Avian Flu
We are the second largest poultry exporters in Europe
Someone somewhere has got to show that the great British turkey is safe to eat!
Don’t be chicken – Britain needs you to eat bootiful turkey today
As soon as I arrived at work this morning I told the troops their duty. This is it, I said. The Russians have banned our turkey. The pathetic Japanese have slapped an embargo on any poultry emanating from this country. South Korea, Hong Kong and South Africa are all equally chicken about our chicken.
We are the second largest poultry exporters in Europe, I reminded them, with a £300 million business at stake. Here we are, in the cockpit of the nation, and the people expect us to show a lead. It is a time for greatness, a time for calm, a time for reassurance – and we are going to show all three.
I reached for my wallet and fished out twenty. “Frances,” I said, “go to the supermarket and buy as many slices of Bernard Matthews as you can find. Someone somewhere has got to show that the great British turkey is safe to eat! And that someone is going to be us.”
In no time she was back, laden with an extraordinary assortment of meat and meat-related produce. As we beheld the bewildering versatility of Mr Matthews’s fowls, I felt a spasm of rage that the people of South Korea – where they eat poodles, for heaven’s sake – should turn their noses up at the favourites of the British people.
We had Bernard Matthews wafer thin turkey ham, 95 per cent fat free. We had a perfectly cylindrical Turkey Breast Roast, serving three or four. Mr Matthews’s chefs had miraculously added water, potato and rice starch (and about 20 nourishing chemicals) to what the front of the packet said was “100 per cent breast meat”. We had delicious golden turkey escalopes, containing as much as 38 per cent turkey.
Look at that, I said: three oven-glove sized crispy escalopes, and all for £1.99. In fact, it all looked so good I didn’t know where to begin.
Here, I said, peeling back the lid of some Premium Sage and Onion turkey breast. A rich aroma filled the room. Come on now, I said, as they shrank back, who is going to be first?
“I’m not eating it unless you eat it,” said one. Eh? I said. You don’t understand. I’m John Selwyn Gummer, and you are Cordelia. You eat the hamburger, or in this case the slice of sage and onion turkey blend. I merely offer it to you. Or, I said, would you prefer a Bernard Matthews Turkey Dinosaur?
I unpeeled another packet. This one contained a mixture of turkey skin, pea starch, milk, potassium chloride, sodium nitrite and assorted other life-giving ingredients, boiled up and turned into a sliced roll complete with a beautiful picture of a dinosaur. Look! I held up the Dinosaur, showing how it ran all the way through, like a stick of rock.
No, no, they said. You’ve got to do it first. OK, I said, no problem.
It was a time for leadership. When the news bulletins are full of pictures of men in white space suits slaughtering thousands of birds; when everyone is panicking about the H5N1 strain of bird flu; when poor Bernard Matthews and his colleagues are beside themselves with worry about the threat to the UK’s £3.4 billion poultry industry, it was time to eat turkey.
I took out that slice of sage and onion 98 per cent fat free, I folded it politely, and I chomped for Britain. Flavour flooded my mouth. It was little short of heavenly, ambrosial, I told my friends; and I suggest that we all do the same.
Let’s say snooks to the Koreans and the Russians, and let’s get stuck into British turkey; and I say this because I remember writing exactly the same – 11 years ago – about British beef. I was right then and I am right now.
Do you remember that whole disgraceful BSE business, at the sad fag-end of the Major government?
Do you remember the way those unscrupulous lentil-munching Labour MPs whipped up public hysteria over British beef?
Thousands of blameless British cattle farmers had their livelihoods destroyed. Their continental rivals conspired with their EU governments to impose an outrageous and unjustified ban on British beef, and which the French have only just got round to lifting.
The British taxpayer coughed up £5 billion for the whole shambles – and all because we were told that British beef could give you mad cow disease.
Do you remember that government scientist who went around predicting that there would be hospices on every street corner, full of victims of nvCreutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and that the entire population was going to be punished for its addiction to hamburgers by being sent slowly and humiliatingly insane? What ever happened to him?
I in no way mean to minimise the suffering of those few people who have contracted nvCJD, but the panic was ludicrous in proportion to the risk; and having looked at this bird flu business, I reckon we are in danger of stampeding over exactly the same cliff.
As far as I can see, you would need to enter into a civil partnership with one of Bernard Matthews’ turkeys, and then perform prolonged mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the startled bird, in order to contract the new type of avian flu. You might get bird flu if you ate ground-up turkey droppings on your cornflakes for a week, or there again you might not.
