Slugger O'Toole

Latest comments from Malcolm Redfellow (see all)

Malcolm Redfellow has commented 2,048 times (46 in the last month).

1. Comment on Gove calls for a split with Wales and NI on GCSE and A Level reform…
   on 22 May 2013 at 12:20 am

   cynic2 @ 10:44 pm:

   I detest Gove, and all his works. Thank geography and everything else he cannot dictate to NI!

   Let us not deny that in any comparators the “best” [= selective, fee-paying] NI schools perform astoundingly well in all those populist newspaper UK tables. Nothing can change that. Pull all the plugs: those schools go [semi-]independent, on the back of the revenue of Mum and Dad.

   What matters, though, is the quality offered to the masses below the “bourgeois”.

   That is, in NI or UK (and even, let me suggest, RoI), the Big Issue.

   If there’s one lesson we ought to have learned it’s that the young climber upward then cannot turn his/her back and pull the ladder up after her or him [N.B. — my Shakespearean reference for this post]. In this world economy, we are all in it together.

   So, where are we?

   Well, I’d go back more than a century. My favourite point of reference in Shaw’s Man and Superman from 1903. Yes: I’ve traipsed this out repetitively. Shaw — let us recall — was actually involved in education. He was a member of the London County Council, founder of the LSE.

   So, in 1903 he writes this play: Man and Superman. The “Superman” is the mechanic, [H]Enry Straker, who maintains the car of the nominal- and romantic-hero (Tanner):
   

   Tanner:: What was that Board School of yours, Straker?
   Straker:: Sherbrooke Road.
   Tanner:: Sherbrooke Road! Would any of us say Rugby! Harrow! Eton! in that tone of intellectual snobbery? Sherbrooke Road is a place where boys learn something: Eton is a boy farm where we are sent because we are nuisances at home, and because in after life, whenever a Duke is mentioned, we can claim him as an old school-fellow.
   Straker:: You don’t know nothing about it, Mr Tanner. It’s not the Board School that does it: it’s the Polytechnic.
   Tanner:: His university, Octavius. Not Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Dublin, or Glasgow. Not even those Non-conformist holes in Wales… Regent Street! Chelsea! the Borough! — I don’t know half their confounded names: these are his universities, not mere shops for selling class limitations like ours. You despise Oxford, Enry, don’t you?
   Tanner:: No, I don’t. Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the Polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?

   Precisely. And in Germany and Austria they put Eng. as a mark of honour on your gravestone.

   OK: in the absence of any way of reviewing this piece, I hope I’ve closed every HTML code I’ve opened. If not …

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2. Comment on Azerbaijan Presidential Inquiry over Eurovision Vote
   on 21 May 2013 at 4:29 pm

   Houston — well, at least its local branch, ℅ Pete Baker at this address — we have a problem.

   I keep confusing President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan with the late (and doubtless sometime lamented) President Saparmurat Türkmenbaşy of Turkmenistan and indeed with ex-President for Life Trff Bmzklfrpz of Greater Berzerkistan.

   Alas: it gets worse. Without a map, I wouldn’t know my Azerbaijan from my Turkmenistan, and my Tajikistan from Kyrgyzstan. All I know is I’m not vacationing in any of them.

   Is this the onset of the feared Alzheimer’s?

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3. Comment on Gove calls for a split with Wales and NI on GCSE and A Level reform…
   on 21 May 2013 at 3:02 pm

   I fear Gove has not recalled the awful warning Grimes gives Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall [Chapter 10, post Mortem]:

   “Take my tip, old boy; never get mixed up in a Welsh wrangle. It doesn’t end in blows, like an Irish one, but goes on for ever.”

   But if anyone here really, really understands what Gove is on or up to, let the rest of us know. Before it’s too late. Most of us suspect the end-result will be something like Mr Levy, of Church and Gargoyle, scholastic agents, telling Paul Pennyfeather:

   “We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly,’ said Mr Levy, ‘School is pretty bad. I think you’ll find it a very suitable post.’ “

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4. Comment on Radical Independence & The Jamaican, Ugandan & Pakistani UKIP candidates
   on 20 May 2013 at 11:12 am

   Kilsally @ 10:15 am:

   Ah, yes! the BNP list. I remember it well. It provided me with ample opportunities for research and amusement; and added greatly to my blog’s stat-porn. Four-and-a-half years on, that one still gets hits, almost daily.

