Five minutes of Will.I.Am swaggering about with a torch in one hand and a BlackBerry in the other, smirking blithely while he repeatedly misspelt the name of the town he was visiting (“Its nuts here in taurton … so much excitement …”) is worth weeks of some anonymous, “inspirational”, non-tweeting, non-rapping, non-member of the Black Eyed Peas doing the same thing.

What the Olympics needs right now is heat, and heat is what Will.I.Am brings to the party. Had he not been tweeting during the procession, The Kids – the people who are, after all, the guardians of the Olympic legacy – would have probably found him dull and alienating. They would not have thought, “Hey, there’s Will.I.Am dicking about on his phone while he’d supposed to be doing something important. That’s like what I do. He’s awesome and so are the Olympics. I’m going to take up gymnastics.” They would have just thought, “Err, look at that idiot, concentrating on what he’s doing, not even bothering to text or tweet anyone while he does it. What a spod. Balls to the Olympics, that’s for boffs and losers. I’m going to sniff glue all through August instead.”

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Excerpt from The Guardian - Sam Delaney - 24th May 2012

Being home-educated – as I was – sets you up for nearly everything life has to throw at you. I can more than hold my own in a pub quiz, and have never wanted for employ. In fact, the only thing I struggle with, inevitably, is “understanding anything about school”.

Now my children are at school, I encounter daily instances of being confused by what the hell is happening to them all day. Just one example: homework. I genuinely don’t get why kids do homework when they’ve just spent all day at school. Dudes, I know the technical term for that, and it’s not “homework” – it’s “overtime”. If they have to use Mummy’s laptop at 7.30pm to find out how the Romans built their roads, while Mummy is trying to tweet something wryly amusing about Simon Cowell’s hair, that, to Mummy, is a bad system.

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Taken from Caitlin Moran’s “The Core Curriculum” - The Times - 5th May, 2012

Essex County Council paid a private company £252,000 a year to have one 15-year-old girl looked after in a “solo care” home in Rochdale. She was known to be a particularly vulnerable child, susceptible to sexual exploitation, with a history of absconding from previous homes to meet older men. That being the case, she was supposed to receive 24-hour care and protection.

Instead, the girl went missing from the home 19 times in three months. On one of these occasions, she stayed away for a fortnight. During her disappearances, the girl was repeatedly raped by several men. On Wednesday, a court in Liverpool sentenced nine of these men to lengthy prison sentences.

To say that the care system let this child down is an understatement. The level of neglect was grotesque….Staff are badly paid, often barely above minimum wage. When prospective employees can earn more at Tesco, recruitment and retention become difficult. High staff turnover creates instability for the children, which is the last thing that they need. Training is inadequate. Almost three quarters of children in care have mental health problems, ranging from depression to schizophrenia. Yet dealing with such problems forms no part of the vocational qualification required to work in a care home. The mental health support provided by the NHS is patchy when applied to children in care. The system for inspecting and registering homes is flawed. Local police forces often do not know they exist.

The neglect of children by their parents is a tragedy. The neglect of children by the State, which is supposed to safeguard them, is shameful. Essex County Council should ask Green Corns, the operator of the care home to which it entrusted the 15-year-old girl, for its money back. The public investment was heavy. The task and responsibility were onerous. The failure is shocking.

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Times Leader Article excerpt - 11th May, 2012

For all his talk of social justice, Michael Gove serves in a government that supports the privilege of a plutocratic class

By George Monbiot

Michael Gove is of course quite right: the “stratification and segregation” of British society are “morally indefensible”. He is also right to observe that “it is remarkable how many of the positions of wealth, influence, celebrity and power in our society are held by individuals who were privately educated”. Among other beneficiaries of this unearned privilege, he names some “of our most prominent contemporary radical and activist writers”. As I came top of his list, I feel I should respond.

The first thing to say is that he has one heck of a brass neck. He talks of “those of us who believe in social justice”. I’m sure he does believe in it, much as he might also believe in the existence of the Higgs boson. What he does not believe in is making it a reality. Or if he does, he finds himself in some very strange company.

In successive budgets, George Osborne has slammed the door on the poor, sometimes trapping their fingers in the process. By cutting the taxes the richest people pay while simultaneously shrinking both benefits and essential social services, he has done more than any chancellor in living memory to prevent the poor from rising and the rich from sinking.

That, after all, is the point of this government. It exists to secure and enhance the position of the banks, the corporations and the rich. It exists to support the system of rentier capitalism – and the inherited wealth that arises from it – that made so many members of the cabinet wealthy. This is the plutocratic class that funds the Conservative party, whose air it breathes, whose interests and opinions it shares. Social justice would require the redistribution of its remarkably concentrated wealth. But that is, of course, structurally impossible for the party to contemplate.

The Conservatives cannot tell us how the land really lies, which is why Gove must make stirring speeches about social justice. If he really believed in it, in the sense of being an adherent to the cause, he would implement a simple policy, which lies within his department’s reach: shutting down private schools. This would produce the following beneficial effects:

1. It would prevent the rich from securing unfair advantages for their children, and thereby obstructing social mobility.

