Plot Predictions

Thirty years ago I was doing Economics 'A' Level. Thirty years!  A good few lessons were devoted to ‘the ageing population’ and the looming pension, health and social care crisis in the UK.  I remember being shown predictions for, well, about now actually.  I remember thinking 'my own parents will be retired'. 

Let’s just say that again. Thirty years ago students were being taught about a well-documented and researched certain future event - our working population would not be able to provide for the increasing number of aged people. This was not hearsay or a teacher cutting an article out (remember that?!) from the press. It was part of our syllabus. 

  

A couple of years later I found myself in a British Politics lecture at university. One of the main themes was the excellent continuity our civil service provides.  The whole ‘Yes Minister’ culture of gently steering whichever party happened to be in government.

But where have we been steered to? Thatcher fell during my first year at Uni (oh the hangover after that) and huge damage had been done in terms of council housing, benefits, etc.  But there was still time for someone influential to say hang on, we are teaching about a looming crisis. How are we doing to deal with said crisis?  Sad to say, after John Major's floundering, Blair’s New Labour seem to have made little dent on social care, council housing, the NHS.  They went for private finance initiatives. And then the banks had their own crisis.

To say nothing of the feeble coalition years and the recent Tory disasters.  Simplified version?  Yes.  But the fact remains that this was expected to happen yet still we have hospital beds clogged with elderly people who desperately need full-time care.  In the midst of what may well turn out to be the worst winter in seventy years of the now teetering NHS.  

Thousands of people still have no real idea how they will fund their retirement.   Many probably don't realise how bad things are going to be.  Retirement ages have been increased but there have been decades of mismanagement.

We are in 2018. With a broken social care system, a breaking NHS and pension problems a go-go.  All predicted.  At least six Prime Ministers and thirty years ago.  Something has gone badly wrong with our system of government.

Educating Everyone

And here we are.  September and back to school.  Only a day late with my first blog...  Hope you have had a good summer.

With the start of the new term, I have been pondering education.  My youngest starts secondary so we are entering a new phase.

Last week, in The Times, there was an article about the three brothers who head up the Harrop Fold Secondary School featuring in the new Educating Greater Manchester documentary on Channel Four.  It was a thought-provoking piece.  Not least for the admission that a school which has been turned around in a remarkable fashion over the last decade - it was once labelled 'the worst secondary school in the country' - is now being held back (strangled) by a £1.5 million debt.  It is not alone in this issue, thanks to the Private Finance Initiative.

Since I had just returned from Carfest, the BBC Children In Need money-raising festival, I was particularly struck by the disparity of expectation in our country.  At Carfest, we had a great time (lucky to be able to afford to participate) and no doubt, millions have been raised over the two festivals this year.  But the enterprise revolves around (duh!) cars.  And most of them are exceptionally expensive cars, owned by billionaires.  Just one of the Ferraris we saw is worth more than that debt at Harrop Fold.  Even if the festivals make a still-amazing £6 million or something, the entire proceeds could not purchase more than three or four of those Ferraris, McClarens, etc.

As I have written before, we do not live in a poor country.  We live in a country where choices are made for us about how our money is spent.  We are then 'persuaded' that these are the right choices and much is made of government debt, 'austerity' needs and so on.

We may talk about the decrease in services, read about the debt in education.  But we are conditioned not  to protest too much.  For example, Harrow Fold is in Greater Manchester.  Where there are two of the richest football clubs in the world.  Each with weekly wages bills that far exceed the strangulating debt of that school.  Indeed their wage bills probably could probably wipe out Greater Manchester's education debt with just one week of donations.

But somehow we believe it is acceptable for these situation to co-exist.  Fans whose kids are at struggling under-resourced schools are paying to watch overpaid, over-privileged footballers and not really questioning the differentials.  And it is not just them of course.  We are all conditioned to believe there is nothing wrong with this gap.  Trickle down economics?  More like 'build a dam' economics.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And speaking of gaps, I was lucky enough to go got Singapore and Bali this summer.  Apart from the staggering scenery, one thing which struck us was the vast number of Chinese tourists.

We have been consistently informed by the Brexiteers that our route to financial and trade salvation after Brexit lies in the East - China, India, etc (Mr Trump's war not withstanding).  Well, our education system is not even remotely on this page yet.  Our children are still usually given a choice of French or German, possibly Spanish for 'modern languages'.  No thought has been given, on a mass scale, to Mandarin or other such languages.

The amount of people and money flowing from China would seem to mean that our future should indeed be facing East, regardless of whether we are in the EU or not.  But we - and more importantly our children - are definitely not prepared.  Even if we rely on the Chinese to be learning English (a typically arrogant assumption and one of which my small snapshot of well-off Chinese this summer saw absolutely no evidence), there are huge cultural lessons to learn.  We really struggled just on a small tourist scale to deal with the differences in manners and attitudes.

Of course, many UK private schools are apparently teaching Mandarin....