In defence of staff rooms

News today that new schools won't in the future be required to have staff rooms:

As someone who until very recently was an outsider to the world of teaching and education I can see why people who don't have the luxury of an equivalent  'staff room' at their own workplace might not see the need for teachers' (and support staff) to have such a place.

I didn't realise it until I spent time in schools how intense and isolated the life of a teacher actually is. Intense, because when you are teaching, you are teaching - performing on your feet with no respite in front of thirty so highly critical pairs of eyes. Isolated, because for the majority of your day you are doing this on your own with precious little adult company.

Whereas in most jobs  - however hard you work at times there is an inevitable large amount of 'down time'. And this is taken up with - for want of a better word  'fucking about'. I know,  I've done my fair share of this - when we were a manual craft industry it involved endless practical jokes and the odd game of 'studio cricket' - in the modern studio environment the equivalent is probably messing about on the internet. And as an executive there is always the liquid lunch and lost afternoon. At whatever level we feel - quite rightly - that the busy times earn us the right to goof around occasionally. And even if you're not goofing around, most workplaces give you an opportunity to down tools and have lunch - whether it's a Gregg's pasty or lunch at the Ivy.  Not so if you're a teacher - as I've found you even have to plan ahead with your toilet breaks ...

All of which points to the need for teachers' staff rooms if only as basic workers' right. I deliberately don't mention the use of the staffroom for all those impromptu meetings done on the hoof between teachers than are essential to the daily running of the school. Because adequate 'non-contact' time should be scheduled to sort all that out. As a manager in my previous life 'meetings' of one sort or another were the single biggest part of my working week. Nobody told me that I should be conducting all these meetings in my own  lunchtime - or that I would have to conduct them all standing in the stair-well.

But let's face it - the move to do away with staff rooms is primarily a political one. Teachers seem to be in the forefront of opposition to the ConDems nowadays and they are rapidly becoming one of the more militant layers of the labour movement. And the first rule of anyone in the business of suppressing opposition is to deny the dissidents their freedom of association ...

Messing about on the river

Lenin said that it was the tops of trees that shake first in a storm - as a metaphor for the phenomenon that the stirring of elements at the top of society, and in particular the youth of the ruling class, was the first indicator of revolution. Historically this seems undeniable. But when I see one posh boy risking life and limb to disrupt another bunch of posh boys' fun I'm inclined to think that it is just more twatish high jinks than a bit of situationist agit-prop:

Trenton Oldfield who swam across the path of the Boat Race and temporarily halted the annual gathering of the braying tribes of Barbour-clad young hoorays claims he was making a statement about elitism. I will pass over the irony of his own private school education or membership of the Royal Society of Arts. He works in urban regeneration management and claims that his choice of target was not simply the symbolic elitism of the annual Oxbridge fest - but  also the route of the race which takes in one of the posher stretches of the Thames. Hmmm. There a couple of serious points to be made here.

The current  domination of the political class by the products of Oxbridge has taken us back two or three generations before the liberal sixties or the supposed meritocracy of the post-war boom. And whole swathes of our inner city that were once  thriving working class communities have become desolate wastelands of chicken outlets, betting shops and pound stores just waiting for yuppiefication. So looking at my own neighbourhood - not quite an Olympic borough but bordering one - I have sympathy for the Stratford demonstrators. Amidst all the hype and pomposity about Olympic heritage and legacy they are raising a small voice to ask 'what's in it for us?'. Good luck to them.

On the other hand I fancy that Trenton Oldfield has struck a blow primarily for his own publicity. And that in the future he will resurface as some sort of minor personality. If I've done him an injustice or am proved wrong in the future  -I will apologise in advance now.

A licence for bullying and casualization.

The ignorant bullying face of Lord-Sir-Allun-Fucking-Sugar has become the totemic icon of 'entrepreneurship'. How apt. As of today the qualifying period for a worker's entitlement to raise a claim of unfair dismissal has been extended from one year to two.

I've got three different angles on this - as someone who was made redundant - as someone who was a manager and had to implement redundancy and dismissal procedures - and as someone who knows a blatant bit of class warfare when he sees it. And this is wrong from every one of them.

Losing your job fucks with your life. Up there with divorce and bereavement it is a life-changing moment and one of the most common causes of stress and clinical depression. Fortunately for me it went the other way - and although I still feel the occasional pang of bitterness it has allowed me to start on my way to a new and happier life. But I'm lucky - and unusual. Most people who lose their livelihoods in middle age are screwed. And - although this shouldn't need to be said -  people are not simply economic units of labour or in the newspeak of management 'resources' to be turned on and off at will.

If you're a responsible manager - or even just a half way decent human being - sacking people is difficult and traumatic. Emotionally and legally it can be a minefield. Which is exactly as it should be. I'm not proud of it ,but over the years I've had to lay people off - I've even sacked a couple for disciplinary reasons. I'm not asking for  sympathy but I lost sleep over it, I wrestled with my conscience and I think I can hand on heart say that I acted fairly - and legally. However ethical managers are not necessarily the norm - and so if we can't count on them to act according to their consciences, we could at least make them act according to the law.