2. It would break down the social segregation that private schools foster, and which Gove claims to lament, in which the most powerful class is separated from childhood from those it will come to dominate, ensuring that its members can neither understand nor empathise with their needs and interests.

3. It would ensure that, rather than opting out of the state education system, they would be obliged to fight for its improvement and better funding. As it is, the dominant class has no qualms about cutting a service upon which it does not depend, and in whose improvement it has no stake.

But this would be the last policy Gove could contemplate: he knows what and whom he exists to represent. In fact the occasion of his speech about “social justice” was the celebration of the elite institution that has just been named “independent school of the year” – Brighton College. Among the methods he celebrated, it has “aggressively recruited, and generously remunerated, talented individuals from a range of backgrounds”. In other words, it has cherry-picked teachers from the state sector. Without any apparent embarrassment, he then went on to insist that the key distinction between good schools and bad ones is “effective teaching”, which “can make a difference of a whole additional year of progress to poor pupils”. In other words: if pupils fail, according to Gove, it’s because they have bad teachers, yet he celebrates a system that reserves the best teachers for the children of the rich. So much for social justice.

As for myself, I can’t help where I’ve come from, but I can help where I’m going. One of my aims is to challenge the system that has granted people like me such undeserved advantages, and help sweep away the obstacles to social mobility, both upwards and downwards. That’s because I believe in social justice. But not in the sense that Michael Gove does.

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Commentary from The Guardian - 11th May, 2012

Going negative, doing retail, overpromising and microtargeting … it’s all there – and Quintus had it down 2,000 years ago

By James Carville

In 1972, when I was a law student and just starting out in the business of politics, I worked on a campaign for the district attorney in East Baton Rouge parish, advising a man named Ossie Bluege Brown. My job was to distribute negative literature on our opponent in strip malls and crowded grocery stores throughout the Baton Rouge area. Over the next 20 years, I did almost anything and everything for candidates at all levels of the political system, working my way up from passing out “hate sheets” in shopping plazas to contributing to Bill Clinton’s presidential victory in 1992. Each campaign had its moments, but nothing in the modern political world comes remotely close to the feeling of winning the big one, which I got to share that magical night in Little Rock.

I thought that the advice I was giving my clients was special. Little did I realize that pretty much everything I’ve said was old news 2,000 years ago, covered expertly in Quintus Tullius Cicero’s strategy memo for the campaign of his brother, Marcus, for consul in Rome in 64BC. The Commentariolum Petitionis, or “Little Handbook on Electioneering”, is remarkable.

Quintus starts with what we campaign advisers call “confidence building”, assuring the candidate that he has what it takes to win. He moves on to an assessment of the nature and strength of the candidate’s base and the need to target specific groups, cautioning against what might be perceived as class warfare. He urges his brother to go negative early, even bringing up the character issue (it must be easier to do when your opponent is a murderer, child molester, and “friend of actors”). He then moves brilliantly back to base development, urges his brother to pander, and anticipates Napoleon’s advice that a leader should be “a dealer in hope”.

Even without the benefit of modern technology, he suggests microtargeting, crafting specific appeals to the narrowest of segments of the voting public. He stresses the importance of retail politics and offers a fascinating discussion of how and when to say no if you have to. And Mitt Romney should take heart from the fact that Quintus advocates pandering and overpromising in almost every situation.

There are always those who say that politics is more negative than ever and that contemporary political consultants are more cynical and unrestrained than their predecessors. Anybody who thinks that just hasn’t been paying attention, and should go read Quintus’ advice to his brother. He suggests sticking to generalities during the campaign, telling the wealthy you are for stability and peace, while assuring the common man that you are always on his side. Oh, and accusing your opponents of “crimes, sex scandals, and corruption”.

I just hope my opponent in the next campaign doesn’t get a copy.

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Taken from The Guardian - 10th May, 2012 - an edited version of an article originally published as “Campaign Tips from Cicero” in Foreign Affairs.

Less driven than New York, less chic than Paris and altogether less Chinese than Beijing, London defies easy categorisation. Other global cities carry established narratives which, however wrong, are still a good place to start. London has none. No single narrative can unite 8 million people with 300 languages between them; any film, novel or, indeed, newspaper article that tries will leave millions shaking their heads and saying, “No, quite wrong, it’s not like that at all.”

From the affluent suburbs to the urban grime, from the packed temples and mosques to the empty churches that tower above them, London is a city of fifth-generation market stalls beside skyscrapers, multimillion-pound townhouses beside council estates and world-famous theatres backing on to streets you don’t want to walk down without sensible shoes. A place where it is easy to be rich and difficult if you aren’t, it is full of parks and you can’t ever park. Its most famous map doesn’t resemble it at all. A wise man once said that a man tired of London was tired of life, but everybody is tired of hearing about that.

