The Times - UK (2022-05-17)

26 V3 Tuesday May 17 2022 | the times

Comment

paper until I grasped that it was asking

me to write about “agricultural

practice in any EEC country”.

With seconds left, I sped through

my essay crossing out the ‘al’ in the

middle of all the Australias to make

them into Austrias, amending the

final one as the bell rang and

dropping my Parker 25 on top of it in

the manner of what would later be

classified as a “mike drop”.

Glancing at my work as

he gathered it in, Mr

Heazell nodded sagely

and said: “So, Coren,

Austria is an island with

only 14 million people but

more than 100 million

sheep, is it?”

“Yeah, well, maybe the

figures will be a bit

off,” I said with a

yawn. “But at least it’s

in the EEC.”

“It’s actually not,”

said Mr Heazell. “But

I’m sure you’ll pick up

extra marks for the

paragraph on our

historic cricketing

rivalry with this

country that was once

a penile colony.”

Classic comics

I

n more great news

for education,

Penguin has issued

a set of its famous “Modern Classics”

that includes Spider-Man,

Black Panther and Captain America

comics. Yay! When I was a kid,

Penguin Modern Classics meant

boring stuff like James Joyce

and George Orwell, while comics

came through the door with

the newspapers and my dad

despaired because they were all I

would read.

So this elevation of my guilty

childhood pleasures to the status

of “classics” is one in the eye for him

and his proscriptive and uncool

generation. All I would ask

Penguin is, why this slavish

kowtowing to American culture?

Where is The Beano in your new

modern pantheon? What

of The Beezer, Whoopee

and Whizzer and

Chips? If Spider-

Man, why not Roy

of the Rovers?

If Black

Panther, what

of Desperate

Dan?

And, for the

love of FR

Leavis and The

Great Tradition, if

Captain America

has a place in the

literary canon, then

where the hell is

Bananaman?

I

s “exam invigilator” really a job?
To the extent that there can be a
shortage of them? Are there
specific skills required? Does an
advert for new ones need to say
much more than “Coffee-breathed
old beardie required for pacing
quietly up and down the assembly
hall — crepe-soled shoes an
advantage, must have own elbow
patches”? Does it take long years of
training to spot hidden calculator
watches and Shakespeare quotations
written on cuffs, or to upbraid
cribbers with a rendition of “copycat,
copycat, sitting on the doormat”?
At my school, we were invigilated
by whoever taught the subject being
examined, just to be on the safe side. I
remember my geography teacher, Mr
Heazell, frantically jabbing his finger
at my essay on sheep farming in
Australia in the last few minutes of my
Common Entrance exam in 1981, and
then, when I finally mouthed “what?”,
jabbing his finger at the question

Tories must challenge campus group-think

Unless the party stands up to left-wing ideas in higher education it will face a bleak future

also selling the cultural pass. So such

conservatives either endorsed or kept

quiet about multiculturalism,

uncontrolled immigration, climate

change hysteria, the destruction of

the traditional family, the erosion of

educational standards and much

more.

Now the Conservative Party

swings wildly between so-called one-

nation conservatism, which is almost

indistinguishable from Blairite social

engineering, and heartless, selfish,

free-market libertarianism.

As Goodwin implied, young and

old now seem to inhabit different

universes. Among the young, there’s

no longer any cultural memory of a

nation that had to fight for its

survival against Nazism, or a West

threatened by Soviet communism, or

once-normative values such as

biologically determined sexual

identity or marriage between a man

and a woman.

With freedom, entitlement and

consumer goodies assumed to be their

birthright, they channel their idealism

into abstractions such as “climate

change” or into banning from the

public square those with whom they

disagree — and whom they tell

themselves it’s progressive to hate.

Why should any of them vote

Conservative if Conservatives aren’t

telling them how rotten or imbecilic

all this is — while failing to

demonstrate what really does need

to be conserved to make the better

society to which such young people

aspire? The youthful revolt against

conservatism is not just due to the

left-wing “march through the

institutions”. It’s because

conservatism has abandoned them.

these “anti-elitist” hang-ups, such as

Germany or Switzerland, understand

that prosperity depends on educating

most young people in vocational

skills. Instead, Britain diverted

increasing numbers away from such

a career path into getting a degree.

As result, academic standards were

lowered in universities and schools,

as more and more young people with

scant academic aptitude were

shoehorned into university courses.

With universities becoming a near-

monopoly of left-wing thinking,

higher education became vulnerable

to ideologies which trained students

not how to think but what to think.

The result is a swelling army of

people with letters after their name

who are incapable of understanding

the distinction between opinion and

evidence, let alone able to interrogate

that evidence in an objective and

informed manner. They have never

encountered arguments that may

contradict what they assume is

unchallengeable fact. As Goodwin

observed, they are unlikely ever to

have to defend their case on campus

against conservative thinking.

Conservatives can either fight this

or just go with the flow. The Tories

broadly chose the latter course,

either because they were themselves

the flow, as was Major, or because, as

Theresa May famously observed,

they had to be careful not to be seen

as “the nasty party”.

