Something happened: A Hillsborough story

On 15 April 1989, I went to a football match with my dad. We’d been to dozens of games together. This, however, was an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield, a match between the two best teams in the country, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. It was a bright, crisp morning as we drove around Manchester and across the Pennines. We made good progress. I recall as we drove into the city lots of signs for parking, all ‘10 minutes from the ground’. We stopped at one of these. We hadn’t been to Sheffield before. It turned out to be a good half an hour walk to the stadium, perhaps a bit more, but we didn’t mind. We had time. It was a beautiful day. There were few supporters on the street at first but the further we walked the greater the throng of people became. It started to feel like a cup semi-final. We were early and stopped for some snacks. We always took a Mars bar and a pack of extra-strong mints each into the ground with us. We were in the Leppings Lane end, seated in the stand, towards the back, high above the terracing. It was still more than an hour until kick-off, but we decided to go in anyway. We passed through the perimeter gates, the narrow entrance through which every Liverpool supporter at that end of the ground had to pass, and then, after being patted down by a steward, through the turnstiles for the West Stand. We were ordinary supporters. We had come to watch a football match.

On seeing the pitch, I felt the usual wave of anticipation, a knot of nerves in my stomach. The greenest green. The ground was less than half full, I would guess. Over the next hour or so it slowly filled up. The team news was announced. I looked at my dad. Alan Hansen, the club captain, who had been out injured for much of the season, was playing. This was going to be our day. The players warmed up. Liverpool were in red, the same vibrant red shirt with the word ‘Candy’ splashed across the front that I was wearing under my stone-washed denim jacket, the only official kit I ever owned (I still have it). Forest were in their change kit of all white. The contrast was beautiful.

Of course, we didn’t know that outside the ground a bottleneck had begun to form at the entrance gate through which we had passed half an hour before and around the turnstiles. People were arriving faster than they could pass through them. There were just seven turnstiles leading to the terracing. Nor could we see, as BBC commentator John Motson did, the relative emptiness of the pens either side of the almost-full central ones. Fences prevented fans moving into the more sparsely populated sections. But, as the minutes to kick-off slowly passed, we knew something was up. Five minutes before kick-off there was a sudden influx of supporters, some of whom found a seat on the steps beside us. Outside, the police had opened the main exit gate to relieve the crush. Two thousand Liverpool fans streamed into the ground in the space of a few minutes, most of them heading towards the already crowded central pens straight in front of them. Police inside the ground were not told that the exit gate would be opened and so did not close the gates to the central pens, as they usually did when they were full. A police constable’s request to delay the game by 20 minutes had been declined by novice match commander David Duckenfield who, it later turned out, was not aware that police were responsible for controlling the number of people who entered each pen or of the tactic of closing the gates when they were full.

The game kicked off, as scheduled, at 3pm. I knew something unusual was happening, but I didn’t know what. It didn’t feel right. I tried to watch the game but everything around us felt weirdly chaotic. I recall a Peter Beardsley volley striking the bar in front of the Nottingham Forest supporters at the other end of the ground. We were on our feet. Shortly after this it became obvious there was something terribly wrong. Supporters were on the pitch. I could see people at the front of the terrace trying to climb out of it. A man walked a few steps onto the pitch and fell over. Some fans were shouting at the Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobbelaar. He was waving his arms. Fans were also waving and pointing back towards the pens. At 3.06 pm the game was stopped. Police initially pushed back against the fans who had climbed out and onto the pitch. I saw a police officer force someone back into the pen through a gate in the fence. People were lying on the pitch by this time, not moving. Supporters were on their knees giving CPR. Fans tore off advertising boards to carry the injured to the far end of the pitch, close to where the ambulances were queued. It wasn’t until 3.16pm that an ambulance finally made it onto the pitch. It was obvious by that time that many of the people lying on the pitch were already dead. Police meanwhile were ordered to form a line, arms linked, across the middle of the pitch, presumably to stop Liverpool fans from reaching the Forest fans at the other end, though no one else in the ground saw any hint of violence or thought, for more than a second, that this was a pitch invasion. False police reports of hooliganism prevented more ambulances arriving on the pitch. It was the beginning of the operation conducted by South Yorkshire Police over many years to blame the victims for the disaster, a campaign cynically perpetuated by the British establishment, and, I regret to say, many others besides, in the months, years and decades to follow.

Much of what followed is a blur for me. Snapshots. I recall the two managers – Brian Clough and Kenny Dalglish – making statements to the crowd over the public address system. The match would not continue, that was obvious. Yet we stayed, stood in front of our seats, not moving, I am not sure for how long. I can’t recall anything we said to each other, not much though, I imagine. Eventually, we left, walking down the same steps we had ascended a few hours before. I don’t know what time it was. Outside, I saw grown men sobbing. I had never seen men cry before. Two men were holding one another, one crying hard into the other’s shoulder while he tried to comfort him. People sat on the kerb, their heads in their hands. It was like the aftermath of a bombing. People queued in the gardens of terraced houses waiting to use the phones of people who had kindly opened their doors to them. We wanted to phone my mum and let her know we were safe. We decided to get to the car and phone from a service station. I remember us both running, it seemed for a long time, away from Hillsborough, past shop fronts and rows of houses, towards the car. Running and running. In the car we turned on the radio. We heard the BBC’s Peter Jones’s measured tones, describing with calm incredulity how the gymnasium at the ground had been turned into a mortuary and how the stewards were charged with picking up the left-behind belongings of the dead and injured. Seventy-four people, he said. Lying dead in that gymnasium.

We stopped at the first service station. The queues for pay phones were enormous. It was a long wait. My mum sobbed with relief down the phone. Like thousands of others, she had been waiting, not knowing if we would come home. My friend Mike had been calling. By now it was night. The rest of the journey was in the dark. I don’t think we spoke. All I remember about getting home was going straight to my room. I was numb. I didn’t feel anything, or rather I was not aware of feeling anything. It was only when my mum came up to see if I was alright that I started to cry, I think as I have never cried before or since, because it felt like it would not stop. I couldn’t remember the last time I had cried. I stayed in my room after that. I must have slept.

We were lucky. I was lucky. I know people who were in the central pens, friends and family. They saw and experienced terrible things. For all that, I could think of nothing else. Hillsborough was on my mind all the time, and for months. I know with other people it was the same. One night, years later, I realised with a shock (and a shudder of guilt) that I had not thought about it that day. I didn’t talk about it, even with my friends, even with my dad. I didn’t want it to be a story or to remember only the story and not what really happened that day. I put my match ticket inside a bunch of flowers and left it on the Kop at Anfield. I carried on.

It was a strange time. Football stadia were in disrepair, the game in decline, wholly ungentrified. Fans were vilified in the press. We had no idea that the stand we sat in at Hillsborough did not have a valid safety certificate or that previous semi-finals at the ground had been the scene of a number of near disasters. No one cared. The fans were despised by the football authorities who wanted them in cages and treated like cattle by police not afraid to use the violent tactics honed by South Yorkshire Police at Orgreave. Instead of preparing to protect the supporters for whose safety he was responsible, Duckenfield’s focus was exclusively on combatting hooliganism. Policing was generally combative and intentionally intimidating. I remember the sneer on the face of a policeman I encountered outside Old Trafford, when the semi-final was eventually replayed. It was full of hate, directed, senselessly, at me. That was how things were back then. The government believed football supporters to be a sort of seditious fifth column and the police acted as their trusted enforcers, enabled to act with complete impunity. Hillsborough was just one example.

By this time, the government-backed campaign of disinformation was in full swing. Lies cooked up over a few beers at the South Yorkshire Police social club found their way onto the front page of the Sun and other newspapers (as they did after Orgreave). The British public, by and large, proved highly receptive to it, believing Liverpool supporters to be guilty of crimes by which all but a few depraved individuals would be naturally appalled. They were almost gleeful about it, recognising an opportunity to do down a city which had always stood somewhat apart, politically and culturally. Many people, perhaps ashamed by their own credulity or aware of their complicity, still purport to believe these things, notwithstanding the mountain of evidence to the contrary (they were effectively debunked as early as 1989 in Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry report). Survivors and families hear them from the rival supporters at almost every Liverpool game.

I don’t want to rehash these lies or the subsequent cover-up, the coerced statements and falsified notebooks or the missing CCTV tapes. There is plenty of evidence out there. People will believe what they want. But I do want to say how much damage these lies do still, today. For survivors and for the families of the dead, they are like a portal taking them back to the moment of their greatest loss. I remember reading Primo Levi’s account of how the guards at Auschwitz would taunt the prisoners by telling them that even if they were to survive and told their story no one would believe them. This thought was a great torment to them, outlasting the horrors of the camps. All survivors want and need to be believed. For survivors of Hillsborough, to have their own first-hand accounts disbelieved has been an ensuring source of pain. It drags them back into the abject misery and utter, unspeakable torment of those distant but still-present moments of personal agony. It brings to the fore all the anguished feelings of guilt people carry with them, however irrationally. We have to keep telling our story if only to remind the perpetuators of these lies that there are real people behind the numbers, real lives and losses.

When I heard Margeret Aspinall, justice campaigner and mother of James, who died aged 18 at Hillsborough, tell crowds gathered in St Geroge’s Hall, Liverpool, in the wake of the 2012 Hillsborough Independent Panel (HIP) report, that they should ‘forgive themselves’, it stuck a profound chord with me, and I am sure many others. I felt guilt, I suppose because I survived and others didn’t, but also because sometimes weeks went by and I did not think about them, or because I didn’t use the time I had well or made more of myself, or because I didn’t do enough to tell my own story or to challenge those who told lies about what happened. When I interviewed Margaret a little time after, she told me that she had felt she was giving a gift to the survivors, and she was. It was like a weight being lifted, for a while at least. Now, in the light of subsequent hearings, the HIP report reminds us how little has been done to bring those responsible for the disaster and the subsequent cover-up to justice.

Ten or 12 years ago, working as a freelance journalist, I did a naïve and, I now realise, stupid thing. I applied to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (now the Independent Office for Police Conduct) to be a reporter on an ‘independent’ inquiry into police misconduct at Hillsborough. I thought my experience could help bring light to the inquiry and, of course, I wanted to help get to the truth and to do my bit to right the wrongs of the past (and I suppose to address my own feelings of having done too little). I travelled to the headquarters at Warrington for an interview. I had to wait, they told me. The team was in a meeting. I sat outside the office. Suddenly the doors swung open, and the officers came briskly out, talking loudly among themselves. I recall one snatch of conversation. One officer spoke with open contempt, spitting out his words, about the ‘fucking Hickses’. For readers who do not know, Jenni and Trevor Hicks are the parents of two teenage daughters, Sarah and Victoria, who died at Hillsborough. So much for stakeholder engagement and inclusivity. I knew then I had made a terrible mistake. I was on the wrong side. Needless to say, I did not get the job. I would have been seriously under-employed in any case as, more than a decade later, the inquiry is still to report. Kicked into the longest of long grass. There are even suggestions that the lease on the Warrington base will have to be extended beyond its 2026 termination date.

I’ve never thought of myself as a ‘survivor’. I have never dared call myself that. I know what others have gone through. But I know too that I have had to carry something, as have thousands of others. There are plenty of people who are still living that day in their heads, every day. It can come to you at any time. Hillsborough never leaves you. For a long time, I was reluctant to talk about it, as were many supporters who struggled to call themselves ‘survivors’. I know many Forest fans felt the same (there is a very brilliant BBC radio series on this). It happened to someone else. It was someone else’s loss, someone else’s tragedy. For a long time, I didn’t think I deserved to be considered. People had lost their children, after all. I couldn’t speak about it in part because I never thought I had permission, and, in a sense, I felt that Margaret had given that. I can’t say how much that meant, that gift.

From Hillsborough to Grenfell to the Post Office scandal the British establishment is supremely adept when it comes to evading responsibility. British life, with all its poverty, shitty, poorly paid work and broken public services, is a perfect reflection of this abdication of responsibility. But that’s just one side of the coin. We need to do better at holding these people to account. We need to ask more of ourselves in these moments. We should do more. We should demand more. Families shouldn’t have to give up the best part of their lives trying to get the authorities to tell the truth about the role they played in the deaths of their children, parents or siblings. How different might things had been if people had not been prepared to lazily believe the unbelievable worst of people? What if football supporters, instead of mocking the victims and engaging in ‘tragedy chanting’ (an utterly grim conjunction of words), came together in a spirit of mutual support and understanding? For survivors, knowing that your story is understood, and your experience recognised and acknowledged can be transformative and affirming. Being alone, trapped in your own head, and hearing only the lies and their echoes, reading the awful vicious stuff circulated continuously on social media, is isolating and sometimes overwhelming. Every story has its own power, and they are all worth telling, particularly those that are told the least. We need to talk.