These Olympic Games will be the first to be held in a city that hosts existing communities from every competing nation. Yet London is poorly understood only as a city of immigrants. People elsewhere in Britain may periodically bristle at the capital’s overweening dominance of the national conversation, but Britishness is core to London’s identity and appeal. There are reasons why the world’s super-rich seek a berth in the capital, and they are not all to do with tax. If they were, they’d be in Geneva.

London has a streak of diffidence, which is not always appealing. Safe behind their stuccoed West London walls, oligarchs know that they will be left alone, perhaps more than they should be. Last summer’s riots were echoed in other parts of the country, but in London, perhaps more than elsewhere, they seemed the product of a dislocation between people and place, a failure of the city to belong to its own. The city has a small-scale but apparently chronic case of the disease of knife crime. Neighbour knowing neighbour is the exception, not the rule.

Yet there is a communal spirit, perhaps espoused best in recent years by Ken Livingstone — who well understands what London represents, much as he sometimes fails to live up to it — after the July 2005 bombings on board Tube trains and a bus. “In the days that follow,” he said, in a trembling voice, “look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.”

In its flaws, London is like any city. In its strengths, it stands unique. Those who have not visited it dream of doing so. This will be London’s summer, even if it rains.

Times Leader Article - 8th May, 2012

Keep calm, liberal friends. Believe it or not—and despite what your conservative friends will tell you—we’re winning the culture war.

One example:

Let’s not throw the war over the loss of a battle.

-mpg

It is the duty of any host nation to make visitors feel as though they are at home. In preparing the ground for this summer’s sporting festivities, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games has gone one step farther by making those who are at home feel as though they are not.

Or nearly. The novel insistence, by London Olympic authorities, that British competitors should compete on a playing field equally accesssed by everybody else, is rooted in three factors. First, it is the result of events being held in commercially owned venues that can be accessed by anybody prepared to pay. Second, it is the reaction to the Canadian Own the Podium campaign which, in the run up to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, ensured that local athletes were dramatically more familiar with courses and arenas than their foreign counterparts. But third, and most importantly, it is because these games are British.

It sounds like jingoism, but perhaps we may tell ourselves it is something more. Maybe, in a country that ties itself in legal wrangles over the human rights of foreign terrorism suspects, rather than simply sticking them on an aeroplane, there are deep-seated behavioural reasons as to why people cannot bear, in even the slightest, or smallest of ways, to think of themselves as cheaters.

To seek unearned superiority, we should tell ourselves, is the preserve of lesser nations; nations that are insecure, totalitarian, or just plain foreign. And we should feel a rugged, honest pride that our own heroes require no special advantage other than the knowledge that they compete on British soil in front of an audience packed with their family and friends. Or, at least, a couple of them. If they’ve bought their own tickets.

Times Leader Article - 8th May, 2012

DON’T start taking pictures of every edible thing put in front of you from here on out. Just because you are an adult, and have learned how to use a stove with some degree of competency, does not mean that everyone you’ve ever come in social media contact with needs to see a picture of the eggs you just made. It’s the adult equivalent of proudly showing your kindergarten artwork to your parents and expecting to be received like Van Gogh. You don’t need the internet’s approval, we get it, you can put a decent-looking ham sandwich together.

Taken from Thought Catalog’s “The Dos and Don’ts of Becoming an Adult.”

“Which leads me to the main advantage of a university education: it teaches you how to deal with people from backgrounds different to yours. Over the years I have felt bad about not bonding enough with my college mates, but just because we didn’t become great pals it didn’t mean I didn’t learn something from the right wing Tory who thought there was nothing wrong with “n” word and had the Confederate flag on display in his room, from the Muslim guy who threatened to throttle me after I made an incompetent attempt to chat up his girlfriend, from the geeks so socially dysfunctional that they would only leave their rooms to wash at 2am, from the middle class descendants of Cabinet ministers trying to pass off as working class warriors, from predatory homosexual tutors, and, more than anything else, from the posh.

I grew up thinking the upper classes were braying ludicrous, pointless, asinine creatures who swanned about in silk dressing gowns, slurred their speech and only really existed in meaningful numbers in Evelyn Waugh novels. But university taught me they are real, are on the whole quite nice, and, moreover, that they run the country. And frankly, if I hadn’t spent 72 weeks learning about the value the posh place on phony apologetic self-denigration (the second mansion in the Highlands is “the Scottish cottage”), dressing badly (we gauche provincial Grammar school boys spent as much time ironing shirts as working, but the average Hooray Henry wouldn’t think twice of appearing with a filthy shirt hanging out from the back of his trousers), the stiff upper lip (emotional invulnerability remaining the uniting feature of all the Etonians I have ever met), and, more than anything else, “effortless superiority” (a technique that involves accomplishing amazing feats, seemingly with ease) I would never have made it onto Fleet Street.”

Taken from Sathnam Sanghera’s post “Cambridge.” H/T Ashley Ball