Conservatism is about conserving

what’s important. Yet many

conservatives no longer appear to

know what this is. This disarray now

threatens not just the Tories but the

West’s ability to defend itself, with

Americans and others on the right

A

n analysis at the weekend
by the politics professor
Matthew Goodwin should
strike dread into the heart
of the Conservative Party.
This month’s local elections, he
wrote, confirmed that the Labour
Party has been advancing most
strongly in areas filled with
university graduates, who now
represent one quarter of the country.
In 2019, Labour gained a 35-point
lead among 18 to 34-year-old
graduates. Only one in five of them
voted Tory. Nearly 80 per cent of
young graduates plan to vote for
liberal or left-wing parties which
mirror their strongly liberal outlook
on issues such as climate change,
immigration, gender and sexual
identities and Black Lives Matter.
The most important electoral
divide today, he suggested, is not the
result of wealth, class or income. It’s
been caused by the expansion of
higher education.
Over the past four decades, the
number of students obtaining a
degree each year has rocketed from
68,000 to nearly half a million.
Going to university has consistently
been shown to make students more
liberal and left-wing, especially those
who study social science subjects.
More graduates, wrote Goodwin,
equals more Labour voters.

The irony is that this correlation

between higher education and left-

wing views also accounts for Labour’s

main strategic difficulty. No longer

the party of the working class, it tries

to please both its traditional red wall

voters and the progressive

intelligentsia. The intelligentsia

patronise the working class and

despise their socially conservative

views. The red wallers believe their

deepest attachments have been

abandoned and betrayed by a Labour

party taken over by metropolitan

pointy-heads with crackpot ideas.

Of course, there are conservatives

who are young and lefties who are

old. Broadly, however, Goodwin’s

analysis rings very true. For anyone

who has followed with dismay the

trajectory of Britain’s education

system over the past several decades,

the reason isn’t hard to work out.

The expansion of the universities

inescapably lowered standards. This

was started by John Major who

turned the polytechnics into “new

universities” 30 years ago. And it was

accelerated by Tony Blair who

pledged to send 50 per cent of school

leavers to university — a target he

recently suggested should be raised

to 70 per cent.

The reason was an obsession with

social class, which in Britain is

associated with education, and

egalitarianism or equality of

outcome. Other countries without

Young and old now

seem to inhabit

different universes

Let them drink gin

H

aving rowed back on legislation

to prevent the hard selling of

junk food to children on the

twin basis that there is a cost-of-living

crisis and that such restrictions of

trade are un-Conservative, the PM

will now, I hope, be removing duty

from cigarettes and booze and

legalising heroin, so as to encourage

trade in those other harmless

working-class pleasures and to give

the destitute a little of what they fancy

at this difficult time. That done, let us

see the end of the so-called “minimum

legal age” for smoking and drinking,

which has always struck me as the

worst kind of nanny-state meddling,

because if we don’t care about

corporations killing kids with burgers

and fizzy drinks, why stop them

doing it with smack, fags and gin?

Smart thinking

T

he tragedy of obsessive

smartphone use for most people

I know is that they could and

should be doing something better with

their brain than wiping it endlessly

back and forth across that filthy digital

toilet floor. But squeaky Joe Wicks?

Come on. The man is as thick as a

meat pie. All his phone “addiction” is

distracting him from is more ab

crunches. Enjoy your life, Squeaky.

Scroll yourself out. There’s plenty of

time to read when you’re dead.

Giles Coren Notebook

Who says

Austrians

don’t love

cricket too?

Water giants should

be made to pay

for spilling sewage

Jawad Iqbal

B

ritain’s water companies,

guilty of polluting our rivers

and seas with raw sewage,

appear to have been let off

the hook once again by the

government.

A system proposed by MPs to

monitor the volume of human waste

pumped into rivers has been rejected

by ministers. It means that those

running the water industry are being

allowed to get away with doing far

too little, too late, to tackle pollution,

improve water quality and update

infrastructure.

Water companies are permitted to

release sewage when there is a risk of

rainfall overwhelming the network

but this is meant to be exceptionally

rare. The reality is very different:

water companies spilled raw sewage

into rivers and the sea more than

1,000 times a day on average last

year, according to official data. This

feels routine rather than

“exceptional”. The water companies

gauge the frequency and length of

spills but, crucially, do not measure

the actual volume of sewage. They

claim that volume monitoring is

“difficult and expensive”.

Such claims of financial penury are

hard to stomach from an industry

that has collectively cut investment

in waste water and sewage networks

by almost a fifth in the 30 years since

privatisation. Money that should

have been used to improve

infrastructure and tackle sewage

outflows has gone, in part, into

bumper pay packets for water chiefs.

To take one example: Liv Garfield,

chief executive of Severn Trent, was

paid £2.8 million in 2020, including

£1.9 million in bonuses.

The water companies are

monopoly providers of an essential

public service yet no one in authority

seems able or willing to get a grip.

Under government plans published

in March, companies will be required

to cut sewage spills by 40 per cent by

2040 and 80 per cent by 2050. That’s

effectively a licence for inaction

in the short term, but the

environmental and public health

crisis of contaminated waterways is

not looming in the distant future —

it is here now.

The Water Services Regulation

Authority (Ofwat) and the

Environment Agency need stronger

powers to take enforcement action

against companies that are failing to

deliver. Regulators appear weak and

ineffectual against a powerful industry

that seems intent on ignoring its

wider corporate responsibilities.

Companies should be prevented

from paying large bonuses to

executives who have failed to curb

sewage discharges into rivers and

otherwise fallen short on pollution

targets. The directors of companies

should be held legally accountable

for environmental pollution. That

would focus minds.

Jawad Iqbal is a freelance writer

Melanie

Phillips

as

h

but

he

So this elevation of m

childhood pleasures to

of “classics” is one in th

and his proscriptive an

generation. All I wou

Penguin is, why this sl

kowtowing to America

Where is The Bean

modern pant

of The Bee

andWhi

Chips?

Man,

of t

If

A

lo

Lea

Gre

Capta

has a pla

literary can

wherethe hell

Bananaman?

@melanielatest