Corbyn and the common good

Jason Cowley quoted the four "big questions" Michael Sandel believes "for the most part" today`s politics "fails to address" (Editor`s Note, 23 March, 2018).There is a British political leader, however, who does "attempt to address honestly" these issues, and should therefore,  according to Cowley, be on target to "win a landslide"!

    Would not huge progress towards "a just society" be made with Labour`s pledges to introduce a fairer tax system, with rich individuals and companies paying more, and a significant increase in the minimum wage? Similarly, the question about the "common good" is hardly being ignored when such topics as selling arms to dictators, increased diplomacy rather than knee-jerk reaction, gender issues and increased spending on health and education are high on the list of Corbyn`s priorities.

         It has also been made quite clear, on the subject of the "role of the markets" that more regulations are needed, as are rent controls and some nationalisation; there is clearly no room for free-market capitalism, or should that be "crony capitalism", in Corbyn`s Britain. As for the question  of being a citizen, what could be more pertinent than his determination to confront tax evasion and avoidance, to make it absolutely clear what the duty of citizenship involves.

    With such policies, Corbyn inevitably attracts unfair criticism from the right-wing media, so it is essential the New Statesman increases its support.  By all means, analyse his policies and evaluate their effects, but work with Labour to rescue this country from the disastrous effects of yet more years of callous Tory rule.

Observer ignoring key issues

Whilst it is to be expected that a centre-left newspaper will respond when the Labour party clearly has a "problem with antisemitism", having the front page headline and story, plus three pages, including a very damning editorial, devoted to the subject, smacks of anti-Corbyn bias (Only action, not words, can purge this evil from Labour, 01.04.18). "Words without deeds are meaningless" indeed, but nowhere in the paper could be found criticism of the Tory leader, despite her being the arch-exponent of spouting rhetoric, with no intention of taking action.

         In a week when the national living wage was due to rise, accompanied by more  government claims of tackling "burning injustices", an editorial on May`s broken promises would not have gone amiss, especially as the average pay of British workers is still 6% below its pre-financial crash level. Wouldn`t it have been apposite to cover the fact that the week would also see a massive £2.5bn of working-age benefit cuts taking effect? According to the Resolution Foundation, these will cut the income of the "just about managing", the group May promised particularly to help on coming to power in July 2016, by about £1000 a year!

      Labour is not the only party "harbouring antisemitic voices", but it is the only one dealing with it, and with a leader prepared to take some action to remedy the situation. Meanwhile, the government, aided by its right-wing allies in the media, escapes the criticism it deserves for its continued policies of austerity, underfunding of key services, selling arms to despotic leaders for illegal wars, and botching Brexit. Yet the Observer, even with local elections looming, chooses to join the gutter press in lambasting Corbyn for not taking enough action! It appears the only action with which the press will be satisfied is his resignation. Shame on you all!

Osborne` half-truths and university admissions` problem

Osborne`s comment that a UK chancellor would only "believe schools required more cash", when there was a "very marked and rapid deterioration in standards", needs closer analysis (School finances: read what George Osborne says and weep, 27/03 18). That he was referring only to Tory Chancellors is obvious, but what he also clearly meant was a "deterioration in standards" in Tory areas, most notably in the south. 

   Would the cuts, which he instigated, have been allowed had a Tory stronghold lost all of its A-level teaching, instead of it happening in Knowsley? If there were more than twice the national average number of Neets in, for example, Surrey rather than in Knowsley, Manchester and Middlesborough, I suspect the same "magical money-tree" which funded the Tory alliance with the DUP, would have wondrously appeared (Poverty and funding gap blight children`s futures in the north, 26/03/18).

     The austerity measures, cuts in local authority grants, and lack of investment in northern infrastructure, for which he and Cameron were responsible, all contributed to the increased deprivation, teacher shortages and the underfunding of schools. Yet it was not until 2015 when an election defeat for the Tories was predicted in the polls, that Osborne came up with his "northern powerhouse" wheeze. When state schools` A-level results begin to match those in the private sector, government looks the other way when public schools start using Pre-U examinations instead of the traditional ones. "Deterioration in standards"? Only it it affects the children of Tory voters!

The National Union of Students conference is right to debate how "postgraduate study is becoming the preserve of the well-off" (Morning Star, 28/03/18), but a similar crisis is already occurring in the field of undergraduate study.

