Poor old England: suffering so many blows, with such a long way to climb back up...

There are times when for nations, as for individuals, everything just seems to be going wrong.

Today, it’s apparently England’s turn.

We find that the English National Health Service is heading for a record £2 billion loss. That’s worrying but hardly surprising: we’ve known for a while that things were hurtling downhill fast. But now we learn that the government was keeping the figures under wraps so that the news wouldn’t overshadow the Tory Party conference, which is depressing but again far from surprising: we know this government has no aptitude for doing good things or doing them well, but boy it’s a past master at making it look as though things are going just fine.

We also learn that half of all teachers in England, according to a recent poll, want to find a new job outside teaching in the next two years. That makes it sound as though the school system depends for its survival on there being enough general unemployment to stop teachers finding other work. Upsetting but, again, not a huge surprise given the attitude of government.

Finally, those of us who could sit through the experience, watched the England rugby team being clinically taken apart by an Australian XV that didn’t just beat them, but outclassed them. Outclassed in much the same way as Barack Obama outclasses Dubya Bush, except that there were times the England team didn’t seem to be as quick on the uptake as Dubya.

So England’s in the doldrums.

England shattered
But Rugby may not be our most serous problem

Of the three perturbing developments, only two can really be attributed to the government (though it would be fun to blame them for the rugby defeat too). The first two are, as it happens, the most important, but hey, at least Cameron and his mates didn’t actually sell us to the Aussies (at least, as far as we can tell).

Curiously, but unsurprisingly, the only one for which we’ve had any kind of apology was the rugby. Both the team captain and the head coach have expressed their regrets for the lousy performance. Naturally, Cameron and his mates will issue no such thing. The collapse of healthcare and education won’t affect them unduly, since they can buy themselves whatever they need. Far from apologising, they are more likely to celebrate such decline as taking us in just the right direction – reducing government spending without damage to anything that matters to them personally.

When nations, or indeed individuals, go through a bad time, it’s often simply part of a cycle. There will be an upswing later. The trough leads to a demanding climb, but the effort will eventually take us back to a peak.

It certainly happens in sport. The England rugby team were world beaters in the early years of the century. They will probably be world beaters again. Fixing their problems will be tough, but it can happen quite quickly.

Sadly, when it comes to health and education, the solution tends to cost a great deal more and take a great deal longer. There’s going to be a protracted battle ahead. If we’re going to win it, we need to get started immediately.

Which probably means that, painful as it was, the quicker England puts its rugby defeat behind it, the better.

A poorly educated population: the disadvantages are obvious, but the advantages may be more telling...

It was interesting to hear a senior executive from a building firm telling the BBC that there were 200,000 applications being processed right now for new houses around Britain. As he pointed out, that meant that for the first time since the cry was raised, the country could be poised to build the 200,000 new homes required each year to meet housing needs.

Except that there’s a problem. 

There aren’t enough skilled building workers. So even if every single application were authorised, the houses wouldn’t be built. People will go homeless because we simply don’t have the training structures, the apprenticeships, in place to make the builders available to provide them with homes.

Whatever other problems there may be,
one difficulty in housing is:
a lack of well-trained building workers

Meanwhile, last year the NHS recruited 3000 doctors from abroad. And over 6200 nurses, against nearly 4400 who left this country: the net gain was just 1800. 

Why are we recruiting so many foreign nurses and doctors? Because we simply don’t train enough of our own. In nursing at least, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t: nursing courses are massively over-subscribed and the present government has reduced the available places. The result has been a shortfall of 8000 nurses from within the country.

This leads to all sorts of glorious consequences. Because we don’t train enough of our own people to fill the jobs that need to be done, we have high unemployment and a dependence on benefits that the very government that created it loves to decry. The Conservatives suggest that people can be driven off benefits and into work by cutting benefit levels, as though somehow that would turn the untrained and unskilled into the qualified workforce industry needs.

Meanwhile the inflow of skilled workers from other countries that goes some way to staunch our worst needs has led to a huge rise in xenophobia. The battle cry of the anti-immigrant movement is that many British citizens are unemployed because foreigners have taken their jobs, even though in reality a depressing proportion of the unemployed couldn’t take the jobs in the first place, because they don’t have the training for them.

So we have the spectacle of UKIP, the cheerleader for this kind of xenophobia, denouncing immigration while at the same time looking for the kind of reduction in government which would make it still more difficult to train our people, to their advantage by providing them with a living, and to ours, by filling the posts that need an educated workforce.

Even more shameful, or perhaps shameless, are the politicians on the right of the Conservative Party, supporters of the government that has done so much to deepen the crisis, joining in with the same kind of denunciation of the immigrants who didn’t cause it, but are in fact are mitigating its effects by coming here and doing work that badly needs tackling.

Which brings me to today.

David Cameron, Conservative Prime Minister, announced his plans for education if he is re-elected (or I should say, “elected”: though he emerged as leader of the biggest single party at the last election, he didn’t win a majority). He intends, he told us to great fanfares of publicity, to protect education spending at today’s levels. Sadly, that’s “protection” of much the same kind that the men in fedoras and long overcoats with bulging pockets offer: holding spending at today’s levels means a real cut year after year, in schools that are already struggling to make ends meet.

We saw the same trick in healthcare. Budgets have been “ring fenced”. Hospitals are receiving more than they did when the present government came to power. But that ignores the constant increase in treatment costs and in demand for healthcare. The NHS may have more money than it did, but far too little to make good the extra pressure on its resources.

