Turning Ours Into Sour

There is, for a lot of places in the west (which I accept is a very general description of one portion of our current civilisation) there is a problem  -- or at least a concern -- with people from the muslim faith. It isn't so much what they do in the lands where their religion is dominant as another car bomb outside a rival mosque rarely makes the headlines several thousand miles away, but more what they do when they come to the west. You don't need me to remind you of numerous assaults, outrages and downright lunatic mayhem which has been committed in Europe and North America and other 'western' nations by people of that particular mindset (and yes, before you ask, religion has to be a mindset or its abstract precepts can have no impact on the human mind and therefore can have no power to guide human actions. The thought precedes the act.)

The question that the west has been reluctant to ask itself, other than individuals, is why so many muslims want to leave their own nations? Not all of them are fleeing from war -- a war that many consider may have been facilitated by the west poking its nose and arms into places it shouldn't be but was started and continued almost entirely by muslim tribes and various sects of islam who don't get along but all have AK-47s. For a so-called Religion of Peace there seems to be considerable evidence many of its adherents don't see it that way at all.

Now it is easy to say that these people want a better life, though it would be a question of what the west has that offers a better life. My view is moving from a warm place to a cold, often wet place where there is very little of the religious and social constructs that sustained those people in their homelands and where there are increasingly fewer jobs to earn money to improve one's life, is not necessarily better. To make it even more unappealing, the languages and cultures and traditions would  definitely be alien to non-westerners. In other words, you wouldn't go unless there was something appealing on offer you couldn't get at home.

It has been said that immigration without assimilation is invasion, and a good number of ordinary people (not the western politicians and assorted media hacks who are paid well enough to live in secure places until the may be obliged to flee their home country) think what we are seeing now is invasion. There isn't a whole lot of assimilation going on, as these refugees inevitably decline to be part of the nation where they they arrive. When you see, as I have, men in white, long desert-like robes and open-toe (and sockless) sandals walking round on a not particularly warm British day, you wonder why the insistence of being 'arab' is more attractive than being warm and dry. But then, if you want to make a statement you are separate then, sure, it works pretty well.

Most of the refugees who passed through economically stable and war-free countries to reach Germany (and possibly other European nations) are mostly MMAs -- Men of Military Age (there are not many women accompanying them though western media has worked hard to show images of every baby brought along) -- and are thus economic migrants. They passed through safe places, even ones that have the same culture and religion that they know, because it wasn't lucrative enough. The better life they want depends more not on opportunities to work but on the state hand outs and 'free money' they know the west has on offer. They want what we have, and they would like it free, please.

Rightly or wrongly, the driving force of politics and social-engineering in the west has been to provide and maintain a safety net for those who, through ill-fortune or plain mismanagement of their own lives, have fallen through the cracks of an economically stable society. The idea was that if you arrest such a fall, people (with help or on their own initiative) can begin to find their own feet following the fall and in time no longer require state assistance. A temporary lapse or spell of bad luck can be put behind the citizen who aspires to a more promising, less dependent life. Laudable of course, but we have seen through several decades of this ideal -- and one that cannot be shifted from the political map no matter what the cost or consequences -- is that all that happens is the safety net quickly becomes a warm, cosy hammock. No need to lift oneself up when you are provided with everything you need without working for it.

Indeed, there is some evidence to show that families in this warm, soft hammock our nation has provided can enjoy a level of wealth that working people cannot hope to attain. When some prominent 'activist' said a few years ago that families on the dole (or whatever phrase is currently fashionable) should have a minimum annual income of £35,000 provided by the state, it made a lot of working people grimace. No matter how hard a lot of people in employment work, they cannot hope to bring in £35,000 after tax with all the attendant costs of transport and not being able to wear pyjamas all day.

The question then is why should people who don't work enjoy a significantly better lifestyle than those who don't? There has been no answer forthcoming, but the idea of more money for the non-working is still 'out there.' When ideas get 'out there' they tend to be a precursor to being 'in here.'

Perhaps none of the people we have elected to government have any idea this immivasion is happening. Perhaps the people of our nations are a complete mystery to them. So we have a situation that our politicians, who we elect in the hope they honour their promises and equally are able to see current trends and patterns also have an ability to be aware of future issues, cannot do what they say they can. For example, the non-politician in me is so unsophisticated that if I fill my fridge with cartons of milk it not only costs me a lot of money I needn't pay, the fridge soon becomes full (denying space for other things I need to refrigerate) and the milk I can never get round to using slowly goes off. So far our politicians, if they are aware of anything like this as regards immigration, have a vague idea that 'we' (as if we are one with them) must buy a larger fridge. It hasn't occurred to them, apparently, that buying more and more milk and stuffing it in is not the way to go.

