Author Archives: Joe Otten

The SAGE meeting on 21st September warned that covid cases may be doubling every week and that a package of interventions would be needed to bring R below 1. This didn’t happen. Cases continued to rise from 4,368 that day to 13,972 yesterday.

Yesterday the Prime Minster announced his new (urgent, delayed and briefed for a week) three tier system of local measures. This amounts to:
– a Medium tier of no change
– a High tier of no household mixing indoors – largely no change for authorities already under local measures, though a useful simplification, and adding Nottingham, Glossop and South Yorkshire (though they forgot to mention South Yorkshire)
– A Very High tier where non-food pubs are closed in Liverpool City Region.

On day zero we heard of some horrendous downgrades. Perhaps that was just anecdote. No longer. Clearly now we are in the realm of overwhelming evidence that the awarded grades are not a fair indication. Every single FE college responding to a survey covering half of all colleges report lower grades than in previous years. Large numbers of independent schools are bragging about record high grades. The stolen A*s have been awarded to others and the top university places have therefore largely been taken.

In principle, an algorithm could be fair from one school to the next, giving effectively each school its prior attainment. Clearly the algorithm hasn’t done this and therefore clearly it contains errors.

Even without these errors, the concept that if your centre expects a U to be awarded, then somebody has to be given a U, however well they are actually performing, is grotesque. But this is the concept, and it applies to all the grades below the level you are performing at, not just the Us.

It bothers me greatly that for months now, Boris Johnson has been attacking Parliament – in terms that question its legitimacy as the sovereign democratic institution of our constitution – for the crime of having a different opinion on something to himself. Normally, in a Parliamentary democracy, if the Prime Minister has a different opinion to the Commons, it is he, not they who is, constitutionally, in the wrong.

Now of course, Johnson is entitle to his view and to express it, as is every other MP, and perhaps the problem is that the “other side” does not seem to have a voice. And the reason for this is that it isn’t clear who the other side is. The official opposition has largely taken a ‘wait and see’ approach to the whole business. There are a number of groups within Parliament, some seeking harder or softer Brexits, or a referendum, or to remain, or to keep quiet while your opponent makes a mistake.

Yesterday’s phoney war over the leadership of the Conservative Party has got me thinking. The hardline Brexiters (confusing referred to in the media as just ‘Brexiteers’) sought to remove Theresa May over the desirability of the Brexit deal she has achieved with the European Union. This is not their Brexit; they are betrayed; they must show how angry they are.

But I still wonder if there was any more substance than that. Could a hardline PM have got a better deal? They claim they could, but how? The EU has made little if any concession to the UK, and their position today is much as it was before the vote. The Leavers promised us the EU would fold quickly and they were wrong, and that is their fault, not the EU’s.

Part of the process by which the party’s Federal Policy Committee seeks approval for its General Election manifestos includes a series of papers to the Federal Conference which show the thinking in progress. This conference the paper is titled “Demand Better…” (available here), and I must say I demand a lot better than this.

As is the way, a motion to conference (F35) summarises the paper. It starts innocuously enough with some challenges the country faces:

Yesterday the Parliamentary Labour Party voted to adopt the IHRA definiton of anti-semitism, in defiance of Labour’s NEC, which recently produced its own definition:

LBC exclusive: Labour’s new guidelines on anti-Semitism.

Key paragraphs:

7). Contentious views will not be treated as Antisemitism unless…. evidence of anti-Semitic intent.

9). Labour adopts just seven of the 11 IHRA examples of anti-Semitism. pic.twitter.com/DKv5lP4LCP

— Theo Usherwood (@theousherwood) July 5, 2018

While Labour’s internal machinations are in a sense none of our business, I do think there are lessons to learn for all of us here. Anti-semitism is by no means confined to the Labour Party, and where we wish to criticise Israel, let us not undermine the moral force of our arguments by carelessly straying into anti-semitic territory.

Not every nuanced political point is a dog whistle for it’s crude cousin, and case in point is Nick Clegg’s recent column in the FT, arguing that the EU needs to consider wider caveats to the principle of freedom of movement that already exist, for its own sake and not just to improve the prospects of rapprochement with the UK.

The belief that freedom of movement is an untouchable principle cannot remain unchallenged. EU leaders increasingly recognise this, and an overture to the U.K. on both external and internal immigration could be a crucial move. My new @FT column https://t.co/GMdukgPSDg

— Nick Clegg (@nick_clegg) June 17, 2018

So I learned a new word yesterday, which may or may not be a racial slur against angry white men of a certain age who voted for Brexit.

Being a white man myself, approaching a certain age, occasionally angry about bad grammar, Brexit, Trump, Corbyn, Putin, the senseless loss of life in the middle east… – I felt I ought to know whether it is a racial slur or not. It doesn’t matter if I’m angry about different things – I needed to know whether to be offended. So I asked the source of my discovery: Twitter.

It is extraordinary to see a leader of a political party suffer a demonstration that includes many of his own MPs.

This follows a letter (here, with Corbyn’s reply) from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which says

There is literally not a single day in which Labour Party spaces, either online or in meetings, do not repeat the same fundamental anti-Semitic slanders against Jews. We are told that our concerns are faked, and done at the command of Israel and/or Zionism (whatever that means); that anti-Semitism is merely “criticism of Israel”; that we call any and all criticism of Israel “anti-Semitic”; that the Rothschilds run the world; that Isis terrorism is a fake front for Israel; that Zionists are the new Nazis; and that Zionists collaborate with Nazis.

Rightly or wrongly, Jeremy Corbyn is now the figurehead for an anti-Semitic political culture, based on obsessive hatred of Israel, conspiracy theories and fake news that is doing dreadful harm to British Jews and to the British Labour Party.

A nerve agent – like Polonium in the Litvinenko case – is the sort of murder weapon used to send a signal. It is the sort of murder you want people to know you are guilty of because it burnishes your “strongman” image. And there are elections due. They will be rigged of course, not because they have to be for Putin to win, but because neglecting to rig the elections would show weakness.

So the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday struck the right tone.

This attempted murder using a weapons-grade nerve agent in a British town was not just a crime against the Skripals, but an indiscriminate and reckless act against the United Kingdom, putting the lives of innocent civilians at risk. We will not tolerate such a brazen attempt to murder innocent civilians on our soil.

It takes some resolve to keep track of the Brexit debate these days. Both government and Labour policies hinge on such nuance that creative ambiguity remains perhaps a better term than policy.

As a party, we have been clear that Labour’s recent movement on the/a customs union has been slight

Corbyn started his speech claiming that Labour’s position on Brexit has been consistent, by which he must mean consistently vague. And today was no different. https://t.co/dpApYCSkGt

— Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) February 26, 2018

and a customs union only gets you some of the way to the open border that the UK is committed to in the Good Friday Agreement

I was woken this morning to the somewhat odd news that the Foreign Secretary was going to press for more cash for the NHS at Cabinet. It was not known whether the health secretary was on board with this. Perhaps Jeremy Hunt wants to give priority to the hiring of more diplomats and trade negotiators. After all, war is bad for your health, and the NHS relies on a strong economy.

Laura Kuenssberg offers an explanation for this, fine as far as it goes, along the lines of Brexiteers wanting to be seen to deliver on their promise on …

It is difficult to understand how somebody who expresses such hatred and contempt for his fellow human beings as we have seen from Jared O’Mara, could wish to undertake or be a suitable choice for the noble calling of public service in politics.

I do accept that is possible for an angry young man to reform over the years and become an upstanding public figure. The problem is that there is no sign that this has happened.

O’Mara first sought election – to the city council – in 2004, the same year he was writing the hate speech against women, fat people …