  David Lammy, last October, revealed how both Oxford and Cambridge, recipients of over £800m of taxpayers` money each year, enrol consistently around 80% of their intake from the top two social classes, with more offers being made to pupils from Eton than to students on free school meals across the whole country. Totally unsurprisingly, the number of ethnic minority students accepted is so low, Lammy concluded there has to be "systematic bias"!

     The universities claim that the Teaching Excellence Framework, with one of its judgement criteria being drop-out rates, limits taking risks with undergraduate enrolment, but it cannot explain why students with straight As from an economically poor area in the north of England stand far less chance of being accepted by one of the Russell group universities than does someone with similar grades from a public school.

      Where is the "risk", anyway, in offering a place to a student from a school in an economically-deprived area, who achieves grade Bs and Cs in traditional A-level examinations? He or she may lack, unsurprisingly, confidence, and may not perform well in a nerve-racking interview, but research by Cardiff and Oxford Brookes universities has proved students from state schools gain better degrees than independently-educated candidates with the same A-level grades.

       Hopefully the NUS will find time to investigate Pre-U examinations, popular in most public schools, where there is the possibility that the exam papers are either set or marked by their teachers. These examinations, not inspected and regulated by the Joint Council for Qualifications like traditional A-level examinations, must give already privileged pupils an extra advantage.

A two-tiered university system needs investigation!

Externalising the problem of our history

The "British habit", as Kris Manjapra says, is indeed to "externalise the problem of slavery", but is it not traditional policy of recent governments to externalise everything of the past which does not show the country and its politicians in a favourable light (When will Britain face up to its crimes against humanity? 29/03/18)? Resisting "calls for reparations for slavery" comes naturally to an Establishment determined to mythologise its history. Does anyone believe such inhuman treatment of slaves as delivered by the British slave owner, Thomas Thistlewood, was not continued into the 20th century, with Britain maintaining control of its colonies?

      Should apologies and acknowledgement of guilt take place, the very history which British governments have been hiding from the public, either by destroying evidence through Operation Legacy, or by secreting 1.2m historical files in Hanslope Park, would be revealed. The many court cases, such as the ones in 2013 on behalf of 44,000 Kenyans claiming compensation after the brutal tactics employed by the British in crushing the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, would reveal a history very different from the traditional and heroic one the British people are taught to believe.

BBC too profligate with our money!

Like so much in this country, the state-owned BBC is in need of a complete overhaul. With revelations about its poor judgement, mismanagement and profligacy now a weekly occurrence, a clear-out both of the top management and of current policies is essential.

     The decline of its reputation is completely of its own making, and would be even more significant if there was more widespread knowledge of its misuse of public money.

     Management`s lack of nous even allowed it to make a mess of the recent publication of top pay to presenters; it had "more than a year`s notice before having to go public, and clearly, to use the words of the director of BBC News, Fran Unsworth, "should have been on to this earlier". Anyone could predict that if male presenters were being paid far more than their very intelligent and articulate female equivalents, all hell was likely to break out.

    But even that is missing the point: the public owned corporation, which many commentators still insist on describing as "decent", has over many years  indecently abused the position of trust given it by licence-payers, with its profligate pay policy.

      A 2017 report by the National Audit Office revealed that the number of BBC managers earning over £150,000 was still increasing, despite the corporation`s pledge to reduce it by 20%, and a quick visit to the BBC website reveals a list of approximately one hundred senior managers earning above that amount. Presumably it was they who gave approval both for the sexist pay awards, and for the low pay to production staff, without whom no programmes would be possible. An example is hardly set when the director general receives nearly half a million a year, and is allowed to escape immediate dismissal because of an apology to a select committee, and a feeble promise to have things sorted by 2020!

     The director general and other top managers are responsible for the debacle surrounding  presenters` pay, the gender gap, and the breaking of equal pay legislation. Does anyone really believe that the millions who watch football highlights programmes do so because of the presenter, or that the Today presenters need to be paid so highly because of the risk they might be poached away by commercial radio stations? Is an autocue-reading news presenter worth twenty classroom teachers?

  Management certainly could not cope with the stand made by Carrie Gracie, no doubt because her moral principles proved far stronger than her greed, something which the corporation certainly would find confusing.

