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Climate ch-ch-ch-changes

I can remember as a child my mother picking blackberries while waiting to pick me up from school. They’d appear just before ‘blackberry week’ which was literally the name people gave to October half-term.

Now, 30 years later, blackberries appear around 10 weeks earlier here, ready to be picked in mid-August. That makes for tasty summer holiday desserts, but leaves me slightly concerned about the pace of climate change.

In the last week, we’ve had scorching hot weather in the UK, followed by intense thunderstorms which led to flooding that derailed a train.

Of course, things are worse on many fronts elsewhere; there are plenty of people, especially refugees, who are desperate to seek asylum in our country. Yet, instead of thinking in a joined-up way about the global climate emergency and the effect it will have on migration over the next 30 years, the inept UK government sends in the Royal Navy.

Within my lifetime, those in charge have missed so many opportunities to steer us of disaster, meaning that now we haven’t got long to avert climate catastrophe. I just hope that elections over the next few years replace the emotional toddlers we’ve got running the show with some grown-ups committed to action.


This post is Day 31 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

You are not Mr Gove’s audience

I’m a big fan of paying attention to what people and organisations actually do rather than what they say they’re doing.

Let’s take Michael Gove as a for instance. Last year I asked whether there was evidence he is systematically dismantling English state education. If we take the 30,000ft view, what’s changed since then? Certainly nothing in terms of the trajectory in which he’s trying (and largely succeeding) to take state education in England.

If you’re a teacher, you’re not really Mr Gove’s audience. If you’re a parent you might be – but only if you read his semi-official outlets such as the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail. So who is Gove’s real audience? Well the Conservative Party for one (he wants to be the next leader) as well as big business. Both applaud his moves to introduce the logic of the market into state education.

The ideals of the right in politics include lower government spending and private enterprise competing in a marketplace with as little regulation as possible. This is the future for our schools in England under Michael Gove; Academy chains, already growing larger, will be allowed to make a profit as the ‘saviours’ to progressively-defunded state schools. Chomsky was right.

There’s nothing new about Gove’s approach, apart from a maybe a new kind of clinical cynicism. Schools will be forced into becoming Academies by hook or by crook. He’s already changed the Ofsted inspection regime, caused chaos via the EBacc, and suggested lower pay for teachers (under the smokescreen of ‘performance-related pay’). We can look at all of these things as separate examples of a floundering Education Secretary who doesn’t know what he’s doing, or we see them as the constituent parts of a approach by a manipulative politician who plays Realpolitik. 

Image CC BY-NC Thomas Hawk

Why ‘government as platform’ is a really bad idea.

In The WIRED world in 2013 there’s an article by Anne-Marie Slaughter talking about ‘government as platform’:

The big political idea of 2013 is government as platform. It is not a new idea, but rather one whose time as come. It is also an idea that will seem more and more obvious and valuable as the gap between government resources and public needs continues to increase. The divide between the societies that have the values and the resources to make government as platform work, and those that continue to work through command and control, will help define the political cleavages of the 21st century.

So what is ‘government as platform’, exactly?

To understand government as platform, first think of government as control tower: an entity that sits above us, directs us and regulates us. Then imagine government as vending machine… where citizens pay taxes in and get services out.

That sounds like a spectacularly bad idea. Not everyone has access to the ‘vending machine’ in the same way. And don’t people have different needs, etc.?

Government as platform… is government as iPhone, providing the basic hardware and software to enable citizen participation, innovation and self-organisation.

Ah, so here it is. An Apple-inspired metaphor (everyone loves those!) to provide a new twist on basic Conservative principles: small state, low taxation, self-reliance. Never mind systemic injustice, eh? Just get out of the way and let people get on with it.

Government as platform sounds exciting. It’s a buzzphrase. It trips easily off the tongue. But behind it is the same old Conservative approach of favouring the rich and damning the poor. Pointing (as the author does) to Tim O’Reilly and to “a set of principles that are often the exact opposite of the way government traditional works” doesn’t help either. We’d still have the same old corrupt politicians and outdated legal structure.

Let’s take an example of how government as platform Conservatism works in action, shall we? Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the city closest to where I live, is being ravaged by cuts. First came the news that because of the need to find ‘cost savings’ of £90 million the city council is to close all but one of the libraries in the city. Next it was revealed that there would be no more funding – none at all – for arts and culture in the city.

Once this stuff is gone it doesn’t come back for a long time, if ever.

I see government as platform as a dangerously idealistic mask for common-or-garden Conservatism. I don’t want pointless pseudo-elections. I don’t want misguided education ministers going £1 billion over budget on an Academies programme most in the teaching profession are against. And I certainly don’t want educational institutions to go private.

There’s an elite in this country. A privately-educated, unaccountable elite wrecking everything that’s good whilst upholding everything that’s bad. It was bankers who got us into this mess. Yet they’re the ones being rewarded with tax breaks whilst the poor have their welfare cut.

In my opinion, my children’s generation will judge the current UK administration as one of the most damaging there’s been for a very long time.

Image CC BY Sean MacEntee

 

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