The previous regulations were no more than a fragile safety net, often circumnavigated by the unscrupulous. But they were a safety net nonetheless. Now it has been taken away by a ConDem government who has no scruples about openly demonstrating that it is on the side of bosses in the name of making it 'easier' for businesses. Of course it will be. In the private sector -  as I know all to well - contracts are hardly ever awarded by big businesses to their suppliers for more than two years. So bosses will effectively be able to hire and fire at will within the life cycle of these contracts - in other words they can operate on a risk-free casualized basis. 

And why should it go without question that things should be made 'easier' for business ? I imagine that the abolition of the Highway Code would probably make things 'easier' for motorists - and Jeremy Clarkson is probably lobbying for this right now. Have a look at some of the arguments put forwarded by the business lobbies and you'd think that the previous employment legislation was tantamount to workers' control. Rather than just a baseline of procedures and administration as to what constitutes 'fair'. Which frankly if you didn't have the competence to keep up with - you shouldn't have been running a business in the first place.

Although as we know this government takes a far more lenient attitude to questions of competence in business - particularly in big business and banks - than it does with the rest of us. 

Birth of a nation

A recent study has shown that the previously believed death-toll  of the American Civil War has been seriously under-estimated. Based on census returns, Prof David Hacker of Binghampton University has  calculated the total killed as 750,000. Staggeringly, an proportional equivalent  based on  the US's current population would be 7.5 million.

Records for the English Civil Wars total death-toll are more sketchy, but 185,000 for the years 1642-51 is a reasonable estimate. Again, a proportional equivalent  based on  the UK's current population would be around 2.8 million.

The numbers alone are shocking. 

But consider the social and economic effect of prolonged fighting - four years in the US - and (depending how you count it) nine years in this country. Or the immeasurable impact on the political and cultural development of both societies.

My experience of the levels of awareness of the American Civil War in the states is only second-hand. But I do know that in this country general awareness of our civil war is woefully low. 

In our schools history lessons often  seem to revolve repeatedly around the Great War and the Western Front, and Hitler and the Nazis. I don't want to jump on the reactionary band-wagon of old farts that wants a return to 'our island story' in schools. But I'd dearly love to see the Levellers and the all too short-lived English Republic salvaged from obscurity ...

One Bradford Spring doesn't make a Socialist Summer.

He said that the mainstream parties all told lies, they supported the same wars and the same neo-liberal economics. And he was right.  I just wish it hadn't been Gorgeous George who said it.

I really wish that this was the breakthrough everyone on the Left has been waiting for to seriously challenge Labour in their heartlands. But it isn't. 

What it is - and there's no point in fudging it - is a victory of opportunist communal politics. Not a step forward but a throw-back to the  kind of boss-politics of the US Democratic Party - with whole communities delivered as an ethnic electoral bloc.

I look at Galloway and I see the ghosts of Derek Hatton and Tommy Sheridan at his shoulder. But actually Galloway for all his undeniable charm and guts  represents something far worse - the personality cults of Deza and Tommy may have succumbed to vanity and hubris, but they never so shamelessly politically degenerated into opportunism.

  

Galloway - a Catholic (?) who is happy to play up to the religious sensibilities of his Islamic supporters - says that the extraordinary election result was 'by the grace of god'.  I'm looking at the sad looking pile of TUSC and local anti-cuts alliance leaflets in the corner of my living room - and thinking that building genuine grass-roots resistance isn't quite as spectacular  or miraculous as that .

In/out - shake it all about

Setting aside the hilarity of the  government squirming over the 'do/don't panic buy petrol' fiasco -  and that 'toffs like pasties too'  fiasco - here's some more overlooked, but equally contradictory news from planet Tory.

Here in Haringey - so very obviously a part of the inner city - Education Secretary Michael Grove has finally woken up to the anomaly that schools here have been receiving per capita funding as if it were an outer London borough. Of course this never made any sense geograhically, sociologoically, economically or culturally  - but there you go.

It might just have something to do with the 'poor performance' of schools here that led Grove to target the borough's schools for academisation - even against the will of staff, parents and governors if necessary. 

Because as with hospitals - or any other public service you can think of  - whilst  funding may not be everything, it doesn't half help. And in that light the decison does represent something of a climb down by Grove - but not I imagine to the extent of withdrawing from his academisation crusade. 

But then again in a classic bit of contradictory  thinking - as they give with one hand comes another suggestion that they take with the other  - and  a ludicrous proposal from the 'riot quango' that schools should actually be fined for not meeting literacy targets. 

Looks like this fuck-wittery knows no end ...

Told you so.

