Where we are vs. where we should be

On the Telegraph I spotted this article, and thought to myself "Thank God for that, finally a bit of discipline"

How stupid I am. Because in fact, this is just another way to freak out young children in the name of sex education:

"Primary schoolchildren could be taught the importance of “no means no” in new sex education lessons, the Government will say today."

Wow. I can see how that is a more important lesson to teach 5-11 year-olds than how to read and write when you're dealing with kids that potentially don't even know their own names.

Then I read this appalling shit propagated by OFSTED, and I think, fuck this.

If I ever move back to the UK and can't afford to go Private, I'll become a Mormon and get my kids excluded from "personal, social, health and economic education". When I want my kids to know about "no means no" in regards to sex, as opposed to having a sweet for example, I, their father, and my wife, their mother, will tell them.

Not some sandal-wearing feminist telling my sons they are by default bastards because of their gender.

Ten ideas for a crapper Britain

Komment Macht Frei carries a 10-point plan to make the UK even worse than it already is, from the notorious Will Hutton. They are in fairness not all totally wrong, but some of them are truly idiotic.

1. Break up the banks
I can live with this actually, in principle, but it would help if there was an acknowledgement that the ridiculously complicated regulatory environment has forced banks to become larger and larger in order to cover these costs and keep up with it all. Reduce the regulatory bureaucracy and barriers to entry and you would indeed improve the banking sector. Not convinced these are his motives.

2. Build Great Companies.
This is a stinker, and worth quoting in full:

Too few British firms have good owners. Two more important companies – Smith and Nephew, and De La Rue – are fighting to retain their independence from foreign takeovers. Their shareholders do not care about innovation, their staff or customers; their priority, and thus that of the directors, is only next month's share price. Increasingly Britain is a hollowed out economy for hire rather than a centre of business decision-making and wealth generation in its own right. There has to be root-and-branch overhaul of the framework for owning, directing and launching takeovers of Britain's companies.

So basically foreign ownership is bad, Will has no solutions, so we should start with roots and branches. Really, this is 6th-form stuff, blindly blaming shareholders. Shareholders do care about "innovation, their staff or customers" because that is what drives the share price. Shareholders tend to want their companies to be successful and well-run. That is why you invest in a company.

3. Bust the Monopolies
Meh.

4 Abolish Redundancy Payments
Why do I sense in this some sort of increased state intervention coming up?

5 Livelihood Insurance
Whoooomph there it is! Surely this is a bit like National Insurance, except I guess everyone will still pay National Insurance, right?

6 A Citizen Grant of £50'000 for every 21-year-old
Oh no, sorry, whoooooooooooomph THERE it is. Now that is special. And where pray tell might this money come from? Oh, you planted some beans? Should be fine then.

7 Payback time for babyboomers
Some interesting thoughts here actually. Probably the least bad of his ideas.

8 An end to parents-pay education

Private schools should ... be compelled to admit, through competitive examination, children from households with less than £40,000 a year. Their fees would be paid by the government.

Ah yes, the problem is private schools, not the parlous state of the state school system. Why not just bring back grammar schools, if you want competitive examinations?

9 An Honest Media
I agree, but bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha good luck with that.

10 A written constitution along with proportional voting
I don't think this would make a blind bit of difference but there you are. This is instructive however:

In particular, there should be an entrenching of local government's power: it should have the constitutional right to raise up to half its revenue from local taxation.

That is the extent of Will's ability to imagine what local government power should look like - how much tax they can raise. Sad.

And to avoid accusations of being negative for the sake of it, here is my 3-point plan for a better Britain.

1. Get the fuck out of our lives, just stop bloody interfering and remember that you work for us.
2. Stop fighting pointless, never-ending wars to distract from what is going on at home.

Actually, that'll do for starters, there you go, a 2-point plan!

No, Facebook is not the problem here

A very sad story in the Mail (yes I know, a dangerous game taking things out of the Mail, but it seems to be in quite a few other places with pretty much the same content) about a 13-yr-old boy receiving death threats from fellow pupils for posting a facebook tribute to fallen soldiers on Remembrance Day. The offenders have now been suspended and are threatened with expulsion (what exactly do you have to do in order to be immediately expelled, by the way?)