Today is the 35^th anniversary of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster. In all that time, my dad and I have never discussed what happened that day. I’m more than 10 years older now than he was when we went to the game. I have two children of my own. I don’t want to tell the story of Hillsborough or try to convince people of what happened or argue for its significance in British cultural and political life – there are many more expert than me who can do that. I just want my kids to know that, once, their dad and grandad went to a football match and that something happened there, to others and to us, and that it still matters, and that, yes, if they want to, we can talk about it.

Surviving school: Some (personal) thoughts on teachers and teaching

The funny thing about writing about the English education system is that it never really changes. Most of the things I wrote 10 or 20 years ago are still as relevant as they were back then. It is also the most depressing thing about it. I’m pretty sure, after more than two decades writing about English education, that most of the things that are wrong with it are things we believe we cannot change, even though we can. We don’t even like to talk about these things – I mean, what’s the point, right, that’s just how things are – but unless we do, nothing will ever get better. It’s true of a lot of things in British life, which is why tinkering at the margins and modest ambition just won’t do, even if it is the only thing that will get you elected. If we want a better life for all, we need to put in a few windows, slaughter a few sacred cows, lance a few boils. We should demand the Earth because our kids deserve it. What’s the point of pruning a branch here or there when the roots are rotten?

There is an unhealthy obsession in English state education with discipline and control. Unlike in most comparable countries in Western Europe – and most places in the world unstained by British colonialism – almost all state school pupils in England must wear uniforms (schools can, in principle, choose not to, but few do). They are often prohibitively expensive but there are no exemptions. If you cannot afford to buy a new one for your child, maybe you can get one second hand, or if there is an older sibling, they can wear their hand-me-downs. Failing that, some local authorities offer grants to poorer families so they can kit their kids out in the regulation 1950s-style shirt and blazer set (you know, like all their parents wear to work). School uniforms are justified as a sort of social leveller. But, of course, they are nothing of the sort. They are an indicator of class and social status through which people in positions of authority routinely adjust their demands and expectations (the difference between a benevolent slap on the wrist and being put on the DNA database).

Schools can also set rules about pupils’ appearance, and these are often pretty draconian. There are rules about hair style (length, fringe, colour, use of gel, clips and extensions, and much else), length of skirt, height of sock, opacity of tights, colour and style of shoe, and so on. Trainers are, by and large, forbidden. And, for the most part, uniforms are gendered, skirts and tights for girls, trousers for boys, reinforcing harmful and restrictive stereotypes and the idea that girls – whose appearance is subject to often quite extraordinary scrutiny – are objects. Children who fail to meet these standards, or who turn up without the proper equipment (pens, paper, proper PE kit and other things some parents struggle to provide) are frequently sent home or given detention. Pupils can face expulsion if they repeat-offend or are (God forbid) ‘defiant’. School websites abound with evidence-free gibberish about how neatness instils pride and uniforms foster togetherness and prevent bullying. But the really important message of uniform and appearance policies is one of control and knowing your place: you may not understand why these rules are in place or what they are for, but you are going to do it anyway, whatever you think of it. You’d better get used to it.

School uniform policy is not the only or even the most important thing wrong about English education, but it is indicative of much else that is and that is why it is worth talking about. While uniforms appeal to some, for others they are a constant, discomforting burden. Many students, those dubbed difficult or challenging, struggle with this focus on discipline and conformity, which penalises the kids who most need support and are often the ones with the most to give. For these students, the outcome of this high-control, highly punitive environment is not a feeling of togetherness or wellbeing, it is the opposite: alienation, stress, fear of the consequences of transgression and, for those who cannot afford the right kit, social stigma. Such feelings are not limited to the pupils; teachers often feel them too, and not just in schools. Micromanagement and overbearing accountability regimes have created a culture across education in which teachers are constantly looking over their shoulder, afraid of the next performance review or inspection. Much of this anxiety is passed on by leaders and managers who often adopt commend-and-control strategies to cope with the demands of targets and accountability and create high-control regimes in their schools, colleges or universities. The pressures they encounter are enormous. Staff feel them too, as do parents who have to support their child in navigating this high-stakes, no-second-chances environment. Anxiety to a quite large extent drives a system the main outputs of which are failure and disaffection.

Is this oppressive culture really conducive to a good learning or teaching environment or to the creation of happy, confident and inquisitive kids? It seems pretty unlikely. Good teaching is about listening and understanding, about igniting a spark the student can follow in whatever direction they like, not taking that spark and forcing it one direction or other. The most important thing a teacher can share is a piece of themselves, a passion or interest that sets the student on their own journey, that makes them curious and engaged. This is particularly true of children who appear distracted or uninterested, who are seen as difficult or defiant. Kids who don’t quite fit often feel ignored in a system so set on fostering conformity and obedience. For these students there is huge power in the moment in which they feel seen for the first time.

For me, this moment came late. My school experience was a dismal and alienating one, also a frequently violent one. I’ve written about it before. I didn’t manage to connect with any subject, even English, or with any teacher. I have no fond memories of it. I was bullied to the point that I simply stopped attending. I didn’t attend any of my final exams. I left without qualifications. It was only in further education that I finally encountered teachers who genuinely cared about their students. My English teacher shared her interests and drew out the interests of her students. She saw them. She listened to them. She thought they could be something more. For me, and I am sure for others, this was transformational. There was something magical about this grown up talking to me about the stuff she was interested in and trying to find out what I liked.

I got the qualifications I needed to study journalism at polytechnic (what was called a ‘pre-entry’ course) but not to get to university. When, after a few years of work, I started to think this might be an option. I applied to a few institutions hoping my work experience and interests would count but only one university, Cardiff, gave me an interview. I remember meeting the course leader, Barry Wilkins, in an office teeming with books and papers. He wasn’t interested in what qualifications I had but in what I was like and what I liked to read. I managed to speak haltingly about Bruno Bettelheim and his book Freud and Man’s Soul, which I had just read, and to convey my enthusiasm for the novels of Milan Kundera. I knew very little about the subject I wanted to study, philosophy. But it didn’t matter. He wanted to know if I was interested and serious and that I wanted to study. Barry became my personal tutor. His interest in his students was inexhaustible (I know I am not alone in feeling this – he is very warmly remembered by his students). What was great about him was that he made you feel like you really mattered to him, that you had value. He didn’t care about your accent or background or who your parents were. He was simply a brilliant guy.

Neither of these two teachers were memorable for their ability to convey a curriculum. What they gave me was a sense of freedom and a feeling that my interests and likes had value. I wouldn’t say they lit a path exactly, but they gave you a compass and showed you how to use it. They knew the job of teaching was not to show you through the right door but to keep as many doors open for as long as possible while they found the things they really cared about. But education, as most working-class people experience it, is about doors closing, disorientingly fast, until almost all options are gone. There were brilliant kids at my school, artists, poets, storytellers, wits, critics and dandies. Often, they were the difficult and challenging kids, the ones the teachers couldn’t stand. They didn’t fit. They were often called stupid or lazy. They were defiant. They were punished. They were bullied, coerced into lives they didn’t want, until there was little left of the person they could have been. At least then there were second chances. These are few and far between today.

When I got to university, all those years ago, I loved to spend time in the library. It was my favourite thing just to wander the shelves. It was amazing to me to suddenly have access to all these books. I would sometimes pick a novel off the shelf and spend the rest of the day reading it. I never doubted that this was what education should be like. I was taking a line for a walk, as Paul Klee put it. I was finding stuff out. I was learning how to understand, learning what it was I was into. I was opening all the doors. That is what education should be about. All learning involves learning about yourself, just as all teaching does. It should be a launchpad for ongoing, lifelong exploration.

I worry though that education is going in the wrong direction, and we are letting down vast numbers of young people and the adults they become. The obsession with control is not just about students’ appearance and behaviour. It is about what they learn and how they learn. There is little freedom because there is little trust and trust is absolutely essential in education and in fostering good learning environments and good student-teacher relationships. The thing we forget about kids is they are smart, and they can spot inauthenticity a mile off. They know when a teacher doesn’t believe in what they are teaching, they know when they aren’t sincere and when they don’t care about them or their learning.

The smartest kids are usually the ones who buck against this, the ones perceived as troublemakers and problem kids, the smartarses and awkward customers. They might show their resistance to mindless rote learning and indifferent teaching through their behaviour or their interpretation of uniform rules. These same kids – the crazy, sensitive, chaotic, inattentive, non-compliant, offbeat ones – will also be the first to notice when a teacher sees them and is prepared to share something of themselves with them. Somehow, we seem to have forgotten this in our climate of high control and accountability and anxiety-amplifying high-stakes testing. Finding these kids and helping them become their best selves is what education and teaching should be about. But, too often, they are collateral damage in the rush to produce docile workers and obedient citizens. Bright lights go out every day. And no one, for the most part, even notices.

Yet another Great British injustice

The Great British Post Office scandal is a story about corruption, cronyism and corporate and political negligence, but, more than anything, it is a story about class and power and how it works in Britain.

Of course, the faulty computer software that made it look as though money was missing from the branches of more than 900 wrongly convicted Post Office managers (or sub-postmasters) did not target these individuals. It could have happened to anyone, given those circumstances. However, what happened next could not have happened to anyone – would not have happened to anyone – and can only be understood through the lens of class and power. It is not new or surprising. It is not accidental or unintentional. It is deliberate. It is calculated. It is what happens in Britain when powerless people threaten the interests of the powerful.

What is now considered a ‘scandal’ was overlooked by most of the mainstream media in the UK for a little over two decades until a television dramatization, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, forced the Post Office, the government and the technology company to admit publicly what they had long understood: that hundreds of people were wrongly convicted – and thousands more falsely accused – of theft and fraud because of ‘bugs and errors’ in an IT system that incorrectly indicated cash shortfalls.

The bugs were known about in 1999, when the faulty system was introduced, and were, according to Paul Patterson of technology company Fujitsu, recognized ‘by all parties’ for ‘many, many years’. In fact, glitches had been reported during trials of the software – and at least two sub-postmasters were accused of fraud – but national roll-out continued, nonetheless. In the meantime, the victims of these ‘errors’ faced financial and other sorts of ruin. Some lost their jobs, others their businesses and homes. Reputations were ruined. Some went to prison for false accounting, theft and fraud. Marriages broke down. Families were destroyed. Some victims killed themselves.

Most British readers are now familiar with the story, but campaigners had to battle for decades just to have their plight acknowledged.

Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office used its powers to prosecute 700 sub-postmasters based on falsely recorded information from a computer accounting system called Horizon. Another 283 cases were brought by other bodies, including the Crown Prosecution Service. Some 3,500 others were falsely accused.

The Horizon IT system was developed by Fujitsu and introduced by the Post Office in 1999. Within weeks, sub-postmasters had reported bugs in the system after it began falsely reporting shortfalls – often amounting to many thousands of pounds. Some even attempted to plug the gap with their own money, as their contracts with the Post Office stated that they were responsible for any shortfalls.

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the Post Office insisted that the system was robust, even unimpeachable, and, instead of investigating for possible errors in the software, prosecuted the sub-postmasters or forced them to make good the amounts, threatening them with prison and forcing many into debt and bankruptcy. Some sold their homes to repay the money they were falsely accused of stealing. Some 230 innocent people were jailed. When the sub-postmasters asked the Post Office investigators if others had reported shortfalls they were told ‘No’. It was only them. But, of course, the Post Office knew otherwise and had from the start.

It was not until May 2009 that Computer Weekly had assembled sufficient evidence to break the story (it had been investigating since 2004). In September of that year, sub-postmaster Alan Bates set up a campaigning group, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. In 2012, the Post Office, finding itself under growing pressure to take the protests of the victims seriously, appointed a firm of forensic accountants, Second Sight, to conduct an investigation into Horizon. Although the accountants, in their interim report, found that Horizon contained faults that could result in accounting discrepancies, the Post Office continued to insist that there were no systemic problems with the software and to lay the blame squarely on the sub-postmasters.

In 2017, Mr Bates led a group of 555 sub-postmasters in a group action in the High Court against the Post Office. In 2019, the High Court ruled that Horizon contained bugs, errors and defects that were responsible for the shortfalls and that sub-postmasters’ contracts with the Post Office were unfair. The government ordered an inquiry into the affair in 2020 and courts began to quash convictions. In 2021, the UK Court of Appeal overturned 39 convictions in a single ruling. However, as of January 2024, only 93 people have had their convictions quashed, while the Post Office has continued to frustrate claims for compensation. It was only in the wake of the television dramatization that the Metropolitan Police saw fit to open an investigation of the Post Office and Fujitsu. The public inquiry is ongoing.

