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. 

Unfestive.

It's that weird time of year 'twixt one holiday and another -  a punctuation in the flow of normality that prompts introspection. And not necessarily of the healthy kind. I can't help dwelling on the fact this time last year I had no inkling that I'd lose the mum I'd known for 45 years, or the job I'd known for 23.

Back when I was in work I used to hate the 'festive' season: Parties for clients. Lunches for clients. Drinks with clients. Corporate gifts for the clients. Departmental parties. Company parties. Lunch for the sales team. Lunch for the managers. Secret-sodding-Santa.

But now that's all gone - I can't escape a nagging feeling that I'm  somehow missing  it: Not the people; not the work; not the bullshit from clients; not the doubt and self-loathing I felt when I thought I was becoming part of that bullshit.  Not even the money really. Although I do miss the not-having to worry about money. Mainly I miss the reassurance and security of routine and ritual. Of having an answer when people ask me what I do.

Rationally, I know it's like a released prisoner who craves being inside again.

So enough already  - I will choose to end the old year and start the new one like Papillon in the final scene of the movie, floating to freedom after his last and most desperate escape - "Hey you bastards - I'm still here !"

Rasputin.

I'm to be found again over at Dorian Cope's 'On This Deity'. Today is the anniversary of the murder of Rasputin. 

He's probably had far more historical attention than he deserves - but if nothing else his life is a weather-vane pointing the way to the real story of the Russian Revolution.

Portrait of the young man as a sell-out artist

My local MP writes today about the riots at some length in today's Guardian:

Hold the front page: Riots are bad. Communities are good. But life in Tottenham sucks. Cameron and his toffs are out of touch. Big business doesn't care - in fact it makes money from it all.

Lammy's answer ? Labour got it wrong with the nanny state - what we need to do is share the profit - share the power. 

OK - I'll sign up for that I guess. 

But hang on what does Lammy mean ? 

Actually he explains - worker representatives on the boards of big business. And dividends not fat cat bonuses. Just like they do in Europe.

Because of course there's no economic crisis there. Fucking hell. 

Even that near extinct species, an honest social-democrat could find something a bit more progressive to point to in the European model: Maybe  a still-functioning public sector that wasn't constantly portrayed as a parasitic pariah, or trade unions that hadn't been emasculated with generations of restrictive legislation.

Given the usual trajectory of Labour politicians towards the right - fuck knows where Lammy is going to end up. Right now  he seems to be one of Labour's rising stars -  and one of the very few who they think can speak to the inner cities and the yoof.

I predict ...

'Tis the season for looking back to the old year and forward to the new.

I'll leave the celebration of the Arab Spring and the return of class politics in 2011 -  and anticipation of an inspiring year of struggle in 2012 -  to my comrades. 

As the ghost at the feast I'll predict a year of nauseating nationalist flag-waving. We have all the ingredients: 

• The gloom of recession that needs warming with an excuse for a street party

• London hosting the Olympics

• The queen's diamond jubilee or whatever the fuck it is

• The long anticipated death of Thatcher and her funeral

• Ditto the Duke Of Edingburgh

Of course it doesn't have to be this way ...

Police want even more...

Given that the riots this summer - which started literally in my backyard  - began because the police shot someone, you'd think that the obvious conclusion would be that they shouldn't be so trigger happy. On the contrary though the Inspectorate of Constabulary reports that they weren't trigger happy enough. Apparently the riots could have been nipped in the bud if only they had been more willing to use rubber bullets -  and even live ammunition. Worse still the top coppers private club claims that they don't need any new laws to make this possible - they claim they are already within their rights to shoot 'arsonists'.

Scary stuff.

I'm reminded of a conversation with my dad shortly after the riots: 

Bear in mind he's a lifelong labour-man (with a small l these days) but he's also 84 and lived most of his life in the homogeneous affluent white working class hinterland of London - so you can maybe forgive him if his social attitudes are occasionally a bit conservative ( but always with a small c). Indeed when he spoke about some of the disturbances in his own area he did talk about copycat 'yobs'. But when we spoke about how it had all started here in Tottenham - he was amazingly spot-on: "Stupid police shot someone they didn't need to AGAIN. They bungled dealing with local  people AGAIN. And then  they lied to cover their tracks AGAIN."

And now the same police want more powers and more guns....