   But: “dozens of Labour, tory, Lib Dem and Green Party supporters names on it”? Not so: I know three of those organisations well enough to be sure that joint membership with any other party, let alone the BNP, is not allowed.

   As for the Nasir Ahmed, he “resigned” (13 May, two days before he was almost certainly going to be expelled by the NEC) after he was twice suspended (April 2012, suspension lifted when it demonstrated he had been misquoted, and again in March 2013). According to Michael Crick, as far back as 2008, Ahmed was angling to get into the Tory Party. To their credit, the Tories were unwilling to lay out the welcoming red carpet. Anyway, another advertisement for the abolition of the Lords and of the Prime Ministerial patronage that goes with it.

   I’m a long-term student of these noxious back-alleys of politics; and recall with near-despair such excesses as:

   ☞ Tory MP Gerald Nabarro’s alcohol-inspired rant on Any Questions: “How would you feel if your daughter wanted to marry a big buck nigger with the prospect of coffee-coloured grandchildren?” (5 April 1963). Nabarro, of course, patented the Huhne driving ploy — though he got away with it (1971).

   ☞ The unofficially-acknowledged (but very real) 1964 poster and leaflet campaign of Peter Griffiths at Smethwick: “If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour”. Although that succeeded in displacing Patrick Gordon Walker as MP, few Tories would ever happily sit too close to Griffiths in the Commons, even when he was re-treaded for Portsmouth.

   There are, admittedly, the odd ex-BNP types who have sneaked under the wire and into the Labour Party. Off the top of my head, there’s Trevor Maxfield at Darwen and Maureen Stowe in Burnley (Kippers are recycling that one, nine years on).

   Isn’t a loon (Gavia pacifica) the same family as our local diver (Gavia immer)? I feel a convoluted pun about “duckers and divers” coming on. Needs work, yet.

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5. Comment on Taking years off your life – NI life expectancy deprivation gaps show increase over last decade
   on 19 May 2013 at 8:41 pm

   [N.B. The following was typed, but not posted, an hour back.]

   I’d have to suggest the way these figures are presented makes them as indigestible as possible.

   For me the Guardian’s version, comparing by health regions, is at least as telling. And what it tells is actually quite shocking: for men, only Orkney has a worse “improvement” than Belfast; for women Belfast, is worst — if only just.

   I cannot for the life [sic] of me see what bus-stops have to do with it. That’s only a PR-man’s translation of “N[orthern] I[reland] M[ultiple] D[eprivation] M[easure] Ward rank”. The official guide specifically says that NIMDM ranking:
   “is a relative measure of deprivation and so it cannot be used to determine how much more deprived one area is from another.”

   So, for once, I accept part of Harry Flashman‘s point.

   Why not specify the Ward (which involves where people live), rather than anything to do with the irrelevant Translink?

   We know that life-expectancy is a function of social class: that is well established. Just ask why housing- and working-conditions link to circulatory disease and cancer (which used also to be the case with killers like TB). So is the improvement in life-expectancy.

   Across the UK the best gains were achieved in Kensington and Chelsea, and in Westminster. What is questionable is whether that reflects decanting more vulnerable social classes (i.e should we be invoking changes in house-prices — as a correlating factor?). Or is it a matter of hearing the messages?

   I’m suggesting the main issue here is health-education. Health education is actually quite cheap: it is very cost-efficient compared to most other interventions. Clearly, NI’s health education is failing in comparison with all other parts of the UK. So, someone, somewhere is “responsible” (which, in my book, means “answerable”).

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6. Comment on Has the Protestant Working Class lost out in the Peace Process?
   on 19 May 2013 at 5:42 pm

   sonofstrongbow @ 5:37 pm:

   … a nationalist defined Irish (mono) culture …

   I guess you’ve never stood between a Dubliner and a Corkman at the same bar.

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7. Comment on Radical Independence & The Jamaican, Ugandan & Pakistani UKIP candidates
   on 19 May 2013 at 5:09 pm

   Sorry, UPC, I looked back at that earlier thread. All I see is my excess of quoted journalism. One precise citation was:

   Martin Williams’ piece for the Herald Scotland [7 Sep 2010]. He made it clear that it was a Scots-led vice gang which spent £50,000 advertising brothels in the Northern Ireland capital.

   Far from suggesting “all Scottish people are signed up UVF members”, which would be arrant nonsense, the focus was on Ashleigh Beuken, Yvonne Dawson. Malcolm McNeill, and Stephen Craig. They all had Scottish addresses, and were reckoned by the prosecution to have made £2½ million from the Belfast sex-trade. Just four names: I make that 0.00007612% of the population of Scotland.