Private Eye, a satirical magazine that was one of the few British media outlets interested in investigating the scandal, has shown how the Post Office and the British establishment more generally sought to block the sub-postmasters’ pursuit of justice. From the start, the Post Office deliberately isolated victims, telling them they were the only case, while bullying them into paying huge sums to make good non-existent losses. When the Eye first covered the story in 2011 – a point at which the Post Office knew about the bugs in the system – the Post Office’s chief operating officer, Mike Young, replied: ‘The Post Office takes meticulous care to ensure the Horizon computer system in branches nationwide is fully accurate at all times’, adding, with respect to the conviction for false accounting and theft, that ‘In some cases, the sub-postmaster pleaded guilty; in others, the Post Office had to provide robust evidence otherwise the cases would have failed’ (Private Eye, No. 1615, 19 January – 1 Feb 2024).

In fact, as the Eye goes on to note, the guilty pleas were ‘effectively blackmailed out of sub-postmasters … in order to avoid jail’, while the ‘robust evidence’ on the basis of which people were sent to jail amounted to nothing more than the lie that the Horizon system was ‘robust’ and reliable. No direct evidence that the sub-postmasters in question had taken or spent large sums of money was sought or required for conviction (ibid.).

Young’s successor as chief executive, Paula Vennells, proved just as obstructive to the sub-postmasters’ campaign for justice. Even after the accounting team identified defects in Horizon, she continued to insist the system was ‘robust’. Second Sight’s second report uncovered yet more evidence that the Horizon system was ‘not fit for purpose’. However, a day before the report was due to be published, as reported by Private Eye in March 2015, the Post Office, under Vennells’ leadership, ordered Second Sight to end its investigation and to destroy all the paperwork that it had not handed over. Vennells resigned in April 2019, a year in which she was paid a reported £717,500 in pay, including £388,000 in performance bonuses (the Eye reports that £36,000 was deducted from a ‘short term’ bonus because of the ‘ongoing postmaster group litigation and its impact on the business’) and received a CBE for ‘services to the Post Office and charity’. Like Young, she went on to hold numerous other prestigious and lucrative leadership roles.

Vennells and Young are not alone in this. Numerous people in positions of authority, from Post Office directors and Fujitsu executives to politicians and civil servants (particularly those with oversight of the Post Office), prosecutors and journalists, and the police, failed to ask the right questions or to think particularly hard about the causes and consequences of the scandal or, for that matter, the culture of reckless profiteering and privatisation that characterises the Post Office and other organisations on the fringes of the British public sector (including industries formerly in the public sector such as water and public transport which investors regard as quick and easy ways to boost their fortunes at the British taxpayers’ expense).

The ITV television drama brilliantly highlighted the human consequences of the Post Office’s actions and prompted the Prime Minster to pledge to overturn the convictions of all the accused sub-postmasters and offer them compensation and the Metropolitan Police belatedly to open a criminal investigation of possible fraud offences within the Post Office (it remains to be seen who will investigate the police for their negligence and selective application of the law). Vennells said she would return her CBE.

Of course, for many of the victims this comes much, much too late. But why now? Why have people in power started to listen and why did they not listen before?

The obvious answer is the public outrage elicited by Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The facts were known to all relevant parties for years. The dramatization did not disclose new information. Vennells, who perhaps did most to keep a lid on the scandal, was honoured for her efforts only four years ago, when ministers knew everything. The whole system would have carried on regardless had the story not been set out in a compelling, dramatic way that did not require people to look too far behind the headlines.

But that alone would not have been enough to provoke so uniform a reaction, or to produce urgent, immediate action from the government (the same government, we should remember, that just a few weeks ago declined an opportunity to pass a ‘Hillsborough Law’ placing on police and public officials a legal duty of candour in testifying to major inquiries). It helps that this is a story about faulty software and that the government and the police were only indirectly implicated. Blame in the main attached to people who could be challenged, removed from post or even prosecuted without calling into question the way the whole system works. Acting now probably represents the government’s best way of making the scandal go away and keeping casualties among the great and the good to a minimum. Convincing Alan Bates to accept an honour would draw a line under things nicely (though it would damage him immensely as a campaigner for justice).

The real test, of course, is whether anyone is actually held to account in any meaningful way. The British governing class is exceptionally good as brushing these things under the carpet and protecting their own.

There is a direct comparison, of course, with other high-profile cases of injustice, such as Hillsborough and Grenfell. In both cases, the authorities disregarded the safety concerns of working-class people, football supporters and tower block residents, respectively. In both cases, enough was known about the dangers to warrant action that would have avoided these tragedies, but the risk to public life was considered a price worth paying in a culture of deregulation and corner-cutting. But most of all, these two terrible tragedies have in common the fact that no-one in power has ever been held accountable. Inquiries have come and gone, hands have been wrung, but no-one has been convicted on criminal charges. If anything, they have been rewarded.

In both these cases, the powerful closed ranks to avoid being held to account for the lives they ruined. In both cases, they tried to deflect blame onto the victims.

Hillsborough survivors, blameless in the events that led to the tragedy (and fully vindicated in subsequent inquiries which found police negligence to be the cause), had to cope not only with what they had experienced that day but also with the attempts of the police, the political establishment and much of the media to portray them as responsible. I don’t want to go into the lies again – they are too awful to describe – but as someone who attended the game and saw the tragedy unfold from a seat in the Leppings Lane stand, I want to say how painful it is not to be believed, how those lies, repeated still today and even put to song by rival football supporters, fester and burn. The lack of empathy is shocking. People have killed themselves because of it.

It wasn’t just the South Yorkshire Police, of course. The political authorities and the legal establishment colluded in the cover-up, as did the football authorities and the media. Successive prime ministers and home secretaries have dismissed the families’ demands for justice, put hurdle after hurdle in their way, closed door after door. Journalists (with notable exceptions such as David Conn of the Guardian) ignored it. Football fans put club rivalry before decency. It is hard for anyone who has not been through this to imagine how isolated and defeated campaigners felt at times. They kept going. But what they achieved they achieved despite the authorities not because of them.

A second inquest in 2016, at which police lawyers reheated the discredited narrative that the fans were to blame, found that there was no misbehaviour by Liverpool supporters that contributed to the disaster and that the 97 victims had been unlawfully killed due to gross negligence manslaughter by the South Yorkshire police officer in command, David Duckenfield. However, to this day, no police officer has been disciplined or convicted of any offence relating to the disaster or the subsequent cover up. One of the officers most heavily implicated in the promotion of police slurs against the fans, Norman Bettison, was, like Vennells, honoured by the British state (as were some of the politicians implicated in Grenfell). Duckenfield was acquitted of gross negligence manslaughter in 2019 following a hearing during which the judge, Sir Peter Openshaw, disallowed previous admissions of responsibility and allowed false and thoroughly disproven allegations that supporters had misbehaved to be again aired, to the families’ distress. Openshaw exhibited more sympathy for the ‘poor chap’ in the dock than for the victims or their families.

The wrongs inflicted on the sub-postmasters would doubtless also have gone unanswered had it not been for the television series. There was a chilling echo of Hillsborough in the revelation that the Post Office, like South Yorkshire Police, doctored witness statements to ‘remove details of “integrity problems”’. Nobody called it out. Nor did anyone seem to find anything unusual in the apparent mass outbreak of fraud among previously law-abiding citizens who lacked clear motive for the crime and appeared to not have benefitted from it in any way. The establishment, by and large, was happy for Post Office workers to be jailed or financially ruined rather than throw the spotlight on malfeasance among its own. At best, they viewed them with a sort of weary contempt. At worst, they didn’t think of them at all. They simply didn’t see them. They were too small, too ordinary.

While the chances of the wrongdoers being convicted are vanishingly slim, the odds of achieving justice are stack massively against the victims of their crimes. While the likes of Duckenfield can rely on public funds to support their case and pay lawyers to traduce their victims, the victims themselves face huge risk and enormous costs when they seek redress through the law. They often face an unsympathetic, even hostile, judiciary, indifferent politicians (David Cameron compared the Hillsborough families of to ‘a blind man in dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there’) and an uninterested, cynical media populated by privileged client journalists who went to the same schools as the lawyers and politicians.

Meanwhile, members of Britain’s governing class simply step from one lucrative merry-go-round to the next, operating in a benign, self-serving context devoid of risk or consequence. There are no serious consequences to misbehaviour in public office. While the Speaker of the House of Commons will not tolerate the accusation of dishonesty from MPs, he is deaf to the everyday lies of politicians like prime ministers Johnson, Truss and Sunak – three titans of vacuous, self-deceiving bluster. Lobbying interests go undisclosed. Honours and influence are bought and sold. Tax and company rules are ignored. Anything for a bit more money. In breach of your respective code of ethics? Why not simply rewrite the code. No one will notice. And no one goes to jail. Everybody knows that no-one ever goes to jail. The gravy train moves on.

It doesn’t matter that the amounts of money the sub-postmasters were accused of stealing were relatively small, nothing compared to the hundreds of millions that should have been spent saving lives wasted on dodgy Covid contracts, for example. What matters is that they had no power and were in a position to embarrass those who did. The people who wield power know working-class people have no redress. That’s how the system is meant to work. They know that whistleblowers are not protected and that those who stand up against injustice are likely to face financial ruin. Outgunned and out-resourced. Ordinary people can be sacrificed, and the powerful feel no compunction about it because when they look at them they see only things, not people. They equate a lack of economic and social capital with a lack of worth. They are from ‘good’ people and deserve everything they have. The motto of the British ruling class remains the one Adam Smith ascribed to them more than 200 years ago: All for ourselves and nothing for anybody else.

Britain is not a fair place or a just one. The law does not apply in the same way to everyone, no matter who they are. The same value does not attach to every child. The same rules do not apply to every adult. Opportunity is horribly skewed in favour of the already privileged. Some can’t fail, while others can’t win. Not everyone counts. And that, by and large, is how the people who run Britain like it.

We are on the brink of a new era, if only…

So, 2023 turned out not to be the year when British democracy was renewed. It will not be renewed in 2024 either, or any time soon, for that matter. If you want to feel optimistic about something, you had better look elsewhere. Britain’s Eurovision chances look promising this year…

While much of the world celebrated the end of a year that will be remembered chiefly for its unflinching child-killing brutality and the West’s equally unflinching complicity in it, the British government was putting the finishing touches on its latest clever policy announcement.

From 1 January 2024, the Prime Minister tweeted on New Year’s Day, most foreign students studying in Britain would be unable to bring family members to the UK. ‘In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people’, Mr Sunak boasted of his latest attempt to appeal to British ethnic nationalists and appease party funders with a vested interest in Britain’s decline (Russia’s influence on the 2016 Brexit vote remains uninvestigated despite Putin celebrating it as a major foreign policy success and millions of pounds of Russian money passing into the hands of the Conservative Party and its politicians).

Leaving aside the obvious cruelty of the policy (another vote winner!), this is another excellent example of a purely performative policy that benefits no-one and stands to seriously disadvantage the British economy and its universities, many of which depend on their income from foreign students. In fact, around a fifth of British universities’ total income comes from overseas students who make a net contribution to the UK economy in excess of 40 billion. Losing even a fraction of this income could put some institutions in a precarious position.

Sunak and his government know this, of course. But they either don’t care or do not expect the policy to be fully or properly implemented. The point, as ever, is not to address the real problems Britain faces but, rather, to stir the pot, provoking nationalistic fervour among their party’s increasingly rabid core supporters while fanning the dying embers of Brexit in the hope that something will catch on fire. Anything that stokes division and discord is good, right? There’s an election coming up, after all.

Fortunately, for international students, other countries are available. The British aren’t so fortunate, at least not since the Tories ended freedom of movement (Huzzah!).

This sort of performative politics is nothing new, of course, but I do think that, by now, we should be better at spotting it and calling it out. So much media attention is given to exploring purely performative policies and giving them credence in the minds of a public that should know better.

The government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda is another case in point. This is the government’s de facto flagship policy. It is the one to which ministers have given most attention and the one to which the Prime Minister most often addresses his remarks. It is important, they say, to cut migration (even if it means treating asylum seekers as illegals). It is a priority of the people (in fact, only a third of British people polled support it, predominantly Conservative supporters). Yet it is a wholly impractical and, frankly, horribly cruel policy that is, in the end, obviously and unalterably unworkable. It also has little or nothing to do with any real-world challenge that Britian as a country faces.

