Solidarity 207, 8 June 2011

No primary school academy in Lewisham!

Leila Galloway from “Deptford Says No to Tidemill Academy” spoke to Duncan Morrison. My parents are both educationalists and I work as a senior lecturer in higher education. I have been doing a post-graduate course in Philosophy at Middlesex University and was involved in the campaign to stop the closure of the Philosophy department there. I have two daughters — eight and eleven years old — at Tidemill. I think it is morally wrong to privatise education and a huge social experiment. What we see now is the increasing commodification of education. When Mark Elms, the head of Tidemill, had been...

Sex in the Big Society

Contrary to popular belief, the schools of Eton and St Paul’s, where members of our current Tory cabinet acquired their top-notch educations, were not rife with fagging, or even shagging. In fact, the whole Conservative lot, Nadine Dorries and Anne Milton included, abstained from sex entirely until they were well settled within the confines of marriage. Once there, they performed the ritual act a mere two or three times, to ensure children were conceived, and contraceptives (which they were happy to learn nothing about) were not used. But how, you’re almost certainly asking yourselves, do they...

The politics of SlutWalk

The SlutWalk story is now ubiquitous. In a January “campus safety information session” at Toronto’s York University, police officer Michael Sanguinetti told women to “avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised”. Shocking? Yes. Unusual? No. Blaming the person who experiences sexual violence, rather than the perpetrator is a common reaction of both the police and wider society. Rape Crisis England and Wales suggests that 40% of adults who are raped tell no one, and 31% of children who are sexually abused reach adulthood without having told anyone — precisely because they are afraid...

Teaching children to fail

Education in England is more unequal than elsewhere. Students who do well in English schools, do well by international standards. Students who do badly in English schools, do very badly by international standards. A recent OECD report* (February 2011) confirmed this: “Schooling outcomes in the United Kingdom are among the more unequal in the OECD area” [i.e. among the world's better-off countries]. Within the general inequality, poor white students suffer worst of all. White students from among the poorest fifth get an average of one fewer good GCSE pass than black or Asian students in the...

Lenin the dreamer

Lars T Lih’s excellent short biography of Lenin is a welcome addition to the serious socialist literature on classical Marxist history. The book’s chief merits are its strongly contextual interpretation of Lenin’s life and its readable style. Lih comments that most recent studies of Lenin seem to be based on the methodology of “nothing but warts”. We’ve all seen the stereotypical image of Lenin: the bloodthirsty monster of the liberal, anarchist and conservative imagination. Pessimistic, voluntaristic, elitist, conspiratorial. Lenin who like Chernyshevsky’s Rakhmetov was sure to have slept on...

Behind the Southern Cross scandal

Southern Cross was bought up by a private equity firm called Blackstone; they then sold off all of Southern Cross’s property — that is, the actual care homes themselves. The homes were sold off to all sorts of private companies, including the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which is owned by the Qatari royal family. These private companies then rented the property back to Southern Cross at extortionate rates. QIA has off-shore accounts, so it wasn’t even paying tax on all that rent it was making. That situation was necessarily unsustainable. But when the cuts hit, funding for care was...

The future under Tory cuts: pauper old age

The capitalist free market means luxury for those with sharp elbows — and being trampled underfoot for those whose elbows have become frail with age. Thirty thousand old and frail people in care homes face disruption, and probably, some of them, being shunted to different places, as the country’s biggest private care homes operator, Southern Cross, goes bust. Disruption and forced moves often kill old and frail people. If they don’t kill, they leave the elderly people frailer and more confused. The plight of those 30,000 is only the top foliage of a forest in which market mechanisms grind...

Storming Pickles

On 24 May an anti-cuts group in Cambridge stormed the Cambridge Union debating society in protest against the presence of Tory Local Government Minister, Eric Pickles. Earlier, a hundred activists from Cambridgeshire Against the Cuts picketed the entrances to the building. The Tory-led county council is making £160 million worth of cuts . Rather than meet local people, Pickles chose to discuss his vision for local government with members of Cambridge University Conservative Association. This meeting was delayed and then disrupted as activists gained access to the building, banging drums and...

Learning disbilities: not out of sight

Like anyone else who watched it, I felt sickened by Panorama’s expose of how people with learning disabilities were tortured by their carers at a private hospital near Bristol (31 May). As a social worker who works with adults with learning disabilities I review placements like Winterbourne hospital fairly frequently. I’ve never seen anything like the treatment shown by the programme, but my heart often sinks when I walk into these places. The closure of long-stay hospitals was heralded by many as the end of institutionalisation — and the end of the appalling treatment that went on. But “care...

The press and benefit claimants

Over the bank holiday weekend of 28-30 May a number of British papers covered stories on the “Ten worst excuses put forward by benefit cheats”. This was simple and yet carefully crafted populist journalism. Crafted not only because it played to all the stereotypes of the poor, (feckless, swindling, on-the-make) but also because it had “watercooler currency”. The ten worst excuses were being swapped on radio phone-ins, comment columns and no doubt workplaces over the following days. For a short time public discussion about the welfare system and cuts was dominated by “yes, but have you heard...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.