The Tory Party's already dead

If only the Tories were in the last death throes of their long and distinguished existence. At least that would suggest a desperate desire to endure in the face of near certain expiration. Instead, they’re more like a farting corpse. What seems like the odd flicker of life, even hope, turns out to be nothing more than hot air burping from the backside of a dead political party.

Let’s take their leader’s response to last week’s local election results as a case in point. They were a calamity. The Tories lost more than 1,300 seats. But Theresa May - in her unique and now fabled ability to deny reality - responded by pointing the finger of blame at the House of Commons. The public had punished the two main parties for failing to deliver Brexit, she opined. In other words, they don’t blame her; they blame those pesky politicians for voting against her Withdrawal Agreement.

Unsurprisingly, there was neither an ounce of contrition born of a sense of personal responsibility for the disaster, nor an indication of, having listened to the people, a change in her government's approach. Indeed, in her mind, the results were not a demonstration of the unpopularity of her agreement; they were a protest against the two main parties and, in particular, the stubborn ERG, for failing to get it through the House of Commons. Her uncanny predilection for self-deception is truly mind-blowing. She now seems to believe that the public’s anger will be pacified by a deal with Jeremy Corbyn that ties us to a ‘customs arrangement’. As I said, truly mind-blowing.

It’s not just about Theresa May, though. It’s about the entire Tory Party, both anti-democrat Remainers and craven Brexiteers, most of whom, like Boris, have sat back and raised the odd objection but, in reality, done nothing to stop May’s betrayal. I realise that this sounds counter-intuitive, but in order to save at least a semblance of something that could claim to be the heir to the Conservative tradition, they should have forced a split and taken many of the grassroots activists with them, calling themselves something like the Real Conservatives. Fortune favours the brave. It’s too late now, though. Farage’s party has beaten them to it.

If they want to save their seats - putting the survival of the Tory Party to one side for a moment - their only hope is to defect to the Brexit Party now. Even this, though, may not work. Tory Brexiteers are tainted by their inaction, and that includes – and I say this with a heavy heart – Jacob Rees-Mogg. As a result, the Brexit Party may not accept them anyway, justifiably seeing them as an electoral liability. I certainly won’t vote for them, and I’ve always considered myself to be a natural Conservative. Furthermore, the party has proven itself to be so incompetent, so craven, so dishonest and so full of charlatans, that I don’t think I can ever vote for its representatives again.

At first glance, it is obvious that the Conservative Party faces an existential crisis. However, when one witnesses the Prime Minister’s woeful, purblind response to last week’s electoral disaster, her wilful refusal to accept reality and change course, and the prevarication and procrastination of the party’s Brexit wing which impotently looks on, one realises that it’s already dead. The party’s various leadership contenders vying for the top spot are a bunch of zombies talking to themselves.

Guardian-Land is a land of chaos and confusion

They live in Guardian-Land. This was the rebuke given to indulgent judges by an ex-police chief on LBC radio recently. 

He was talking about the case of an 18-year-old who threatened a motorist with a 12-inch zombie knife, only to receive a derisory suspended sentence, nine-month curfew and 150 hours of community service. 

Leaving aside the judge’s unfathomable decision to set a 7pm curfew for someone convicted of an offence committed at 5pm, this sentence is a scandal, especially when one considers the Home Secretary’s promise to get tough on knife crime.

It is also indicative of our elites’ morally perverse and reprehensible approach to dealing with offenders. The judge justified his leniency by citing the offender’s traumatic history. Apparently, some years ago he had been profoundly disturbed by the sight of his brother’s corpse. But does that justify his reckless behaviour? Is that really a mitigating circumstance? I mean, lots of people experience traumatic events. Life is indeed full of them. We don’t all kick cars and wave knives around though.

Such an inadequate punishment sends a truly appalling message to violent offenders. If you threaten or harm a law-abiding member of the public, you only have to tug on the judge’s heart strings with a hard luck story and, at worst, you’ll receive a community sentence. Where’s the deterrent?