Who would have thought that a plan to deport thousands of asylum seekers to a country with a sub-optimal infrastructure and a dodgy human-rights record some 4,000 miles away would be impractical or face legal challenge? The government certainly did. On the basis of Rwanda’s current undertaking to accommodate 200 migrants per year it would take the country 165 years to absorb the 33,000 refugees currently scheduled for deportation by the Home Office. But, of course, the policy was never really meant to work, and the scorn poured on it by critics is just grist to the government’s mill.

The point of the policy is not to ‘stop the boats’ or reduce migration numbers, but to create division, to start fires, because that is what consolidates the Conservative vote and keeps the party viable as a mainstream political proposition. From the government’s perspective, the Rwanda policy has already been a stonking success. It has provoked criticism from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who raised concerns about the ‘externalisation’ of asylum obligations and the consequent risks to refugees, and from Human Rights Watch, which has said that Rwanda should not be considered a safe third country given ongoing human rights violations. Most recently, the British Supreme Court ruled the Conservatives’ plan unlawful because of the risk of harm to asylum seekers, prompting the government to introduce new legislation declaring Rwanda safe in order to circumvent the ruling. Leaving aside the obvious absurdity of legislating a country ‘safe’, all of this serves the government’s larger objective of fuelling opposition to ‘meddling’ international courts and human rights law. The government has already indicated its willingness to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. All for a policy that everyone knows will not work.

But, of course, it doesn’t really matter if a policy never comes fully to fruition. The government can always pretend that it has. Just this week, Home Secretary James Cleverly claimed falsely (lied, in old speak) that the UK asylum backlog had been cleared, in line with a long-standing policy promise, despite the government’s own figures showing that 98,599 applicants (a third of them eligible for deportation to Rwanda) remain in the asylum system awaiting an initial decision on whether their claims are admissible (more than at the time the promise was made). The government claimed that its pledge concerned only ‘legacy’ cases (people who arrived before 2022) but its own figures show there are more than 4,500 cases even in that backlog still awaiting initial decision. Why worry about the failure of a policy when you can simply pretend that it has worked?

So, if the policies aren’t real, what is it that Conservatives actually do in government?

Well, other than ‘taking the tough decisions’, pursuing the ‘people’s priorities’ and being ‘a safe pair of hands’, the answer seems to be, in the main, enriching their friends and themselves while deepening the impoverishment of working-class people. It does not seem inappropriate to describe this as ‘class war’. Wealth has been funnelled to the super rich on an unprecedented scale, with the rest of us having to make do with a smaller and smaller share of national wealth. It’s hard to believe that before Thatcher gained power in 1979 Britain was one of the most equal countries in the world. Now it is among the most unequal in the developed world.

While Conservative austerity has crippled public services and left the National Health Service in a state of permanent crisis, turbo-charging child poverty and levelling down life expectancy for the poorest, the wealthiest have had a bonanza. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, when the COVID-19 crisis was at its height and the police were kicking in doors and breaking up children’s parties, billionaire wealth increased by almost £150 billion. In 2023, according to the Equality Trust, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population, comprising 33.5 million people. If the wealth of the super-rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, the Trust says, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP. At the same time, Britain has seen the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars.

And while ordinary people adjusted their behaviour for the greater good and kept essential services ticking over during the pandemic crisis, the government waived procurement rules so they could funnel yet more public cash to the already wealthy. The smell of public money prompted a feeding frenzy among the rich, and especially those with an existing link to the ruling party. VIP lanes were created for the supply of urgently needed protective equipment and companies set up five minutes ago with no office or staff were preferred to companies with years of experience. Exorbitant quotes with staggering profit margins were readily accepted. Much of the equipment supplied turned out to be unusable. Transparency International UK found that a fifth of government COVID-19 contracts triggered red flags indicating possible corruption. A New York Times investigation of 1,200 UK government COVID-19 contracts – worth a total of $22 billion – found that around half went to companies run by friends and associates of Conservative politicians, or with no experience in that area. Many of these ‘friends and associates’ became very rich. Luxury yachts were bought. Offshore trusts were created. The money disappeared. Lawyers were instructed. No one was arrested. No one is ever arrested.

This is very serious stuff. Corruption at the top. No government could survive this, you would think. But this is Britain, where the people who own the country also get to run it (stick around long enough and you will get a go) and do not have to answer to anyone, even the law. Things just carried on. Power passed to a new, unelected and entirely unqualified Prime Minister. Then to another. Memoirs were written. The Queen died. A new King was installed. Flags were waved. The national anthem was sung. Knees were bent. Cronies were honoured. Chums were appointed. The absurd circus continued.

Britain remains undemocratic at its core, and this is how the ruling party likes it. Parliament’s unelected second chamber is now stuffed with donors, political favourites, media cronies and crooked politicians. Legitimised corruption, the New York Times called it, quite properly. It was no less democratic, and I dare say a good deal less corrupt, when its was exclusively populated with hereditary peers. The House of Lords is one of the pillars of Conservative Britain. A second might be said to be the royal family, a beloved national institution that also hoards much of the country’s wealth (the King is one of the country’s biggest landlords), resists taxation and even scoops up the assets of the ordinary dead.

The third is the system of private schools (termed ‘public’ schools in Britain, without a hint of irony – or perhaps the irony is privately savoured, a kind of delicious joke), which ensures that privilege is passed on from generation to generation while state school kids scramble around for a few crumbs from their table. They are the reason our politics and media and every other important institution have come to be dominated by the wealthy and their privileged perspective. That is what they are for. While the income and position of private schools have been protected and strengthened by successive governments, state school funding has been cut, along with pretty much everything else. While the rich get a rounded, liberal education intended to support a happy, flourishing life, and access to elite universities, most of the rest of us are prepared for a joyless life of endless work and debt with no prospect of commutation. We get an education fit for an object, a unit of production, not a human being. We get an education that erodes our sense of self-value and belonging, that makes us distrust ourselves and where we come from, that turns us into things. That is what state school is for.

But, you might say, aren’t these the institutions that make us what we are and made us what we were? Aren’t they the stuff of Britain’s glorious empire, forged on the playing fields of Eton. Well, not really. Maybe for Boris Johnson and his oafish ilk. Certainly not for me. I grew up on different playing fields, without servants or a trust fund, or influential parents able to give me a leg up. I grew up among people who were sharp and funny and defiant and hardworking and deeply sceptical about the legitimacy of any form of authority. I grew up not singing the national anthem or tugging at my forelock or wanting or expecting something for nothing. I grew up in a different Britain. And I miss it.

This is a general election year, of course, at least if the Prime Minister is to be believed (spoiler: see above). A change of government is probable. Labour, led by Keir Starmer, is likely to be in power by the end of the year. But will this result in meaningful change for the British people? Starmer has done his best to dampen expectations, certainly, recognising that the best way to get elected in Britain is to promise to be almost but not quite as bad as the last lot. Few people know what he really stands for, if anything. But, again, the British don’t like conviction politicians, preferring opportunistic, uncharismatic balloons of hot air like David Cameron.

Maybe Starmer is playing a clever game. Maybe he had his fingers crossed when he bent the knee to media vampire Rupert Murdoch and purged the Corbynite left. That hope, I suppose, is what keeps traditional Labour voters and progressives in the party on board. But, very sadly, they are likely to be disappointed. Changing anything in Britain means changing pretty much everything, including the institutions that keep us trapped in the fever dream of a long-disappeared imperial past. I don’t think Starmer has an appetite for that. He is a tinkerer not a reformer. He has not done enough to challenge the narratives of the ruling party, which will, to a extent, tie his hands in office. And while he is likely to foreground a return to ethical politics and a rejection of Johnsonian cynicism and venality, he has provided no evidence of a supporting vision to sustain this. Introducing new codes of conduct won’t be enough to restore trust in politics, nor should it be. It won’t get foreign money out of British politics or end cronyism or corruption or give marginalised people a voice in how things are run.

The Conservatives are the natural party of government in Britain, or in England at least, which, of course, electorally dominates the other countries in the union. They are in power most of the time. They dominate the House of Lords and the newspapers and most of Britain’s key institutions. They are the party of empire, the royal family and Eton and all of that. They control the narrative, even in opposition. They are in power even when they are not. Britain’s archaic electoral system is part of the problem and seriously limits the prospects of progressive politics. The departing party can constrain what any new government can do in office and can just as easily break everything up when they return to office, as the Tories did in 2010, under the cloak of austerity and the financial crisis, which they, with chilling electoral effect, blamed on excessive domestic public spending.

There are good ideas within Labour on social policy and education. But real, lasting change means changing how things are done, and most especially Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which routinely awards unchecked executive power to a party with a minority of the vote and puts a tiny minority of swing voters at the centre of the national policy debate, while most people are effectively ignored and marginalised. Introducing a system of proportional electoral representation would change this and could be the start of a serious re-examination of the institutions which continue to dominate British politics. It would end Britain’s Punch-and-Judy style of politics and ensure every vote counts equally.

Britain needs more than a change of government, that much is clear. But a new government could initiate the kind of deep-rooted institutional change the country really needs. That demands bravery and boldness, as well as a willingness to govern differently. But it also means envisioning a politics that is not dominated by the grand old parties and embracing a political future in which people not parties have the power. It’s hard to see Starmer or any leader of either of the two main parties legislating for their own eventual obsolescence, even if that is what the country needs.

My Grandfather, the Tory

My Grandad was a Conservative, not a party member but a loyal voter and a kind of philosophical sympathiser, to a degree at least. But he wouldn’t for a minute have stomached the current regime.

He was a proud and decent man, warm, funny, and passionate, if a little short-tempered. I admired him a great deal, though I disliked his politics. I came to understand that his conservatism had moral roots, grounded in his belief in self-reliance and his dislike of state intrusion of any sort. He despised charity and mistrusted its motives and eschewed anything he thought of as a handout. The terraced house he shared with my Nan and their young son, my Mum’s older brother, in Seaforth, adjacent to Liverpool’s docks, was destroyed by bombing during the Blitz. The government offered compensation to affected families, but he turned the cash down. How could he accept money for bricks and mortar when other people had lost their lives?

He lived his life with a kind of absolute moral certainty that attracted others. He knew what was right and he lived his life accordingly. He expected others to behave morally too and was scornful of those who failed to meet these standards, though he could be indulgent to his friends. A marine engineer, he believed in hard work. Work was in some ways the main focus of his life. He was at home there, much more so, I suspect, than in his actual home. He was well respected there. People called him ‘Boss’. I remember when my brother and I were young, he took us to the docks and into the engine of a ship, a huge, cavernous, sweaty and dirty place, teaming with people from different corners of the world, or at least it seemed so to me at the time. It was noisy. It seemed as though everyone was talking at the same time in their own language. I still recall the feeling of unease this experience gave me (as well as my sense of his disappointment at this). I had never met anyone who wasn’t from the northwest of England before. I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t white or who spoke a language other than English. It was a glimpse into another world, and of a different man I realised I did not really, or fully, know.

As a merchant seaman, he had travelled the world and seen a great deal, though he never spoke of it, at least not with his family. During the war, he took part in the Dunkirk evacuation. He served with the British Merchant Navy, charged with supplying the raw materials, arms, ammunition, fuel, food and other necessities the country needed to survive the war. He caught Malaria while in Africa. His crew mates sailed without him, only for their ship to be torpedoed on the journey home. The Merchant Navy suffered a casualty rate much higher than any other armed service. All hands were lost. Malaria had, in a sense, saved him, though its complications troubled him throughout his life. Typically, he wouldn’t complain but he never talked about it either, or indeed about much of anything else concerning the war, nothing personal at any rate. Some decades on from his death, I wish I had talked to him more. His reticence was forbidding, unchallengeable. Despite his wartime experiences, I had the impression he rather admired the Germans. He judged Britain’s allies more harshly. Most of his ire was reserved for American soldiers whom he considered to have behaved selfishly in combat, putting others at risk to save themselves. A lot of his attitudes were shaped by this experience of war, the harshness of which we could only guess at.