I won't dwell on the horror of what these kids wrote, it's pretty appalling and I would hope the Police do prosecute them. However, the principal of the school made an incredible statement utterly missing the point of what is happening. Here it is:

Sidney Stringer Academy’s principal, Wendy Thomas, said Facebook was an increasing concern for schools. She said the children have been told to remove the comments from the site.

She said: ‘Darius is the victim of bullying. All the students involved have told me they did not mean what they said but they will learn a hard lesson from this.

‘Facebook is a big concern for schools and we urge all parents to monitor what their children say on the site. As soon as the school was notified about the comments on Monday we interviewed the pupils.

Facebook was an increasing concern for schools? Qué? What about 6 illiterate, hate-filled children threatening another child with knives? That would be my primary concern.

Facebook did not threaten this child. I remember at school a massive older kid organising a fight with the smallest kid in my year. We didn't have mobiles, but the small kid was bricking it by the time the fight came around that afternoon, he'd got the message about what was going to happen to him loud and clear (he actually acquitted himself pretty well in the end but that's by the by).

Facebook does make it a little easier to send the message, as do mobiles, but bullying was just as pernicious and nasty 20 years ago as it is now. The difference is that no-one takes responsibility for it, neither parents nor teachers. Wendy Thomas has found an out, a way to escape facing the appalling behaviour going on at her school, and she's jumped on it. You could not send a worse message.

Employers in "Looking for 2:1 Degree" Shocker

So the BBC ran this little nugget this morning - it seems that "Three quarters of employers 'require 2:1 degree'".

My first thought was actually "what are the other employers looking for?", because frankly if you don't require a 2:1, then why ask for a degree at all? I got a 2:1, and it really is not that hard, I was incredibly lazy at uni, as were most of my peers. The ones that managed a first worked pretty hard, but everyone else just arsed about mainly.

Bear in mind as well that two-thirds of students get a 2:1 apparently, so employers are actually only ruling out 1 out of every 3 applicants, which is bugger-all really. Particularly since apparently 69 grads apply for each post on average, so that still leaves 46 applicants in the game.

Yet according to the Association of Graduate Recruiters, "While this approach does aid the sifting process it can rule out promising candidates with the right work skills unnecessarily". Well, evidently the right work skills do not include being able to work at all or indeed learn anything. This is the bottom third of a massive pool of people who did something (get a degree) that is for the most part very easy.

The BBC's spin is predictably entitled and leftist (emphasis mine) -
"so this means the remaining third, who will still have passed their exams and paid their tuition fees, will not even be considered by these employers."

So because someone wrote his name on some exam papers and handed over some cash, he should automatically be considered for a job. Otherwise it is unfair.

The unintended (if incredibly predictable) consequence of Labour's obsession with everyone going to university is a whole bunch of people with a worthless piece of paper no-one is interested in, who are worse off than if they had gone straight to work. They are also saddled with unrealistic expectations borne out of entitlement shown beautifully by the BBC above.

Hike tuition fees, slash the number of available places by 25%, and spend some of the savings making sure that bright poor kids can afford to pay these fees. It really isn't very complicated.

Where to start?

This article manages to include not one but two fairly major fails.

First of all, WTF is up with an 11-yr-old getting taken to the "prom" in a helicopter? Why is there even a prom at all? When I was 11 (and that's less than 20 years ago) the end of primary school heralded potentially some chocolate, an activity of some kind and there might have been a disco, to which I imagine I wore a shellsuit, things being how they were back in the day. But a prom? Ferraris? Limos? What a bunch of spoilt little pricks are going to come out of this school.

Secondly, isn't it amazing how some fecking charity manages to muscle in on the article. Kids at Mearns are clearly not short of a few quid, and yet we have some worthy from One Parent Families Scotland (less than 1% funded by donations, fundraising & membership, can I hear you say fake charity?) explaining that "schools need to be sensitive to the financial circumstances of all parents".

So this is the school's fault now? Well in one sense it is, in that they should probably just tell the parents to stop being such fuckwits, but ultimately it's neither their problem nor their fault if parents decide it's a good idea for their offspring to learn about pimping out in a limo at the age of 11. To be clear, this is the parents' problem, or in the case of the families this "charity" looks at, the parent's problem. But of course that wouldn't fit in with whatever bullshit cause they are pedalling, so better blame the school then.