And even then we still have no evidence that the disease can be transmitted from one human being to another, in the way of other flu epidemics.
I tell you what is driving this story: it’s a bourgeois horror of processed meat of the kind that Bernard Matthews produces so cheaply and so deliciously.
It’s all about people’s sense of guilt at the ease of their lives, and the cheapness of supermarket food. It’s a Marie Antoinette faddishness about farming, a belief that it should all be so much more natural.
I say phooey. OK, so Bernard Matthews mixes milk and turkey skin. Is that any odder than a restaurant offering black pudding and marmalade fritter?
It’s time for Blair to follow our lead, eat a slice of patriotic turkey and tell the Russians where to get off. Anyone failing to do so is a snob, a sissy and a scaredy-cat.
106 Comments
…well, it would be interesting. I was talking against the situation where people are having to move house to get little johnnie into the right school. Of course the very rich will always send their children wherever they please (if the brainpower isn’t there, a new library often succeeds in place of an entrance exam) but a situation where many schools are developing a very narrow economic and social pupil intake is not, I think, desirable for anyone, whether a huge inner city comprehensive or a small private school. I hope this helps clarify my rant.
If parents received the ‘cheque’ for the cost of education at school and had to present this to allow their child to enrol, maybe there would be fewer problems relating to the ‘free at the point of use’.
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Seriously, if this is true, maybe you should get yourself some better mates. I’m just saying. ( C Badger)
Seriously, it is true.
And I don’t want any better mates.
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What an excellent and heartfelt ‘rambling rant’ from Russellg. My views exactly, and expressed in a coherant manner that puts all of the Stalinist, cocaine-snorting, whisky-drowning posters and their Islington sound-alikes firmly in their place.
A minor quibble:
I would say that 19th Century England under Gladstone was a freer place than the country was post WW2, when centralised state planning (even after the labour government was thrown out) still was the political orthodoxy.
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Idlex:
“Seriously, it is true.
And I don’t want any better mates.”
At least you acknowledge that they do, if only in principle at the moment, exist. Who knows, when it no longer seems ‘cool’ & ‘hip’ to shove something up your nose that 24 hours previously was probably stick up someone’s bottom before it was cut with horse tranquiliser, you may branch out into the real world. Here’s hoping!
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Idlex:
Is tha cocaine fair trade?
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Jon Cummins:
Green Cocaine? there’s a novel idea. You know Coke (the beverage) is naturally green don’t you? Oddly, since, due to the methods conventionally used to smuggle cocaine, I expect it’s naturally brown.
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As for subsidies in the event of livestock cull, the alternative is private insurance.(StevenL)
A few months ago I was in Tesco’s during a power cut. Black plastic had been draped over the chilled meat aisle to slow the warming process, but the manager stood anxiously by a thermometer waiting for it to hit the red line (4 deg C, I believe).
Hit the line it did. A crowd of staff descended on the cabinets and started loading meat in barrows. “What are you going to do with that lot?” I asked. “Scrap it,” he said. “Probably landfill. Don’t worry, we’re insured”. I could hardly believe what was happening.
Hoardes of people begged him to let them take some of this perfectly good meat home. Joints of beef, pork and lamb, chickens, turkeys… the lot, all heading straight for the scrapheap. There was nearly a riot.
I would have been quite happy to load up with a few joints myself. They were probably colder than meat you’ve lugged home in the car on a summer’s day.
Have we become obsessed with food hygiene?
(Talking of joints, why couldn’t Cameron take a leaf out of Boris’s book? “I have but it made me sneeze”. No-one batted an eyelid).
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Russellg:
“If parents received the ‘cheque’ for the cost of education at school and had to present this to allow their child to enrol, maybe there would be fewer problems relating to the ‘free at the point of use’.”
Unless the ‘cheque’ has genuine negotiable value, then all you’re doing is creating meaningless administration masquerading as choice. Sure, if it was a basic education voucher it would be very welcome in rich & middle class households, where it could be used to part pay school fees, but it’s been established these aren’t the people with kids who are being failed by the state school system anyway.
I don’t have any solutions, (apart from more caning, & less crap food) and am clearly in the majority.
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Cpt. Badger:
Not necessarily Green, but fair trade – i.e. the people doing the growing of the stuff getting a comparitively high slice of the end price. As it is, the cartels round up villagers and march them off at gunpoint to do their growing.