I am sure there are some who would be outraged that I appear to be equating people who 'want a better life' are milk cartons. That isn't the point of analogies. We have a small island with limited living space and if you believe what the social observers say, a shortage of housing but an increasing strain on education and health provision.

The question in any kitchen must be where do you put a larger fridge?

I have a relative, by marriage, who is very keen on this immivasion and sees no problem in more people coming here to do little but to maintain their stance that they are different. This relative even sends out messages suggesting if it wasn't for these people, Britain would have fewer brain surgeons and heart specialists. The trouble would appear to be that the brain surgeons and heart specialists who arrive from the middle-east, say, come in by plane direct to Heathrow and not by train and foot into Germany or get into the back of lorries at Calais. But like our politicians, my relative doesn't seem to have an ability to see what is happening though this person lives in a comfortable part of London where reality can seem a long way off. Certainly when I lived in one industrial northern town, the immivasion lot if they had any job at all was as taxi-drivers, or mostly lived off the state safety net in their own non-assimilated hammocks and among them had a good number of men who regarded the people already there as either sexual playthings (if young enough) or worthy of disapproval.

To go back to the MMA immivasion breaking on Germany and threatening other western nations, a lot of these young men want -- as young men will -- sex. If their officially-approved hijab-clad females aren't coming with them then they will have to turn, when the urge takes them, to what is available locally.

My conclusion is that the west's leaders are wilfully blind, or ignorant of consequences, and all we are doing is planning for larger fridges because we don't know or want to know anything about things of ours that are turning sour.

A Game of Games

Back when I was doing some teaching on computers, if I asked the 'students' (they never really studied as such, but we had to call them that) what they wanted to be when they finished college, almost all of them said they wanted to be games designers.

They also thought they would immediately be paid £30,000 as year minimum in such a job and didn't have to turn up at work every day. Perhaps they were right: maybe office work had changed since I had done it.

I was somewhat neutral about their aims as I didn't really play many games, despite the fact that I had some spare time in my part-time teaching work. Frankly I regarded games as largely 'electronic mazes' where going left, left, right, left, jump, pick up the magic sword/gun/crystal jump again and go right one more time would give you untold pixel wealth. But, each to their own: they might not be for me but there was clearly a market for this even if most games fall into a few limited categories.

But I also have to admit that since those conversations five years ago computer/console/mobile gaming has grown even larger than it loomed then. Given that these students were one cold, wet evening queueing up at the door 15 minutes before going home time eager to get out and spend their EMA (the then Educational Maintenance Allowance, intended to help them pay for transport to college, buy academic materials, etc) on the latest incarnation of Call of Duty then it was clear this was important to them.

So for all I know these intrepid games-players are now even more intrepid games-designers, responsible for animating some pink gorilla in a tree opening fire on some alien-spaceship to stop them stealing the life crystals we all need to survive. Who knows? I must however wish them luck if only because since they graduated to seek this well-paid employment many colleges around the country will be pumping out yet more kids eager to take the same programming job for perhaps a little less than 30 grand a year.

Now, I have to admit that while I do certain things in my retirement I do have some spare time and have started to look at games more closely. Back when my sons were little the games on things like the Spectrum were nothing more than lumps of pixels going left, right, right, etc. Then came the Atari and so on, and the standards of graphics improved though to me they lacked the cut and thrust of a true game like chess. Or even Monopoly, for that matter. But the standards were on the up, and lately I have looked at a couple of games that have stunning, almost real world graphics and reasonably engaging play.

But of the games I have dabbled with of late, time permitting, the elements that can destroy and be destroyed might inwardly involve human beings but you never see them. These computer tanks, warships and spaceships all have people on board (or they could be remotely controlled for all I know) but no matter what the destruction I never hear the screams of the wounded and the crying of those close to death. In effect, inanimate objects are reduced to twisted metal but no humans actually die, and nor do you get to see any semblance of a human in most of them. Certainly you do not see them writhe in agony the way war sometimes tends to make them.

My philosophy, and I had never thought of a 'philosophy of games' until recently, is more that objects can be ruined, but not people. I have therefore no interest in a shoot-em-up where your are led to believe you are targeting and killing humans, no matter how many pixels they are made from.

But this leads me to another point. I saw this game ad on twitter today and it disturbed me.

Being disturbed is probably nothing new in life, but this one got to me for two reasons.