Usually if you start spouting off about 'the state'  and 'class interests', people's eyes glass over and you're dismissed as a doctrinaire loony. Then every once in a while a story comes along to  remind us exactly of what's what in society - this morning there's two:

Ray's got in there first on The Cruddas Affair - Tory chairman caught red-handed flogging lobbying access to 'Lord Snooty' Cameron himself. The only surprise is that business interests had to pay at all - although presumably big businesses,  like the ones engaged in the Workfare scandal, have their own direct hot-line anyway.

And then there's the news that the army are being trained up to take over from UNITE tanker drivers who have balloted to strike over the bank holiday. Of course the British Army - often smugly seen as superior to the military  in those dodgy countries who dabble in politics -  has a  long and ignoble history of intervening in 'trade disputes' on the side of employers.

Maybe the loonies aren't quite so marginalised after all ...

A depressing challenge

I observed a history lesson yesterday - Year 11 pupils looking at Nazi Anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930's. 

This was in a typically diverse London secondary school - with seemingly every ethnicity represented -   except Jewish. 

In my liberal-naivety I thought lessons like that would be tricky because they were shocking and upsetting for the pupils. In fact this one was tricky because may of the kids took the position that given the weight of Nazi propaganda there couldn't (and I quote) 'be all that smoke without some fire'. 

Fucking hell that's depressing. 

The teacher did a valiant job of challenging it: Parallels were drawn with Anti-Semitism then and Islamophobia now. But I'm not sure they were won over. I'd like to think that one day I might do it better. It certainly makes me thing that it's vitally important to try. 

Most of all it makes me think of Christopher Hill's quote which should be carved on the walls of every school:  

‘History, properly taught, can help men to become critical and humane, just as wrongly taught it can turn them into bigots and fanatics.’

Thomas Holmes & the London poor

The Victorians had an obsession for collecting and classification. The rural curate with too much time on his hands scouring the countryside with a butterfly net  is something of a stereotype. And the social do-gooders of the age tended to be all too-similar. 

Henry Mayhew's  definite survey of the London working class is a masterful piece of work - but it is also strangely lacking in affection and human warmth. I don't know about Mayhew specifically, but I suspect that like the naturalists - or the enlightened imperialists of the age of the 'white man's burden' - many of these philanthropists regarded the poor as a different species to be studied, pitied and possibly helped -  but still essentially different.

I've just been re-reading a very different kind of late Victorian social commentary - Thomas Holmes' 'London's Underworld'. By a strange quirk, in the last years of Victoria's reign,  Holmes lived in Tottenham only a couple of streets away from where I am now. Then it was not the  inner city area it is now but a new suburb for the emerging lower middle class - often clerks working in the City. Holmes himself was a crime reporter and perhaps it was this not-quite-respectable job that drew him to the poorer sections of London's working class (and he used 'underworld in the sense of the under-class rather than of a criminal network). He certainly writes about them without the condescension of other do-gooders.

In fact his writing shows genuine affection for the chancers, wide-boys and scammers who would have horrified many who considered such types the 'undeserving poor'. He even has admiration for the ingenuity and invention  of  the con-artists who he was frequently taken in by himself. And far from standing aloof and disapproving from his subjects, he often invited them into his home  maintained friendships with them for years and even lent them money with little hope of repayment.

Most significantly he had no time for the 'self-help' schemes of the moral-improvers and temperance factions - who all wanted to make the under-class respectable. Nor did he have much truck either with philanthropists and charities - including the Salvation Army. In fact in an early glimpse of the welfare state, he argued that all charities should be combined into a single entity run by the government. 

I can't find anything that connects Holmes to the pioneering socialist or labour movements of the time - and he did have some fairly odd ideas about 'incorrigible tramps' and compulsory boarding schools for the bright children of the poor - but he is definitely worth a read.

Unity still over-due

A year on from my guest piece at 'On This Deity' to mark the anniversary of the Kronstadt Uprising. Also about a year ago I wrote a piece about an over-due rapprochement of the various tribes of the Left.

A year later and another year wiser  - and I think it's truer than ever. 

Last year, in the course of the local anti-cuts campaign, the campaign against workfare and the pensions strikes,  I've campaigned alongside various characters -  Anarchists, SWP,   Labour 'lefts' and former Stalinists  - and been inspired and frustrated in equal measure. And this seemed to have been dependent not upon their historical label or tribal allegiance but on their  individual integrity, decency  and good sense. 

So no apologies for the repetition and re-linking to previous posts. Here's to the future and its possibilities ...

The not-so 'real world'

Being around schools these days, an expression I often hear in reference to everything outside education is 'the real world'. And being in a strange sort of betwixt and between position of also freelancing in my old field I am well placed to comapre the two.

Yesterday I had to drop off a job at a typical central London design agency:

Standard layout of offices - a bar and a pool table in reception - smoked glass and minimalism in abundance. I had to meet the production director and the account manager. The production director was a chap about the same age as me who looked as if he had been subject to some sort of queer-eye-for-the-straight-guy make-over by the combined talents of Gok Wan and Jean-Paul Gautier. He looked as if he'd be more at home watching Clarkson with a mug of cocco but felt obliged to dress for work in skinny jeans and one of those scooped fronted tee-shirts to display his slighly portly male cleavage. The account manger was an attractive woman in her thirties dressed fairly normally from the waist up but sporting a pair of skin-tight 1970's hot pants and stilletto shoes. 

