Class of 2012

As a Scotsman, it is possible to enjoy the faint schadenfreudic glow that follows the time honoured, quarter final tournament exit of the England football team on penalties.  Whilst it is true that a Scot can only rightly make fun of English football by employing a German expression, (and bastardised at that) it seems possible to see certain patterns emerging.

Failure is this country's boogie man of choice.  You would think that a country that hasn't won anything since a couple of years before the moon landings would regard failure as the guy you know will eventually turn up  at your party and ruin it by vomiting in the dips.  You don't like him, and he leaves a sour taste in the mouth, but you are so used to him that you've started putting paper down in the living room.

Is it just a coincidence that in the same week as this predictable failure on the international stage, our politicians have been bemoaning the English school exam system.  As a teacher in our prisons and our universities, I can see both ends of the education spectrum - those who fail, and those who are failed by it due in part to what could be described as an over-reliance on 4: 4: 2.

Here the metaphor diverges slightly.  It is an irony perhaps that what are often described as would-be economic basket cases of Europe are so clearly outclassing England on the football field.  Spain, Portugal, Italy, mocking us with their latin sensitivities, corruption and siestas.  But alongside these teams stands Germany.  Resolute, unflappable, consistent Germany.  Perhaps the only mercy in the Italian penalty agony was that it saved England from a mullering in the semi.

In truth, our team looked extremely ordinary against foes capable of retaining possession.  Superior technique born of a system of training from progressive youth programmes.  The 'get stuck in' attitude and swash bucking bombing up and down that characterise our play has produced brave, big hearted but woefully under skilled heroes waiting to be knocked down and eulogised come quarter final day.

Can the same be said of our education system?  Will the silky skills and economic ball retention of young German, Chinese or Indian workers and intellectuals consign young Britons to the third tier of competition or failure to qualify all together?  As a teacher, the signs are worryingly similar.  I teach a University class in which, of the three students who know how to use an apostrophe, one is German, one Indian and one American.  (gasp)

Whilst this is a pedantic point, it is symptomatic of an erosion in standards which is beginning to become evident not just at the bottom, but at what is regarded as the upper echelons of successful society.  Students regard me in shock when I dock their grades for poor grammar.  They are shocked because nobody has made this stand in their full education.  'But I got an A in English'.  Yes, maybe, but who gave it to you?

My lawyer recently worked miracles to help me purchase my first home.  He sent multiple legal letters. He is my age, educated and can't punctuate or spell.  I rewrote much of what he sent me not out of my usual pedantry, but out of the bare fact that in the midst of a fraught and bloody legal battle, I did not want the seller's legal team (who were determinedly trying to screw me) to think that my lawyer was an illiterate.

I teach in a prison full of people who genuinely cannot read.  People whom our system has rejected, often because they can make twenty or forty grand a month selling drugs, more than their limited brush with education could ever promise.  This is the smash and grab mentality of our system.  The GCSE and A Levels that are the educational long ball to the big man.

Yes the exam may be passed, the domestic goal scored, but against real adversity of recession and in competition with our own privately educated middle classes, driven foreigners and the talent of emerging economies, our young people risk being left out, sidelined and found wanting like Emile Heskey at a Spanish training session.

Just as with England then, the solution can only lie in re-engaging with the youth.  Teaching young people to compete intelligently and to earn the tools they will need to do so.  But this begs the question of the fate of our current generation.  Whilst our football heroes can go back to their clubs where the foreign stars that humbled the national side can resume their time honoured duty of making mediocre Englishmen look better at football than they are, the generation education has failed face a life in prison, on benefit, the work scrapheap, stuck in the dead end job as the promotion goes to the guy who can use an apostrophe.

In the meantime, they must make the best of glorious failure.

Taxing moralisations hide the same old story

The moral high ground is a blood-soaked place, overrun by skirmish-hungry politicians and commentators hell bent on positioning themselves at the heart of the public good, or more commonly, public outrage.  Moralising seems to have expanded to encompass almost every aspect of our lives including, it appears, that most dispassionate of subjects, tax law.
And so, it comes to Jimmy Carr, unwilling poster boy for avoidance schemes more commonly associated with the upper echelons of business fat cattery.
I must admit to more than a pang of disappointment in Jimmy, not for his avoidance behaviour but for the slightly sycophantic whining nature of his capitulation and apology.  Jimmy's tax affairs, within the law as they are, are not accountable to the public and even less to the Prime Minister whose family fortune is built upon a creative relationship with legal tax obligations.
But more than this, Jimmy clouds the issue.
A friend of mine once told me a story of a man who stumbled onto the London comedy circuit, armed only with jokes, controversial in the post Connolly age of aggressive comedy.  The man was not well received, battered by audiences in clubs with only a handful of confused tourists hooked off the Leicester Square in attendance.  In gigs like these, five or more comedians share 'the door' and can expect to make as little as £15 for a night's work.
My friend was also a comedian who worked within this unforgiving world for many years until necessity drove him back to the government sanctioned, hard working, nine till five 'real world'.  The man in my story had a different ending.  He worked on his material over a period of ten years or more, broke the invisible barrier into television and became a comedy superstar, selling out arenas and raking in massive reward for his years of effort.
How did he succeed?
Talent for sure.  A prolonged flirtation with the controversial perhaps?  Hard work?  Definitely.  Comedy is a brutal and unforgiving mistress that tends to take of its suitors years at the bottom and allow only a chosen few the light of exposure and rewards of success.  But whilst my friend did his years, honing his skill in that half-life of an existence suffered by those with the audacity to be broke in London, Carr was able to take ten years at this same comedy university, supported by the multi-millions of his now estranged accountant father.
Behind this case is the same equation that David Cameron fears so much.
Privilege opens doors.  Privilege begets success...
Privilege gives you an advantage over those without it.
Nobody can stump on this argument.  My granny, proud in her council house in Edinburgh's rough Craigmillar was always the first to say that 'there is always someone less fortunate than you', often when threatening to mail my vegetables to Africa if I didn't eat them.
Cameron has made a mistake in highlighting Carr as it is the accountants of the elite who are able to work the magic of the one percent tax bill.  Carr's hypocrisy may rankle but Cameron's must ring louder and greater for one reason.
Jimmy Carr for all his talents has no power to reshape tax policy in this country.  That power lies with another privileged Oxbridge graduate with a wealthy father, and unless David Cameron acts, he will see his tenuous grip on the moral high ground slip in a way that cannot be reclaimed.