First, as I am currently reading a book by Barbara Tuchman (The Guns Of August) about the origins of World War One, this ad jarred with me. I find Tuchman's book well written, engaging and an eye-opener how the nations of Europe stumbled into a terrible conflict despite many misgivings and anxieties and doubts. It was as if the 1906 Schlieffen plan for Germany to invade France through Belgium was, once it was made known, became a prophecy that had to be fulfilled. I have also read Max Hastings on WW1 and other history books too of the time. I really feel it isn't a subject that could bear much fantasy, but one assumes that as games are fantasy and why not fantasise about trenches, mud and barbed wire? I wonder if the poppies put in an appearance?

Second, what got me most about this was the character with the Mauser pistol. The image of a cool black man in British khaki (as opposed to field grey, which the Germans who had Mauser pistols wore) with fashionably upturned collar and without a helmet somewhat made me think that this was more the image of a street thug. I doubt if the image is the typical British army officer at say, the Marne.

This is not to say that black people weren't in the war. The French had troops from North Africa, we Brits had Indian troops. There may even have been soldiers from the Caribbean fighting for the British Expeditionary Force. But it wasn't what this picture shows.

This for me is the worst side of the modern games business. War here is seen as movie-styled urban street-fighting (though undoubtedly it was at times) and reduced to acts of individualism and gung-ho 'you-never-have-to-reload' adventurism. Games, I accept, have become like the movies are: an extension of today's cultural preferences and practices forced on to a sketchy view of reality. So why not have a black man in casual attire, armed as street thug might be (or for those who are driven by BLM, as a cop would be) and calmly picking off 'the enemy' with unfailing accuracy? Cool, bro. Know what I'm sayin'?

I shouldn't be surprised. We casually think that putting modern actors and trendy styles in period costume and the actors behaving in currently acceptable, thoroughly modern ways (oh wow, the rich in Downton Abbey caring about their servants so much they gave them time off, supported them emotionally, attended lower-class weddings, wept with them at their funerals and so on) is the stuff of history. Yes, it is drama and it may always have been so from Greek times onwards with actors wearing what they did in everyday life, but war deserves to be treated with a certain respect and accuracy. Not just because we don't want to see it happen again but because of the people who died in those wars, many horribly, many in lonely terror, deserve a proper regard and respect.

Perhaps I shouldn't imagine that computer games, crafted for the unknowing and fawned over by the ignorant, should be any different. But, really... Know what I'm sayin', bro?

Back and Leaving

It is a long time since I wrote anything for this blog. Not because I don't have anything to say but because there is too much to say.

Like most people who care about what is happening around us I am full of thoughts about what is happening to the west, and the elements that are seeking its decline and even collapse -- and my thoughts are anything but kind towards towards those people and systems and ideologies and cults who are working so tirelessly (and so misguidedly) towards our end. But there are so many aspects to it all that there is neither the time to cover them all nor perhaps any point.

For reasons that any sane person cannot fathom, those elements that want to see everything we have built and nurtured being replaced by something corrupt, unworkable and unworthy are having their way. Common sense was probably always in short supply, but it does not even make a showing any more. A succession of bizarre demands have replaced any semblance of normality.

Take, as an example, the Brexit vote. The question, in pretty plain language in June of 2016, was put to the people of these islands. A simple choice on membership of the European Union was offered to those eligible to vote by the terms of our laws and the majority of those voting could see it clearly. Does this seem obvious? Well, you can look at a referendum like the one in Australia a few years ago that was a pitch for independence, such as to stop having our monarch as their head of state. But it was apparently so confusing that few people could work out what they were actually voting for, or so one Australian told me. I wasn't involved, so I can't say as a fact, but that was the view of someone living -- and voting -- in Sydney. Mind you, this person voted to leave Britain's 'control' so was disappointed the outcome wasn't going the way they wanted, and perhaps we have to accept that whatever was asked the majority were in favour of staying with the UK.

My point is the question has to be clear, and then people can be in no doubt.

It is of course entirely possible that despite the welter of political and media pressure to tell us all to remain in the EU, the vote to leave was done for a variety of reasons. these however weren't itemised on the referendum.  Speculation may abound what a lot of people wanted, or feared, but in any event the question was yes or no, in or out, or more accurately leave or stay?

I had reason for my vote, which I will state at the end of this blog.*

The majority was as we now know in favour of leaving. I was one of them. True as of yet the actual process of departing a failing and corrupt organisation that has wrought so much havoc on the nations of Europe (which incidentally we are still very much connected to by common culture and aims) hasn't started, but an answer was clearly given.