For about half an hour they pondered the 'job' I had taken in - a printed mock-up of a magarine tub - with the intensity of two archaeologists examining a precious Ancient Greek artifact - musing wherher or not their concept 'worked'.

Sometimes in schools I  have difficulty keeping a straight face whilst over-hearing teachers ponder if pupils' shoes displaying logos qualify as  trainers and consequently merit a 'leadership detention'. And I wonder if I'm doing the right thing in getting into this world. But then after a glimpse over my shoulder at my former world I am in doubt as to which one is 'real'.

Catholic home goals again.

Sometimes it's just too easy:

Earlier in the week we had the head of the Catholic church in Scotland talking in a truly staggering example of Orwellian news-speak about gay marriage as 'a violation of human rights'. And then a slightly more tempered bishops' letter read out in all churches in England and Wales condemns the  proposed reforms to  make gay  marriage legal as some sort of an affront to the moral fabric of society.

In between these two self-righteous pronouncements there came the news on Friday that Fr Alexander Bede Walsh was sentenced for 22years for sexual offences against young boys over a twenty year period.

Why any organisation with as dodgy a record as the Roman Catholic wouldn't observe a self-imposed dignified silence on anything remotely connected to human sexuality is a bit of a mystery. But religion and sex have always had a bizarre and fatal connection,  and the Catholics - more than most - just don't seem able to leave it alone.

Guns (and truncheons) for hire

These days it seems to be a fairly safe bet that if you want to access some dirt on a celebrity, find out the details of trade union activists so they can be black-listed, or even just fancy borrowing a horse for the weekend - all you have to do is 'phone a bent copper.

Even by the usual standards of Tory insensitivity it's pretty staggering that in a week where all these stories are in the news, plans are revealed to put out certain police functions to tendering from private security firms.

Of course dealing with private firms as well as streamlining the whole  business of bribery and corruption will take policing one significant step further away from public scrutiny and accountability. Which I suspect is no accident - it's a process already well-established in the intelligence and security communities where the use of shadowy arms-length private contractors has proved  very convenient in the world of covert and 'dirty' operations.

I can't help recalling that even Machiavlli regarded the dependence of any state for its security on mercenary companies or condottieri was symptomatic of it's moral and political decadence. He had a point.

Changes. Or not.

The more observant of you may have noticed that I have change the 'About Me' on the side panel of this blog. 

It reflects some changes in my life - and I suspect that this might be mirrored with some changes in the subject matter of my posts. There will probably be more about history and education. 

But then again I won't be able to help myself with political posts. And martial arts and bikes remain a big part of my life - so they will continue to creep in too. And 'life and other stuff' has a habit of getting in the way of everything else. 

So maybe no changes at all ...

Hypocrisy on health care

How sodding typical of the sinister pomposity of late capitalism that the solution given for the undeniable problems of our beseiged health service is that staff need to be more caring. I predict the introduction of some sort of 'charter', NVQs in compassion and recruitment procedures to test 'emotional intelligence. I have already heard on the radio this morning that customer care lessons are to be taken from John Lewis...and Starbucks.

For five months of last year I watched with anger, frustration and heart-break, my mum die in an acute dementia ward.

The agony of a condition that robs the patient of dignity and of self was compounded at times by what seemed to me like a lack of compassion or respect, and even neglect. But I was also overwhelmed by the kindness and patience of many of the people working in the hospital.

In fact those qualities seemed to be most evident in some of most 'menial' support staff - auxilaries, porters, cleaners etc. The further up the chain of command the more likely it seemed to be that you would find - not  exactly callousness - but a brusqueness and general lack of warmth.

And that's a clue to what should be bleeding obvious. Doctors and nurses were universally stressed and hemmed in by procedures, policies and bureaucracy. And most of all there were never enough of them to take the precious few minutes that constitute 'kindness'.

They don't need charters and courses on caring - they need to know that they have the support and respect of the people who run the health service - and the best way of demonstrating this would be by massively increasing and improving the resources they work with. Not being treated like a failing business to be asset-stripped and flogged off to the highest bidder.

Workfare sham kicking off

Workfare looks like it's blowing up in Tory faces. 

I've just watched last night's  Newsnight footage. 

In some ways it's a return to the good old 1980's: We've got a Tory arguing the 'commonsense morality' that people shouldn't expect something for nothing. So stacking the shelves in a Tesco distribution centre is the modern version of turning the crank in a Victorian workhouse. Pointless but instilling a work ethic in the otherwise undeserving poor. Countered by a socialist - mistakenly identified as a member of the SWP (why is it they always seem to get the attention of media luvvies?) - arguing that it's all about profit from unpaid labour.