However, you’d be stunned at the number of people one encounters who smugly claim to boycott, say, Nestle due to them exploiting the third world whilst happily stuffing the white up each nostril like there is no tomorrow.
Hypocrisy? Never!
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I’m with you Boris!
(I’d not normally eat milk protien boosted breast but I’ll go and take one for the team!)
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Jon Cummins
“However, you’d be stunned at the number of people one encounters who smugly claim to boycott, say, Nestle due to them exploiting the third world whilst happily stuffing the white up each nostril like there is no tomorrow.”
I probably wouldn’t. I used to think it was a victimless crime, the user simply excercising his or her right to stick whatever they like in their own bodies, until I heard of FARC, then I changed my mind. There’re a lot of people out there who deliberately avoid learning about the effect their actions have, to avoid learning why they should mend their ways… Using cocaine ia a bit like firing a machinegun up a crowded street because you like the bang, but denying the corpses have anything to do with you.
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“Sure, if it was a basic education voucher it would be very welcome in rich & middle class households, where it could be used to part pay school fees, but it’s been established these aren’t the people with kids who are being failed by the state school system anyway.” Capt Badger
I take all your points, CB, and acknowledge that the world is inherently unfair as regards childrens’ oppportunities. The grammar school system was excellent for those who were able to beat the threshold for entry, just a pity that the ‘comprehensive’ system was so eagerly taken up by the Conservatives, instead of raising the standards of Secondary Modern schools to some of today’s better forward-looking establishments.
If middle class families continue to send their children for extra tuition after (state) school, does this really suggest they perceive the system to be doing its job thoroughly?
What this country has created is a state education system which offers your child an education dependent on your income.
I accept that people with similar standards and aspirations will tend to try to send their children to similar places, and that the issue of basic education vouchers will make it easier for those on average incomes to send their kids to a private school where a child’s opportunities for development and success may increase. I see it as benefitting those people the most.
Of course, since private education is a free(ish) market, there is every possibility that prices would rise to take account of parents’ greater spending power. However, the more money and attention given to the school system, the better.
It is a sad fact that some of our more successful criminal and disruptive young people are intelligent and frustrated. Therefore extra money flowing into private education could be used to offer more scholarships and assisted places for bright youngsters from uninterested backgrounds.
No matter what policy is implemented there will always be losers, but a concentration of effort to significantly raise standards – instead of jealously making life difficult for lower-income middle class people, dragging everyone outside the private sector down to a uniform norm, as have successive Labour governments – is what I believe would stimulate a REAL rise in pupils’ achievements and capabilities.
Some other points regarding education vouchers are raised here:
http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/hnp/hddflash/workp/wp_00064.html#TofC23
and here:
http://www.educationforum.org.nz/documents/articles/Issue57.pdf
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I have a feeling that much of our school food was made up of Bernard Matthews’ et al. by-products which were rejected by the pet food industry. It certainly looked and tasted that way, so it’s amazing what one can survive on…
having said that, there were more than a few ‘disfunctionals’.
Is it the lack of drugs in the latest school dinners which is pushing kids towards their ‘supplementary’ use? We didn’t give a thought to coke etc, just a few pints at lunchtime, ready for double Physics.
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< ‘Have we become obsessed with food hygiene?’ (PaulD)<
Food hygiene, health and safety, ‘anti-social behaviour’, binge drinking, smoking. We’ve become completely obsessed with all the things that don’t matter. There is no opposition to all this fannying about either.
I’m on the receiving end of it at the moment myself. I was ill in July and unable to work for 3 weeks. In mid-August my doctor signed me fit to go back to work. It’s now mid-February and I’m still not back because of all their bollocks ‘health and safety’ procedures that are apparently there ‘for my own good’. It’s not good enough any more that your doctor says you are fit enough to work. An army of self-serving ‘occupational health’ idiots and pathetic bureaucrats have to spend over 6 months having meetings about medical matters they have no understanding of, simultaneously inserting and removing their fingers from their rose-scented rectums.
Quite how spending 6 months sat on my backside, and on the dole because my employer cares no much about ‘my own good’ that they refuse to give me sick pay, is for my own good I’m still unsure about. None of the aforementioned prats have managed to give me a satisafctory explaination either.
The state has an overbearing obsession with protecting the weak, the irresponsible and the stupid from the harsh reality of life. This merely serves to breed more weakness, irresponsible behaviour and stupidity. Look at your Tesco example. Throwing away perfectly good meat! Gross stupidity, bred by an obession with protecting the weak and feeble from a biological reality.