For all of this, he wasn’t a textbook conservative by any means. He disdained any kind of unearned privilege, reserving the best part of his scorn for the Church and ‘holy rollers’ of all stripes. He was no fan of the aristocracy or the royals either. Yet his scepticism about authority and pretty much all uses of power was tempered by his belief in ordinary people and his faith in his community. He would do anything for anyone. I remember him, by then in his seventies, climbing onto the roof of a neighbour’s house to rescue their escaped cockatoo. He was fond of children and took their welfare to heart. Communities had to look after their own. He was heartbroken and uncomprehending when 2-year-old James Bulger was murdered by two older children not far from his home. It was as though a light had gone out. He couldn’t make sense of it. He was on his own by then, my Nan having died a few years before. He wasn’t himself after that. Their relationship was tempestuous, and after a while resentful. As the community they had grown old in, now in steep economic decline, crumbled around them, she had wanted to move. They could easily afford it. There was a house in Crosby. But in the end, he refused. He couldn’t leave. She was hurt by that, and things were never the same.

I was thinking about him this week as I watched the Conservative Party conference unfold in desultory fashion in Manchester. What would he have made of this latest iteration of the party he voted for, I wondered. The answer, I suspect, is not much. I think he would have been shocked by the indifference to human suffering on display in Manchester, the cultivated divisiveness and, perhaps above all, the absolute lack of moral seriousness, the utter emptiness of a party that appears, now, to believe in nothing (or, at least, nothing it would be prepared publicly to admit to).

The party of self-reliance and hard work has become the party of self-delusion and ruthless wealth and opportunity-hoarding. The party of aspiration is now the party of self-absolution, absolving itself from blame for any of the problems it caused and now pledges to fix, serving up tired old promises tied up with a brand-new ribbon. Unable to offer anything meaningful to its working-class supporters, it relies on fabricated claims and imaginary enemies, culture wars and Hitlerian hate-mongering about the threat posed by economic migrants (a profound irony in a country that built an empire on global economic opportunism, usually conducted at the end of a gun). Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s speech wouldn’t have sounded out of place at a brown-shirt rally in Munich in the 1930s. The suspects were the usual ones: human rights lawyers, ‘woke’ teachers and academics, ‘lazy’ benefits scroungers, ‘lefty’ civil servants and, most significantly for a party now indistinguishable from the fascistic splinter group that captured much of its vote and forced the Brexit referendum, refugees.

The Tories some time ago stopped being a party concerned with lifting people up, despite all the bad-faith nonsense about levelling up, and have become instead a party of fear and regression. It is hard to discern among the deliberately orchestrated noise and disinformation any serious policy intent or plan for the country. Policies are cooked up, reheated or thrown out at an electoral whim. It is hard to believe that for some the Conservatives still represent a safe pair of hands at the tiller of the economy. The truth, inadvertently let out of the bag by Boris Johnson in his notorious ‘fuck business’ remark, is that the Tories no longer care about the health of the economy or the wellbeing of the country. They are the party of property owners and private wealth. They are the party of low tax, low wages and skyrocketing shareholder dividends. They are the party of vested interests and climate denial. They are the enemies of the future.

What made my Grandad different to these modern Conservatives was that he cared about community and about people’s wellbeing. He thought that self-reliance and moral discipline were the best ways of vouchsafing this. He would have been shocked by the corruption in today’s party, its willingness to trade honours for donations, the mass redistribution of public money to private donors and friends of the party under the guise of pandemic procurement, and the utter contempt shown for the rules they devised and strictly enforced during lockdown. The cheap kneejerk resort to fearmongering and divisiveness, a staple of news appearances by Tory politicians, would, I feel, have disgusted him. Most of all, he would have been appalled by the moral vacuum at the heart of the party. The Conservatives are a party that asks nothing of itself. There are no rules they feel they need to respect, no codes they should observe, nothing that can’t be jettisoned should it become for a moment inconvenient or electorally disadvantageous. It started at the top but has poisoned every level of the party and those associated with it, including, troublingly, the police, increasingly a biddable tool of power.

My Grandad died some decades ago. His time is past. The world has changed. I feel the same way about the Conservative Party, though I feel no affection for its passing. The Tories are a party of the past and have nothing to say about the future, beyond a vague feeling that they would rather it didn’t happen. They are the party of fear and hopelessness, of concealment and coercion. Rishi Sunak talks of renewing long-termism in politics, but his party daily stokes hate and division for short-term political gain. They are not honest. They dodge and dissemble at a moment when we desperately need to talk frankly and openly about the country’s future. We deserve better. Our communities deserve better. It’s time to move on. The party of the past belongs there.

Prison state Britain

Rishi Sunak’s clumsy, bad-faith attempt to evade scrutiny of a budgetary decision that would make his already staggeringly wealthy family even richer is yet more evidence that Britain is not the sort of place where everyone is equal before the law and treated the same no matter what their background.

In fact, Britain is just the opposite – a semi-feudal, oligarchical society where the poor are continually surveilled and audited, and the rich can do pretty much what they want and needn’t worry about getting caught. While Sunak can glibly shrug off the latest breach of parliamentary code and face no further action, hundreds of thousands of people are sanctioned every year for breaching the conditions of their benefits claims, however trivially. It seems unlikely that these breaches would be dismissed because they were ‘inadvertent’ or because the claimants were ‘confused’.

Britain’s ‘one rule for them’ culture was nowhere better evidenced than in the lockdown ‘partygate’ scandal, where government and Conservative Party officials repeatedly held boozy parties despite a ban, at the time, on almost all gatherings. While the police gleefully broke up family picnics and used drone-surveillance to intimidate people into compliance – over-using and abusing new and old powers and filling their boots on over-zealous and intrusive interventions – they also happily stood sentry outside the doors of Downing Street while, inside, the people who made the rules drunkenly broke them.

Of course, lockdown wasn’t only about partying and having fun. The Conservative Party also saw in the pandemic an opportunity to redistribute dizzying amounts of money from the state (your money, methodically subtracted from your hard-earned pay!) to wealthy friends and donors. Having relaxed procurement laws, the government proceeded to award contracts worth £881 million to individuals who had donated a total of £8.2 million to the Conservative Party in recent years. But this was just the tip of the iceberg. In the first year of the pandemic, government contracts worth some £18 billion were outsourced to the private sector. A New York Times analysis of $22 billion worth of contracts found that half had been awarded to ‘companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy’.

Firms expert in producing or procuring personal protective equipment (PPE) for the NHS were overlooked in favour of companies set up overnight, with no grander purpose than to syphon money from the state and enrich private individuals. According to the New York Times, fashion designers, pest controllers and jewellers were among those who won supplier contracts. Chums of ministers were offered lucrative deals on the basis of texts and WhatsApp messages. PPE Medpro, a company set up on 12 May 2020, had received more than £200 million of government Covid contracts by the end of June 2020 after Conservative peer Michelle Mone recommended it to ministers. The Guardian later reported that Mone and family made £29 million from the profits of the venture though she declared no financial interest in the company.

PPE Medpro was one of the companies put into a ‘VIP lane’ of preferred suppliers based on political connections (recommendations from ministers, donations to the Conservative Party). Knowing the right people got you into the ‘VIP lane’. Knowing what you were doing or being good at it got you nowhere. As a result of this, much of the equipment supplied to the NHS was, in the end, unusable, including £122 million worth of surgical gowns supplied by PPE Medpro. The Department of Health is estimated to have spent around £15 billion on unused personal protective equipment, Covid tests and vaccines (luckily for us it is only spending on schools and hospitals that ‘bankrupts the economy’). To date, none of those involved in this mass redistribution of wealth has been held to account.

For the rich, purchasing influence over UK institutions is easy – almost as easy as making more money (money makes money, after all) – and relatively cheap. Facilitating or guaranteeing a loan for the PM evidently does you no harm when it comes to getting a fancy job running the BBC or the British Council. Honours are routinely doled out to political donors and in-kind supporters, sympathetic media chums and political friends willing to keep inconvenient knowledge to themselves or to use their parliamentary vote to keep a pal in power. London, meanwhile, has become a kind of global centre for money laundering and reputation washing. British elites have been all too happy to allow oligarchs, particularly Russians, to buy influence and respectability in British society, provided the money kept flowing (as it continues to). Dirty money, often linked indirectly to Putin, has flooded the capital, where armies of property agents, lawyers and others have lined up to spend the cash and protect the interests of kleptocrats, frequently using Britian’s pro-wealth libel laws to intimidate journalists and neuter opposition. While the papers fulminate about ‘small boats’ in the English Channel, permanent residency is for sale to the very wealthy. And, of course, the money kleptocrats spend buys more than just property. It gives them influence, access to the law, the ability to shape opinion and soften their image (by buying football clubs, for example), and access to private places and institutions off limits to the average Brit: the hunting estates, the prestigious private schools, the private members’ clubs, the select gatherings and celebrity-stuffed ‘charitable’ functions. You can even buy a game of tennis with the Prime Minister.

The British elite has found a new role in the world. Oliver Bullough describes Britain as the ‘butler to the world’, but I prefer Cory Doctorow’s description of Britain’s fawning, wealth-addled elites as ‘forelock-tugging Renfields’ willing to ‘buy you a Mayfair mansion under cover of a numbered company, sue your critics into silence, funnel your money into an anonymous Channel Islands account’. Meanwhile, the vampires they serve, flatter and admire drain and diminish everything with which they come into contact, boosting their fortunes at the expense of the commons. As with Dracula, the veneer of sophistication and affability, the suffocating faux nobility, is just a front for the most ruthless sort of violence and exploitation imaginable.

While the rich boost their fortunes and dominate every aspect of public life in Britain, what of the rest of us? Despite FTSE bosses taking home an average £530,000 extra last year, we are once again asked  by government to tighten our belts and take a real-terms pay cut. While tax-avoidance is normalized among the super-wealthy, the less well-off are expected to choose between eating enough and heating their homes. There are no special accommodations for us. We all have to make sacrifices, we are frequently told, but, in reality, it is the poor that make the ‘tough decisions’ politicians like to talk about but in fact pass on to others. Benefits and wages have been cut or frozen, in some cases for longer than a decade, yet rents and house prices continue to rise, along with the cost of living. A coalition of organisations, including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Trussell Trust and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, was prompted to write a letter to the Prime Minster, saying that ‘despite living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, there are people in the UK unable to afford the essentials we all need to get by, such as food, household bills and essential travel costs’:

Every day, we see people unable to afford enough food because their incomes are simply too low. We hear heart-breaking stories from people who are forced to miss hospital appointments because they can’t afford the bus fare, from people who are missing or reducing their medication because they can’t afford the prescription, or from people with diabetes who risk serious complications from going without food. Many conditions people present with, like asthma, are exacerbated by the poor state of their home, which should be a place of safety, which they cannot afford to maintain or even heat properly. Many of the people we help and care for say the stress and anxiety of getting behind on bills is taking a serious toll on their mental wellbeing.

Everywhere you look you see a society in steep and perhaps terminal decline. The privatisation of public services in Britain made some people obscenely rich, but it has been calamitous for the country, ushering an era of unfettered profiteering and dividend stripping rather than cutting costs and boosting efficiency, as we were promised. Private water companies make huge profits and pay massive dividends to their shareholders, while basic infrastructure is neglected and unspeakable amounts of sewage are pumped into our waterways, now as a matter of routine rather than exceptionally. The UK is the worst-served western country when it comes to public transport, yet providers are heavily subsidised while charging some of the highest fares in Europe. Privatisation, by pretty much any measure, has failed, yet so stuck are our leaders in their worship of the market and their belief that the private sector should run everything that the further privatisation of the health service now seems inevitable, whichever of the two main parties is in power.

The reproduction of disadvantage and inequality, not to mention other forms of discrimination and prejudice, is embedded in the structures around us, though we are so used to this we barely notice it. Education funding is skewed to benefit the already-wealthy. A kind of education apartheid is in place. The rich send their children to different schools, unaffordable to most, while the elite universities are dominated by young people with a private education. As if the benefits of wealth were not enough, these people can expect to have on average three times as much spent on their education as state school kids. For those at the truly elite schools the gap is wider still. Many state schools are struggling financially and academically, battered by real-terms cuts and rising costs, and overwhelmed with the demands of an overbearing, high-stakes accountability regime. Head teachers have warned that many schools in England will be in deficit by the start of the next school year. Yet, during the pandemic, when cash-strapped state schools looked to the government for support, ministers made sure it was only private schools that could benefit from £157 million in government-subsidised loans.

Rather than reduce the enormous and growing funding and facilities gap between state schools and private schools, the government prefers to pretend that the superiority of private schools is not about resources and that somehow a bit of their lustre can be passed on through charitable endeavours such as the establishment of the so-called ‘Eton of the north’ which aims ‘to give world-class education to “ordinary” youngsters’ (yes, even your ‘ordinary’ children can become special!). After all, they tell us, you don’t solve a problem by ‘throwing money at it’ and, of course, spending that improves the lives of working people is the bad sort of spending (as opposed to the reckless syphoning off of billions of pounds to super rich friends so they can buy another yacht = good spending). Like other Conservative initiatives to boost state school performance, such interventions are deliberately piecemeal, their ‘success’ achieved through some form of selection which, in the end, lowers achievement overall and makes it more difficult for poorer kids to do well. Selection after all means that someone’s education is better than someone else’s, and competition demands that we have losers as well as winners, which, of course, is why Tories like it so much. We should ask ourselves whether such terms – core to the Conservative philosophy – really have a place in education. If inclusion matters at all, then education is one area in which we simply cannot afford not to be generous.

