The Times - UK (2022-05-23)

28 Monday May 23 2022 | the times

Comment

teachers feel pressured to upwardly

adjust teacher-assessed grades. Eton

is not alone in hitting the headlines

for exam-cheating. Question: do

private schools give the best moral

education? Discuss. (12 marks, more if

the teacher does a cheeky edit before

handing in).

Keep it underground

O

ne classic episode of The

Simpsons is a Freemasons

parody, where Homer joins a

secret society. The main perk is private

access to tunnels under the city that

zip you from A to B in no time along

lavish, empty underground roads

with chandeliers and piped

classical music.

There’s a £19 billion state of

the art cross-city tunnel

network opening in London

tomorrow... but, read the

room Elizabeth Line! This is

awkward timing. I’ve

commuted on the Tube

pretty much every

year of my life since

I was 11 years old

and I wanted to

spend next weekend

zooming back and forth

from Heathrow to Essex,

face wedged on the train

window, like a Victorian day-

tripper on the first Victoria

Line tube.

Yet there’s a problem. My

other half is from Sheffield and his

friends are coming to stay. For their

whole lives they have complained,

justly, about their creaking Soviet-

era public transport system. We’re

going to have to avoid trips on the

lavish line while they’re here, keep

those “cathedral-like” new stations in

the capital under wraps.

Boris Johnson is in the same

position. BoJo loves playing with his

buses and trains, he must be

desperate to dress up in hi-vis and go

“toot toot, all aboard the Elizabeth

Line”. But he also has to shore up

cracks in the red wall, to be

seen to “level up”. Tricky.

Best if the Elizabeth Line

remains, you know, for the

locals. Take it off the Tube

map. Shhh! Our little secret.

Sick list

O

nce, when flicking

through The Sunday

Times Rich List at a

friend’s house, one of their

teens asked me, was there

a Poor List? The idea felt

obscene. Then the follow-up

question: how would you

rank who was poorer,

someone with nothing or a

start-up founder with debts

amassing vastly less than

nothing? Focusing on

those at the other end of

an infinite scale was a

A

re the famous playing
fields of Eton level?
Because I run in fun
circles I was at a party
where the main chat was
teenagers doing their GCSEs. Pretty
soon, the stories began to flow from
parents with kids getting “extra help”
at private schools, which were
laughed off but they stuck in my
mind. The French teacher who in the
language oral exam jabbed silently at
the words in the textbook the
floundering student should say (this
is possible as the exam is audio-
recorded, not videoed). The
geography coursework that was “pre-
marked” multiple times by the
teacher because, well, they could.
And also, private schools are the
biggest customers of the “iGCSE”-
style exam, whose selling point is
coursework. Coursework is rather
more improvable than exams.
Whilst these are just anecdotes, we
know from surveys that private school

Nato’s next chief should come from Estonia

Baltic leaders understand far better than most westerners the expansionist threat of Russia

aggression abroad and repression at

home cannot be blamed only on

Putin’s personal neuroses. It stems

from deep-seated Russian attitudes

to history and geography that are all

too often overlooked in the West.

The Robertson analysis is also

overly centred on Russia (in fact: on

Moscow). Norman Davies, Britain’s

foremost historian of eastern Europe,

was in the audience at St Antony’s.

He noted sharply that Russia’s past

“greatness” invariably came at the

expense of other countries, notably

Ukraine. Why would any future

manifestation of greatness be

different? Post-Soviet Russia dumped

the Communist one-party system

and the planned economy. It did not

dump its imperial mindset. Putin’s

reign has entrenched that failure.

Uprooting it will require an

enormous shift, probably even

greater than Germany’s post-war

efforts to overcome its Nazi past.

More realistic is to assume that

post-war Russia, whether defeated or

victorious, will be extremely difficult

to deal with. Young people (and

indeed most Russians) are unlikely to

be yearning to build bridges with the

West. Our best bet will be to try to

contain the problem, not to indulge

in wishful thinking.

The insights and expertise of allies

such as Estonia should be central to

that. They know their giant eastern

neighbour far better than we do.

They were right when we were

wrong. Nato will be looking for a

new secretary-general next year. It

has never had a female leader, nor

one from eastern Europe. I think

Kallas would be an admirable

successor to Lord Robertson.

the need to offer a way ahead for

young, professional Russians, the

colleagues he remembered fondly

during his post-Nato stint working

for an oil company, then part-owned

by well-connected tycoons and partly

by Britain’s BP. This new generation

must “rescue the country before it is

too late”, he averred. They needed an

“idea, a narrative that articulates

where a civilised and constructive

Russia will fit in to the future global

setup”, a notion that he encapsulated

as “Make Russia Great Again”.

Trumpian flourishes aside,

Robertson’s experience is not to be

sniffed at. As Nato’s top official he

had nine meetings with his Russian

counterpart and is under no illusions

about him. “The man in the Kremlin

has a remarkably thin skin and we

should avoid provoking him into

even more reckless violence against

the Ukrainians. I have seen him in

meetings, in what were good times,

display an emotional side which

surfaced from the cool, controlled

approach he took to most matters,”

Robertson said. “Today, closeted

away from the virus and from the

real world, that emotionalism has

been boiled up with a partial view of

history and a messianic obsession

with Russian greatness. It has

produced a dangerous mindset.”

