DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived Cleggeron era

have u read the book

please

david law resigns.

yikes

well

...

wonder if this is a tory power-grab in some way

haven't read enough but (e.g.) how has this only come out now? did the telegraph figure he wasn't wurf it (being a mere lib dem) during the original expenses scandal?

seems like the telegraph held this back and timed it for maximum impact -- quite murky.

danny alexander becomes new Chief Secratary.

...who has no financial background.

No need. A phone call or two from Mervyn King is all these guys need right now.

wonder if this is a tory power-grab in some way

haven't read enough but (e.g.) how has this only come out now? did the telegraph figure he wasn't wurf it (being a mere lib dem) during the original expenses scandal?

― English: The Money Woman (history mayne), Saturday, 29 May 2010 19:50 (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

think the tel just didn't know that his landlord was his bf until now, and there's no story until you've got that element. would be surprised if tories are behind it, they're been spinning on his behalf all day.

this must be the quickest fall from grace of any uk minister though, right? congratulations on yr new politics, libcons.

“This government is going to persuade you to put your faith in politics once again.” - Nick Clegg, ten days ago.

Did catch Max Hastings (former Telegraph ed) on Q time saying that Clegg would be 'toast' after this was all done. They must really hate this coalition? Not that would stop a pro-Tory paper from publishing this story...

And yeah, Laws seemed to be regarded well (unlike Cable), someone they could work with.

Yeah the idea that the Tories would want any Cabinet minister to resign over a scandal two weeks into a new government is ridic.

Laws was the minister who was supposed to appear on QT with Alastair Campbell, but was pulled.

Kind of astounded he didn't realize that you can't claim a reimbursement if the money will benefit a partner or relative, as millions of people on benefits - or needing to be, but unable to claim because they're living with partners in the same way Laws does with his - find to their frustration.

Apparently he (or a Minister) would have appeared only if Campbell was 'bounced off'. Only watched the last 10 mins but he showed a framed photo of Laws at the end. V funny.

Marina Hyde was very funny on this yesterday, being as Campbell had no love for the BBC over Dr. David Kelly and vice-versa.

OK so we got rid of Toryboy Laws, Clegg's next. Pretty nauseating hearing a succession of "Coalition" figures queueing up to waffle on about Laws' intergrity, when if a guy on the dole in Hartlepool or somewhere had been lying about cohabiting and screwed 40K out of the DSS he'd be denounced, by the same people, as a scrounging scumbag.

... but, hey, it's the New Politics!

More good news.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/30/niall-ferguson-school-curriculum-role

Answering criticisms from the audience that the project sounded uninterested in the fates of the oppressed, Ferguson lashed out against "the militant tendency" in the audience and said: "Can we get away from this rightwing-historian, apologist-for-empire crap?"

Sounds like my history lessons at school back in the day.

This man is a total cock. Surely he's too busy leaving his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be of any value to the rest of us.

Don't see anything wrong with a narrative approach in one sense - certainly I came out of school with a sense only of isolated events and would have liked at least some sort of sense of beginning to end (even in a Kings and Queens of England sense).

Of course the big problem is which narrative you choose, and I think, like most, that the 'rise of the West' is going to be an increasingly unhelpful structure with which to interpret not just the past but also the events of today, if that Whiggish approach was ever really justified other than as the justification for power. It can lead naturally to the clash of civilisations rubbish. Niall Ferguson isn't quite as unnuanced as that article makes out I think, but still, 'the syllabus was "bound to be Eurocentric" because the world was Eurocentric' = nagl.

Tapas and smorgasbord history! om nom.

ha, i really dislike niall ferguson but am a total stan for whiggish, narrative history. fwiw so is eric hobsbawm: marxist history is basically whiggish really.

think history teaching already *is* eurocentric, as are the questioners when they talk about the "fates of the oppressed". kids shd study the euro-indian relaish.

