Olympian Problems

Well, today there were two good sporting stories; both were good because they were filled with interesting facts. They were less good as records of modern life.
The first story was the dramatic day at Old Trafford where Manchester United played Arsenal in a match of records. MU won by 8 - 2. This is one of the biggest ever goal tallies ever achieved in the Premier League and Arsenal have not let in 8 goals in a match since 1896 - just before the era of Arsene Wenger - when they were defeated by Loughborough in Division II. Arsene Wenger is an old misery guts at the best of times but after this disaster he has something to be miserable about and his job is going to be threatened, no matter how good his past record. This season has started so badly for Arsenal that it is possible to be almost sympathetic. They have lost two key players who wanted to leave and some of their star players are suspended or injured. So Old Misery Guts Clouseau has played with a much weakened side. AW says that he is trying to sign new players before the transfer window closes on 31st August and he certainly needs some. One of these is Gary Cahill from Bolton. Bolton don't want to sell him — I think — you can never be sure of anything in these times. He is a good player and Bolton need him but. on the basis of today's disaster, Arsenal's need is greater. But while AW is searching for strikers, it was his defence that spearheaded the disaster. We could blame the young goal keeper, Szczesny — this going to look bad on his CV — who had a torrid time but the primary problems were very poor defence and discipline. Arsenal have had a player sent off in every one of their league fixtures so far this season and it could be argued that today that they were lucky only to receive one dismissal. Many times when MU attacked the Arsenal defence was nowhere to be seen. They may be young players but presumably they were signed up because it was thought that they had talent. It always amazes me that teams fail on the fundamentals. Maybe the Arsenal defence is not good enough to stop Wayne Rooney but they should not be giving away penalties and they should be in the right area when the opposition are attacking. When Crawley Town played MU in the FA Cup they played with total commitment, ran around the field like terriers, trying to win from the kick off and only lost 1-0. It was argued by many that they deserved a draw at least and even Alex Ferguson was very complimentary. But this Arsenal team seemed completely lost, they were so outplayed.
Alex Ferguson has been defending AW's record as a manager, which is right, but surely times are getting bad when AW has the sympathy of Alex Ferguson? AW is having his problems at the moment but he has done a wonderful job at Arsenal over 15 years and he deserves to be allowed the time to sort out this current problem. But that time is running out fast.
MU, on the other hand played a blinder. On this form there is no team in England going to stop them and they will have a very good chance of going all the way in Europe. Wayne Rooney scored his 150th goal for MU and, at 26, we can expect many more in the years ahead. He went on to score a hat-trick and all were scored with the consummate ease of a top professional at the peak of his powers. I don't like Wayne Rooney much as a human-being but he does know how to play football. Even MU do not beat teams by scoring 8 goals very often but today they gave a masterclass of how to play football.
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The second item I want to comment on, concerns [again] the ludicrous expenditure on the London Olympic Games. Nothing will persuade me that we should ever have involved ourselves in this ridiculous extravaganza, but as the bills pile up, the newspapers are now reporting the lavish excess that is to be poured upon the Olympic bureaucracy. And it is a truly Olympian bureaucracy. All officials, especially those at the top, are to be looked after — every one of them — like manic dictators in tin-pot republics who are feted in obscene wealth and grandeur that tries to match their overblown beliefs in their own importance. All these ridiculous men — and they are largely men — will be housed in the most expensive luxury in the most expensive hotels in Central London; they will be provided with chauffeur driven limousines travelling in special lanes on the roads to the Olympic Stadiums, so they do not get held up by plebs trying to fight their way to work in the middle of this needless Olympic congestion; there will be no right turns allowed across their paths; traffic lights will be controlled so that they never have to stop — this electronic modification alone is costing us £12,000,000. These ridiculous men should be made to suffer the traffic just like anyone else. They could have stayed in perfectly acceptable hotels around Canary Wharf, which would have allowed them to get to the stadiums quite easily — they could even have walked. There are 86,000 of these officials and supporting sponsors from Coca Cola and the like who will be given this absurd treatment — all at our expense. The list even includes Sepp Blatter of UEFA and his cohorts. What have they to do with the Olympic Games? Football at the Olympics is a pretty minor activity. All of this rubbish is apparently written into the terms and conditions of the contract we signed when we got the games — it was even written into the enquiry document against which we bid.
The absurdity does not end here with their thousands of petty plutocrats, bureaucrats and hangers-on being ferried around London. No! We have to make it clear that none of this applies to the athletes. They will have to travel by bus or on their bikes.
As Richard Littlejohn is prone to say — you can't make it up!
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Failings In Education

There are many people about this week telling us why the riots and looting across England occurred and what should be done to correct the faults in our society. Everyone is keen to find a quick fix — that will be the preferred solution. But no quick fix will work; the problems are far too deep-seated for that. Dominic Lawson writing in The Independent makes some valid points the central theme of which is the failure of education. Today, this year's A Level results were published and — predictably — the pass rate rose again; this has happened for the last 29 years in a row. It is not believable. Even more it is not believable because employers are complaining about the poor educational standards of school leavers. Lawson provides a statistic that suggests that 40% of black boys leave school with a reading age of seven. That is bad enough but it gets worse. Even with our immigration rates whites are still a majority and among this majority 63% of boys from working class homes also leave school with a reading age of seven. Some of this educational failing is obvious from the words spoken by some of those arrested in the riots. They can hardly string a sentence together and are obviously incapable of any slightly sophisticated reasoning abilities.

