Democracy: British Style
According to an ICM poll:
More than three-quarters of adults believe more academically-selective schools should be opened, particularly in inner-city areas with poor education standards, it was disclosed.
Support for grammar schools has actually increased over the last four years, figures suggest.
This is not a new phenomenon. An ICM survey of 2005 found that support for opening more grammar schools was at 47%, with only 7% calling for them all to be closed down (37% thought the current number was about right).
Yet, despite the long-term evidence of strong support for opening more grammar schools, which of the major political parties has taken this on board? Which of them reflects the will of the people on this issue?
It is absolutely scandalous that on this issue, as on so many others (Europe, capital punishment, immigration, law and order), our political classes feel free to ignore majority opinion.
The revolution can’t come soon enough.
Joanne Cash Reinstated
Apparently Joanne ‘will-she, won’t-she’ Cash has been reinstated as Conservative candidate in Westminster North. She announced this on Twitter thus:
I did resign. Assoc did not accept. CCHQ has resolved specific issue so I am not leaving. It’s official DC [David Cameron] has changed the party!!!!!!!!
Joanne Cash is apparently a ‘high-flyer’, tipped for the top by the Tatler, no less. I’m not sure that I’m too keen on being governed by someone interprets her own reinstatement as evidence that David Cameron has changed the party, or who feels the need to use that many exclamation marks.
The End of Real Men?
Oh, my God! This can’t be true – not in Britain: men take longer to get ready to go out than women:
A study has shown men dedicate 83 minutes of the day to their personal grooming, including cleansing, toning and moisturising, shaving, styling hair and choosing clothes.
In contrast, women have their beauty regime down to a fine art and manage to get hair, clothes and make up done in just 79 minutes.
What would Onslow have to say about that?
Marriage and Taxation
How marriage is penalised under Labour’s tax regime:
…a one-earner married couple, with children, earning up to £33,000 a year, pays almost a third more tax in the UK than in the average OECD country and 18 per cent more than the EU average.
This is according to a report issued by CARE.
So, Mr Cameron, be bolder in your ambitions for recognising marriage in the tax system. A little bolder than just saying that any changes will be “more about the message than the money.”
The Impact of Proportional Representation
An interesting analysis in the New Statesman of how the different systems of PR might have affected the result of the last General Election. I say ‘might’ because, of course, we can’t know what the impact would have been. The assumption underlying the analysis is that people would have voted the same, which is not necessarily true. Knowing that PR is in operation when you turn up to vote could affect how you cast that vote.
HIV: Saying the Unsayable
Elizabeth Pisani on HIV in South Africa:
…countries get the HIV epidemics they deserve…But woe betide anyone who points this out. At best, you are insensitive to cultural traditions. At worst, you are perpetuating racist myths of the hypersexualised African male, blah, blah, blah.
Granny Thrown Out of Pub for Wearing Beret
To think that within living memory this country ran an Empire:
A crippled grandmother has been barred from a gastro pub because she refused to remove her beret.
Institutional Racism Lives On
Still moaning about racism:
The chairman of the Metropolitan Black Police Association has said the Met is "without doubt" institutionally racist.
This follows the imprisonment of Commander Ali Dizaei for four years for corruption, about which ex-deputy assistant Met commissioner Brian Paddick said that it "will do little to improve race relations in the police service". What is he implying? That corrupt policeman who happen to be from an ethnic minority should not be imprisoned, in case it damages ‘race relations’?
It’s Not Fair!
Thomas Sowell bemoans the inappropriate use of the word ‘fair’:
If by “fair,” you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, at any place or time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense.
Lincoln Allison on the Benefits of the Cane
Lincoln Allison poses a reasonable question:
‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ was a maxim in Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and a hundred other languages. The abandonment of a principle which had served humanity well from pre-history until fairly recently should at least be subject to some rigorous, bottom-line, questioning. Why did we abandon it?
