's done with now -  and I'm back in the game.

Farage - fool or Fascist ?

Many years ago reading 'England Your England' I thought George Orwell was on to something when he said that in this country socialism would have to have a distinctly English flavour.  A tradition rooted in John Bull, John Lillburne and  William Morris as much Marx, Lenin or Trotsky. And much as I respect all those dead Russians - I agree with him.

Conversely the results for UKIP this week lead me to think that reaction in this country will also wear a similarly English face. 

The real threat to the working class has never really been social inadequates with Adolf Hitler's initials tattooed on their necks. It is the saloon bar bigots in blazers sipping ale from tankards. 

Whilst it is clear that Boris's bumbling persona cunningly  conceals an intelligent - and thoroughly nasty - political operator - the jury is still out on Nigel Farage.  I can't make my mind up if he really is the Alan Partridge of the new British Far-Right or if this is a genius construct to woe the ranks of alienated Middle England. 

If the former then I have no doubt he will be replaced as UKIP grows - either way we should be worried. An effective populist-nationalist movement has never really  achieved critical mass in this country. They might just do it yet.

Tories. Nasty then. Nasty now.

Maggie may be dead and buried - but the spirit of the thoroughly nasty party is alive and well.

I should know better, but I fell of my chair when I read the extraordinary story about Sussex  Tory Councillor John Cherry. He's the NIMBY racist who caused a minor shit storm in his reaction to the news that a South London Academy was going to set up a boarding school - for inner city kids - in his little patch of Middle England.

In an echo of the Smethick by-election Cherry says that the prospect of letting these kids - who he says will be 98% Black and Asian - out into the local villages will create a 'sexual volcano.'

He does concede that it wouldn't be so bad if these bussed-in 'ethnics' were Chinese or Indian because apparently these groups have a hard-working academic ethic. But he is quite clear that he doesn't want any Pakaistanis - because that group are 'uncertain what hard work is'.

Sadly, the interaction of class, culture and institutional racism means that there is a grain of truth in his observations about the over and under achievement of various groups. Although if he did his homework further he'd have found that one of the most under-achieving groups of all is the  "white British'.

Councillor Cherry has swiftly apologised and resigned and the Tories are of course now desperately back-peddling.  Cherry's views certainly don't sit well with the metro-savvy Notting Hill-ite wing. But I suspect that Cherry  just said what many of the Tory loyalists in the shires actually think.

Ding Dong. Trafalgar Square.

Last night, like many other right-minded people  I was wandering around Trafalgar Square looking for a celebration that was never going to be truly adequate.

About thirty years ago I was planning a very different kind of celebration.The 1983 'Falklands election' was the first one I was able to vote in. I had just turned 18 and somewhat still naive. I was possibly one of the few who was confidently expecting a Labour victory on the night of 9th June. Even in those pre-Miners's Strike days, how could it be otherwise ? 

So we stayed up all  night at a friend's house watching the results come in, fortified by way too many cans of Carlsberg Special Brew as celebration turned to sorrow-drowning. For some reason we went into school the next day - looking very much the worse for wear -  and were advised by a friendly teacher that it would probably be in everyone's interests if we discretely went home.

So it was with a certain sense of closure - both melancholic and contented - that I was at Trafalgar Square, along with my own 18 year old daughter and her friends. If only it wasn't thirty years too late.

Let's take a moment to rejoice

Having spent most of my adult life waiting for this moment - Maggie Maggie Maggie Out Out Out has been ringing in my ears since I was 16 - now that it's actually come I feel a bit of an anticlimax.

As a historian I am certainly  not inhibited in talking ill of the dead. I enjoy the childishness of all that stuff on Facebook as much as the next man. Although I do think that Tony Benn hits the nail on the head with his characteristically sober and dignified epitaph:

"Mrs Thatcher was a politician that believed what she thought, did what she said she was going to do and that gave her a certain integrity. However, she used that trust to make war on the working class. She taught us the meaning of class war through campaigns against the miners and the introduction of the Poll Tax. We are still dealing with the effects of that 'Neo-Con' economic experiment".

'Integrity' I would add only in the perverse sense of an enemy that looks you in the eye before stabbing you in the guts. As opposed to the turncoat Blairs, Browns and Millibands who stab you in the back. 

And that's my sense of anti-climax. Thatcher may be dead but Thatcherism is all too much alive and well. Still for tonight at least - let's permit ourselves a bit of time to rejoice.