Now I do not put much faith in democracy as such: making a choice once every five years for a local parliamentary representative does not have any influence on a government, and even less on what they do thereafter while in power. If I want Joe Bloggs to represent me in parliament and Joe Bloggs wants to affiliate with a political doctrine and the party of that doctrine gains a majority of seats and accepts the offer by the monarch to form a government (and they can refuse, unlikely thought that may be) I can have no say in that process or what this collection of people do once their chosen head person has moved his or her sofa into Number 10.

My democratic moment lasted two seconds while I made an X on a piece of paper. I certainly was not voting for peace, a prime minister, a relaxation of border controls, the building of nuclear power plants or even the new colour of the wallpaper in Downing Street. I voted to relinquish any such say when I slipped the folded paper into the ballot box, trusting only that someone would add the votes up properly -- and that is a whole separate issue these days.

So the June vote came out for leaving the EU. Not by a landslide, but a sufficiently large margin to leave no doubt that this was what the majority wanted. Fifty-two per cent to 48 constitutes enough of a win to make the job of a recount pointless.

At once however the enemies of Britain, by which I mean people who live in these islands but cling to all sorts of weird ideas and ways that run counter to the welfare of this nation, began whining and moaning. The Remainers rapidly became the Remoaners, saying it just wasn't fair, that the people who wanted us all to Leave were old and stupid and racist and had no vision of the security and prospects that open borders and increasing legislation from foreign interests would bring to our islands. There were predictions of doom and economic collapse, that war would break out in Europe, Fears that innocent Poles and Romanians would be rounded up and shipped home in containers. There were calls for a second referendum, with among many reasons cited being that the vote for a change in the status quo should be something like at least 75 per cent of the electorate. So to Leave it had to be a clear 50 per cent of the people wanting out. Anyone not voting of course would be assumed as wanting to stay, rather than perhaps not caring either way.

There was talk that London, which voted in favour of staying put, had been cruelly ignored by the rest of the country. Let down, even. It was argued that the uneducated bumpkins, peasants and crass northerners had ruined it for Londoners, who of course were the only ones empowered by their exalted location to see what was good and pure and lovely. There were Remainers who argued, on state television (which naturally is centred in London and handy for the Channel Tunnel) were being denied unrestricted, no-visa travel to Europe.

One woman who voted to stay even said to me that the most important aspect of all of this was being able to have holidays in France without the inconvenience of having a passport checked.

Well, each to their own. Given the events recently in Paris and other towns and cities of France I am not sure I am all that keen on going there myself, but we each have our views of what constitutes local bother and what is terrorism bordering on armed insurrection.

We are told that the process of leaving the EU will begin in 2017, and while that seems disappointing to the Leavers like me at least it is promised to happen. In the meantime we continue to operate EU laws, follow their court rulings, pay our fees and any fines imposed, and accept for now we don't have much say in our state of being. We are after all considered a region of Europe and not a nation and generally no one expects a region to have their own ideas and separate needs.

No matter, this is immaterial to the Remoaners, who haven't finished even though the referendum is done. Indeed the recent long drawn out leadership election farce of the Labour party was peppered with loud claims that if Labour's new leader was this bloke or the other chap then we would indeed vote again on this issue, that we would ignore any vote to Leave, that we would immerse ourselves even more in Europe to the point of throwing out Sterling in favour of the Euro.

I would imagine then that unrestricted travel to French holiday resorts would be even easier with the Euro as the only currency. Yes, it makes sense. To some.

*My reason for voting Leave was a matter of laws. I simply want us to make our own laws, governed by the issues affecting this country, rather than meekly adopting perhaps unrealistic laws imposed by Belgians and the like who have no concern about the nations of these islands. It wasn't racism, it wasn't denying access, it wasn't fearing Johnny -- or Ahmed -- Foreigner on our shores. It was the simple desire of having a parliament of our own people on our lands which has to consider what we need to grow and thrive.

When I make a mark in an election, my only concern is that the person I am voting for ably represents me and my family in parliament with the added bonus that he or she will argue for or against laws affecting me and mine. Selfish some may say, but there we are. In the end the only thing that counts is who we are and what we have and what we want to build. Letting some one else make those choices for us without caring is, frankly, bizarre.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, I don't rate the EU parliament at all as they seem to have very little say in what the unelected Belgian civil servants and various grubby self-interest groups want.)

Stand for Albion?

I was going to write a post about this country and its structure, or more specifically about the decline and decay of England.