But seen from Estonia, pandering

to Putin is more dangerous than

provoking him. Also missing from

Robertson’s optimistic, forward-

looking approach is any contrition,

or even a recognition that Nato

leaders and their counterparts in

national governments might have

got something wrong. Estonians

reckon Russia’s descent into

T

hose in charge of our
policy towards Russia over
the past 30 years should
bear some responsibility
for its disastrous outcomes:
tens of thousands of people dead and
maimed, millions of shattered lives,
and the prospect of a global famine
this autumn. Conversely the east
Europeans who for three decades
have been dismissed as hysterical
doom-mongers are wholly
vindicated, though as Kaja Kallas,
Estonia’s prime minister, notes, it is
impolite to say “I told you so”.
I met Kallas last weekend in
Tallinn at a regional security
conference fizzing with outrage at
Russia’s invasion. On my return I
headed to Oxford where Lord
Robertson of Port Ellen, Nato’s
secretary-general from 1999 to 2003,
was giving a lecture at St Antony’s
College on the future of European
security.
The contrast was stark, and not
only because Kallas is 44 and
Robertson 76. Estonians ardently
want Ukraine to win: donations
amount to a third of their entire
defence budget, the highest figure in
Nato. They also want the alliance to
make serious plans to defend its
eastern front rather than relying on
the current tripwire forces. These are

existential questions. Ukrainians can

retreat across a vast country;

Estonians have their backs to the sea.

Seen from outside, the slice of

Ukraine occupied by Russia may

look like a smudge on the map, but it

is much larger than Estonia’s entire

territory. The looting, destruction,

deportation, torture, rape and

murder being experienced by

Ukrainians awaken painful, vivid

recollections: this is what happened

in living memory under the Soviet

occupation of the Baltic states and

eastern Poland. Kallas’s mother was

deported to Siberia aged only six

months.

Estonians, like their Latvian and

Lithuanian neighbours, are not afraid:

they are used to living in Russia’s

shadow. But they do worry about the

squishiness of some western leaders.

The event in Oxford exemplified

the divide. Robertson forthrightly

condemned Russia for attacking

Ukraine. But he counselled against

overreaction. Defending Ukraine

should not mean attacking Russia: it

will still be there after the war ends

and we should start thinking now

about how we will deal with it. He

quoted Basil Liddell Hart, the

strategy savant of interwar Britain:

“Inflict the least possible permanent

injury, for the enemy of today is the

customer of the morrow and the ally

of the future.”

Robertson’s particular point was

Russia’s descent can’t

be blamed only on its

president’s neuroses

momentary spiritual reboot. Then I

glanced back at the gazillionaires

counting their pots of gold.

Music in the dark

I

was struck by the phrase

“rebellious hope”, the mantra of

Dame Deborah James. James is the

bowel cancer campaigner who has

defied the odds to survive over five

years since her diagnosis and has not

long to live. “Rebellious hope” stirs

something so powerful in the blood.

The Ukrainians have been living on it

since the Russian attack began.

What does hope look like? Hope

by the Victorian painter GF Watts,

now housed in Tate Britain, shows a

woman blindfolded, battered, her

harp broken but for one remaining

string. The sky is dark save for one

star. She plucks that last string and

tilts her head to hear. This painting

was cited by Martin Luther King Jr, a

copy was in Theodore Roosevelt’s

New York home, but it later fell out

of favour, too sentimental. One snide

journalist at the time mocked that

the woman depicted “would be none

the worse for a warm bath”.

But rebellious hope is how James

has raised more than £6 million for

cancer research in the last week. The

rebellious hopeful are not afraid of

sentiment, or rather idealism; it’s

how those who are cornered can

become extraordinary. They see

darkness, but hear the music.

Helen Rumbelow Notebook

Good grades

can often be

a question

of morality

Our carelessness

towards marriage

will cost us dear

Melanie McDonagh

O

nce it would have been

big news — I mean, huge

— that marriage rates

have gone through the

floor. But the reaction to

the latest bombshell from the Office

for National Statistics has been a

collective shrug, even though the

number getting married fell in 2019

to the lowest rate on record, viz,

since 1862, and that fewer than a

fifth of weddings were conducted in

a church or other religious building.

In 2019 there were 18.6 marriages

per 1,000 unmarried men and 17.2

marriages per 1,000 unmarried

women. That makes fewer than two

married couples per hundred

bachelors or spinsters, terms now

redundant precisely because they

pertain to the married state. The

number of marriages has fallen by

half since the peak in 1972.

The ONS says sagely that this is

because of “couples choosing to

cohabit rather than marry, either as a

precursor to marriage or as an

alternative”. Some of this is indeed

down to people getting older at

marriage, with first-time husbands

now on average 34 years old and

wives 32. In Jane Austen’s time you’d

be unmarriageable by then.

Nope, even taking the pandemic

into account, it looks like people are

passing on the married state. To

every generation until now, this

would have seemed baffling.

Marriage was once simply an aspect

of growing up. You got to adulthood

and you looked for someone to settle

down and raise a family with. End of,

usually.

Obviously, the primary casualties

are children. But when marriage

goes, so does something important:

what you might call social psychic

stability. When people marry, usually

for life, they know where they are,

and so does everyone else.

Cohabitation makes for more

contingent, insecure relationships. I

grew up in Ireland before divorce

was legal, and while there were

unhappy marriages there was also a

reassuring sense that one of the

fundamentals of an ordered society

was in place.

Granted, marriage is a tough call,

and it’s hell if you’re in an unhappy

one. But in its most basic, procreative

aspect, it works better than the

alternatives. As Cristina Odone

points out in a report for the Centre

for Social Justice, even after

controlling for income and

education, there’s an outcome gap

between children whose parents are

married and those who cohabit,

including social and emotional

health. Once, all classes married,

now it’s mostly the middle classes.

What to do? The emperor

Augustus put a tax on bachelors. We

could do it in reverse by increasing

the risible married person’s allowance:

make marriage pay. And let’s just

drop weddings that cost as much as

the deposit on a house, shall we?

Edward

Lucas

@edwardlucas