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What I love about some of your articles is the infinite intellectual effort required to not work out whether you are parodying yourself or not.
I’d never even heard of Bernard Matthews until a week ago (and then had to scratch my head to think why he remeinded me of an old British comedy act, but that was Manning), but had been misled by the Grauniad & Indy into believing the company was in the business of producing food, albeit the sad battery-farmed fettered fowls of GBaribusiness as opposed to the clucking chickens and guinea fowls walking around mine and neighbours gardens in Sri Lanka, where they make part of the organic culinary delight known as ‘bubble-gum chicken’.
If BMltd truly produces the vile artefacts BJ describes then they deserve having the Koreans abduct Lady Matthews pet poodles, bottle them in pickle and served to her children at a Hogwon.
But just think, Boris, a few more scares like this and the British will start to eat real food again, and you might even no longer be considered thin in comparison to the great unwashed.
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correction: “the more money and attention given to the school system, the better.”
Reading back through what I wrote, I have to argue with this statement. Throwing money at the state education system could end up like throwing money at the NHS. Setting the right framework for intelligent teachers to enjoy operating in would make much more sense than more cheques. Allowing schools to operate to benefit their own particular intake rather than a set national curriculum would seem to make sense, too.
More on vouchers here, well written by Eric Anderson:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/01/02/do0201.xml
All the anti-voucher writing I can scroogle is of the opinion; “If we remove through creaming off the more gifted from state education, the quality of state education will fall further”. Typical of what’s gone wrong with schools policy in the UK. Instead of having a competitive, national policy relating to ABILITY, we have a competitive, national policy relating to EARNINGS. Not how we became a great nation, but quite likely the way we will lose credibility around the world.
What’s the DC line on state education, I wonder?
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Are you “employed” in the public sector, Steven?
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Who knows, when it no longer seems ‘cool’ & ‘hip’ to shove something up your nose… (Badger)
I’m not sure where ‘hipness’ and ‘coolness’ come into it. Cocaine is the drug of choice of busy people, that lends them the stamina to work 24/7. Native South Americans have been chewing coca leaves for precisely this purpose for thousands of years. When, if ever, you arrive in the real world, you will find that all these various drugs have differing utilities.
It surprises me some days that tea and coffee have not been made illegal drugs. They have something of a similar effect. But perhaps New Labour are working on this.
(Talking of joints, why couldn’t Cameron take a leaf out of Boris’s book? “I have but it made me sneeze”. No-one batted an eyelid). (PaulD)
Actually, someone said something like: “Well, that narrows it down a bit”. It almost certainly wasn’t a joint that made Boris sneeze.
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< ‘Are you “employed” in the public sector, Steven?’<
How did you guess?
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Idlex:
“Cocaine is the drug of choice of busy people, that lends them the stamina to work 24/7.”
Are you sure? I was given to understand amphetamine sulphate is the drug of choice for the hard working ’24/7′ Grumman A10 ‘Warthog’pilot. – And you don’t get a much tougher job than making the world safe for democracy to flourish!
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How did you guess? (StevenL)
I do recall your saying you work(ed) for a local authority.
If is really is as you say, haven’t you got a case for constructive dismissal? They can’t just lay you off indefinitely, unpaid, without good reason. Or is there more to it?
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“Cocaine is the drug of choice of busy people, that lends them the stamina to work 24/7.”
Really? The epistemiology indicates that cocaine use is significantly higher amongst the unemployed and the ill-educated as a proportion of population than amongst graduates and the employed; i.e. those with least to lose and, one would assume, the less busy.
Unless busyness includes 24-hour clubbing, but I’m not sure that can be counted as plus when arguing in Cocaines favour as compared to the the costs.
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I was given to understand amphetamine sulphate is the drug of choice for the hard working ’24/7′ Grumman A10 ‘Warthog’pilot. (Badger)
I’m not sure I’d think of A10 ‘Warthog’ pilots as being ‘hard working’. War consists, as someone remarked, of long periods of boredom interspersed with brief episodes of terror. I’m sure the pilots have to concentrate very hard when they are strafing British troops in Iraq, but other than that I believe their lives are rather comfortable. Perhaps amphetamines are suitable for that sort of life.