That the nation that was England -- it isn't any more as a walk round many towns will show -- is less than it was can't really be argued about. This is not a mourning of the passing of an empire (they come and go, so ours came and went. So be it) and nor is it quite a foray into the nationalist arena: if Scotland thinks it can survive on its own then that's how it is. Same for Wales and Northern Ireland if they wish to stand alone. I think it a shame if Britain becomes series of smaller entities but you can put it down to the will of the people, though I do have to say if Scotland achieves independence then let us hope they grant the same privilege to any part of that country which wishes to secede. If the Hebrides or the Orkneys say they want to go it alone, I presume the new king of Scotland will agree it's okay.

Anyway, be that as it may. Life goes on, one way or another (I do though find it curious that at time when the likes of the European Union grow then more and more areas want to be 'independent') and my concern is the patch I live on, known as England.

I would imagine that at this point there may be someone reading this who begins to get agitated that I represent that worst of things and thus am a Little Englander. I probably will in association with that be labelled with many tar brushes, to mix my metaphors. I doubt if any of them would be flattering. But while I don't like some things that others adore (or say they adore; the reality is sometimes different between saying and doing) I do care about where I was born.

In the light of this I was thinking about England. It isn't the country my grandparents and my father were willing to die for through two wars, nor the land my father-in-law served to protect when he was an officer in the army in places like Belfast. This is not the land I remember growing up in and while times change, they do not always change for the better or for that matter, for the happiness of the people who live there.

I'd like to say "so it goes" but we have been badly let down by the people who pretended to care and essentially pissed on the nation once voted into power.

Nothing can be done now. We trusted these people to do the best for us and they let us down. Now we have to get on with this even as it falls apart on a tide of mismanagement, dishonesties, fiddling, financial collapse and corruption against background of unfettered immigration. No matter how bad it gets, we can be sure we will be given more of what has gone before but in larger doses.

It made me think that perhaps we should go back to smaller countries for ourselves, because the bigger gets more greedy, more incompetent, and more ineffectual with it. No matter what the theory is, the desire for more gradually asserts itself over the desire for just letting things be.

Perhaps then the way forward is to be smaller. If England stands alone then it stands alone and we have to manage ourselves. With that, we don't have to fund other regimes or support other greedy ambitions or even nurture other cultures. We are what we are and that is how it is.

So, as England is largely lost, how about starting a new entity called Albion? An independent entity which embodies what England and the English are?

Before you get agitated, this is not a rejection of other skin colours. If anyone wants to be a member of Albion, irrespective of skin colour, they can be. All they have to do is not worship another nation, lust for another ideal and most importantly, not drag along a religion that curses people for not being in that religion. You see, it would be about attitude. If the attitude is that Albion is English -- not British, not British-Asian or British-non-liking-the-English or whatever -- you qualify. We would, difficult though it would be initially, stand alone and sort out our own problems. While I'd prefer Albion not to be under the thumb of the EU, I presume the will of the people would determine how much pressure we were willing to take from unelected officials in foreign places.

But here's the biggest problem: where would Albion be? The English cities are now lost, and most of the towns too. The politicians who carved up the nation for the benefit of the non-English, the people who yelled that we were not multi-cultural enough (even when the newcomers were resolutely opposed to anyone else's culture), have enabled the submerging of England into some strange hybrid and essentially unhappy place.

As we can never go back in time, as we can't invite people to leave and as we can't expect them to change their outlook, we have to go. Leave our own land. We who don't want the muli-culti approach would have to surrender the cities and the towns totally, given the numbers of non-English there already. All the landmarks, all the architectural achievements, all the theatres and the libraries and the galleries, all the urban achievements... they would be left behind too. Albion would have to start again on absolutely everything.

It would take time, perhaps too much time. One thing we do not have now is patience; we are reluctant to play the long game. People would be disaffected by having to build a whole new country from scratch, made unhappy by the thought of all they gave up to endure this. Suddenly freedom and with it the prospect of not being overwhelmed by cultures that despise the natives, would seem worthless. It takes time to build all this, and probably we probably wouldn't do it as well as our forebears did.

We would have to redefine our boundaries and guard against the barbarians that would flood the lands we left behind. We would be weary and vulnerable.

No, as much as I like the idea of Albion, I can see it won't work. Not unless we the English decamped en-masse to some Scottish islands who had gleefully declared independence from the new Scotland...

Hmmm. Well, you never know...

The only game in town

You would wonder why we play politics.

Here's a game with ill-defined (and often undefined) rules where people who are all striving for the same thing end up with temporarily different views of slight variations of the same thing. Similarities that allow them to posture, scream at each other and offer the occasional witty barb in defence of their position. People who manufacture 'sound bites' to attract applause of their own kind, a section of the population who would probably applaud just as enthusiastically at a flushing toilet.*

Thus we have, say, two or even three political parties (three if you count a bunch of former members of one party who had a split over some faint brand of their ideology from their mates, or couldn't get the power they wanted. You choose which issue forced the split that shattered British politics, etc) who are arguing about the same thing. Arguing about shades of the same thing.