If we are to do anything about our sick society and its atmosphere of violence then we need to start with education. There needs to be some balance in equality of opportunity. Now, to get a good education means that you must come from a rich background. This is not exclusively true but it is not far off. When I was in secondary education, I passed the 11+ exam and went to a grammar school. I became one of the elite. The grammar schools were condemned by the liberal left as being elitist and denying the vast mass of the population the same educational chances that I got in a grammar school. And so they abolished the grammar schools. Everyone would go to comprehensive schools and all would have the same opportunities. And they did! They had equal opportunities of getting a third rate education. But there is more! Many of the old grammar schools — particularly the better ones — pulled out of the state system and became independent fee paying schools. They still provided excellent education and along with the old public schools [Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the rest] they educated boys and girls to much higher standards than any state comprehensive. In 2010, about half-a-dozen independent schools send more students to Oxford and Cambridge than 2,000 comprehensives. Now there is true elitism in education but it is an elitism determined by wealth. Every year the exam results get massaged to make things look good and more and more kids are sent to poor universities to spend their money on useless courses in subjects that don't matter and get qualifications that no one wants. The politicians of the Establishment refuse to do anything about it and get all their kids educated privately. All of this needs to change. We need to again expand grammar schools and give working class kids the chance that is now totally denied to them. We must remove this two tier education system. We should also cut down on the drive to send everyone to university and concentrate on getting people to A Level with proper qualifications in proper subjects. Then give them a real choice between university education or occupational apprenticeships. No longer will it be acceptable for children not to read fluently or to be unable to express their thoughts with clarity and understanding. And they must be mathematically literate as well.

This country has always been run by the wealthy. After the 1944 Education Act that started to change. We had grammar school educated kids from ordinary backgrounds finding their way to the top — the days of Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Now this route through the grammar schools is almost totally sealed off [one or two grammar schools still remain]. Now the country is run by the rich, for the rich and with the rich having all the connections into the corridors of power to ensure that nothing changes.

The indiscipline in schools and homes has to be tackled. It is not acceptable for children not to be chastised and infrequently but if necessary, beaten. The teachers who complain about violence and chaos in the classrooms should remember that it was their colleagues in the 1950s and 1970s who fought to eliminate corporal punishment from all schools, when we knew that it was only the threat of violence that kept order.

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News From Another Planet

While England has been suffering vandalism, riots and looting, the wold's stock markets have been collapsing. The FTSE 100 index has fallen 1000 points in a week, This has a terrible effect on confidence, our savings and is particularly disastrous for people about to retire. The rest of us hope that the markets will recover over time. But something that has dropped 20% in a month may take a year or more to recover and that assumes that the fundamental cause of the troubles will be addressed. And that is not looking very likely.

On this side of the Atlantic the EU is talking about all kinds of methods of supporting the Euro. In the end it will collapse but politicians will spend billions of tax payers money in order to save their pet project. Every proposal that involves extending more credit to countries around the Mediterranean in order to give them time to pay off their debts only kicks the can down the road. To pay off the debts they need to cut spending and increase taxation. Increased taxation tends to depress the economy and is unpopular with electorates. To increase tax collection and reduce benefits spending, the economy needs to expand. There is little sign of economies expanding at the moment and more tax will give less growth - which means less tax income. Many countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal have debts so big it is unlikely that they can ever pay back. They will default. Lending them more money just puts off the evil day and makes the disaster worse.

Britain is trying to cut debts — albeit very slowly but we also need growth and more tax income.

In the USA things are bad. The government of Obama has spent weeks and weeks arguing and posturing with Congress on the matter of debt limit. Not content with borrowing $14.5 trillion, the government wants to add up to $2.5 trillion to its borrowing limit. The whole pantomime — and it has been a pantomime — has been about presentation for next year's presidential election. Who the Republican candidate will be is not known yet but there is a great possibility that it will be some nutter from the Tea Party wing of the GOP. They want less Washington spending, less government spending and much lower taxes. It was they who led the opposition to Obama's health care reforms — which previously excluded 42 million Americans from getting treatment. At present the Federal government borrows $1 of every $2 it spends. This is totally unsustainable. On top of that there is a vast private debt which is acting as another great block on economic growth. The whole mess linked to the buggering about by the politicians has led to Standard & Poor down-grading the US credit rating from AAA to AA+. This has never happened before in American history. Instead of facing up to it Obama blames Bush and Europe tells everyone that America is still the greatest and will always be a triple A nation. But American government is so atrocious and corrupt. It spends vast sums on armaments so that it can keep making military interventions, tries to spend too little on social services, taxes the poor and protects the rich. Last weekend, after Obama had made his statement on the AAA rating of the USA, he went off to a fund raising dinner which charged $35,000 per plate for people to contribute to the Democratic Party. There were no poor people there and those diners will want paying back at some time. Is not that corruption?

