Department dogs look like their jobs

It is often observed that dogs resemble their owners which, if true, would make me a handsome black chap, friendly to everyone he meets, always thinking the best of everyone and eager to please, absolutely none of which is true of me (nor, indeed, and perhaps fortunately, do I pee on every bush and rest my head on visitors’ knees under the table). Have you noticed, though, that public servants somehow acquire the characteristics which suit their jobs? Or perhaps people who look like that gravitate to jobs which suit them.

Brown the waster tells us not to waste

Hypocrisy is New Labour’s prime characteristic, and Gordon “Heathcliff” Brown’s injunction to us all not to waste anything is a fine example of Labour – and specifically Brownite – hypocrisy

We are, apparently, throwing away £1bn of food each year. That is indeed something to be corrected, with implications well beyond the £420 per family which a Whitehall study has alleged. It deprives others, it generates waste and it inflates the profits of the supermarkets. It is nothing, however, to what Gordon Brown has wasted.

Tom Stoppard’s message to Gordon Brown

I went to hear Sir Tom Stoppard speak this morning at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. I usually come away from such a session with my notes in my head, confident that I can do a reasonable précis from memory. Stoppard taken aurally is as densely packed as Stoppard in print. Each memorable statement (as one thinks of it as he speaks) is immediately overtaken by the next, and most were lost to me by the time he finished.

A few points stuck in my mind as I wandered homeward – can one better, by the way, being in Oxford on a day when deep snow had fallen overnight, Stoppard had talked, and the sun shone on stone buildings from a brilliant blue sky? One could forget, temporarily at least, the Brown unpleasant land around one.

Alienation in my own land

The state of the nation was neatly summed up between trains at Reading station one day last week.

For the second time that week I had bounded out of a west-bound train and dashed across to Platform 8 in time to see the doors lock on a train heading north to Oxford and beyond. Both trains were running to time so it is deliberate time-tabling which ensures that one cannot do a seamless change. Well, it may be deliberate – some venomous little bureaucrat spotting an opportunity to inflict a little more misery on those who are compelled to suffer the “service” which First Great Western offer to those who pay the wages; it may just be stupidity.

A Level results – Jim Knight Errant

“Tell me which candidate does not deserve the A-level they achieved today”. This was the reaction of Jim Knight, Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Learners when critics suggested that a combination of grade inflation and dumbing down made this year’s A level results even less meaningful than last year’s.

It is worth analysis, that reaction; “which candidate did not deserve the A level they achieved”. First, however, who is Jim Knight? That is no rhetorical device, by the way – I had never heard of him before he spouted this nonsense.

Government misses all primary school targets

“Four out of ten pupils could not read, write and add up properly by the time they left primary school this summer, the Government said yesterday.

Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, hailed the test results as the best ever”

The Times, from which this quotation came on 8 August, is strangely uncritical of the fact that 40% of our children leave primary school illiterate and innumerate, and did not even seem to notice the hubris in Adonis’s reaction. New Labour has had more than ten years to make good Tony Blair’s commitment to “education, education, education” and we no longer notice that its creatures boast even about its failures.

Alan Johnson hits at state teachers

There is less to this Alan Johnson bloke than meets the eye. Following his clumsy attack on Margaret Hodge by labelling her brave attempt to open up discussion on immigration as “an echo of BNP policy”, he has now launched into private schools – or, at least, that was apparently the intention. What he did instead was to denigrate state school teachers.