Not one of them, for example, would say that we don't need schools or the NHS or any army. Unthinkable! They argue about how much schooling, the amount of medical care or the degree of defence we need. No question to be asked on the subjects themselves. It's not big differences they have either on their agreed platforms; the gaps are minute in global terms. Ten billion or ten billion one hundred thousand? The differences are marginal but the rhetoric inspires the fans of these strange groups of people to get agitated and blubber that their person has it right.

More? Well, how about our involvement with Europe? Do you want more Europe or a lot more Europe in your life?

No, that's silly. You are never asked if you want any Europe in your life. It is there and we are subservient to it that's all there is to that subject. You are told it's good for you and the discussion -- grown people acting like kids and making gestures at each other across a polished table in a long room not big enough to seat everyone who wants to be there -- is just then about how much Europe is good for you.

You see, the battle lines have already been drawn up, the site of the battleground fixed, the 'forces' of each side using the same words and ideas and the terms of our surrender worked out. It's just how much surrender can we manage.

The end result is the same in all these politics. The mindless slaughter of a few thousand words with people retiring into dark corners of a subsidised bar or restaurant to lick their wounds over coffee or wine. Reserve forces, aka the media, are wheeled in to report the conflict as unfairly as possible but the battle is over. Oh well, after a good night's sleep and the due claiming of expenses, its back to the fray for how much of this or how much of that.

Perhaps one day there will be a party who says that, actually, we don't need any of this or that. I wouldn't however count on it; all of them are capable of 'crossing the floor' to join the other side, or sides, without any loss of rank of privilege.

But worse of all, these people want this 'battle of wills' to be exactly as it is. They want power and all the trimmings of glory and elevated position -- with attendant wages and expenses -- to be in this strange game. How strange? If you play chess with someone else you try to win, not reach compromise. You play with pieces of quite different colours, clearly identified with clear rules. Yet politics is not like that. The rules are vague and can be bent, the pieces have no real clear function and better still they are all on the same side of the board and might only be distinguished by a subtle shading that requires you to hold each piece up in the brightest of lights to check which 'team' it belongs to.

Best of all, the chess pieces in politics are changeable. They are not fixed forms. They are changed sometimes by circumstances and whispers beyond your understanding but mostly altered by whim and whimsy as the need arises. Or they are changed by those people -- often not even elected by you and yours but secure in foreign climes and tyrannies -- who can offer something tasty for a change to be made. Further, what one piece says can say something quite different a while later. What one piece will attack will vary depending on the direction of a political wind that you don't generate or even have felt.

There is however a declared 'need to do things' given credibility by statement and bluster and yet it wasn't you who stated it. You might go along with it, if so instructed or guided or misled, but frequently the issues are all the same on both sides of the board. Sorry, I meant the one side of the board; I was forgetting there is only one side in this.

In which case, it suddenly dawns on you that there are actually two sides to this game but it is you on the other side of the board. And the politics side has all the power and all the self-serving interests to put them out of your reach. They may be misshapen and unidentifiable pieces but they gave themselves all the power and money.

So why do we play this when it works against us, the people? Simply because it is the only game in town. All you can do is stop playing because, frankly, it is the only move you have left.

Happily nothing will alter and the discussion of degree can carry on among the similar but shapeless pieces arrayed on the far side of the board, well out of your reach.

*I regret the reference to flushing toilets and any slight on them my blog may have made. Flushing toilets are, in fact, the opposite of party politics. The mechanism that causes a mini tidal wave to get rid of what you don't want is far more useful, and more clever, than all the overpaid, preening, posturing self-servers in public life.

Private vs state: where do the kids eat crisps?

My house is sandwiched between two schools. To my left, and as it happens slightly down the slope, is the state primary school. Turn right at my garden gate and there is a private school a little up the hill.

Two different ideas in education, and as such I suspect they never meet up much. No reason why they should: they are just kids of people with different priorities even if as kids they are probably much the same in their interests and activities.

If I had lived in the house where I now live I know that going out of the garden gate as a fresh-faced ten year old say, I'd be turning left to go to the state school. I probably wouldn't even have looked up the hill: my parents had little money so I went to the place with the tall rooms and the tendency to make us line up for our morning milk. Yes, that's right: I was of the generation that had morning milk (seeing the third-of-a-pint bottles lined up on the radiators on a freezing morning and us all trying to poke straws through the icy block of milk to get a drink was a sight that will stay with me) so you can see I went to a state primary school when I was little, shortly before my wife went to a private school. Sometimes I tell her about the horrors of schooling where I went and she responds with the horrors of education where she went. Together we can conclude that being a kid in school can have its horrors, relatively speaking.