The judges appear to view criminals as victims. And this is the crux of the matter. The legal establishment consists of liberal-left activists who see offenders as unwitting victims of an unjust society. They must therefore be molly-coddled and protected from punishment, not locked away. If anything, this extraordinary and perverse view of the world sees the victim as the de facto guilty party (at least partly responsible for the societal conditions that spawned the criminal in the first place) and, of course, vice versa.

It is therefore no surprise that we’ve seen such an astronomical rise in crime. And before you scream ‘cuts’ or even Kahn in the case of London, it’s not a recent phenomenon either. Crime’s been rising since the 1960s - when these views first became fashionable.

As a school teacher, I witness exactly the same approach on a daily basis. Bullies and violent pupils are treated as the real victims- victims of an uncaring society. They are thus permitted to torment their targets with impunity. The poor souls they abuse, in contrast, are left unprotected and, in some cases, even take the blame for the cruelty inflicted on them.

It really is shocking in its perversity. Morality has been upended by leftist elites. Criminals go unpunished and bullies unchecked. Guardian Land is indeed a land of chaos and confusion. And it’s going to get worse.

Will the British go the same way as the Ottomans?

During the nineteenth century successive Ottoman sultans, most notably Abdul Hamid II, in a desperate bid to modernise and challenge Western military dominance, enacted a series of reforms to Ottomanise, or force uniformity upon, the disparate peoples of their empire. A polity that had for centuries derived its legitimacy from its tolerance of difference and the decentralised structures of governance that enabled such tolerance to flourish, now sowed the seeds of its own demise. 

The different ethnic, cultural and religious groups within the imperium - each already imbued with an incipient national consciousness - resisted such centralisation and enforced uniformity and, one by one, broke free from Ottoman rule. With the help of World War One, Great Britain and France - who mischievously fomented nationalist opposition within the imperium throughout the nineteenth century - the Ottoman empire finally expired with the formal abolition of the sultanate in 1922. 

Yes, the war precipitated its end, but, in reality, the Ottoman polity's loss of legitimacy made that end inevitable. From Serbia and Montenegro to Bulgaria and Romania, gradually, former Ottoman territories, angered by Istanbul's centralising programme and filled with nationalistic fervour, became either semi- or wholly-independent. 

What lessons can we learn from this bloody catastrophe and what relevance does it have for us in Britain? Well, unless it has the wherewithal and inclination to rule by fear, the survival of any state depends upon the consent of its people. If that consent is withdrawn, its continued existence becomes impossible. In the case of the Ottomans, consent was dependent upon the metropole's restrained interference in the affairs of its peripheries and the different ethnic, religious and cultural communities which inhabited them. When this tolerance was reversed, so too was the consent of Istanbul's subjects, leading to the empire's inevitable break-up.

In the case of Britain, over the last fifty or sixty years, we too, like the Ottomans before us, have begun to question the very nature of our existence as a political entity. Our state's legitimacy, though, unlike the Ottoman one, has historically been based upon uniformity. We have an established church, a common language, a strong commitment to equality before the law and, until recently, a common culture as well. But these things, this uniformity, is now being questioned and undermined like never before. Our elites are engaging in nothing less than an ambitious programme to redefine the relationship between the state and the citizen, to reformulate the social contract, just as the nineteenth century Ottoman elites reformulated theirs - with, it has to be said, catastrophic consequences. 

Through the damaging doctrine of multiculturalism, successive governments - supported by politicised, liberal-leftist civil servants, teachers, police officers, university professors and the media - have promoted and encouraged difference at the expense of social cohesion and national solidarity. People live entirely separate lives, speak different languages within the confines of their respective communities, hold different, incompatible beliefs, demand special privileges and even seek justice in different courts. 

In the cases of FGM and Pakistani grooming gangs, for example, the British state has abrogated its duty to prosecute the law, as a consequence of perceived cultural sensitivities. Indeed, the state has accepted that its jurisdiction does not extend to include the communities that house those responsible for these outrageous offences. Equality before the law, that precious British constitutional gift, has thus been repudiated. The state now believes that different communities need to police and govern themselves. We're no longer one people, bound by culture, the rule of law and shared experience, loyal to the British state as historically constituted. Instead, we're a fragmented collection of different peoples and cultures, linked only by a shared and rather flimsy commitment to tolerate one another. The hope is that Britain - now a mosaic of loosely affiliated peoples - will derive legitimacy and loyalty from this new settlement. I have my doubts. 

