Tag Archives: politics

Paying for the privilege of a private education

Private schools are divisive, unfair and plain wrong. No political party is ever going to put a stop to them, so what is to be done?

The obvious answer is to improve the state system so people will be less inclined to waste their money on private. But improving state schools is not easy and the solution is not to bring back grammar schools which were also divisive and unfair. No…the answer is to invest in; well run, secular, comprehensive schools. It’s a novel idea but this is the best chance of giving every child an equal chance regardless of wealth, class, religion or innate IQ.

This isn’t enough though, we also need to accept the obvious advantages of private schools and recognise the greater effort that state schools pupils require to achieve the same results. Universities need to positively discriminate in favour of state schools pupils to rebalance the fairness equation. Employers should look to state schools for their high fliers and elitist ghettos like politics and city institutions need to break the stranglehold on top private schools filling their seats.

For too long the UK has been afflicted by division based on privilege and demography and the private school system lies at the heart of the problem. It is now time for change.

David Cameron’s Christian Country

shutterstock_145450387I don’t really care about the semantics, although it seems to me from every statistic I have seen that we are not really a Christian country; more a country which has been heavily influenced by Christianity.

Hopefully, at some point we will look forward rather than backward, disestablish the Church, get the priests out of the House of Lords and get the Queen to give up her role as head of the Church of England. Let’s get rid of state funded faith schools while we are at it.

That said, I do think it’s important that politicians come clean about their religious beliefs. It’s no good pretending that your religious beliefs don’t affect your world view, which in turn will affect your views on society and policy. They simply cannot be separated.

In the US, knowing that Mitt Romney was a Mormon would certainly have influenced me if I had been an American citizen. Surely you have to doubt the judgement of anyone who believes that Jesus magically went from the Middle East to America to spread the word and that the 10 lost tribes of Israel will one day come back and gather in Missouri!

So I am grateful to David Cameron for showing his Christian hand. I wish Tony Blair had been more open about his faith. Had I known how much he thought God was on his (and our side) I would have been even more suspicious about his foreign policy, his ideas on family and education. I am sure he is a decent man and a great believer in peace but like all religious leaders, peace only comes on Gods terms and if you don’t see the world in the same way as ‘my God’ sees it you may have a problem.

So David, we know you are a Christian and you see this as a Christian Country, now tell us how you see this influencing policy.

Specifically:

Constitutional reform
The monarchy
The justice system
Family and taxation
Discrimination laws
Foreign policy, particularly in countries where religion is the problem
Education and faith schools
Defence
Foreign Aid
Environmental policy

I’d also be interested in Gods’ views on all of the above.

Fox Attacks

In behavioural economics they call it heuristics. It’s the discipline that explains a whole series of built in biases in the way humans think. Heuristics are mental short-cuts or rules of thumb that often result in thinking errors. The availability heuristic is particularly relevant in the case of Fox attacks.

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Put simply, the availability heuristic operates on the notion that if we can recall something easily we tend to overestimate its importance. The classic would be shark attacks. When we read about a shark attack it sticks in our memory and so we tend to  over-estimate the risk and its importance. In reality the chances of being attacked by a shark are infinitesimally small.

This applies to the recent media coverage about Foxes and Fox attacks. The number of Fox attacks in recent years are in single digits. Compare this to the fact that over 6,000 hospital admissions in the UK  last year were for dog attacks. But dog bites are so common they are not even reported in the press, so few people worry about the issue.

The recent hysteria and demands for action after the Fox attack in London are exactly what the availability heuristic would predict.

The reality though is: there are around 40,000 urban Foxes in the uk. They may be a bit of a pain, annoying everyone’s pet dogs, occasionally going through the bins and making a lot of noise. But they aren’t usually dangerous, most people like them and in a country that needs to hang on to all the wildlife it can, they do add a certain exotisism to the city experience.

It’s amazing how  animal species are respected when they are few and far between: how much we love red squirrels, deer, beavers, stoats, pine martins and hedgehogs. But heaven help the species that actually do quite well: grey squirrels, foxes and badgers seem suddenly to change status from darlings of the nations to pests and pariahs.

So lets try and fight the availability heuristic and not waste time and money worrying about urban Foxes……. now dog attacks…that’s another matter.