   Please assist me, and this exchange, further with a precise cut-and-paste.

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8. Comment on Has the Protestant Working Class lost out in the Peace Process?
   on 19 May 2013 at 4:44 pm

   I’ve just done something I do not recall from any previous Slugger thread: I printed off the whole thing so far. I wanted to study it as a text.

   Then I tried to think through a summation. It came out remarkably similar to that by Brian Walker @ 2:23 pm.

   Then, to muse on …

   Why is NI so different? After all, most of the social comparisons are not greatly out of line with the rest of the UK. Certainly not to the extent they were historically.

   For a start, it is not to my mind quite the case propounded by Gareth Mulvenna:

   While the white working class of the East End have adapted to the refashioning or withdraw into a familiar sense of British identity by moving away from the area, the Protestant working class in parts of Belfast are arguably still coming to terms with the breakdown of community and civic structures which occurred in the early 1970s.

   I had to revisit and old stamping ground — Dagenham and beyond (“not so much mad, as seven stops beyond Barking”) — three times in recent weeks. What was interesting is the old Becontree Estate is one of the few areas in London where the Union Flag, and more commonly the cross of St George, are commonly flown. Note that is not the same as #flegs: it is largely a continued protest against ethnic mixing. That means the “white working class” (frequently third and fourth generation immigrants themselves, many from Ireland, imported to the Ford plant) feel “their” housing stock is being alienated.

   So what is the gripe among the “Protestant working class”? It is more to do with status, and the lost right to swagger.

   That leads me on to the main difference of NI “Britishness”. The ambition of those patriotic NI “Britons” appears to have again a statelet all of their very own. As they had between June 1922 and March 1972; and which was so badly managed, it relied on oppression and coercion. The Ulster Unionism of that half-century is still felt by many to be the norm.

   We’ve been waiting a while for the next bit of Chris Donnelly‘s analysis. So far he focused on employment (or not) and education.

   Now, as I recall in 1923 unemployment in NI was 23%. By 1938 it had risen to near 30%. Much of that total and disproportionately more of the increase seems to have impacted on the topic here: the Protestant working class of Belfast. H&W was down to some 1500 employees. The “Wee Yard” had long gone. There were the unemployed disturbances of 1924, 1926 and 1932. I’d be asking why the social order then was side-tracked into the later Protestant sectarianism, by whom, and to what effect.

   Today there is the odd isolated pocket where unemployment reaches those levels of the pre-War period: as I recall, Larne — those 260 jobs at FG Wilson — and Magherafelt in particular. I believe [West] Belfast is rapidly matching Derry as a jobs black-spot? But even then no worse than (say) Hull or Middlesbrough. And certainly well below parts of Birmingham.

   Finally, that photograph in the headline piece. I don’t know whether the presence of two women represents “equal opportunities”; but balding males of a certain age and girth seem to predominate.

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9. Comment on Radical Independence & The Jamaican, Ugandan & Pakistani UKIP candidates
   on 19 May 2013 at 4:40 am

   Yes, indeed: students are revolting. It’s what they always were. Long may the tradition persist. Massed ranks of obedience and dutiful compliance are contrary to Scottish, archipelagian, or even European natures. Anyway, it annoys the hell out of Gradgrinds and Goveians.

   I’d stand by my assertions that:

   1. There are some deeply unpleasant types who have opportunistically thrown their lot in with UKIP (see above for examples).

   2. There is something wacky, tacky and rackety about the whole UKIP operation. Witness the number of resignations, expulsions, and profiteerings at public expense over recent years.

   But also:

   3. Kippery has added to the general laugh-level of UK politics. Where else could one find an eccentric like Godfrey Bloom and his “clean behind the fridge”?

   Which brings me, by close association, to “swivel-eyed loons”. Even that has upsides.. Suddenly Andrew Feldman has a public profile that reaches beyond 0.0001% of the politically aware.. And, as the ultimate example of local humour, the twitterati have spent half their weekend obsessing and conflicting over the better hash tag: #loongate or #swivelgate?

   There is hope for us yet.

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10. Comment on Radical Independence & The Jamaican, Ugandan & Pakistani UKIP candidates
    on 19 May 2013 at 12:00 am

    @UPC

    Huh?

    Give me a clue? Date? Context?

    I don’t do sweeping generalisations sober. That one seems over the top, even lubricated.

    Put up or shut up.

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