Like the Ottomans before us, we're in the process of radically changing the relationship between the individual and the state. In their case the state became more centralised and powerful, demanding greater uniformity across the empire, and in the process delegitimised itself in the eyes of its subjects. In ours, it is becoming less centralised and more tolerant of profound difference. Could it have equally catastrophic consequences? Time will tell.

We need to expose these so-called ‘centrists’ for what they really are: extremists

I always find the tendency of some to label those who wish to see more immigration controls as extremists mildly amusing. I mean, what could be more extreme than advocating uncontrolled immigration and a border-free world? Indeed, the irony would be delicious if the charge were not so terrifyingly Orwellian, and so successful in its ability to stifle debate and crush dissent.

Ditto Brexit. Since when was championing national sovereignty and, by extension, the democracy that gives legitimacy to national governments an extremist, indeed fascistic, endeavour?

As an ordinary voter and, I hope, a sentient human being, I find it deeply unnerving and disorienting to see reason jettisoned so readily on a daily basis. The likes of Tony Blair, Andrew Adonis and Alastair Campbell are apparently centrists for example, despite advocating the abrogation of democracy and open borders. When in power, they presided over a policy of unprecedented, untrammelled immigration that saw communities irreversibly altered, against the wishes of their inhabitants, all of whom looked on with a mixture of fear, impotence and horror, terrified to raise objections lest the New Labour propaganda machine denounced them as racists.  And get this: according to a Labour insider, they did this simply to rub the right’s nose in diversity. Do these individuals honestly sound like moderates to you? Do they even sound sane?

And, as if this isn’t bad enough, they now want to reverse the biggest democratic vote in our nation’s history, and, instead of reviving our hitherto moribund democratic institutions, stay wedded to an authoritarian oligarchy. For heaven’s sake, let’s call a spade a spade: these people aren’t moderates; they’re radical extremists and, more to the point, always were.

So why do our commentators insist on characterising them as centrists? It’s either an act of wilful dishonesty, self-delusion, blind ignorance or perhaps a combination of all three.

Even their political opponents have fallen for it, referring to them as Labour centrists before mimicking many of their policies – just consider the fact that net migration is now higher under the Conservative Party than it was during Tony Blair’s period in office. The Tories have been radicalised in an effort to show the world how moderate they are.

Fanatical globalists like Blair have indeed been extremely effective at sowing linguistic confusion and painting themselves and their policies as moderate. Consequently, these same policies have gone mainstream. We actually see them as centrist.

But they aren’t. Notwithstanding their verbal acrobatics and blatant dishonesty, advocating open borders and mass migration is an extreme position to take, as is the negation of parliamentary democracy and the ‘pooling of national sovereignty’ – another example of the globalists’ Orwellian desire to obscure reality (for ‘pooling’ read ‘abolition’).

Recently, they’ve been at it again. An attempt to overturn the June 2016 people’s vote, before it has even been honoured and acted upon, has been marketed, incredibly, as, yes, you guessed it, a people’s vote. Thus, an egregious act of anti-democracy is sold as the opposite. You couldn’t make it up!

We need to spread awareness of this globalist con trick and expose its conjurors for what they really are: extremists.

If Damian Hinds really wants to reverse the teacher staffing crisis, here's what he needs to do

The bell finally goes. I dismiss the class; breathe a sigh of relief and slump into my chair, exhausted, head in hands, ruminating on the events of the school day. I’ve had to break up a fight; deal with the fallout from an earlier assault upon a Year 7 pupil; phone the home of a notoriously surly parent who – surprise, surprise – spat venomous abuse at me for having the audacity to question her daughter’s behaviour and, lest I forget, taught four lessons, as well.

I now have to gather myself before attending two back-to-back meetings with concerned parents. When will I get the chance to mark books and plan lessons? I worry, before angrily considering Damian Hinds’ latest pronouncements.

