Or how to recognise a “Termite” when you meet one.
If you have been following these Posts you will know all about my obsession with “Termites”. Again I have to remind you to go back to the very first Post to understand how I came to use this word. Let me give you a new description of the sort of people I am talking about. They are not so much in a groove as in a rut. Leastways their thought processes are in a rut, their instinctive reactions too. Maybe not their careers.
There are two ways you can approach life. You can start, probably at school, with some basic ideas about life. You may have inherited them from your parents. You may have been influenced by your social background, and worked them out for yourself. As your life progresses anything that confirms your early opinion you remember, anything that conflicts with it or challenges it you conveniently dismiss or forget. In today’s world, you delete without reading. I know quite a few people who have done that to emails that I have sent them.
The other way you can go through life is to allow its widening experience to teach you things, more than any teacher ever did or could. The result is encapsulated in the T.S. Elliot quote in the opening pages of “Death of a Nightingale.”
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
TS Elliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding 1942
Be honest with yourself. Which way have you approached life?
I am going to be personal here; critically personal. And I need two Posts to develop this theme. In the first I will deal with politicians and academics, in the second with the civil service and lawyers. I shall be critical of all of them, and with good reason. Death of a Nightingale resonates with these criticisms as does this Blog (Revisit Post 6). Then I have never ceased from my journey of exploration.
So to be fair, I shall start with me.
I shall be honest with you. My early involvement with the Liberal Party started before I reached the age of 20, as a Young Liberal endorsing a Mr. Kitchell as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Sunderland. Subsequently I listened to Clement Davies, Liberal Leader at the time, Lord Beveridge, a great Liberal, by the way, Professor Gilbert Murray, Salvador de Madariaga. Not a bad Liberal pedigree. Yes, I know this well and truly dates me.
For three years I was a full time employee of the Liberal Party at 58 Victoria Street in London, organising its Annual Assembly and servicing its Party Council and National Executive. Then a Prospective Parliamentary candidate for Newcastle North and a member of the National Executive.
I had some wonderful times. I shall never forget sneaking into the count in the Orpington by-election in 1962. I shouldn’t have been allowed in, but that is by the way. I enjoyed some wonderful friendships; some still going strong to this day.
But all of this, as I now see it, was based upon on a serious misunderstanding of very many things.
The nature of politics, for a start, the power game that it is, the debating society, the think tank that it is not. How people are, not how I would like them to be. Their social, cultural and religious diversity. I didn’t really consider that. The hierarchy of their many and varied talents, skills and abilities. Yes hierarchy, unlike egalitarians I am not afraid of that word. I didn’t acknowledge that, still less see its importance, when it comes to education, to develop them, all of them.
The multitude of job opportunities, ever changing to meet a changing world; many of these not needing a University degree yet still affording a good, rewarding and satisfying life, taking a 24 hour, round the clock view of it. It does take 360 degree vision in politicians and educationalists to recognise this. I am not sure it is always there.
I didn’t know about the enormous number of quite different special educational needs. Then I had never even thought about special educational needs.
On a different tack, I didn’t know of the basic selfishness of self, the challenge being to harness it for the greater good. I had no training whatsoever in human psychology.
Forty years ago I could never have written these words about Inclusion that I put into the Prologue of “Death of a Nightingale”:
Social reformers have not always grasped this. I fully appreciate that an international consensus set the wheels in motion, but I suspect that many have looked at this simplistically, seeing it as essentially society’s difficulty not an individual’s and, with the very best of intentions, projecting what they felt in their gut they would want for themselves for everyone else, a not uncommon mistake. Even disability organisations that have done so much to help the disabled may have fallen into the same trap. That is why they may not always have seen the quite different and varying needs that some children and their parents actually have, and a not always pleasant reality they have to deal with every single day. Very simply, some do not want an open door. What they want is a helping hand and the comfort zone of their own company. For them change is a worry and a threat.
I had no understanding of the sheer complexity of absolutely everything.
And I never really understood how the Liberal Party, the once great Party of the Left had allowed itself to be replaced by a Party that was the political wing of the Trade Union Movement.
Only in the last few weeks has this all come together as I read the chapter devoted to Asquith and Lloyd George in “Pistols at Dawn – from Pitt & Fox to Blair & Brown” by John Campbell. Asquith himself not “the last of the Romans”, but “a snobbish, post-Victorian amateur.”
Asquith, his daughter Lady Violet Bonham Carter, her son Mark Bonham Carter, her daughter Laura Grimond, the wife of the Liberal Party Leader Jo Grimond – that great Liberal dynasty that I so respected at the time, intellectually brilliant but politically flawed.
I wrote in the Preface to Death of a Nightingale:
So far as the Liberal Party was concerned, I had walked with Jo Grimond “towards the sound of gunfire”, but I never quite got there – nor, I fear, did he.