No, my understanding is that cocaine use was taken up in high-powered US companies during the 80s, where people were working flat out all day every day, making fortunes. It was used very liberally, from the boardrooms down. And cocaine was also suitably expensive to go with the business lifestyle.
As with everything else, it soon filtered across the Atlantic. I first encountered it in the late 80s in Britain, among similarly busy people. But not being a hyperactively busy person myself, I found – perhaps unsurprisingly – that it did nothing whatsoever for me.
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JonCummins,
I think that’s probably Idlex’ point: It’s a drug which makes mindless drudgery bearable. I wondered why they had to pay streetlamp bulb changers £80kpa, and now I know, it’s to keep them buzzin’ & motivated!
As long as he has a job which doesn’t require judgement, or the ability to operate machinery more complex than a griddle or deep fat fryer, he should be okay.
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JonCummins: I take it you’re a medic then?
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As long as he has a job which doesn’t require judgement (Badger)
I don’t think cocaine affects judgment very much, if at all. I believe that it allows people to concentrate harder and longer than they otherwise would.
I think that, used recreationally, it probably allows people to stay up dancing all night, and the like.
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< ‘If is really is as you say, haven’t you got a case for constructive dismissal?’ (PaulD)<
Don’t know, don’t care really. These superfluous health and safety procedures are there to stop them being sued. I doubt you can sue them for following their procedures. I’ve just started applying for other jobs instead. If anything else comes up before they pull their fingers out they can shove it.
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Comparing doing a line of C with munching on a Coca leaf is rather like comparing taking nicarbazin, lascalocid and dimetridazole in pure form instead of taking it in a gentler form by eating a factory turkey.
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Idlex:
“I think that, used recreationally, it probably allows people to stay up dancing all night, and the like.”
Ah, so it come to this: It’s fine for your mates to routinely engage with organised crime, and pay for the destruction of society in Columbia, because you think it helps them stay up all night, dancing 1/4 beat out of sync with the music & generally cluttering up my dancefloor with their drug fuelled lurching.
Why didn’t you say? I’m sure Luis Galan will lie easy in his grave now. You should have just said. I just got the worng end of the stick.
Seriously: these jerks are criminals & they’re paying other criminals to murder, kidnap & extort children to feed their narcissistic greed, They should be in rehab, or prison, and you’re in denial. Grow up.
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< ‘As with everything else, it soon filtered across the Atlantic.’ (idlex)<
For some reason ‘angel dust’, or PCP, hasn’t filtered over here. I’ve never heard of it being in the UK and I’ve never met anyone that has either. I’m glad it’s not here, it causes terrible problems over the pond. I wonder why the US has such a problem with PCP use, and with Methamphetamine, but we don’t.
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It’s fine for your mates to routinely engage with organised crime, and pay for the destruction of society in Columbia (Badger)
All these drugs used to be legal, and not particularly problematic. It’s now a ‘crime’ (and also a problem) because it was quite arbitrarily made illegal, circa 1920, along with a lot of other drugs. Up until then Coca Cola, for example, used to contain coca extracts.
And it’s America and its War on Drugs that is destroying Colombia. It’s also arguably destroying America, which now has a prison population of 2.5 million, many of them incarcerated for drug offences of one sort or other. Yet 40% of Americans have used drugs of one sort or other. They’re criminalising their own people.
People have always used drugs, and always will use drugs. The government’s business should be to regulate the trade, and ensure high quality products, just like they regulate the quality of milk and everything else.
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Tayles-
“Oh dear, I seem to have riled a few people again. Sorry if I don’t subscribe to some romantic idyll, where humans regard themselves as no better than animals and get all their foods from the farm shop up the road. Unfortunately the fact of the matter is that we need industrialised food production to feed the world. The idea that the future lies in going back to nature and ‘peasant’ farming techniques is nothing more than a middle class fantasy that ignores reality in favour of a snobbish disregard for ‘dehumanising’ mass produce.”
Now correct me if i m wrong – but i believe China can now, with over a billion people, for the first time without famines, more or less feed itself with what it grows itself. Thats despite the high percentage of peasants still residing on small intensive plots employing organic techniques such as recycling waste. Its exporting manufactured goods all over the world and sending thousands of students to UK Universities so it can catch up with all the “knowledge intensive” value-added stuff that we re presently specializing in selling to them. I expect animal welfare standards are pretty much non-existent there though!
I ve read that an individual can live on 1 acre and with the most modern scientific methods each of us could get by with as little as 6m squared of land on average for each person.