That’s what will happen to education too if the Tories are returned. Budgets protected in nominal terms, falling increasingly behind in real terms. And a deepening crisis in the mismatch between the available homegrown skill base, the needs of citizens for work, and the needs of us all to see that work done.

What amazes me is that a great many people suffering from the effects of the crisis still seem intent on voting Tory, or even UKIP.

Perhaps that only reflects the problem we have in teaching some of our citizens to understand just how the world really works. So the government that creates the knowledge gap benefits from it in votes. If the Conservatives had ever shown themselves skilful enough to contemplate it, that would leave me wondering whether there wasn’t some method in this apparent madness.

Shakespeare at 14, Joyce at 60

It’s extraordinary how many self-appointed experts claim that what modern education needs is a proper grounding in the basics. You know. Shakespeare. Dickens. To say nothing of fractions. And dates in history.

Pontificating politicians from across the political spectrum make this claim. Pundits of the right unsurprisingly proclaim it, but to my disappointment so do people who ought to know better on the left.

In my view, those who feel kids ought to learn dates lack a fundamental quality for the study of history: a memory. They’re obviously incapable of recalling their schooldays and the murder of memorising dates, particularly at an age when dates are things you crave for not things you learn by rote. A sense of chronology is useful in history, but you could probably work out that the Second World War came after the First without precise knowledge of the dates of either.

The study of fractions is even more ghastly. Who on earth has ever needed to know, outside a classroom, what 4/17 of anything was? The only time you ever get anywhere near this kind of division is when you’re cutting up a cake and, hey, all you do is cut the slices small so it goes round with some left over for the greedy ones.

And it’s just as bad with literature. Great books? Oh, you mean Dickens? Or Shakespeare? I bet you the Bard would be mortified (if he weren’t already dead) at the idea of nearly twenty generations of kids being bored mindless by great chunks of incomprehensible blank verse. What fourteen-year old know or cares what it means to make your quietus with a bare bodkin?

A really inspirational teacher can bring all this stuff to life. I remember my boys quoting chunks of Macbeth to each other, at home. Forsooth. It was the most striking testimony to a fine teacher. But such teaching is rare and most kids leave school convinced that there is nothing duller than Shakespeare, except perhaps Dickens.

It’s curious, however, that there comes a time in life when you can suddenly discover a taste for all these things. I read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I was about sixteen and was fascinated by it, as well as appalled by the description of hell. I switched to Ulysses. Utterly turgid. Stream of consciousness? It left me unconscious within minutes.

And that view stuck with me for over four decades. Until a couple of weeks ago when I downloaded an audio version of the book. What a fabulous novel! A pace that just whips along. Writing full of humour and charm. A real delight.

I had to get the Kindle version too so that I could check up on some of the material and it’s as much fun to read as to listen to. Turgid? You’ve got to be kidding.

That fine Dublin fellow Joyce.
Worth waiting to get to know

But I’ve realised all that as I approach my sixtieth birthday. Trying to foist Ulysses on me in my teens would have put me off completely. 

What we need to communicate to teenagers is simply a desire to read anything at all, a sense that there’s pleasure in it. And let them read what they like. Pride and Prejudice if they want, Harry Potter if they prefer.

So why is there this deadly consensus that we need to force kids to deal with the classics at a time when they have no interest in them? Why impose on them what we found deadly when we were their age? Why do we think that what we hated is good for others?

But here we’re at the central question of power in society. It’s wielded by people who have little feeling for other people’s concerns.

And the worst of it? Some of them get into positions of power precisely because they share those concerns and want to help. Somehow it’s the very fact of holding power that drives the fellow-feeling out of them.

My message? Wake up. Don’t tell others what they should be doing, particularly if you wouldn’t be prepared to do it yourselves.

And, in particular, stop forcing Shakespeare on fourteen-year olds. Let them decide when they want to get to know classic writing. Even if they only meet Joyce at sixty.

England, blessed with Rhyme and Reason

Here in Britain, our bright new government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, or ‘ConDems’ as the Daily Mirror has so aptly baptised them, has been announcing all sorts of exciting new initiatives. One of these – perhaps a bit more Con than Dem – is to make sure that schools again start to teach poems by heart. This is presumably because of the abiding love of poetry that has been inspired in so many by reading reams of Walter de la Mare as a child and being able to recite ‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, and his something and something and something and gold’.

Equally they want schools to teach lists of the Kings and Queens of England. Being able to rattle through them in the right order is clearly the kind of accomplishment without which civilised life is barely imaginable.

Note, by the way, that this really does mean England, so that James I is always the first, even though he was the sixth King of Scotland of that name. Also the list starts with William the Conqueror as no-one wants to have to tangle with difficult names like Aethelred, Athelstan or Edward the Confessor. We just write the Anglo-Saxons out of the picture and pretend that history only started when the Normans came blundering in without knocking.

As it happens, I can do the first eight, because I’ve never been able to forget ‘Williy, Willy, Harry, Ste, Harry, Dick, John, Harry three’. You can imagine what comfort this gives me. I can’t count how many times it’s been useful to me, but that’s only because zero isn’t a counting number.

Meanwhile, our government – or, again, the Con part of it at least – would like to do away with the Human Rights Act. Obviously, no-one really needs human rights. Just learn to recite ‘Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII’, and we’ll be able to proclaim with every ConDem in sight, ‘the snail's on the thorn; God's in his Heaven – all’s right with the world.’