I agree that narratives are the way to go but I would haaaaaate to be stuck with Ferguson's. I'm quite startled at how compartmentalized the curriculum here has become, maybe because my school's history/social studies department was amazing: we had mandatory US history, European history, government/civics, USSR (with Imperial Russian history too, obviously), world religions in historical context, a further governance course called Political Behaviour... took 'em all, only discovering 20 years later that most US high schools including my own no longer teach civics as a mandatory thing (which leaves a lot of dumbass, entitled Americans not actually knowing how the Constitution etc. works). There were also history modules in science and cinema. I cannot bear thinking what's sprung up in the place of this amazing curriculum (although I checked and students there can now do an IB).

xpost to hm

Completely agree. I mean, there are obviously all sorts of other factors here, that make me wonder how workable this Gove/Ferguson hand waving is - how much time there is (do you really want a syllabus where a lot is studied at the expense of learning in depth about other subjects, + historiography and stuff). + You're naturally going to want to study things that apply to the country in which you live, allows you to interpret your context (although, as with any colonial country, this gives an awful lot of scope for far-flung histories - Boxer rebellion anyone? wd've been great). And how much will this really change things anyway? Far as I know, Romans, Victorians and Second World War - imperial stuff - are still the meat of the syllabus.

I know what you mean about narrative history (I still love HAL Fisher's History of Europe, wch Norman Davies is v sniffy about), although I'm not convinced by the Marxist approach (which I absolutely agree is whiggish - as is Marxism generally), and find all concepts of ideological progression in history to have a whiff of the millennarian about it.

But my main gripe would be this West is the Best thing. Don't think it's helpful or meaningful, or even fruitful as an ideological approach (or even true as far as it goes). It's kinda complacent about democracy imo as well (something that is naturall victorious and comes about when common sense prevails - I tend to see it as something that needs defending). + it's not a useful armoury with which to approach all the thorny ethnological issues, and shifting about in a globalised economic system.

Very Conservative approach. I thought David Cameron didn't want to interfere with teachers?

iirc we basically learn about totalitarianism now

honestly though: gcse was all 20th century history for me. there *must* have been *some* other stuff but i can't remember it.

and we didn't have any equivalent to civics/citizenship classes... or one explaining that we aren't citizens lol

xpost

ha -- boxer rebellion is exact;y what they shd teach kids. opium wars too.

Right, didn't realise that about the heavily 20th bias to the syllabus. xpost to suzy, that does sound great, and as history mayne says, no idea of civic role at all in this country, hardly surprising.

We had this dreadful thing called personal, social and religious education, which was none of the above. Hope that's gone (this is about 20 years ago now).

It's hard to say that totalitariansim isn't a vital part of any modern history education. My solution: children must learn ALL history, across ALL classes, have a sense of narrative and an in-depth understanding of important eras, at home and abroad and have a sense of interpretative and historiographical methods and collating primary source material.

It's hard to say that totalitariansim isn't a vital part of any modern history education. My solution: children must learn ALL history, across ALL classes, have a sense of narrative and an in-depth understanding of important eras, at home and abroad and have a sense of interpretative and historiographical methods and collating primary source material.

EXACKLY

despite my internet display name, feel kind of short-changed by school on this score

n e way

on other matters

Yeah the idea that the Tories would want any Cabinet minister to resign over a scandal two weeks into a new government is ridic.

― The Men Who Stare At Goatse (Matt DC), Sunday, May 30, 2010 10:24 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

well, ok. but there are tories and tories. it's surely interesting that the telegraph decided to do this. and it's interesting that laws's replacement isn't exactly of the same calibre, and is already getting heat from the selfsame paper:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7787010/Opinion-divided-over-Danny-Alexanders-move-to-Treasury.html

Pretty nauseating hearing a succession of "Coalition" figures queueing up to waffle on about Laws' intergrity, when if a guy on the dole in Hartlepool or somewhere had been lying about cohabiting and screwed 40K out of the DSS he'd be denounced, by the same people, as a scrounging scumbag.

I heard a bunch of this on the radio yesterday, as well as pro-coalition ppl kind of inferring that it was because he is gay. It made me furiously angry, the fucker was blatantly on the make! How hard is it to "get" this.

xposts Governments really have no business going on about rights and responsibilities if the education system isn't equipped to teach people what those are.

HM, if you're a history education stan, google Lee Smith and Wes Bodin - I had no idea how renowned these guys were until long after I left school, but, basically, WHOA:

By far the most influential program now in use is that developed by Lee Smith and Wes Bodin of St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Originating in a suburban system near Minneapolis, their course on world religion grew out of a controversy about school holidays. The local community, approximately one-third Lutheran, one-third Jewish and one-third Roman Catholic, was sharply divided. The high school elective course that Smith and Bodin developed has significantly improved interfaith relations. Its carefully crafted materials (filmstrips, tapes and texts) are used nationwide -- indeed, throughout the English-speaking world. Funded by three successive grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the project was able to develop class-tested materials and to enlist the support of recognized historians of religion.