Working-class children are trapped in a system that considers their thwarted potential a price worth paying for reproducing privilege and ensuring that a rounded education, and the opportunities that stem from that, are the preserve of the wealthy. While the children of the wealthy get a decent education, make lots of connections, and get endless opportunities to try new things and, importantly, fail and try again, education for less advantaged children is a high-stakes, high-pressure business, with failure at any stage likely to prove insurmountable. Little wonder that mental health referrals among children and young people are at a record high. For those working-class kids who do well, their experience of higher education is likely to be quite different to that of their better-off peers. They are much more likely, for example, to take a course with a vocational focus and to attend an institution specialising in such courses. They will have to work to fund their studies. And they will leave with higher debts and the prospect of spending much of their adult life paying them off. Not only is higher education in England among the most expensive in the world, but its funding system has been designed in such a way that it costs poorer students more than it does richer ones who do not need to take out a loan to pay their fees.

This sounds utterly perverse, but it is like so much of British life, full of unnecessary traps, barriers, and deterrents, pointless and self-defeating penny-counting that results in the worst of all possible worlds for the poorest and least advantaged. As such, it is probably good preparation for an adult life likely to be bounded by debt and low pay, surveilled at work and discriminated against when it comes to progression, with little prospect of anything resembling retirement at the end of it – the modern-day equivalent of indentured servitude. At least, before Brexit, there was the prospect of getting out and building a life elsewhere in Europe (as millions did), but that door too now has closed, with a symbolic crash applauded by some and mourned by others. Britain’s policy perspective has become more insular as the country has become more difficult to get in and out of. We are an outlier, in many respects. A stagnating, low-pay state where wages have all but stopped growing, in contrast to our nearest neighbours, and the proportion of GDP spent on state pension is lower than most comparable countries. Public transport and energy bills are among the most expensive in Europe, despite public subsidies and the supposed efficiencies of the market, while our education system performs poorly in comparison with other advanced countries. The health service is chronically underfunded, at levels well below the EU average. Our coastal and inland waterways are almost all polluted thanks to agricultural run-off and the release of untreated sewage. And while the country could be said to be wealthy – indeed, among the wealthiest in the world  by some measures – that wealth is so unevenly distributed that more than 4 million children – one in every three – live in poverty and millions of people depend on charitable food parcels.

Britain has come to resemble a sort of prison state, where the ruling class visit colonial rule on the one remaining bit of empire they still control. While the privileged dominate every important institution, from politics to the media, the rest are surveilled, means-tested, loaded with debt, lied to and denied access to basic services. Elite institutions aside, the school and university curricula have narrowed. There are fewer working people studying arts and humanities subjects or making a career for themselves in the creative arts. Language learning is on the decline. Opportunities for working class people have reduced across the board, while the wealthy have tightened their grip not only on the country’s resources but on the means of social reproduction. Not surprisingly, their wealth and authority are scarcely challenged. When you live your life one negative performance appraisal away from losing pretty much everything, you don’t tend to go out of your way to make a fuss. And, for the most part, we don’t. People everywhere are getting on with it, often leading grimly unsatisfying lives without hope of anything better. For many, this is as good as it gets. And isn’t it just as bad elsewhere? Germany is struggling, isn’t it, and the Scandinavian countries aren’t doing too well either. There have been a spate of stories in the kleptocrat-run press about how bad things are in Germany, including this one by Rupert Murdoch’s own Renfield, Andrew Neil. Things are far from perfect in Germany, of course, in large part to do with its energy transition, but the country as a whole is in much better shape that the UK – its health service works, people are well-paid, pensions are good, transport cheaper and more efficient, and so on and so on. Germany remains a wealthy country, Britain is a poor country in which some very rich people live. But, of course, this isn’t the point of such articles. They are not really about Germany and the writers have little serious to say on the subject. The point, rather, is to get readers to believe that however bad things are here, they are just as bad, or worse, elsewhere.

While everyone I suppose would agree that times are hard and things could be better, we have largely bought into the government’s big lie that we just can’t afford to do anything about it. Many people believe that the global financial crisis was caused by Gordon Brown spending too much on schools and libraries (or, in the slightly more sophisticated version, that we were not prepared for the crash because public spending had risen to the point of putting the economic health of the nation in danger). I suppose if you can sell this to the public you can sell anything. People really do believe that Liam Byrne’s ill-advised note to his successor as chief secretary to the Treasury was a formal handover of accounts rather than an idiotic joke. The thing is, the politicians making such claims know full well that they are not true or at least represent a serious distortion of reality. It doesn’t matter and they do not care. The point is to cement in the public imagination the idea that political choices such as austerity are not really choices at all, but necessities visited on us by circumstances. But, of course, they are choices, and they inflict real harms on people and communities, and if you told people they were in fact motivated by an ideological desire to reduce the size of the state they would not swallow it. In the short term these strategies have been successful for the government (and bad for the opposition), but they have also contributed to the creation of a culture of quietism and hopelessness, underscored by misplaced anger, deliberately stoked by politicians who would rather we did not think too hard about the real causes of our distress and reserved our resentment for the most vulnerable people on the planet. Arresting Britain’s national decline depends on our successfully challenging this and giving people real hope of something better. But as the next general election looms and both parties look to strengthen their appeal to reform-averse, right-leaning voters, people whose politics veer between angry ethnic nationalism and a silly, flag-waving sentimentality about a mythic past, change seems further away than ever.

The crisis in climate leadership and how we can learn our way out

In 2015, the global community – Britain included – signed up to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, an ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 140-plus targets, on critical development areas ranging from climate change and poverty reduction to health and education and lifelong learning, which countries committed to achieving by 2030.

As we pass the midpoint on the road to 2030, it is clear that progress on most fronts is woefully insufficient. The UN’s preliminary assessment found that only 12 per cent of the goals and targets were on track, with close to half ‘moderately or severely off track’ and 20 per cent either regressing or showing no progress at all. On current trends, the UN estimates, 575 million people (almost 7 per cent of the world’s population) will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, while 670 million people will still be facing hunger in 2030, some 8 per cent of the world’s population, the same as in 2015. Worst of all, action to address the climate crisis remains wholly inadequate, with the 1.5 °C target ‘at risk’ and the world ‘on the brink of a climate catastrophe’.

There is little chance now that global warming will be kept to 1.5 °C and I suspect most leaders in the wealthy West privately accept this and are, in different ways, planning for it. The opportunity to keep to the target has likely been squandered, and the worst predictions of climate scientists are beginning to play out in real time before our eyes. Parts of the world are already well on the way to becoming uninhabitable for humans. Amid the warmest month on record in July, the UN Secretary General warned that ‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived’. It is here and it is going to get worse. Countries’ current commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions put the world on course for at least 2.5 °C of warming by the end of the century, a level consistent with catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every bit of fossil fuel burned contributes to global heating and exacerbates these risks.

Yet, as the world heats and 50 °C temperatures become the devastating norm in many places, the fossil fuel industry is increasing oil and gas production and making record profits in the process, aided and abetted by politicians, many of whom are on its payroll. In fact, rather than upping their game at this crucial moment and shutting down oil and gas production, leaders are loosening their commitments, often in the name of ‘energy security’, and reconciling themselves to failure. Some, such as Lord Frost, are even waking up to the benefits of global warming (a new and really remarkably stupid form of climate denial). The UK, which once positioned itself as a leader in tackling climate change, now leads the world only in the audacity and insincerity of its rhetoric. While the government’s decision to grant more than 100 of new oil and gas extraction licences in the North Sea has been condemned by environmental groups as sending a ‘wrecking ball’ through its green pledges, it continues, straight-faced, to describe itself as a ‘world leader on net zero’.

The truth, though, is that rather than listen to environmental groups and climate scientists (including its own), the UK government has little interest in honouring its climate commitments, only in appearing to do so. While it ‘maxes out’ Britain’s North Sea oil and gas reserves, it is confident that it can manage the public’s perceptions, as it has quite successfully over a decade or so of austerity politics and economic stagnation. And if that fails, it is in the process of introducing new laws to curb dissent and criminalise protestors who disrupt ‘everyday life’. Whether they believe it or not, politicians still talk as though an accommodation can be found between extractivist economics and environmental protection. Continued fossil fuel extraction will bring more jobs and boost energy security, they say. It will even reduce our reliance on oil and gas in the longer term. The Prime Minister meanwhile eschews sustainable forms of transport in favour of private jets and helicopters, justifying this as the most efficient use of his time. Such supposed trade-offs are, of course, false and unjustifiable. Every private jet journey contributes to making the planet uninhabitable. Every oil and gas licence issued brings us closer to environmental collapse. To talk as though such risks could be counter-balanced by increased efficiency or greater economic or environmental security is, to be frank, risible, as is Mr Sunak’s Orwellian claim that increasing oil and gas production is ‘entirely consistent’ with net zero goals.

None of this though should surprise us, demoralizing though it is. Generations of politicians have been ideologically captured or else co-opted by the fossil fuel industry. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, for example, received £3.5 million from individuals and entities linked to climate denial, fossil fuels and high-pollution industries in 2022 (a lot of money in Britain’s eminently biddable and reassuringly affordable political landscape). Many senior politicians have stakes in oil and gas companies or accept donations or gifts from them. And these are just the interests that are publicly declared. They tell the story of a party that is simply too close and too dependent on an industry to effectively regulate it, still less to close it down or even limit its production. Instead, Britain now finds itself a leader in the group of countries prepared to increase fossil fuel production, ‘truly dangerous radicals’ pursuing ‘moral and economic madness’, as the UN Secretary General put it (a group that also includes the United States).

We are facing a crisis in climate leadership, globally and in the UK, which is symptomatic of a more general failure of political leadership over the past few decades, itself emblematic of a wider crisis in democracy. Politicians in Western democracies now operate in a kind of post-truth environment in which slogans have supplanted argument and rhetoric outflanks reality. Pledges – on climate or anything else – matter only in the moment they are made. They are a cheap way of generating some positive news. Achieving them matters rather less.  It is a problem to be dealt with through the careful management of public expectations. And for a government that convinced a large proportion of the British electorate that the global financial crisis was caused by reckless domestic spending and that austerity was a necessity rather than a political choice, no lie can really be considered too big.

Politics – real politics, that is, in which real decisions about things that really matter are made – has to a large extent become about personal enrichment and private collusion. The access given to Big Oil and to oligarchs of various stamps, including the media barons to whom senior UK politicians of all stamps bend the knee, gives them a direct say over policy, while public debate, such as it is, takes place largely within parameters already set behind closed doors. Policy debate has become mean and small, with politicians stoking culture wars and fabricating outrage, particularly through policies on asylum and immigration, which they know will divide people and frequently have no greater purpose. There is no serious attempt to resolve the underlying issues or to make people’s lives better. We are all now used to the dissembling of politicians. Johnson and Trump were the apogee of this, openly lying to the public while selling this, quite effectively, to their supporters as a facet of their charismatic leadership. Meanwhile, a demoralized, under-informed electorate veers between infantile sentimentality about the past and a fear of otherness, both enthusiastically nourished by their leaders, though neither does us any good.

I think the implications of all of this for education and learning are quite profound and pose an important moral choice for educators and advocates. Can we carry on with business as usual when business, to put it mildly, is anything but usual? Is it the job of education lobby groups to contract to support government policy and make it work? Should education aim narrowly to supply the economy with the skills it needs and be blind to the industrial uses to which these skills will be put? When I worked for the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), the institute aimed to act as a ‘critical friend’ to government, supporting policy it felt was progressive and looking to improve policy that was not. There was a presumption in this that there was broad alignment between the values of the organization and the ministers and civil servants it worked with, as well as a joint understanding of the challenges faced and the areas of policy intervention to be prioritized. I no longer think this presumption holds. Some would say it never did (while NIACE’s achievements are now widely recognised and the institute fondly remembered, its decision to work more closely with government met with bitter resistance from many of its supporters). It is no longer clear quite what the government means to do, what its true priorities are and why it does what it does. Its commitments cannot be ascertained simply by listening to what they say they will do. In such circumstances, it becomes important to take a critical approach to engagement with ministers, and to reflect thoughtfully on the dangers of co-option and what this might mean more broadly, across different areas of public policy. There is a responsibility for all involved in public advocacy to think between and beyond their silos, and to not talk only to their members and stakeholders. We cannot afford to be in it only for the money.