According to our Education Secretary, his top priority is the staffing crisis in our schools. He’s concerned that we’re failing to recruit and retain enough teachers. He isn’t wrong. In my school, for example, we have an acute staffing problem. Nobody wants to work here. And if you think we’re unrepresentative of the country at large, you can think again. I’ve worked in lots of different schools over a 15-year career. They’re all the same.

But why? I hear you ask. Why is there a recruitment and retention crisis? Well, where do I begin? Our workload is unmanageable. To paraphrase our Vice Principal, each teacher is doing the equivalent of two jobs, that’s how stretched we are. I am a Head of Year – a position in which one would expect to teach fewer lessons. Not a bit of it. I have a full timetable and teach thirteen separate classes, seven of which I share with different colleagues. I now teach more lessons than I did before my promotion.

In addition, the behaviour of our pupils is atrocious – a factor that immeasurably adds to everyone’s workload and general stress levels. We spend a huge amount of time dealing with feral children when we should be marking books, planning lessons and, yes, spending time with our more respectful, hard-working kids.

Misguided school leaders have spent decades encouraging their staff to view children – even those with criminality etched into their souls – as infallible. This Rousseauian philosophy conspired with the social and moral revolutionary movements of the 1960s to challenge and erode the authority of the teacher. Children were not to blame for their misdeeds – they’re pure and innocent – it was society, controlled by corruptible and corrupting adults, that was at fault. This philosophy still endures, as is demonstrated by my school, day-in, day-out.

Violent children are never excluded. It’s never their fault, you see. They’ve been corrupted. The result: chaos, a Hobbesian nightmare as children fight for their survival, the bullied recoil in fear and us teachers, bereft of authority, suffer physical and verbal abuse on a daily basis.

So, Mr Hinds, you want to reverse the staffing crisis? Then deal with the above. Force Ofsted to scrutinise school behaviour policies, encourage schools to protect their teachers, even urge them to permanently exclude violent pupils if necessary. And crucially, penalise them if they don’t.

Extend the Free School policy to encourage the birth of new units for violent and psychologically disturbed children, thereby reversing Blunkett’s cruel inclusion policy and relieving the pressure on mainstream schools and educators. These kids need to be helped by specialists. Lastly, and again through Ofsted, penalise senior leaders who create unnecessary work for their teaching staff. That should make trigger-happy head teachers, all too prepared to pile task upon task, think twice.

Sorry if I appear cynical, Mr Hinds, but this could and should have been done years ago.

First published on The Telegraph website on 11th May

Divorce is responsible for our crime epidemic

Violent crime is up. Police numbers are down. There must be an inverse correlation between the two, surely. It stands to reason. Cressida Dick, the metropolitan police commissioner, certainly thinks so, as does Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor. 

We’re in the midst of a crime epidemic, nominally due to the Government’s - and, in particular, Theresa May’s - short-sighted cuts to the policing budget - a decision that’s unavoidably led to a reduction in police numbers. Indeed, the number of police officers in England and Wales has fallen by over 20,000 since 2010. In the year ending in December 2017, moreover, ostensibly as a result of these cuts, there was a 22 percent increase in knife crime and an 11 percent increase in offences involving firearms. Violent crime’s certainly on the up. Since the beginning of the year, London has even seen more homicides than New York. No mean feat, I’m sure you’ll agree.

But is it really caused by a reduction in police numbers? I have my doubts. According to Home Office data, there are now more police officers per capita than during the 1960s. There are 462 people for every officer in contrast to 807 in 1961. One could be excused for thinking that, based on this measure - and based on the intuitive assumptions of negative correlation espoused by such luminaries as Cressida Dick and Sadiq Khan -, crime must have decreased during this period. After all, both proportionately and in terms of total numbers, there are now more police officers on the streets than there were back in 1961, right? Wrong. 