One term of the four terms in ninth-grader Civics was taken up with driver's education (end of year, kids in class were 15) and I am sure that if we'd done UK history specifically the class would have been called Empire. Bodin's USSR class was most people's favourite because of a unit called Czar Power, in which students were given roles and a kid who happened to be great-nephew of Trotsky was made Czar for LOLs.

We covered European history from 1870 until the beginning of the cold war in pretty good depth, with half of our time was covering Irish politics from the Act of Union onwards.

Would love to see a curriculum created by Hobsbawm, btw

Me too - in America as well. I now know that we were unusual in that our version of the Pledge of Allegiance was the Godless, original one. If we had any fundie retards objecting to this at the time, I'm sure teachers just said 'don't be crazy, we display this and Jewish parents go mad if you pass out disposable stuff with God written on it.'

The article (about Gove and Ferguson) backs away from it's sub-heading pretty quickly.
Niall Ferguson asked to rewrite school syllabus by Tories
Rapidly becomes - ...help us design a more exciting and engaging history curriculum? And from what the article says he's not actually been officially asked yet?

I've nothing vs. a narrative approach, although tbh my kids seem to getting just that. They have detours into, shock horror, non-European history but to call it a smorgasbord or tapas is going too far (and made it sound pretty good - was it an attempt at a eurosceptic joke? I have no doubt that other parents/teachers experience will differ.

BBC Breakfast this morning "Eric Pickles is throwing his weight behind a scheme to reward householders who recycle".

Kudos to whoever got that one through.

was it said with the appropriate smirk?

on history, I don't remember doing anything in high school apart from the Industrial Revolution, and maybe something about Roman central heating. Then, when it came to doing GCSEs, there was a timetable clash, probably with IT, and that was the end of what could've been a distinguished career as a historian.

I don't think narrative is dispensible but I don't think it's the be all and end all of History and on the whole I think it's over-valued.

I am channeling a family member who spends all this time on this, but here we go: I think the difficulty with putting too much stress on a narrative approach is it can bump out attention to historiography and how to do history, because of 1. limited time for history in the curriculum and 2. hard to understand how competing historical accounts are produced if the stress is on a single narrative.

The thing with the "interpreting sources" stuff is that it's really valuable but really hard to actually *teach* - when I tutor students for History exams I sometimes up giving them a list of specific things to look for but short of that kind of basically dishonest approach it seems very "you've got it or you don't", whereas I imagine if you do narrative for 20 lessons you end up knowing a lot of narrative.

I can see value in teaching under 16s predominantly narrative, it's more the place of narrative in historical writing I'm thinking about. But sure critical skills are probably harder to teach than Facts, but in a general pre-Uni education mightn't critical skills have more long-term use for most students than a set of general knowledge answers?

nah, coz narrative isn't just facts, it's ideas too

It's often ideas asserted as facts without acknowledgment of their ideological contestedness?

As I say, I'm not anti-narrative - I enjoy reading narrative - but I think it disproportionately dominates History, especially popular History, and that domination distorts our sense of the past.

Cameron's judgement on the economy "it's even worse than we thought". So far, so predictable. And yet, "Let me be clear. Our debts are not as bad as Greece. Our underlying economic position is much stronger than Greece." Uhhhhhhh, that's not quite what you were saying before election. So prognosis: things are worse AND better than we said! Trebles all round!

Cameron is talking shit on the deficit, according to - get this - the Telegraph's Economics Editor.

You expected a former PR boy not to talk shit whenever his mouth happened to open?

I know we're not supposed to get all Class War in these shiny 21st Century coalition times, but when Cameron says the cuts will affect everybody, cd somebody in lol Opposition not ask him how much they'll be affecting wealthy families who use private education and healthcare?

it's hard to ask that question when they all are kind of weather families who use private education and healthcare?

Noodle, since we've been told to not get all Class War by people with millions of pounds, I kind of ignored the request.

xpost

imo you could use that shit but still be politically opposed to it, but the cut and thrust of parliamentary democracy is based on the ad hominem iirc.

xpost to Gravel - yes, I think it is hard to teach, but those who do would agree with Noodle that it's entirely feasible and worth the effort. The Schools History Project people have probably got a lot to say about this: http://www.schoolshistoryproject.org.uk/