 Most recently, it is becoming clear that the BBC is at the heart of yet another tax avoiding scandal, with HMRC investigating about 100 current and former BBC presenters and so-called "stars". The allegations focus on the employees falsely declaring themselves as self-employed, working on personal service contracts, and using limited companies to enable lower rates of tax needing to be paid. The greed of these people, including highly paid Jeremy Paxman, Christa Ackroyd and Fiona Bruce, apparently knows no bounds, but what is emerging from the current tribunals is that the BBC offered such contracts to its presenters, and Paxman even said, according to a report in the Guardian, that "the corporation required him to set one up"!

      The BBC`s excuse says a lot: apparently, according to the corporation`s spokesman, paying employees in this way was "standard industry practice"! We are meant to be appeased because ITV were doing it too! The BBC still appears unaware that this is public money, our money, they are throwing around, and have a duty to spend it wisely! It is different from ITV and all the other TV companies.

       So we have a publicly-funded organisation encouraging its overpaid employees to adopt tax avoiding schemes so that the Treasury is denied valuable sources of revenue, at a time when there is already a tax gap of around £100bn and health and education services are in financial dire straits. If that is not an institution in need of wholesale change, then, frankly, what is?

      In the real world there have been austerity cuts and public sector wage freezes, resulting in earnings averaging around £28,000. A pay cap at the BBC is essential, and all those refusing to sign new contracts need to be "named and shamed". Contracts can be re-written, and those who think they are worth far more to the country than a prime minister should be interviewed by Ms Gracie live on-air and explain themselves!

Naming and shaming doesn`t work!

"Naming and shaming" have been expected to end tax avoidance, stop bankers and many CEOs being paid obscene levels of pay, force the BBC into ending its extravagant use of public money on presenters` salaries, and prevent employees being paid below the minimum wage. Yet faith in their effect still appears, for no obvious reason, undiminished, and now we are informed that companies which "fail to report their gender pay gap" will be on "a list", which "will be made public" (Report gender pay gap or risk court, firms told, 26/03/18). Firms which have already adhered to the "reporting requirement" and revealed huge differences in the amount men and women get paid, like HSBC and L`Oreal, might make slight changes to their remuneration policies, but does anyone really expect businesses to react in a way which will end pay discrimination because of bad publicity?

        It was brave of the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission to threaten companies like this, but until there is legislation in place making significant gender pay gaps, and for that matter, huge pay ratios, illegal, her hopes for businesses to "take proper action" remain illusory. 

NS letter on university admissions

Last week`s Leader rightly stated that "we do too little to help the poorest ascend the education escalator", and criticised the government`s "dogmatic marketisation" of universities (Education and the common good, 23rd February, 2018).What it omitted to mention, however, was how social mobility is also being "harmed" by the admissions policies of the so-called "elite" universities. David Lammy, last October, revealed how both Oxford and Cambridge, recipients of over £800m of taxpayers` money each year, enrol consistently around 80% of their intake from the top two social classes, with more offers being made to pupils from Eton than to students on free school meals across the whole country. Totally unsurprisingly, the number of ethnic minority students accepted is so low, Lammy concluded there has to be "systematic bias"! The universities claim that the Teaching Excellence Framework, with one of its judgement criteria being drop-out rates, limits taking risks with undergraduate enrolment, but it cannot explain why students with straight As from an economically poor area in the north of England stand far less chance of being accepted by one of the Russell group universities than does someone with similar grades from a public school.

      Where is the "risk", anyway, in offering a place to a student from a school in an economically-deprived area, who achieves grade Bs and Cs in traditional A-level examinations? He or she may lack, unsurprisingly, confidence, and may not perform well in a nerve-racking interview, but research by Cardiff and Oxford Brookes universities has proved students from state schools gain better degrees than independently-educated candidates with the same A-level grades.

     Rather than a government review of university finance, May`s government should be investigating Pre-U examinations, popular in most public schools, where there is the possibility that the exam papers were either set or marked by their teachers. A cheating scandal was exposed involving these examinations last summer, resulting in an "investigation" by the Commons education select committee. These examinations, not inspected and regulated by the Joint Council for Qualifications like all the other examinations taken by sixth-formers, are run by Cambridge Assessment International, part of Cambridge university, and must give already privileged pupils an extra advantage.

     Reducing fees for some degrees is not going to improve social mobility, but that never has been the aim of this, or any recent, Tory government!