Day trip to Chelsea

With time to kill and an eye for free stuff - I took myself down to Chelsea to see the Warhorse exhibition at the National Army Museum. We went with the kids to see the play at the National Theatre and I thought it was great - but the exhibition was a disappointment.

I say free but I  picked up TWO parking tickets with a face value of £260 - apparently in Chelsea you need a permit to park a motorcycle in a motorcycle bay. The two tickets I hope are an error as they were issued within two minutes of each other- but who knows. So possibly my verdict of the exhibition is retrospectively prejudiced, but then again I was already pissed off after riding around the ridiculously  smug moneyed  backstreets of Chelsea. If we could spare Warrs Harley Davidson off the Kings Road, there would be a strong case for nuking the whole fucking borough and all the hoorays who live there.

But I digress: The exhibition managed to be  both a not-quite-the-history of the British cavalry - and an attempt to convey the horrors of the Great War by anthropomorphising a horse and its sufferings. I wasn't too comfortable about this -  I can well imagine that many of the officer class 1914-18  being more upset at the loss of their favourite hunter than a few working class oiks...

Actually the exhibition came across primarily as a lure to bring kids into the National Army Museum - much like the exhibition of the history of Commando war comics going on at the same time on the upper floor.  

The museum itself is a strange one: full of the traditional glass cases of uniforms, weapons, dioramas and the history of military campaigns - which I have to confess I'm a sucker for - but also an underlying  message of 'join the army-it's great'. A message told with a poorly concealed subliminal attempt to be inclusive and politically correct.

So we have mannequins portraying a soldier at Waterloo from the West Indies (factual but hardly representative) and a lot of coverage of empire troops in the Second World War. But no explanation of why the British army was fighting a succession of campaigns in Africa, India, Burma etc - although these are grouped in a gallery titled with unconscious irony 'Changing The  World'. We are also treated to another gallery singing the praises of post-war national service which seems to have been a bit like a lads' holiday with camping and paint-balling thrown in. And  another gallery about life in the modern British Army - apparently it's all about 'the army family'.

There's a gift shop on the way out with a mixture of fairly esoteric military history books and a range of kid's versions of modern camo-clothing and equipment. The eleven year old me would have signed up on the spot and I didn't even visit the 'kids zone in the basement' ....

Unilever strike

Eclipsed in the news by Lord Snooty's Churchillian 'we'll stand alone and fight them on the trading floors and in the city wine bars' moment - there's a breaking story that is a telling slice of real life in contemporary fucked-up Britain:

At Unilver's Gloucester plant 2,500 workers went on strike yesterday over their pensions. These weren't the 'pampered' public sector scroungers who we are told are now the enemy within. These are workers in that paragon of all Tory values - a profitable private business. Profitable to the extent that unlike many well known brands these days, business is actually booming for the nation's leading supplier of grocery products with profits last year of £6.5 billion. No wonder the chief exec trousered a package of over £3million.

So just why are Unilever trying now to get rid of their final salary pension scheme ? The only answer is because they think they can. Capitalism is a rapacious beast at the best of times - and in the midst of a depression it is savage. And the supposed Quaker antecedents of the firm and its heritage of ethical business is  whimsical bollocks. Just as it was at Cadburys a couple of years ago.

Jeremy-twatting-Clarkson

It shouldn't have taken 'The One Show-gate' to confirm that Jeremy Clarkson is a smug, mean-spirited Little Englander Tory-tosser.  

Regardless of taking his comments in or out of context  -  I'm troubled by   the backlash over his comments about having public sector strikers taken out and shot.

Asking for an apology - whatever that means - tends to cast the injured parties as humourless and self-righteous, something the Left hardly needs more of. And equating him with General Pinochet - who of course really did shoot trade unionists - is on a par with calling parking attendants Nazis; it's simply disproportionate, historically inaccurate and offensive to the memory of genuine victims.

There are plenty of genuine villains really worthy of our rage  from the strike last week - the entire Tory Party, the vast majority of the Labour Party and fat-cat fuckers like Philip Green who lecture the rest of us about tightening our belts. A b-lister with a dodgy perm who has built a career out of having his mid-life crisis in public,  comes some way down the pecking order.

Historic ?

Any socialist who has been around for a few years will have heard  the word 'historic' much used to describe things that almost certainly aren't.