Crime has risen exponentially. In 1961 there were only 806,000 recorded crimes compared to 5.2 million in 2017. When one considers both the statistical and anecdotal evidence - in which people old enough to know recall going out and leaving their front doors unlocked - the general trend of rising crime since the late 1950s is irrefutable. On average, there were 1 million recorded crimes committed annually throughout the 1960s, rising to 2 million in the 1970s and 3.5 million in the Eighties. Even if we allow for the more rigorous recording of crime as a partial explanation for these statistical differences, the general trend is hard to ignore.

For homicides, moreover, a crime for which recording methods have not drastically altered, the growth in cases is clear, despite an increase in the number of police officers. If indeed there is a negative correlation between the number of police officers and the volume of crimes committed in England and Wales, we haven’t seen the evidence to support it yet.

So, if it isn’t the evil Tories and their inhumane, vindictive cuts, what is responsible for the recent spike in crime? 

In my view, this question is a distraction - a distraction used by liberal-leftists to score cheap political points and divert attention from the real causes of soaring crime rates over the last 50-60 years. How can we possibly draw meaningful conclusions from a recent development that could be an aberration? Such conclusions invariably lead to misguided responses that do more harm than good, after all. 

No, we need to look at longer term trends in an effort to get a fuller, more accurate picture - trends that show, notwithstanding a relative decrease during the late Nineties and Noughties, an increase in crime over the last 50-odd years. 

As mentioned above, this is not the result of having fewer police officers - numbers have actually risen. Neither is it the malign consequence of increased poverty levels. Both relative- and absolute-poverty have declined since the 1950s. 

It seems to be, all things considered, the unique product of an increase in family breakdown, a concomitant rise in drug misuse and the stubborn refusal of our betters to adequately punish and deter offenders. 

Seven out of 10 prison inmates come from broken homes. According to a recent study, moreover, children from such homes are nine times more likely to end up in prison and significantly more likely to abuse illegal drugs. It is therefore no surprise that since the Sixties, as the number of broken homes has inexorably risen, so too has the number of recorded crimes. 

In addition, prison - when eventually offenders do get there - has ceased to be an adequate deterrent. Inmates have televisions, games consoles and relatively short sentences. They have unfettered access to illegal drugs, too. In short, they are treated as victims rather than criminals - that’s why our reoffending rates are so high.

These causal factors are the progeny of the irreverent, subversive Sixties - a decade that challenged conservative attitudes, traditional values and the rigid social boundaries that accompanied them. Moral and cultural certainty was replaced by the creed of non-judgementalism, through which different ways of living were deemed equally valid. Christianity became an anachronism, abortion was legalised and divorce, that enemy of societal stability, was made more accessible and acceptable for unhappy couples. 

In addition, anarchic, nihilistic rock-stars encouraged drug misuse as an act of rebellion against old, crusty fuddy-duddies and their suffocating conventionality. And our justice system, in the vice-like grip of a revolutionary ideology that still endures today, endeavoured to stop judging criminals by normal standards of behaviour. Henceforth, they would be seen as unwitting victims of their unique socio-cultural and economic circumstances. They are casualties of an unjust society, driven to criminality by desperation and despair. As a consequence, only in the most extreme cases would long prison sentences served in austere conditions be fair.  

Some of these developments were undoubtedly liberating. For example, single parents and women who had chosen to have abortions were no longer harangued and insulted for their choices. However, there was an altogether darker side to them. As divorce rates increased, so too did childhood angst, adolescent drug abuse - promoted by influential celebrities, remember? - and criminal activity before, ultimately, incarceration at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Non-judgementalism and soft-sentencing encouraged further criminality, as well. It was a radical social and cultural shift, driven, aided and abetted by leftist hardliners like Jeremy Corbyn.

Not that you would know. With the help of the mainstream media, such individuals have hidden these inconvenient truths and constructed a new, fanciful narrative in which crime was under control until the Tory Government’s reckless cuts to the police budget. To fit this ahistorical claptrap, they focus on a short term relative spike in crime, from which it’s impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions concerning causation. It’s one great big red herring.

In the real world, crime has been on the increase since the 1960s, despite a significant rise in police numbers. Furthermore, it has increased because of the liberal non-judgementalism espoused by people like Corbyn and the right’s craven surrender to their intimidatory wailing. When will a Tory politician stick his or her head above the parapet and say so?