Of course, it is important that education, and adult education, in particular, provides people with the skills required for the much-vaunted ‘green transition’. There is a clear role for lifelong learning in the retraining and reskilling of adults to work in new and changed industries, should this become a reality (though training alone won’t deliver this). But the crisis in leadership and democracy described above suggests another, still more important role for adult education, one that points to a reassertion of is past values and objectives. The ‘deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions’ demanded by the IPCC won’t be delivered by politics as it is currently construed. It requires mass public engagement, cooperation with environmental groups and a redirection of political will, driven by an informed, committed and politically savvy population. Lifelong learning has a critical role to play not only in generating informed, critical public support for climate action but also in encouraging political action and fostering shared agency for change.

One of the interesting, more positive outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis was people’s willingness to act with agency and joint purpose in responding to the pandemic, demonstrating the moral clarity, solidarity and willingness to make sacrifices Britain’s  political leadership so plainly lacked – Dame Ruth Silver coined the term ‘leaderhood’ to describe it and we write about it here (behind a paywall but please get in touch with me directly if you would like to read it). Leaderhood, as we frame it, can characterize leadership but goes beyond it: ‘Where leadership concerns an occupation or activity—managing a school or college, for example—leaderhood is more a state of being, recognizable not only in formal leadership situations but in every part of life, emerging not from policy and regulation but from a sense of fellowship and an awareness of our responsibilities to others and our community. These qualities are at the heart of good leadership—are, indeed, indispensable to it—but can be exercised anywhere, by anyone’. We see this as an antidote to the sort of closed, introverted, conservative leadership that is focused on retaining what we have rather than building for the future. Leaderhood, by contrast, is ‘about how we position ourselves and our sector in relation both to our values and to the wider context’. It is leading that ‘transcends institutional settings and exists powerfully at the interface of different contexts … that builds bridges to the future and embodies an ethic of care and public service, rather than holding on to the past and refusing to do better or different’.

It is this sort of shared agency that education is in a unique position to promote. The early twentieth-century adult education movement saw its purpose in broadly these terms. It recognised its social purpose in giving working people the means to be active citizens and thus change the world, ‘without a revolution’ as historian John Harrison put it. Adult education can give people hope that another world is possible, and it can give them the means to be the change they want to see in society, a platform for joint action and activism. Lifelong learning should be the enemy of quietism and the friend of creativity, courage and critical thinking. It should grow people’s collective agency and empower them to become active citizens who believe the world can be different and that they can contribute to that transformation. To transform society and our relationship with the planet we must transform education too, recognizing both its limitations and its largely dormant potential. Of course, education concerns skills and employability. We need skilled people in key roles at every level of society, and that is important. But by focusing only on skills and training, we are starving democracy of the oxygen of active citizenship, dissent and critical thinking it needs to survive and thrive, as well as stifling human development in its fuller sense.

The planet is crying out for a different kind of leadership. But it will not come from politicians. Change of this sort can only come from the ground up, and it will not happen without dissent, disruption and civil disobedience. As educators and advocates we can make a difference, strengthening the links between education and social movements, promoting critical thinking, and fostering shared agency among learners and joint propose with others in their communities. Only through the distribution of leadership can we begin to make collective sense of the world and start to change it. We need to think of leadership as an ensemble undertaking in which everyone can play a part. As I write elsewhere, the austerity fundamentalists have persuaded people that while another world may very well be possible, it is simply not affordable. But the situation is really the reverse. Unless we transform our world, our relationships with each other and with nature, in a truly profound way, against the entrenched interests of many powerful and wealthy people, we will remain on the road to climate catastrophe. This, it seems to me, is unarguable. More of the same means more extreme heat, more depleted oceans, more uninhabitable zones, more death and morbidity. It is in all our interests to change course. This should form part of a new common sense about climate change and planetary sustainability. We are in an emergency after all, even if, for the most part, everything feels the same. The real ‘climate radicals’ are the politicians who are ditching their commitments and stepping up oil and gas production in full knowledge of the terrible consequences their actions will have.

Coercion in the classroom: Why school uniforms are bad for us

One of the peculiarities of British cultural life is our willingness to support rules and conventions with arguments that have little to do with – and even run contrary to – the reasoning that led to their introduction. The monarchy may well have its roots in military force, land appropriation and vassalage, but we retain it because, we think, it is good for tourism and a source of national pride and unity. The same applies to the UK’s antique system of titles and honours, a reward for the loyalty of feudal gangsters rebranded as a way of recognizing achievement in public life or service. It survives, despite its ugly associations with colonialism, as a means, primarily, of rewarding support (financial support, especially) to the ruling party or its leader. Likewise, grammar schools, those bright, shiny engines of inequality and social segregation, are defended, against all the evidence, as vehicles of social mobility, choice and fairness. These are distortions of language, words used misleadingly to perpetuate institutions that would otherwise be quickly recognized as straightforwardly harmful. But they are also testament to our remarkable capacity to believe things that aren’t true just because we would like them to be. We are very good at coming up with benign justifications for customs and conventions that are, in all honesty, anything but.

One of the most interesting examples of this phenomenon is the UK’s almost universal attachment to school uniforms. They are mandatory in most British schools and in many former British colonies and have been for decades. The sight of children dressed in ties and blazers to learn is so common that it is seldom questioned or thought about in a critical way. It’s just the best way to do it, isn’t it? But it is important to note just how much of an outlier the UK is in this respect, at least among comparable countries. While the practice has been adopted by many countries in Asia, the UK and Ireland are the only countries in Europe to widely apply a compulsory uniform code for children in state schools. Few European countries have any sort of tradition of uniform codes, and there is little demand to change this. In fact, in most places their introduction would be met with strenuous opposition, not only because of the additional expense involved but also, and I suspect most importantly, because there is no problem for which school uniforms would be seen as a solution. There is no evidence, for example, that school uniforms improve pupils’ behaviour or help children learn. And while some studies have shown a link between uniforms and reduced bullying, other studies reveal little or no impact. So, why are uniforms thought of as indispensable to learning in schools in the UK?

Perhaps the most important reason is tradition. The modern school uniform has its origins in sixteenth-century England, where poor ‘charity children’ at Christ’s Hospital boarding school wore blue cloaks and yellow stockings to convey their lowly status. Uniforms were not taken up by wealthy private schools (‘public’ schools in polite English doublespeak) until the nineteenth century, when the Eton suit was introduced. Other private and grammar schools followed this example, usually preferring caps to Eton’s proudly patrician top hats. They became important symbols of privilege and wealth. After the Elementary Education Act 1870 established elementary education on a national scale in England and Wales, grammar schools introduced uniforms more widely to distinguish their pupils from poorer ‘school board’ kids who wore no uniform. Once secondary school education had become free to all and the school leaving age was raised to 15 after World War II, school uniforms gradually became more widespread and, eventually, ubiquitous. While it is still not compulsory for schools to adopt uniforms – each school can write its own policy – the government strongly encourages them to do so and almost every school follows this advice, usually opting for the classic shirt, stiff collar, tie and blazer combination and often applying their often highly detailed and prescriptive rules extremely strictly. We are all like the private schools now, just not as good. And that, of course, is very much the point. From the start, uniforms have served as markers of status.

The proponents of school uniforms – and there are very many, including among pupils themselves – say that school uniforms foster a sense of belonging and institutional pride. They reduce bullying, they say (since children are sometimes bullied because of how they dress, and this won’t happen if everyone is dressed the same), and promote equality among pupils (not real equality, of course, more equality of footwear). Pupils, furthermore, will be more focused on their studies and achieve better results, it is argued. Uniforms also improve attendance, discipline and punctuality. This is an impressive list of claims, and some may have elements of truth in them. The main problem though is that the substantive claims – that uniforms raise achievement, reduce bullying and promote equality – are not well-supported by the evidence, which is inconclusive at best. There is little evidence, for example, of a link between uniform codes and academic standards. Finland, the best-performing education system in the world (with outcomes the UK education system cannot begin to match), for example, has no school uniforms. And while some studies have suggested a link between uniforms and a reduction in bullying, others have found no evidence of this. It is not really much of a social leveller either, since the poorer kids are more likely still to be in ill-fitting or second-hand uniforms and social segregation is more extreme between schools than within them. More generally, school uniforms are signifiers not of unity but of hierarchy. In Britain, where wealthy people seldom school their children alongside those of poorer people, they can tell you what part of town a child is from, what kind of jobs their parents are likely to do, how big their house is, whether it is owned or rented, and what their prospects are likely to be. Thus, uniforms accentuate the very social distinctions they are supposed to overcome.

The strict enforcement measures in place in many schools – and the insistence on a code of dress that is weirdly out of step with the fast-changing, increasingly informal world of work – suggest that there is something at play here other than a desire to promote a level playing field and boost achievement. It is common for children to be sent home for not wearing the correct uniform or to have items of clothing considered ‘inappropriate’ confiscated. For girls, such strict policies extend to skirt length and material and the thickness of their tights. There are rules too about make-up, nails and hair styles. Uniform policies are heavily gendered (for many schools, trousers are still the preserve of boys), with girls’ dress choices much more likely to be scrutinised for ‘appropriateness’. So much for fostering a sense of belonging. In fact, none of this, if we are honest about it, has anything to do with academic achievement or student wellbeing. It is about control and compliance, exercised over a part of people’s lives which is, for many, highly personal and private. It is about conformity and the intrusive hand of government. It is about learning to jump when told to jump and not asking why. As such, it goes to the heart of the question of the type of education we want for our children. Do we think the purpose of education is to force every type of peg into one type of hole? Or do we want our schools to be places of possibility where, as bell hooks writes in Teaching to transgress, ‘we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress’.

As a square peg who experienced school as a series of doors slamming in my face before I had a chance to understand what was behind them, I very much want it to be different for my children. I would like it to be different for everybody’s children. I don’t want schools to be places where compliance is rewarded and those who don’t fit or see the world differently are punished and left behind. I would rather teachers and school leaders were focused on teaching and learning and not on what their pupils happen to wear. I would rather they appreciated the difference that difference makes. Schools need to change, just as education more generally needs to change. It needs to support collaboration and co-production of knowledge, creativity and critical thinking, dialogue and possibility. It’s no longer enough to educate people to be units of production but not much more. Truthfully, it never was. The adult education movement has, over many decades, expressed people’s appetite for this something more, an unrealised desire to transform and transgress, to resist and challenge, to effect change and remake the world. It continues to do so, in spite rather than because of the actions of government. The problems of the twenty-first century demand something other than more of the same. Schools should be places in which everyone is comfortable being who they are and becoming who they might be. And for that we need children who are willing and empowered to deviate from the norm and an education system that acknowledges and values difference. Finding and fostering difference, opening doors of possibility rather than closing them, is what transformative teaching is all about. Uniforms, with their emphasis on control and compliance, standardised learning and standardised learners, belong to the past. They are not at all what we need now. It’s time we moved on.

Station to station

King Charles III, the newly minted (in every sense) king of England, made his first state visit this week, not, as planned, to France, where police have been smashing their batons into the faces of people protesting against a rise in retirement age, but to Germany, which seemed altogether nicer. He met a few hundred people, some of whom waved flags, spoke a bit of German in the Bundestag, shook some hands, went to Hamburg, mentioned the Beatles, laid a wreath, looked sad but didn’t say sorry, shook some more hands, advocated climate action, then flew home in a private jet made of solid gold while the heralds of the lord blew their trumpets and flights of angels guided him on his way. I may have made the last bit up (it was an RAF VIP Airbus A330).

He gave a nice speech to the Bundestag, albeit one largely devoid of serious content (‘Bitte den Brexit nicht erwähnen!’). Nevertheless, I found myself unexpectedly moved, as Charles reminded his audience of the complicated history of the two countries and of the duty we all have to learn from the past in realizing the future. He also highlighted the many cultural affinities between Germany and Britain, and, indeed there are many, as he noted, from Kraftwerk and Shakespeare to Monty Python and Henning When – and, of course, Dinner for One, the much-quoted British comedy sketch that millions of Germans watch every year as part of their New Year celebration (even though, until recently, it had never been shown on British television). I am a little ashamed to admit that, as an ex-pat living in Hamburg, I had a tear in my eye. For a moment, I forgot to notice just how little he was saying.