But there's also a thoroughly modern angle too: A nice middle class lad from the Labour Party with a laptop babbling about young people and social media. And best of all a morally bankrupt reptile from brand consultancy Wolff Olins not concerned at all about the morality or politics about young people having to work for benefits - but whether it's good PR for big business to be seen to support the scheme.

Meanwhile in the real world I am just back from leafleting on the issue outside  the local McDonald's - and judging from the response of people who aren't members of Trotskyist organisations, New Labour cyber-activists or brand consultants - it looks like interesting times ahead.

What's in a title ?

Something on the BBC breakfast this morning about the use of Miss / Mrs /Ms. 

It comes in the wake of the campaign in France to replace ‘Mademoiselle’ with a universal ‘Madam’ for all women. Given that ‘Mademoiselle’ translates as ‘little lady’ you can see that you don’t have to be a Feminist to find the title pretty patronising.

And having been filling in more than my share of application forms over the past few moths I have been struck at how odd this obsession with ‘titles’ is. It’s the first question on most forms – yet it’s something that in the normal circumstances no sane person gives much thought to.

Like many things that are dismissed as mere ‘political correctness’, there are actually solid historical grounds for deeming them reactionary and out of place. 

As far as women are concerned the Miss/Mrs/Ms thing is quite straightforward. For centuries to be taken seriously as independent peorson a woman needed a badge of  a man’s endorsement. There were wealthy and influential merchant women even in the Middle Ages – but invariably they were widows. In a later age there was the category of ‘honorary Mrs’ for independent women.  Landladies, housekeepers and cooks were powerful players in the domestic-service hierarchy  - the fictional ‘Mrs Bridges’ of Upstairs Downstairs or ‘Mrs Hudson’ of Sherlock Holmes were not actually married, but required the gravitas bestowed by the title. And in a bizarre twist on the same rationale, lecherous toffs from Charles II to Edward VII would only take married mistresses – even to the extent of finding husbands for the objects of their desire.

When it comes to men, assuming you are not a Duke or Earl, then social implications of titles is a bit more nuanced. In some circles the use of ‘Mr’ is still reserved as a means by which a gentleman can patronize members of the working and. lower-middle class. ‘Mr’ is a tag attached to ‘tradesman’ – a gentleman will refer to his own social equals by a first name, or if he is particularly old-school, by his surname.  In the army it is institutionalised so that the use of ‘Mr’ is reserved for a particular category of senior NCOs’ – a group very much of officers BUT not gentlemen. And if that all seems like archaic pedantry – in the modern world of business the use of first names is just about universal – except as  a subtle way of patronising  builders and other workmen.

So here’s a radical thought – why don’t we just do away with titles altogether? They just perpetuate inequality and provide a crutch for the seriously insecure.

Where's the Humanity(ies) ?

A few weeks ago I was delighted to hear that I'd got a place in September to go back to university for teacher training and do a PGCE. And I still am. Although I will be ducking and diving until then, it has given some sort of shape back to me life. However I also was half way through an application for the other sort of teacher training - the learn whilst you earn 'teaching apprenticeship' - the GTP scheme. I'd done what I thought was the hardest part and found a school who would take me on - but I heard yesterday from the university who accredits the scheme that they had been told they would receive no funding this year for Humanities GTPs.

I'm not really in a position to compare the differences in the quality of training between the two schemes. But I do know the financial difference - about £40k. In inner London, that's a salary of £18k for the GTP versus a debt of about the same amount for the PGCE. Fortunately I have redundancy, savings and an understanding family so it won't deter me. But for many 'mature' students the GTP is the only route they can consider.

But setting aside my own money  problems - why the blanket refusal to fund Humanities ?

Supply and demand in the teaching labour market is the easy answer - but in reality there are bigger political issues relating to the curriculum. And the consensus that school should be some sort of pre-training for work shapes this. 

So we are fed  for example a mantra that ICT in schools is an essential part of the country's economic revival. We witness classes full of a generation who have evolved an intuitive grasp of ICT in every aspect of their lives, taught  by older people who struggle with their mobile phones. And they learn on equipment that is more antiquated than anything they will encounter at home or at work. I suspect that for these kids having a distinct subject called ICT makes about as much sense as having a subject called 'eating breathing and sleeping'.

Or there is the dazzling variety of vocational options in supposedly work-orientated subjects. I'm on home ground with these having worked with Modern Apprenticeships for several years: Sadly for the kids who are directed towards them I have to say that they are generally worthless in relation to the practical world of work. Forget graphic arts, media and D&T - the only subject that seemed to have any correlation to trainees' ability in my old world of print and design was good old-fashioned Art.

I know everybody lobbies for their own pet subject - but I can't believe that it is an accident that it is the supposedly 'liberal' arts - the Humanities -  that are getting squeezed out of the curriculum. History more than any other subject encourages you to try to understand the world around you and question what you see. It is consequently the most overtly political of school subjects which is why the Daily Mail et al are so obsessed with the History curriculum as a benchmark of government thinking. 