If I look at the downhill school each morning I see the road outside it (and spreading up the hill) full of cars disgorging their kids. If I look up the hill I see the road at the top (and spreading down it) full of cars disgorging kids. The ones at the top have uniforms (and interestingly no matter what religion the girls so far follow the rules of the school and wear skirts and dresses with no headscarves) but the ones lower down the hill can wear what they want, and do.

By and large the cars allowing kids to get out on the road side into traffic are much the same either at the bottom of the hill or the top, and by and large the parents are much the same even if the state school does have more of one ethnic group and noticeably more of one gender than the private school does. But kids are kids and as they struggle out of the backs of cars into the flowing traffic they have, top or bottom, to listen to their parents give them last minute instructions about lunch and so on. Instructions from parents who can't be arsed to get out of their driving seat as their kids try to make it to the pavement in one piece.

Some of the parents will park in the worst place they can at both schools, and at both places of learning some mothers shepherding their little darlings look weary before the day has even begun. It was ever thus, at least about the weariness if not the parking.

Well, that's kids and parents for you wherever they are headed.

There is however one thing that unites the parents of all these kids: they all pay for a state education. Both groups of parents (if they work) are taxed by the state to provide for their child's education whether they pay privately or not.

That's the thing about private education: the parents are in fact paying twice for their kid to go to school. You could argue, in a happy-I'm-a-socialist way that this then is penalty incurred on those who don't want for whatever reason to send their offspring to a state school. Paying twice is an example of some sort of left-leaning justice, an idea of which animates the hard-of-thinking 'intellectuals' in their eternal quest for fairness solely on their terms. It is also possible to argue that the ones who send their kids to a private school are thus making the load lighter for the state school system by removing their kids from possibly already crowded classrooms, and making a contribution to the costs of educating other children.

Whatever you argue or feel about private education, the question arises why there are parents who want their children to go elsewhere -- at a cost -- to be educated. As it happens, I know a family whose child is currently in a private school and they tell me they have no problem with paying taxes for education that they essentially don't use (though this is taxation for you: we can argue many of us pay taxes for things we don't directly use such as nuclear weapons, well-paid 'comedians' at the BBC and buying personal jets for tyrants in other parts of the world, and so on) but think their child will benefit more from a private education.

The child in question does seem to be getting a good education and is developing interest in all sorts of things and gaining skills in a variety of areas. It comes at a cost but the parents feel it is money well-spent. They have to make sacrifices in order to pay for their child's private education but they accept it is part of the deal. If they want their child to have a chance in future at a shrinking number of jobs and opportunities, they think this is the best way.

Others may feel differently about their money and want to spend their hard-earned cash in other ways while their kids are taken care of by the state. So it goes, and each to their own.

But one thing makes me think about this, putting aside the moral or political questions of how we want our kids educated and what it costs, and it is something I see every day I take the dog for a walk. It's a little thing in the great scheme of life and while it may be wrong to blame kids, I have to say this: there is far more litter such as drink cans and sweet wrappers and gum on the pavement outside the school down the hill than at the top.

Whatever they teach in these two schools something happens to the kids more at one than the other. It may be sheer numbers (the private school is smaller than the state one) but somehow at the private establishment the kids there seem to understand that the world is not a litter-bin.

For all I know the fact that kids are making an effort to be smart in uniform and looking at a greater variety in school or aware that their parents are paying for it all -- or perhaps the teachers have more time or more inclination to make the point -- but the kids at the top don't litter the place anything like the ones at the bottom. But then, talking to someone in education, the problem is often that kids in low income families go to school with their breakfast in the hand, consisting of crisps and a can of fizzy pop (apparently the sight of a child chewing gum and eating crisps at the same time while swigging cola is amazing, and revolting) and so breakfast's remains end up on the floor outside the school.

Perhaps in the act of paying for education, a lot of those parents make an effort to get their children to eat at home and not on the road. It's small thing, but just one of those little differences you get to see when it comes to argument between state and private schools.

Maybe it all comes down to the different ways of parenting: a choice of feeding the kids crisps at home or letting them feed themselves crisps on the street.

Disrupt and learn

If you ever want to get a handle on the lunacy that now manifests itself throughout the American education system, you can find numerous examples online though I do like Heather Mac Donald's excellent investigations and analysis into this subject. She really does root around those educational ideas in the US that on the surface seem stupid but on closer examination reveal themselves to be really, really stupid.