Suddenly I knew why. He didn’t actually like the sound of gunfire. In the First World War when the Liberal Party fell apart, Asquith, then Prime Minister wanted to be above the battle not in it. It was all a great Parliamentary debate even the Great War itself. Westminster was his metier. After the passing of time Jo Grimond was his true heir. He was a wonderful orator and a great Parliamentarian, but he was no President Kennedy and certainly no Barack Obama.
That is why the Liberals made their speeches, and I conveyed resolutions earnestly and enthusiastically passed to the appropriate Minister and received their acknowledgement, finally realising that my role was simply facilitating a dialogue between filing cabinets.
Well, the Lib Dems have rejoined the battle in Local Government. Have they done so in the nation’s affairs? Or are they still glorious amateurs? Is the ghost of Asquith still sitting at their table?
Special Educational Needs is a case in point.
I tried to engage with Ming Campbell when he was Leader of the Party. Despite my credentials I never got very far. If I had been offering the Party a cheque for a million pounds I am sure that a door would have opened. It didn’t.
In 2006 I tried to engage with Sarah Teather MP when she was in charge of their education portfolio. While I received a long letter by way of reply, she asserted that appropriate funding was the issue, which I do not believe it is, and she and her Lib Dem colleagues had still not taken on board the facts that persuaded Baroness Warnock to conclude that “possibly the most disastrous legacy of the 1978 report was the concept of inclusion.” (Revisit Post 13 and this website).
I quote in Notes & Quotes
Phil Wills MP, former Lib Dem spokesman for Education, said in the Commons on 20 March 2001: “Working in Chapeltown in the late 1960′s convinced me that unless we could educate the whole community together – wherever they came from and whatever their needs and disabilities – frankly we would breed dysfunctional communities. It is a point of principle to me and my colleagues that inclusive education goes to the heart of the education system.”
Education should go to the heart of an education system, not social engineering.
And fairness to all, not Equality, should be the watchword. Equality is the wrong word. (Revisit Posts 4 & 5).
Hence Margaret Williamson, the head teacher in Act One Scene 3
“Exactly. Meanwhile our great government can’t make up its mind whether we are a part of one large sausage machine, or a lot of small sausage machines, and they keep coming up with more and more paper plans, more and more targets.”
And this little dialogue:
Act Two, Scene 2
Joan Errington, the English Teacher and Eileen Winterton, the chair of governors, discuss Inclusion.
JOAN ERRINGTON … I’m sure none of this sadness would have happened to Margaret if people realised like we do that all kids have very different needs.
EILEEN WINTERTON Well, I’m afraid our old friend Karl Marx is still around in education. People are looking for that elusive level playing field, and with the proviso that no-one actually competes on it.
JOAN ERRINGTON I agree. They are looking for solutions to the world’s problems in the libraries of their minds, not in the classrooms of the real world.
EILEEN WINTERTON Of course it’s not just Karl Marx you know. The Achilles’ heel of the Liberal is naiveté. And, when you don’t know you’re naïve, well it’s highly dangerous.
JOAN ERRINGTON Insanity. King Lear.
EILEEN WINTERTON No, I’d put it another way. You can actually care too much. You can you know, if that blinds you to uncomfortable reality. But going back to our friend Karl Marx, to coin a phrase, Marxism is still the opium of the brainy classes despite its terrible history. And they hate globalisation too. But you can’t turn the clock back. Those people shouldn’t be looking for an old clock. They should be looking for a new compass.
I summed up my views of the Lib Dems a bit cruelly at the end of a parody I wrote some time ago. (Revisit Post 15):
From “Alice in Blunderland”
At this point a very strange thing happened. The small black fly on the wall behind the Mad Hatter’s chair suddenly took off, whizzed three times round the room at great speed, buzzing all the way.
Doormouse opened his eyes. The White Rabbit sat upright with a jolt. The White Rabbit, by the way, is known affectionately as “the politician”. His political affiliations are however unknown. Alice thought he belonged to the Lib Dems. He had taken no part in the proceedings. He had not been asleep like Doormouse, nor had he been fully awake. He had been lost in his daydreams. The sudden buzzing of the fly disturbed his reverie.
“Where am I?” he asked, gazing around. No-one answered. No-one even heard.
For at that very moment the small black fly suddenly turned into a wasp, and stung the Mad Hatter right on the tip of his nose.
As the Labour Party struggles to regain its soul, have the Lib Dems finally got round to reconnecting with their roots? Not my problem.
When I was at the Bar in Manchester, a colleague, Donald Summerfield, later to become Manchester City Coroner, a wise and a perceptive man, said I would be alright because I was a Liberal by conviction. I was not an idealist. I never fully realised at the time the importance of that distinction. I still am Liberal by conviction, but where does that leave me in the political spectrum?
A purveyor of provocative thoughts. In electoral terms, a “don’t know”. A “cockeyed optimist – a dope with a thing called hope.”
All of these, but certainly not a “Termite.” Maybe this can help you to spot some of those who are, especially on the Liberal Left.
To be continued.
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