As my title says this all sounds like reports from another planet.

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Our Sick Society

Tonight, things are fairly quiet on the streets of London's Boroughs and in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Gloucester. Over the last few days all of these places have had rioting, vandalism, violence and looting. Houses, shops, offices, restaurants and even a furniture shop in Croydon have been burned in an orgy of violence, and destruction. In Birmingham three men standing on the street to help protect their property were deliberately targeted, knocked down and killed by a car. The driver, I am glad to say, has been arrested and charged with murder. Throughout the length and breadth of England [so far nothing has happened in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland] there has been mass destruction and shops and other premises have been boarded up, locked and abandoned as decent people have tried to avoid this orgy of destruction. But throughout the nights of disorder, looting and mayhem, the most sickening image [see above] has been that of the Malaysian student in Croydon who was dragged from his bike, thrown to the ground, his jaw broken and who then crawled to the side of the pavement to escape. As he sat against the wall with blood running from his mouth and all over his hands, a man went to help him to his feet. But the man was no Good Samaritan. As he lifted the small student to his feet there were hands unzipping his rucksack and robbing him. It is an image that has gone around the world. It makes me ashamed of my country. That there are people who exist in our society who are scum of the lowest order who have no morals and not even a small spark of decency. There were others who boasted about their robbing the shops, of being free to do what they liked to spite the police and the "rich people." But it is not just rich people. They have taken and destroyed the lives and the belongings of ordinary people. David Cameron has said that there are pockets of our society that are sick and he is right.

But what can we do to put these problems right? It is not an easy question to answer. Some of the young men — and they are mainly men — who have appeared in court today were not from deprived backgrounds, living on the streets, unemployed, ill-educated and useless. One was a teaching assistant who works in a school giving children guidance on living in the modern world; some were university students; some were in well-paid jobs. There were, of course, many of the usual suspects — men who have been before the courts before for theft and GBH and often part of the gang culture. Why do such things happen?

I believe that there is a fundamental problem — or even a series of fundamental problems — that blights our society and it begins with parenting and primary schools. There are children who arrive at primary schools who have not even been toilet trained by their utterly useless parents. Those parents believe that society is responsible for doing everything. They take no responsibility for their kids but are every ready to object if anyone else tries to instill some discipline. Throughout our state schools there is often chaos. The children chat among themselves, use mobile phones sending text messages and so on. They have no educational targets and wallow arrogantly in their own monstrous ignorance. There is not the discipline necessary for ordered and constructive teaching. The standards of behaviours of many children — not all — is abysmal. They reach 16 hardly able to read, write or do sums and we massage the exam results to make it look as though they are properly trained for life. Their culture is one of instant gratification, to have without any labour; to achieve without any ability. Some of these feral youths complain that they cannot get jobs because of the immigration rate. I have grave reservations about our too high immigration rate but immigrants will come into this country to work. They are better qualified and certainly better educated in many cases. I have met many Polish immigrants who have come here to work. And work they do. And they are, almost without exception, very courteous. Many British born teenagers are little better than ignorant, work-shy, lazy, arrogant youths who are almost unemployable.

But the problem goes further. Throughout our society there is an atmosphere of violence in almost every aspect of our lives. We have people killed in road rage incidents; violence on football fields and rugby fields that goes lightly punished or in far too many cases unpunished; disputes between neighbours often lead to violence because far too many people take the attitude that they will do whatever they like, when they like and if you don't like it, then "F*** You!" We could go on and on about violent attacks on teachers by pupils and parents; about policemen taken to court and often losing their jobs because they clipped a young thug around the ear.

David Cameron is promising action. What will happen, I do not know, but what is essential is that the perpetrators of the criminality are caught, they are convicted and, without exception they are given prison sentences. If we have to build more prisons, let us build more prisons — at least it will create some more jobs via a dose of old fashioned keynesian economics. I tend to take the old Michael Howard attitude to prisons. "Prisons work!" They work because they take the rabble off the streets. It is time that ordinary people who have a more robust attitude to revenge and retribution were taken more seriously. A poll tonight has 68% of respondents saying that the problems of the last few days were caused by gang culture and criminality; only 8% blamed government cuts. Government cuts is the excuse of the Labour left and the beans and sandals brigade who got us into this mess through their sloppy liberalism over the last 50years.

There are many other things wrong with our society. There is a vast gulf between the standards of living of the rich and that of the huddled masses. I have said many times that it is wrong for bankers and their like to be paid annual salaries [with bonuses] that are more than 10x those of the average person. In some cases more than 100x as much. The education system does not work. Too many people go to university doing pointless subjects and landing themselves with debts of £25,000+ which they will never be able to pay off and which will stymie their chances of getting a mortgage or providing themselves with an adequate pension. These are all matters which the government must address. But at present there is precious little evidence that they will do so.

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