The UK is the only country where History is not compulsory until school leaving age. And I don't think that it is stretching the point too far to see some correlation between this and our position near the bottom of just about every other index of educational standards. Or the low level of political engagement.

All the world loves a toff ?

It's a depressing phenomenon that recession seems to go hand in hand with an upsurge of deference. When times are tough maybe it's just easier to look upwards that around you.

This weekend we have the return of the BBC's antidote to ITV's toff-fest Downton Abbey - the revived version of Upstairs Downstairs. The BBC push it even further - their toffs don't just swan about in their big house whilst the rest of the country are up to their necks in shit in the trenches  - theirs' actually flirt with the Mosley and the BUF. But it's OK 'cos you can tell by their fresh complexions, defined cheekbones and vaguely vacant pain-ed expressions that they are just so much more sensitive than the likes of us.

I even see today that there's a new story about Lord Lucan re-surfacing. If ever there was an utterly  pointless and odious toff it was 'Lucky' Lucan - a playboy gambler who did a bunk after killing one of the servants. And had the distinction of coming from a long line of similarly dim-witted morally bankrupt absentee landlords in Ireland - the most famous of which has the dubious distinction of having presided over the charge of The Light Brigade.

What's the fascination ?

A disappearing name

Being on the cusp of a new life I now find myself having to answer the question - what did you do used to do ? The poncey answer would be 'media-production' - but nobody knows what it means - and it throws up altogether the wrong image of Hoxton-ite wankers. I also have a sense of wanting to capture some industry trivia before it rapidly slips into obsolete obscurity.

I'm inclined to just say that I worked in printing - but just as it did back when I actually was in the industry, that often provokes requests to knock out people's wedding invitations and parish newsletters on the cheap. And I was never that kind of printer.

In fact we would never have used the word printer to describe ourselves. We were 'litho planner/platemakers'. The planning bit has nothing to do with making strategic decisions about the future but comes from the type of printing plate used - which  was flat or planographic.  (A litho plate is flat because lithography relies on the mutual repellence of grease and water to keep the ink where it is meant to be and away from where it isn’t and not a raised or engraved image as in Letterpress or Gravure). If that's confusing - in the 'states the same trade was known as 'film-stripping', which conjures up quite a different image again.

The job of a planner was to get all the elements that make up a piece of print – the photographic images, the illustrations, the text onto a set of four printing plates – one for each  ‘process ‘ colour. And that’s all we did.  We didn’t set type - that was the job of the typesetter. We didn’t lay out the page - that was the job of the paste-up artist. We didn’t proof the page - that was the job of the proofer. And we certainly didn’t print it.  Printers were a different species altogether. If they were feeling particularly precious about it, some of the older guys would refer to themselves as ‘lithographic artists’ or ‘photolithographers’ - but never printers.

Racism. And class-hatred.

Here we go again: I had to do a dangerous double take whilst riding on my bike when I first saw this poster for the latest Channel 4 series 'inside' the Traveller community - and its even most offensive companion featuring a couple of scantily clad young Traveller women.

I cannot think of any other ethnic group that the media would dare portray in this way. 

Maybe in multi-cultural PC Britain, the closed world of Traveller communities is the only minority left that can be safely sneered at and scape-goated with impunity.

I'd be the first to admit that I know bugger-all about Traveller communities - but I do know snobbery and racism when I see it.

One curious thing  though -  the supposed characteristics of Traveller culture that are pilloried and ridiculed in this program are a sort of caricature of the much broader white working class 'chav' stereotype: More money than taste. Violent. Uneducated. Vulgar. Orange... You get the picture. 

Here's a thought - maybe the media-middle class know they couldn't get away with such a vicious  portrayal of the working class as a whole - so they displace their snobbery on to a smaller group who it's safe to isolate.  Either way it's ugly and leaves a bad taste.

Dickens hype

I have a philistine confession to make - I just don't get all the fuss around the Dickens bi-centenary. I have never 'got' Dickens. Sorry. I have tried to  force myself to read a few of his novels because I thought it was a necessary  part of being 'well read'.

I find his style ridiculously verbose - never using one word when twenty five would do; his plot lines ridiculous and convoluted; and as for his characters - they seem to be just a parade of caricatures and stereotypes. But fair enough - that's just my personal taste. I struggle with many of the nineteenth century literary giants. Perhaps it's a reaction to be force fed Thomas Hardy at school A level.

But that's fine; Dickens had an undeniably huge impact although I suspect that rather more people have his fat volumes on their bookshelves, or enjoy the lavish TV serialisations on a Sunday evening, than ever actually read them. Still, on the basis of his undeniably enduring influence, I'll grit my teeth and suffer the excessive fuss this year over his bi-centenary.