I suspect that powerful interests have covered up the circumstances surrounding Ann Maguire’s death

Ann Maguire was a dedicated teacher, utterly devoted to the children in her care. She had worked in the teaching profession for over four decades, had a loving husband, two grown-up daughters and, after the death of her sister 30 years earlier, selflessly raised her two nephews as her own. She was a good person who clearly cared about others. But tragically, back in 2014, she was brutally murdered by a disturbed and deranged pupil. She was attacked and stabbed seven times in her classroom, as she marked another pupil’s work.

Since then, disgracefully, her bereaved husband’s attempts to find out about the circumstances surrounding her death have been met by a wall of silence. A secretive internal report was followed by an inquest in which the coroner refused to interview the killer’s friends and classmates – quite an omission when investigating, among other things, whether the murderer had evinced any signs of what was to come in the weeks and months leading up to the crime, I would suggest. 

Needless to say, both concluded that the school was not to blame in any way for Mrs Maguire’s tragic death; it had not failed in its statutory duty to protect her welfare at work; in short, there’s nothing to see here, guv. 

This, I’m almost certain, is utter hogwash. Over my 15-year teaching career, I’ve worked in lots of different schools, and, without exception, in every single one of them, senior leaders and school governors have failed in their duty to protect their staff. Teachers are assaulted with impunity. Sometimes we’re even blamed for the assaults we suffer, as though we’ve somehow aggravated and antagonised our attackers. 

In the real world, you’d be forgiven for assuming that violent pupils are permanently excluded in an effort to protect their peers and, of course, us teachers – we’re humans too! But you would be very much mistaken. Pupils who attack their peers and teachers are rarely permanently excluded. They may experience a week in isolation or, in some schools, a brief suspension, but they are, as I say, rarely permanently excluded.

So teachers and pupils are expected to run the gauntlet, day-in, day-out, anxiously awaiting the next outburst from our more violent charges, with not so much as a whisper of protest. If we do, we risk attracting the opprobrium of our senior leaders and, in my case, our CEO.

I currently work in a school that refuses to exclude pupils, no matter how violent. Indeed, our most severe punishment is a brief spell in isolation. The result: anarchy and chaos, a brutish Hobbesian nightmare as children, unprotected and fearful, fight for their survival. 

Others simply leave, hoping that their next school will be different. Last week, a pupil was forced to leave after being attacked a second time by an unrepentant thug. His parents, understandably, chose to move him. The alternative was to throw him to the wolves. The trouble is, his new school will probably be no different – at least we’re honest about our no-exclusion policy. As a head of year, since September, I’ve admitted several new pupils desperate to escape violence and bullying in their previous schools. To my shame, I am prohibited from telling them that our school is no different. If anything, it’s probably worse.

One of my colleagues, moreover, has been absent for the last seven days. He was attacked by a pupil who repeatedly slammed a door into his back. Astonishingly, the pupil was back in school the very next day. Another deeply disturbed boy has physically attacked his peers and two of my colleagues. He also keeps threatening to stab us. He really is a tragedy waiting to happen. God forbid, if the worst should happen, and he was to maim, hospitalise or even kill someone, the school would be responsible. It could not honestly say that the warning signs weren’t there, could it?

I suspect that Ann Maguire’s school had a number of warning signs before her tragic end, too. That’s why they’ve seemingly done everything to obstruct a thorough, transparent investigation – an investigation that would not only expose the school’s failings but start a nationwide conversation about the abject failure, no refusal, of schools to protect their staff and pupils from violent thugs. 

Such a conversation would reveal the widespread incompetence of senior leaders and education trusts – in thrall to discredited progressive ideas that proscribe the punishment of poorly behaved pupils – the inadequate nature of our organisational structures (in short, we need more special schools for violent and emotionally disturbed children), the failure of the unions to protect their members and the egregious state of Ofsted’s inspection regime. 

When you consider these myriad failings and the vested interests that their exposure would harm, a cover-up seems eminently preferable for everyone involved – everyone, that is, except Ann Maguire’s family.

First published on The Spectator Coffee House Blog on 10th May 2018