Agriculture cannot and should not be dealt with purely “economically” like Adam Smith’s pin factory. It’s not Agri-industry (agri-business to the US) but culture. You can t just extract, you have to put something back.
As previously, i find there’s usually an element of black and white ‘either/or’ thinking and of setting-up-a straw-man-to knock-down in your approach to argument.
Serious, thoughtful people like the Australian philosopher Peter Singer (still thought of as a fatherly guru to many of the worse “animal rights” nutters) actually give credit where its due. eg that UK animal welfare standards overall are better than for most of the world. They then suggest areas and ways of further improvement eg- buying free range and not battery farmed eggs. (According to Singer this is about the most effective thing you can do for the least financial cost to yourself.) I would not eat French foi gras because of the methods used its rearing but i think the French attitude to food (and life in general) healthier than the US/UK one.
I dont think animals have ‘rights’ but i would much rather put a healthy, happily reared, more humanely killed animal into my body, as i think it would taste better!
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Russellg-
“The continuation of current economic philosophies will drive almost all farming out of this country as we strive to be the ‘high-value economy’ so loved by the theorists. Most other industry has gone from our shores, to be replaced by business which frequently makes money by doing no work. Not only do we risk handing down an economy based on falsehood, but poor health and a cultural desert – as well as an inability to be self-sufficient. Little wonder it is those who wish to earn money who enjoy residence (often temporarily) in the UK, whilst too many indigenous British are heading for ‘real’ countries where governments place greater value on the individual and are not short-term minded. Where people still produce goods and money isn’t the main God.”
You ve made some excellent points here much better than I could, like the passage quoted above . Then you went and messed things up with the point below!
“To improve the appalling standards of those entering teacher training institutions, there must be a minimum standard for any new teacher entering the profession. If the UK cannot supply sufficient numbers, they may be brought in from other countries, to a maximum of 10% of any year’s entry to teaching. Hang the question “what about the poor countries left with fewer good teachers?” Their internal markets will provide more, with possible increases in their pay due to shortages. It is a ruthless world, and we no longer act as the Good Samaritan”
If their “internal markets” can magically provide more trained teachers by increasing pay “due to shortages” why can t the UK with its far greater resources do the same and stop poncing well trained ( but cheaper) labour off 3rd world countries then? What chance have these poorer countries of building an infrastructure if the rich world countries expect to be subsidized by poaching their trained people? And when have we ever “played the good samaritan”? Were nt any benefits gained by countries as a result of colonization by us incidental to our main purpose for being there?
Your earlier comments seem to suggest that you really dont think this is or should be a totally ruthless “beggar thy neighbour” sort of world for the sake of some mythical “economic rationality”. It looks like you may be 2 different people posting under the same name Russellg!
Don’t let Tayles rile you. He s an argumentative sort, and i ve established on another thread that he is this way because he was bullied in public school and wants to get his own back. If i had to guess i d say he was both Boris and Dave C’s “fag” at Eton!
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“Jon Cummins: I take it you’re a medic then?”
Psychologist by vocation, bum by trade.
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Idlex:
Old arguments. Basically, you’re telling me you’re breaking the law because you think the law is silly, and hence shouldn’t apply to you. I don’t know which side of the risible/contemptible border your deliberate ignorance falls.
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And I don’t care.
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We established that yesterday. Remember?
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Insomniac, yes I recognise the two different-sounding arguments. I usually see the world in many different shades of colour, and this sometimes shows itself through apparently dis-jointed thinking and conflicting-sounding ideas.
No, completely free markets are what even Tayles would shrink from and only exist in rare circumstances, perhaps in a strange form when the Jews were compounded by the Nazis. Even then humanity frequently surfaced in circumstances few people could comprehend. However, markets are a natural way of human behaviour, even if this means bartering goods instead of using money to acquire things necessary for living.
I believe that two large factors have come together to contribute to our problems sourcing quality people for professions which were once seen as noble, which counted for far more than money – and still does today, when the chips are down. Firstly, the influence a massive state monopoly has on a market, in the case for teachers, doctors and nurses in the UK. Secondly, this country’s new form of control to replace religion – money.
Too many people see it as a form of deity to make a career of the education of children (which if carried out diligently, requires enormous reserves of intelligence, compassion, reason and stamina) seem remotely attractive, and this poor ‘image’ becomes a very powerful tool even for those who do not value money above all else. Combined with children who are abusive, violent, completely lacking in discipline and have no respect for knowledge, we develop the problem there is today recruiting young people. Similar arguments apply for nursing.