But I am forced to spit the dummy when he his held up as some sort of champion of the working class. He may write about the poor with some detail because he knew at times real poverty himself but he does so in a way that sentimentalises 'misfortune' and above all extols the values of self help and respectability. In other words his views are typically those of the Victorian do-gooding middle classes - possibly  well intentioned but judgemental and patronising of their inferiors.

And when the royal family queue up to eulogise him - as they did yesterday - you can be pretty sure that Dickens doesn't belong in the radical pantheon.If you want a slice of social history of the same period with a genuinely  radical edge -  have a look at Zola's Germinal instead.

Goodbye to all that.

Today I am celebrating the anniversary of Gutenburg and the print revolution over at 'On This Deity'.

It's quite a personal piece as it coincides with me finding out this week that I will be starting teacher training - and a whole new life - in September. And leaving the world of printing behind me.

I have been in 'the print' for about twenty five years. Although I followed my dad, and come to that my grandfather too, into the trade, it was not an obvious career choice at the time for a graduate. But I was seduced by the romance and history of printing; a proud and quirky closed world of chapels, banging-out - and journeymen. And the Gutenberg anniversary is an appropriate time to step back and reflect on just what an incredibly important part of western civilisation - and its radical opposition - printing has been for six hundred years.

But Murdoch, technology, corporate avarice  and off-shoring slowly eroded all that romance. And at the same time imperceptibly I slid up the greasy pole into a job far removed from the one I signed up for. To the point that when it all went tits up last Autumn and I was laid off - I felt a sense of liberation.

I'm actually pleased that I am now spending my last few weeks in the print in a small trade house - surrounded by the smell of ink and the sound of endless banter. It's an epitaph for a love affair that is over.

Worse than bankers ?

For many years plying my 'honest' trade in the print I thought that I had left my university years a thousand years behind me. Recently, as I have tried to change directions I have had to dig out qualification certificates - even some old essays -  and memories of it have come beck to haunt me. Then this morning thanks to the power of Facebook I saw this message: "Any management consultant alumni out there, please, who could offer some advice to a current student  who is applying for jobs at the moment? Please email XXXX XXX, Deputy Development Director" 

I was tempted to respond.To paraphrase the words of the great late Bill Hick directed at the next circle of corporate hell - marketing: "Kill yourself. Seriously you think I am joking. Kill yourself now. You are Satan's spawn"

Of all the disgusting spectacles that late capitalism throws out there can surely be none worse than that of a pimply pampered young grad eager to advise businesses how to 'downsize and synergize cost efficiencies'.

The equally late and equally great Douglas Adams postulated a future where the useless people - including management consultants - but also estate agents, personnel execs and telephone sanitizers -  were jettisoned from the planet to build a new world on a far away galactic colony. Maybe that's a more humane solution.
  

League tables of inequality

These days I take more than usual interest in stories about education. It's that time of year for the schools' league tables. And the usual bollocks about 'failing schools'... 'failing teachers' and life chances.

You don't need to be a genius - or even a sociologist - to work out that whilst the odd working class hero might buck the system thanks to a few inspirational teachers, some innate talent and quite a bit of luck, your 'life chances' are pretty much determined at birth. It's called capitalism -  and it stinks.

For the terminally hard of thinking have a look at these two maps from that hot-bed of class warriors  - the BBC: The first shows the distribution of 'good' GCSE results - the second the distribution of child poverty. 

Corduroy and leather elbow patches are out.

Strange coincidence - on the same day that the new head of the V&A museum is mourning the decline of tie-wearing by the modern  British male I went for an interview with a headteacher. In the nicest possible way he told me I could come back to do a couple of days in his school but only once I'd had a haircut and wore a suit. He wanted his staff to project a 'smart business-like image'.

I made a half-hearted attempted to tell him that in my previous life - 'in business' - nobody wore a suit and tie but I think his view of creative businesses probably stopped around the Mad Men era. Just to be clear I wasn't wearing my usual uniform of combats and t-shirts - I was actually in my 'smart mode'  - wearing a shirt and tie, black canvas jeans and a corduroy jacket. My hipster version of a stereotypical wannabe teacher's garb - circa 1970's I suppose.

Anyway that kind of 'history man' nonsense apparently doesn't wash in the post-Thatcher academy-ised era. Stepford-like conformity is everything nowadays  so that staff  and kids look like Mormon missionaries or sales assistants in Currys - or young offenders preened for their first court appearance. Maybe it is teaching the kids valuable lessons in preparation for post-school life after all....

At the end of the day I want a job and to help me get it I want as much experience of what modern schools  - for better or worse - are really like. So I'll grit my teeth, have a trim and dig out a suit - I just have to remember not to roll my sleeves up - a glimpse of my tattooed arms would probably send the head into apoplexy.

Keep the information super-highway open

I'm not joining in the online blackout in protest at the US government's attempts to keep control of information firmly in the hands of big business. But only because I'm sure that nobody gives a toss whether or not they can access this blog. Otherwise I'm right behind Wikipedia's stance today.