After his visit to Berlin, Charles came to Hamburg, visiting the Kindertransport commemorative statue at Dammtor railway station – the counterpart of the one outside Liverpool Street Station, in London, which he was instrumental in commissioning – and the St. Nikolai war memorial, a church destroyed by allied bombing raids in 1943 which demolished much of the city and killed tens of thousands of people. The church was kept in its bombed-out state as a kind of warning from history, not only of the brutality of war but of the necessity to live with the past, however painful. This is an important lesson (largely well taken in Germany), and it is one to which Charles referred in speaking of the danger of our failure to properly reckon with the past. A failure to confront the past is typical of the new authoritarianism and the ‘strongman’ leaders who trade on fake nostalgia for a past that never existed. There was some irony, however, in this warning coming from the head of a state that is increasingly unable to talk intelligently about its past or even to acknowledge large parts of it (the bits where we killed and enslaved people and pinched all their stuff).

Dammtor was the departure point for around 1,000 of the 10,000 Jewish children who fled mainland Europe for the safety of Britain between November 1939 and August 1939 to escape the Nazi terror. The monument – called ‘Der Letzte Abschied’ or ‘The Last Farewell’ – commemorates the Kindertransport and depicts the moment of separation and departure. There are two groups of children, one, presumably, destined for a new life, the other for extermination. One of the two children advancing towards the train track and the hope of a new beginning is half-turned, arm outstretched towards the others. A teddy bear is tucked under her other arm. The ones who remain have Jewish stars stitched into their clothes. They have suitcases too. One lies open, containing only a broken doll, its arms pulled off. A violin case is on the floor, smashed open and empty.

It’s a hugely poignant depiction. Few of the Kindertransport children saw their families again. In most cases, their parents and older brothers and sisters were put into trains and transported to camps where they were murdered. I walk past the memorial sometimes (I work nearby). White roses, a potent symbol of resistance to Nazism in Germany, are often placed on the statue or dropped into the suitcase.

At the request of Jewish organisations, the British government agreed to allow Jewish children up to the age of 17 into the country, provided they could fund their own passage. Visa requirements were lifted, and the government actively publicized the programme. Once they arrived at Liverpool Street Station in London, the children were placed with family members, if they had any, or with foster families or in boarding schools. Thousands of families in the UK opened their doors to these children. It was an act of humanity in the face of profound inhumanity. In time, many of the rescued children made important contributions to their new society, raising families of their own and making their contribution to public service. One such was Lord Alf Dubs, born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to a Jewish father, who became director of the Refugee Council and, as a politician, one of the UK’s most vocal advocates for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.

It was fitting, therefore, that Charles should visit this monument as part of his visit to Hamburg. His wife, the Queen Consort, placed her own white rose on the monument. It’s important to remember and to honour these acts of decency and compassion; acts that transcend nationalism and partiality. But it is far better, of course, to honour them in the way we live, the laws we make and the societies we create, rather than simply through acts of symbolism, important though these are. How a country treats refugees and displaced peoples generally is an important test of its humanity. It is a test that the UK government is currently failing.

Instead of offering a haven to refugees, the government has been using refugees to stoke fear and manufacture a crisis, using something close to hate speech to appeal to the ethnic nationalist base that voted for Brexit and helped put them into power. While ministers bang on about cracking down on the people smugglers who take people across the English Channel in boats, the real target is the people in the boats. Around 45,000 people came to Britain using this route in 2022, and the vast majority of them – around 94 per cent according to the Home Office – went on to claim asylum. The majority were, like the Kindertransport children, fleeing conflict. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, forced global displacement is higher than it has been at any point since the Second World War. The government knows all of this, yet is determined to create a crisis, closing legitimate routes to seeking asylum in order to paint genuine refugees as ‘illegals’ seeking to ‘invade’ the UK. The xenophobic language is quite deliberate, the sign of a desperate government attempting to hold on to power by reopening the divisions that got them into office in the first place.

The government likes to pretend that its plan to send some asylum applicants to Rwanda to have their claims processed, in defiance of the 1951 Geneva Convention and in spite of fears for their safety in the country, is intended to deter people arriving in the UK through ‘illegal, dangerous or unnecessary methods’, such as on small boats. The Prime Minister even has the slogan ‘Stop small boats’ emblazoned on podiums from which he speaks (it is one of his top five policy pledges). But the truth is that the government has deliberately created the crisis. Of course, the numbers of people arriving in small boats is going up because the government has blocked other routes. There was no small boats problem before this. And, of course, asylum centres are full because the government is preventing community integration and access to the labour market and has slowed down application processing. In short, the UK government is engaging in the most cynical manipulation of some of the world’s most vulnerable people for short-term political gain. Little wonder that Lord Dubs has described the government’s policy on refugees as ‘shameful’. One outcome of the government’s strategy was the recent attempted attack on asylum seekers at a hotel in Knowsley, in the northwest of England.

The growing numbers of people forced to leave their homes and seek refuge elsewhere is going to increase. It will be one of the defining challenges of the coming decades. We can choose how we react to this challenge, either humanely, in the spirit of the Kindertransport, or inhumanely, as a means of dividing opinion and shoring up political support from the racist far right. It is sad to see what we are becoming. While Charles speaks the language of unity and comradeship, and celebrates our shared humanity, his government is acting ever more illiberally in denying the most vulnerable people their basic rights, while spreading moral panic about the issue. But, of course, this is just one strand of the government’s drift towards authoritarian rule. Curbs on public protest and the introduction of voter ID to suppress part of the vote are further examples of solutions to non-existent problems that just happen to further erode people’s democratic freedoms. Democracy is meaningless if people don’t have the opportunity to intervene, resist and challenge. Britain has never been a paragon of democratic virtue, as the presence of a born-to-rule unelected head of state would suggest, but it has had its moments. That we are failing to live up to the best of them could not be more obvious, and all the pomp and pageantry in the world cannot hide it.

Diving for pearls

With all the will in the world

Diving for dear life

When we could be diving for pearls.

Shipbuilding, Elvis Costello

It’s World Poetry Day today and, for the UK, where the study of poetry and the other arts is increasingly the preserve of the wealthy and privileged, it should be moment not only for celebration but also for critical reflection and rigorous self-examination.

Research from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and Macmillan Children’s Books, published last week, found that schools in the UK have ‘limited poetry book stock’, with poetry read out loud less than once a week in 93 per cent of schools and children in 20 per cent of schools never having an opportunity to hear a poem read out loud.

Nearly a quarter of schools were found to teach poetry only once a year or less, partly due to a lack of training and support for teachers. Teachers were found to be most familiar with poets they themselves had studied at school. Most teachers surveyed said they did not have enough knowledge of poetry or experience of teaching it.

No one who knows anything about education policy in the UK will be in the smallest bit surprised by the findings of this survey. Decades of policymaking have reduced opportunities for all but the most advantaged to engage in any kind of study not related to either work or basic skills. The arts and humanities have been under attack across the state sector, at every level of education. Courses have been cut, departments closed, and curricula narrowed. Public libraries, a vital resource for people who don’t have access to books at home, have had their funding slashed too, despite rising demand.

A 2022 study by Heidi Ashton and David Ashton found that while arts education and culture play a central role in many European education systems, in England the state has, over the last two decades, ‘progressively marginalized the role of the arts in the public education system in the belief that the “market” does not value the arts’ at a time when leading private schools – often termed ‘public schools’ in the UK, a nod, I suppose, the significant public subsidy they are given by the government – are investing more in the arts.

The omission of arts as a measure of school performance and success in England, together with cuts in annual spending on state education imposed by government since the Conservatives gained power in 2010, have resulted in a reduction in opportunities for children in state schools to engage with the arts and culture and the growing marginalisation of arts education in state schools, Ashton and Ashton write. At the same time, they observe, private schools ‘have witnessed a growth in the importance and value attached to the arts and culture as part of the preparation of young people with the life skills necessary for effective participation in the society’s elite positions’ – an approach, they find, ‘more in line with that of many European countries’. I have never understood why people in the UK acquiesce so willingly in the second-class treatment of their own kids.

Unsurprisingly, over these past decades of regression, working class people have found it increasingly difficult to develop a career in the creative industries. An analysis of Office for National Statistics data reported here found that 16.4 per cent of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, compared to just 7.9  per cent for those born four decades later. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37 pent cent of the creative workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21 per cent.

These grim findings reflect the creativity crisis in UK education, but they are also indicative of a wider trend towards a two-system approach to education in UK, and in England in particular, what Ashton and Ashton and others term Britain’s ‘educational apartheid’. The dominance of people who attended elite private schools among the professions and in the creative industries now constitutes something of a closed shop. It is increasingly difficult to become a lawyer, doctor, academic, actor, musician or artist if you are from a working-class background. Your chances of joining these professions have more to do with who your parents are than with your talent, commitment or ambition.

Parent-funded state-subsidised private schools spend on average three times as much per pupil as do state schools in the UK, with the differential much higher between state schools and elite private schools such as Eton. And while private schools, which educate just 7 per cent of the population, are largely autonomous and subject to minimal state control, state schools and further education colleges are subject to regular high-stakes inspections, as part of an overbearing and punitive accountability regime, which constrains and inhibits effective educational leadership while doing little to improve the quality of education.

Over the past 30 years there has been a critical shift in publicly funded education – barely noticed by many but hugely significant when it comes to the kind of opportunities available to young people and adults, and to those from less advantaged backgrounds, in particular. It has changed the nature of educational provision as well as the language in which we talk about it. While just a few decades ago, government papers on education recognized ‘the creativity, enterprise and scholarship of all our people’, and the ‘wider contribution’ education makes to strengthening community and promoting active citizenship, while opening doors to an appreciation of music, art and literature, all we hear of now are the economic benefits of education and employment, the importance of getting a job and of contributing to growth and productivity.

The marketisation of education has been part of a wider assault on the public sector – its competence, its value and its budgets. The government recognizes only one solution to the problems we face, which is yet more of the things that have created the current crises, from water and energy to climate and welfare: more marketisation, more privatization, more private sector profiteering in every part of our lives, more erosion of the commons and of the public sector. And while this is often sold as delivering more choice and more efficiency, in reality it means what it has always meant: more wealth and power for the privileged, less control, democratic accountability or public scrutiny for the rest of us.

We talk now as though the only measures of educational success are future earnings or a worker’s economic contribution. But engagement with the arts and culture and with creative subjects is not a luxury, it is not something only the rich and privileged need or want; it is an essential part of a good life. But it is easy to see why a government whose power rests on division, the deliberate cultivation of culture war and the suppression of informed dissent might not want this. After all, as the 1998 green paper The Learning Age noted, exposure to the arts and humanities supports critical thinking, fosters active citizenship, makes us better parents, friends and colleagues, and supports community cohesion and engagement. It also gives us a sense of shared value and common humanity. We see more clearly what we are and what we are worth and are more likely to see the world as it is.

Poetry is one of the most important forms of this expression. It challenges us to think, to be critical and to be compassionate. It makes us more mindful of the world around us, more sensitive to nature, more empathetic and caring. There is care in the craft and the craft is itself an act of care. As Don Paterson writes in a poem written in answer to his son’s question, ‘Why do you stay up so late?’,  the poet collects ‘the dull things of the day’ in which they ‘see some possibility’ and looks at them ‘until one thing makes a mirror in my eyes/then I paint it with the tear to make it bright’.

I have been rereading Barry Hines’ novel A kestrel for a knave, the story of Billy Casper, a bright, rebellious boy growing up in a mining town whose inner world is lit up when he finds and trains a kestrel. While his potential is clear and fleetingly recognized, his hopes are, in the end, casually and brutally dashed.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened to Billy. Probably the same thing that happens routinely to millions of working-class kids in Britain. Doors slam shut, chances dissipate. Routine, hard work and the need to continually chase money and keep the landlord at bay take care of the rest. All that potential, all that desire, quietly thwarted, again and again, for generations of people, when all that is required, often, is that the door be held open, just a little longer, just a little wider.

While, for working class kids in the UK, opportunities are few, resting, as they often do, on success in a high-stakes environment which rewards sameness and conformity and the willingness to jump without asking why, wealthy children get every chance, including the chance to try and fail, multiple times if they need to. Little wonder the creative arts and the professions, our key institutions and our chambers of democracy, are now swelled with so much well-spoken mediocrity.

Why do we stand tolerate an education system which routinely fails most of the people who pass through it, that denies most people the chance to find out who they are and what they love? We all deserve the chance to dive for the pearls that lie everywhere around us, waiting to be discovered, so charged with life. It is shameful that so many of us are denied that opportunity.