This problem is so acute that to use the free market to encourage generate higher standards in education would be almost impossible in the short term. Almost every aspect of education would need to change as well as salary for recruit standards to begin to rise to a level which would impart all the tools young people are missing out on today. These things take time, which is why I see a potential way round this problem as limited recruitment of good teachers from overseas.
If carried out in a responsible manner this could have positive effects in every direction. 10% of our teaching population need only be a tiny fraction of any one country’s if the net is spread broadly enough. Of course, problems would exist regarding discipline and there would probably be difficulties holding onto gifted people if the teacher’s level of authority in our schools wasn’t improved, but that is something which will have to change anyway.
Reversing the fortunes of a sliding-standards profession is an extremely difficult project when free markets are so far removed. When a relative of mine headed a school, he was given free reign to take on whomever he wished until the Education Authority came under the control of a Metropolitan Borough, when his hands were tied and not only could he not ‘sack’ a poor teacher but could not recruit from outside his area.
The French start their newest teachers working in the most difficult schools, and over time they are given more opportunity to teach where they wish. Different countries’ approaches to education could do to be as well studied as (or better than) the Tories’ study of healthcare outside the UK.
Education has a long history of ignoring political and social barriers, and in the best businesses people spend time working on different levels to gain an fuller appreciation of their own job and relevance to the ‘end product’. I do not suggest this idea of foreign recruitment in isolation, but as part of a complete overhaul of state education. By definition it would be a temporary measure until our own standards were improved – probably five or six years.
The best possible of way of running any organisation is to allow a natural market place to exist, within obvious boundaries of common sense and decency. Too far one way or the other and standards slip. The network of private schools throughout this country exists in a strange market place, where the aspect of snobbery plays a considerable part in affecting people’s judgement, yet even so, the schools are in general of a good standard. Poorly-performing individuals and institutions are improved or weeded out by the relatively free choice of parents. What was once snobbery of social ability and standing has become more a snobbery of financial wealth, to the detriment of the nation. Once upon a time it took three generations to develop credibility in this country – today it takes just one large City bonus, which makes a teacher’s job even more difficult.
Eric Anderson writes and speakes with a lot of experience of the education system, and would do well to be heard on a wider stage.
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By and large I’m agreeing with you so far Russellg, (with reservations regarding the defacto tax cut for people who send their kids to private schools) but you’ve made a bit of a sweeping statement there:
“within obvious boundaries of common sense and decency”
which, bearing in mind the amount of human rights ‘elf ‘n safety nonsense thrashing round, are clearly neither obvious, nor sensible. Oddly, in a country run by a lawyer & a control freak, you’ll need to make some clear rules about what these boundaries are.
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Captain Badger – am with you completely and yes, trust the “lawyer & a control freak” to take a good idea, ‘elf ‘n safety’ and make it ridiculous!
Russellg – I have enjoyed reading your thoughtful comments. Do you mean this Eric Anderson? Which particular writings did you have in mind?
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insomniac”If the UK cannot supply sufficient numbers, they may be brought in from other countries, to a maximum of 10% of any year’s entry to teaching.”
As a graduate I have teaching training and experience in my self starting Vocational Training Center and worked as facilitator for NGO capacity building aimed at social actors – At Oxford I wrote many letters for taking up teaching jobs in different levels – but I never received any reply to my applications.
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Yes, Jaq – that Eric Anderson. I referred to this article a few comments above:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/01/02/do0201.xml
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Many thanks russellg
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This blog’s gone downhill.
[flaming not allowed... Ed]
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So Turkey’s good arn’t they
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Turkeezer Goode?
I hear at least Private Eye find it worth a read, as apparently ‘Green Coke’ makes an appearance in their cartoons this week. Must pick a copy up. & start copyrighting my jokes… Oh, that one was Jon Cummins. Send ‘em a bill, J.C.
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Yup, a direct lift. Who’d have thought the Boz’ old pal Ian Hislop would read his blog. Wonders never cease etc.
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Just to change the subject slightly, the Warwickshire Hunt continues to hunt foxes week in, week out, with no police interest. I’m interested to know where Boris stands on hunting and breaking the law.
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tinnie746 – there is an ‘ask Boris’ thread on the forum (see top right for link), you can post your question there.
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I had so much turkey for lunch today I am still stuffed now, and it is 20 past 7 at night.
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