Copyright's is a funny old thing: Before Gutenberg and Caxton changed the world forever with movable type legislation wasn't really necessary - the Catholic Church had pretty much got the medieval media sewn up on its own. Printing blew that apart and the artisan printer / publisher (because they were often the same person) was often a fee-thinking radical too.  So the first copyright laws were all about ensuring control of reproduction by the state - such as the1534  charter from Henry VII to the Cambridge University Press. And nothing much seems to have changed.

For a  while the waters got muddied and we all got bogged down in the idea that copyright laws were there to protect the little guys. Certainly it sometimes looks that way in my former world of the 'creative industries'. Laws are there to stop designers and photographers having their work ripped off by bastard clients. But in the real world these laws are only as good as they can be practically enforced. And if you're a sole-trader designer pursuing a multinational brand from using the work you did as part of an unpaid pitch - then best of luck. 

But that's another argument - and not at all what the present rows over  SOPA / PIPA is about. The fact that Rupert-sodding-Murdoch and his empire of evil - the modern day version of the Holy Inquisition when it comes to media control - are behind the US government's attempt to police the internet is probably enough reason in itself to support Wikipedia.

Everything has a price tag

None of this is a surprise and bemoaning it is hardly original - even so it has struck me personally this week: 

For the first time for many weeks I am actually earning some money. I've been 'consulting' - a poncey name for casual labour - in my old industry of print and graphics. I've also been applying - without any success yet - for Teaching Assistant posts as a prelude to getting on to some sort of teaching training.

Of course I knew it all along - but it's a hell of a wake-up call to realise that this consulting pays something like five times the wages of a lowly teaching assistant.  And I'm only talking about doing a bit of freelance selling for a small printing buisness on a shitty industrial estate - I'm hardly some corporate reptile at McKinsey & Co.

I bloged some years ago about the value of viewing work through a child's eyes. To a child a teacher - and those who work alongside them - are the most important people in their world. Even in this celebrity fixated age - it's difficult for them to imagine anyone else more deserving of status. My own kids are reasonably aware of how things work these days - but even they struggle to see how a teacher can be rewarded less than a plodding junior manager or administrator. And they're quite right.

As a 'consultant' am I better academically qualified than a Teaching Assistant ? No at all; Am I more skilled ? Not really - only in the art of bullshit; Is the work harder ? Certainly not; Is it more socially useful ? You've got to be kidding.

Roots 4: Water Lane.

Over the holidays,  I met up with an old mate to see the rugby at Twickenham. Afterwards we walked down to Richmond to enjoy a couple of pints of Youngs Special in the White Cross on the riverfront. 

It's a part of London that these days oozes affluence from every pore, so it's hard to imagine that a century ago the little streets leading down to the river were a  working community - and home to a very peculiar and distinct breed of artisans. It's where my mums' family lived for many years, in White Cross Yard with a boathouse on the river front, and before that in Water Lane - where another Youngs pub still stands - the Waterman's Arms. 

The family were Thames Watermen in Richmond going back to at least the 1750's for certain - and very possibly beyond that. It's easy to establish this continuity from the records of apprentices and licensed Watermen still held by the Company of Watermen. Amongst the few family heirlooms I have inherited are three generations of apprentice's papers - eldest sons indentured to their fathers. 

Even in my grandfather's time, this apprenticeship lasted for seven years, during which the waterman would  learn boatmanship and the complex geography and shifting currents of the river. In the upper reaches of the river the role of Watermen who conveyed people, and Lightermen who carried freight were combined - although down river in the docks the two trades were usually  distinct. 

By my grandfathers' time suburban omnibuses and railways had started to signal the death of the river as a commercial highway. The family concentrated on the pleasure-boat business and had a small boatyard with boats for hire. The business did not survive the depression and so in the 1930's my grandfather gave up the yard and put his skills to work as a river policeman and moved to the docklands.

Thus ended an incredibly stable way of life: Whilst other strands of my family led a  precarious existence ducking and diving over the generations in various trades and moving around  to scrape a living, the watermen part stayed  put in the same couple of streets for the best part of two hundred years - and in the case of my grandfather married a girl from the next street.

Relatively prosperous, fiercely proud of their status these Thames Watermen were notorious for their stroppiness and uppityness. Henry Mayhew records in his study of London's labouring classes:

'The character of the Thames Waterman... was what might be expected from slightly informed, or uninformed and not unprosperous men. They are hospitable and hearty to another ... civil if such fares are civil to them; but often saucy, abusive and even sarcastic'.

Then as now, there was nothing the do-gooding middle class feared more that workers with a few bob who wouldn't be patronised or take too much crap. 

Black Jacobins remembered.

Starting the year on an up-lifting note - I'm on a roll at the moment with yet another piece over at On This Deity - the anniversary of the Haitian Revolution of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Black Jacobins. And a moment too to remember CLR James -  Trotskyist and sportswriter - a true revolutionary renaissance man.