A lot of balls

A new experience for me this weekend - I visited a pawnbrokers. 

That old-fashioned description wasn't what was over the door - but that's what it was.  It offers of course a very old-fashioned service, but one that - in my neck of the woods  anyway - is depressingly flourishing. In fact along with fried chicken shops and betting shops, places offering pay day loans at interest rates of over 1000% are just about the only enterprises that do prosper around here.

Thankfully I wasn't there for a loan - I wanted to collect a Western Union transfer from Greece.

I wanted to  - but I couldn't because I could not persuade them that the name on the paperwork from the sender - 'Chris' - was a universally acknowledged abbreviation of the name on my driving license 'Christopher'. Even my signature on the very same license  'Chris' was not enough to assuage their jobs-worthiness. Nor were my pleas that only the DVLA, the Passport office and my grandmother got away with calling me Christopher - and she's been dead for twelve years.

So I left empty handed. I am nor sure whether I should be relieved that bureaucratic bullshit seems to trump old-fashioned avarice. Or doubly depressed at a new corporate  take on old-fashioned parasitism.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

It was always going to be a risk: 

Taking a bunch of cynical street wise London teenagers to an art-house cinema to watch two hours of largely black and white talking-heads in a worthy  documentary.

But getting my GCSE class to watch Ken Loach's 'Spirit of 45' paid off. You couldn't make it up - the kids came out wide-eyed and buzzing: Had it really happened ? And how come people had let that bitch Thatcher get away with destroying it all ?

As I walked back to where my bike was parked I have to confess to being choked with emotion: 

Satisfaction that a generation whose experience was so different, could be inspired by these old people talking about socialism. Melancholy for that older generation - my Mum and Dad's - who had seen their dreams fall apart and who we will never get a chance to properly thank. And anger for my own generation - those 40-somethings who bought into the 80's Thatcherite dream that shat on it all.

Thanks Mr Loach - you confirmed that I am in the right job.

No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid*

Ironic. As mentioned in my last post I was going to interview my dad to use his reminiscences as a source for one of my classes. One that I had heard before was of  him going to a meeting as a teenager shortly after the war to hear Aneurin Bevan speak on the creation of the health service - a defining moment which persuaded him to join the Labour Party. 

I was going to brave the icy weather and ride down to Kent when I got a call from his carer to come early because he had been taken into hospital. Fortunately he was able to be discharged the same day. But whilst spending a fairly harrowing day in the very same AndE department from which my mum was admitted and never returned, we had an announcement advising us that waiting times were three hours and that anyone waiting to be seen should go to another hospital ten miles away, or to see their GP. 

And next week I will be on a march next Saturday  to protest the cuts at the Whittington Hospital - roughly a life time on and from my dad going to that meeting ...

* These words from Aneurin Bevan's 'In Place of Fear'

History of our own

I am happy to be working in a school at the moment that promotes the kind of History that would get Mr Grove foaming at the mouth. No kings, queens, Isambard Kingdom Brunel or David Livingston. 

The student population is largely Black and the school makes no apology for featuring Black history heavily in the curriculum. And not just the usual GCSE focus on 1960s Civil Rights but Black British History - pre-colonial Africa, slavery in the Caribbean, decolonisation and post-war immigration. It shouldn't really be a surprise then  that as a result, History is popular at the school, and the kids are actually keen to take part in the lessons.

This attempt to connect what is being taught to student's own experiences and the world today is not restricted to Black History. Yesterday we were discussing the possibility of  a school trip to a viewing of Ken Loach's new film 'Spirit of 45'. And this weekend I was interviewing my Dad to use a source for his memories of hearing Aneurin Bevan speak at a public meeting at that time.

This teacher-training business is probably the most all-consuming and draining thing I've ever done -  but it certainly beats the crap out of what I used to put up with in my previous life ...

Cardinal O'Brien - inappropriate ?

I hate the expression 'inappropriate'.  It is particularly over-used in schools. And in more general usage it has become a euphemism for anything from 'a bit naughty' to 'absolutely fucking outrageous'.  But I had to suppress a giggle (which in itself was probably inappropriate) when I heard that Cardinal O'Brien (Stonewall's 'bigot of the year) is standing down because of inappropriate behaviour towards young priests. 

Given the track record of the Catholic church - predatory sexual behaviour and the mis-use of positions of authority would seem entirely 'appropriate' with that particular organisation's ethos.