But one idea I have seen in action in this country in my limited time teaching was one she highlighted in an article of hers. One that has popped up over here as well as over there.

It was that any disruptive elements in a class must be allowed to continue in the class.

I am sure in liberal circles the theory looks good on paper: if a student is engaged in learning they have less time to disrupt the learning of others and if they do disrupt others then they should remain so they don't miss out on the learning they so obviously need. After all, they will learn nothing when out of class, right?

In practice this noble theory, like all such theories, falls over with a solid thud when you test it with a little push. No matter what the theory, the truth was the disruptive elements in a class stopped other students achieving. Some of the disruptors even enjoyed the disruption they caused because they were at the centre of attention. As they had better things to do than learn stuff they aren't interested in -- yes, even on a course they signed up for and allegedly wanted to pursue a career in -- they can enjoy the discomfort of other students who may want to learn but can't. People who inevitably find it harder to get on with the task because of the mayhem around them.

There are also some students who might learn in the class but prefer to be easily distracted. Idly sitting staring at a group of young men arguing over the fish names they should adopt as nicknames for themselves is way more interesting than writing things. You think this is a joke on my part? Ha, I wish! I had this in one class where five young males argued noisily over whether Carp was a better nickname than Shark. However when I did point out that they needed to sort out which were freshwater fish and which weren't they did nod in appreciation of my interest in their quest for the best nicknames.

Well, you have to help where you can, and it saved me wasting my breath telling them to do some work.

So why didn't I ask them to leave the class? Because they were there to learn and me sending them packing would have interrupted their learning. Obvious, innit? Keeping the kids in the class, no matter how unruly or bothersome they might be to others trying to learn, was the central platform of the college I was at. If you send one or two out they might go home and, wait for it, not come back ever again.

Gasp!

Retention, retention, retention was the mantra of the management. Keep them there no matter what.

Why? Because for the college to be paid by the state (and with it, the generous wages of all those who could sit in rooms far removed from the kids and not have to teach because they were deciding 'policy') the yoof had to stay on for the full course.

Still, at least I didn't have that trouble with Adrian. A somewhat cheerful if largely witless lad who preened his hair in the reflection from his iPod and then would spend ten minutes each lesson "choosing a track to listen to" as he worked. I did say something one morning to him that it would be a good idea, after twenty minutes "choosing" that he really ought to do some work.

"But I haven't chosen yet," he moaned.

Oh well, silly Adrian was determined to stay on the course and choose the very best tracks even if it took him all year. But here was the problem: no one wanted to confront the problem of kids who wouldn't work.

As a teacher you soon learned that you were effectively powerless. More, the students knew it too. What ya gonna do, huh? Nothing much, as it happens. The management at this college were on the side of the student. No, let me correct that: they were on the side of the student staying.

So if there was nothing much you could do then you had to hope you could persuade them gently or ignore them and concentrate on keeping the workers on task and getting something from the lesson. Though they were students and were reckoned to be there in order to study the truth was if they didn't fancy it that lesson they could put their feet on the desk and talk about the fast cars they would own one day. You could ask them to take their feet off the desk, and some did, so I suppose progress was being made.

If I had the authority to get rid of the non-learners and the disruptors, then the unthinkable would have happened: the ones who wanted to get on could get on without distraction. But they were the unimportant ones. The trouble-makers and the problematic matter most of all, so let us theoretically give them our attention. Concentrate our policy on their needs, and not the ones who would benefit from a more conducive atmosphere for learning.

I do know that throwing half-a dozen spotty, noisy, preening and self-centred but utterly uninteresting and unambitious young people out of a class would have allowed the non-disruptive ones to get on and learn but that would have been too easy. For a start in some classes the ones who wanted to learn would have access to a computer. You see, there was always race to get in first and grab the best chairs and then do nothing. But with say six gone from a class of 28 then the twenty computers available (and the fifteen reasonable chairs) would have been put to better use.

But theory was for those who didn't have to do anything. The practice was for those who had to do it. Quite a shock I suppose to many, but one that really needs to be said.

Sometimes the theorists had to interface with reality, but not often. I can recall the time when members of senior management came round with clipboards to count the number of students in the room through the glass panel in the door (I hope they saw the ones sitting at the back on the floor) but when I went to the door and asked one if I could help they said not at all. They were just checking the rooms were being put to full use.

Well they were, so no worry there. Disruption and squabbling over broken chairs was in full flow, as per the curriculum.

Management didn't have to interrupt the learning at all, for which they were probably eternally grateful.