Yesterday was one of those rare occasions when its use was actually justified. The biggest strike since the General Strike of 1926 - and perhaps most importantly the biggest strike since the Thatcher watershed. Having spent the day from  the early morning riding around visiting pickets in my borough, going on the central London demo and finishing  up with a shop stewards meeting in a pub in Whitehall - I'll happily confess that I was caught up in the euphoria of the day. And why not - there  is something qualitatively different about a demonstration of striking trade unionists - it means so much more than the usual suspects on a day out.

But the morning after is possibly the time for a bit of sober reflection: General strikes are a very big deal in this country: Rightly so when  2milllion plus workers are involved. And the idea of 'general strike' will forever be associated with that oh so un-typically 'British' moment when the country came close to revolution. But 24hour general strikes occur quite regularly in much of Europe. They are treated as ritualistic  fete-days for the labour movement. And we shouldn't be under any illusions that the TUC would happily adopt this European custom.

Survival of the insecure

I can't deny that I've got time on my hands. Too much fucking time - there's only so many hours you can spend online job hunting and researching. 

Whilst surfing through the nauseatingly smug cliches of the ever growing 'how to cope with redundancy' industry I came across an academic paper from Cranfield University - a study of redundant executives. A category I reluctantly have to accept I fell into.

There's a lot of pseduo-socio-psychological padding to it but the gist of it is that redundant executives in their survey group show the following personality characteristics in comparison with  their peers who weren't made redundant (or in bollock-speak 'out-placed').

More calm
More socially bold, uninhibited 

Much more imaginative and unconventional 

Less shrewd, more natural, forthright 

Less self critical

Less tense, overwrought

I think I tick all of those boxes - although some who know  me may laugh at the idea of 'calm' - in a work context I was perfectly stoic it's only motorcycle electrics that drive me psychotic.

In fact I could add a couple of more categories of my own:

Less likely to play golf with the boss

Less able to network / generally brown-nose

More inclined to take the piss out of corporate bullshit 

Or in other words, businesses like their managers to be properly socialised - and a bit jumpy. No shit Sherlock.  

I don't know if any of this makes me feel much better - I never felt that I sense of inferiority that I'd got the bullet when others didn't - but now I realise that I'm deficient in those attributes that will get me back in the game ....

My trade union CV

In the past few months I have written out my CV  dozens of times - so many times in fact  that I'm even starting to bore myself.  So just  for a change - I thought I'd set it out in terms of the chronology of my trade union membership. 

I  have to say it's not an inspiring story:

• TGWU - in between school and uni I worked as a lathe operator in a factory making photocopiers. It was an old-fashioned shitty  assembly line and played no small part in getting me politicised. The factory was run on the lines of a caste system; the T&G was the union for the 'un-skilled and semi-skilled' - we wore grey overalls; there were engineers (AUEW) who wore blue lab-coats; and technicians (ASTMS) who wore white lab-coats. Paranoia about demarcation and a kind of apartheid system prevailed.  I wasn't there long enough to form a proper view of it all but it did seem like  something out of disutopian sci-fi movie.

• NUS (students not seamen that is) - I couldn't really take this seriously as a proper trade union. Certainly at that time (the 1980s) and place (Oxbridge) it was a drinking club with overtones of political correctness. The high-point of this was an occupation against the proposal of fees (sounds familiar) - but being a respectable bunch the union actually  booked the venue they were occupying in advance.

• SOGAT - joined by mistake whilst I was a student at the London College of Printing. We used to go down to Wapping on a Friday night - which is where I was first  at the receiving end of  police thuggery . Once I started work - in the pre press sector - I found that I was in the wrong union. It then took about six months of arguing and pleading before I was allowed to transfer to the right one.

• NGA - I came in at a time which might considered the swan song of ascendant craft unionism. The chapel had a degree of control over recruitment and working practices which seems almost impossible in these post-Thatcher days. I thought it was great and in retrospect was a bit seduced by it all. It was corrupt and riddled with nepotism, racism and sexism.  And whilst new technology was about to bury us - the union was burying its head in the past. In my section many of the members identified more with the pre-merger( even more arcane) craft unions- like SLADE and the ASLP. The  leadership was more concerned with defining who could and couldn't join - certainly not the new generation of mac heads who did 'desk top publishing'.  The trouble was this was the next generation who were poised to replace many of our jobs.

• GPMU - at last a single union for the print. Trouble was the stable door was bolted  after the horse had run away. The union at my place - and many other smaller companies - had already been de-recognised and members were largely an aging minority.

• AMICUS and  then UNITE - successive swallowing-ups and the union became increasingly remote and irrelevant. Out of 80 odd people in our place there were three members and one of them was me - supposedly a senior manager. 

Which brings me to the latest installment: When I phoned the union offices a few week ago - the first time I had spoken to anyone there for years - to tell them that I had been made redundant, they could tell me only  that as I'd been in for 25 years  I was eligible for a free 'retired members' level of membership. They didn't even ask me if I was happy that I'd received my statutory rights or offer me any support or advice.  I was seriously tempted to tell them to poke my union card - although I have kept it as an 'unemployed member' out of some sort of misplaced sentimentality.

Here's hoping that wherever I end up next has something resembling a healthy union ...

Let's work together

Divide and rule is an ugly game as old as the hills - and  the latest flavour of this seems to be pitting  private against public sector workers. Now just to be clear, I've never worked in the public sector - although it looks like I might be about to reverse the much touted trend of public sector jobs flowing to the private sector. 

This supposedly inevitable  drift to private enterprise  is heralded as somehow emancipating. Because it's an ideologically driven impulse from Thatcher's heirs in the form of Lord Snooty and his chums. But it's not emancipating - and I speak from personal experience here - it sucks - statutory redundancy after 25 years and fuck-all pension to go with it. I don't feel liberated by the market I feel shafted.

But I'm not jealous of the public sector.  Well actually I am  - but not in the way that the Tories want me to be. I'm jealous that even the most 'lowly' of public sector workers goes home at night knowing that they have done something - however menial - that makes their community a better place.  Like many others in private business, when the sun goes down on another working day I can only reflect that I have helped someone else get a bit richer than they were this morning.  

And there's the simple truth - only a tiny number of capitalists (the 1% ?) truly depend on the private sector - for the rest of us it tends to be the public sector that delivers those things that make life bearable. 

So when the mini general strike on November 30th comes around those like me who have never worked in the public sector should get their arses down to the picket lines to let the strikers know that there is no such thing as 'the general public' to be pitted against them - only a different kind of worker. And we're all in it together. Literally.

A bit inspired. A lot frustrated.

I've just finished a week spent in a secondary school as preparation for applying to teacher training. It's been a strange week - after all I haven't even really been in a school since I was at school - maybe thirty years ago. I suppose the good news is that the experience hasn't put me off - in fact I want to get some more time under my belt -  but it has made me much more frustrated about how I can now change direction.

Contrary to all those ads - and the articles about bankers seeing the error of their ways and turning to something more worthwhile -  nobody  is  falling over themselves to lure people  into teaching with incentives to change careers.

Certainly not if - like me - you're thinking about teaching something as 'un-useful' as History. Maybe I might stand more chance if I'd elected for Business Studies - god knows I've had more than enough experience in that area, but I've also had enough of that shit and I just don't think it belongs in schools. 

It gets worse: Forget about any golden handshakes - even those 'earn while you learn on the job' GTP schemes just don't seem to  be available for 'non-shortage' subjects either.  If I  get a place on a PGCE course for the next academic year  I will have to face the prospect of living on not much more than fresh air for a year whilst at college. And only then after several years of working my way up to get something like an average wage. But first of course I've got to find something to keep me going for before I can start in Autumn 2012 -  and whilst I'm fully resigned to never again earning as much as I did in my previous over-paid existence -  I'm still wrestling with the implications of inflicting that on my family.

And that's all assuming I can even get on a course  -  the laws of supply and demand mean that applications for teacher training are up 40%  this year - as a result of redundancies and mid-life crisis - or in my case both simultaneously. There's  a catch-22 too of having to demonstrate in your application that you have spent time  in schools (inevitably unpaid) - which is a hard thing to do when you've also trying to find a paying job to keep you going and puts the 'mature' career-changer with responsibilities at a big disadvantage against the recent graduate in their 20's who can afford to take a gap year volunteering. 

Perhaps I should make a case for age discrimination.

A true revolutionary role model

I'm running a bit short of blogging inspiration this week - so I'm  just going to repost a link to an anniversary  piece for Victor Serge that I wrote a year ago. 

Amongst the 'dead Russians' he's maybe not the greatest of revolutionary theoreticians but these days he's probably my favourite. 

'Early on, I learnt … that the only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history … one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is in no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error to live for oneself.'