Twenty Years Ago

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are celebrations planned in Berlin.

There was no victory parade to mark the fall of communism or the end of the Cold War.

Wouldn't the establishment of an annual Europe-wide national holiday be one way of keeping the memory of this monumental event alive for future generations?

Meanwhile, a couple of pieces in the press today weigh the significance of the event. In a ridiculous piece in the Times, Mikhail Gorbachev stretches comparison and credulity to the point almost of offensiveness:

In the 1980s the world was at an historic crossroad. The arms race had created an explosive situation. Nuclear deterrents could have failed at any moment. We were heading for disaster, spending billions on an arms race, rather than investing in creativity and people.

Today another planetary threat has emerged. The climate crisis is the new wall that divides us from our future, and today’s leaders are vastly underestimating the urgency, and potentially catastrophic scale, of the emergency. People used to joke that we will struggle for peace until there is nothing left on the planet; the threat of climate change makes this prophecy more literal than ever. Comparisons with the period immediately before the Berlin Wall came down are striking.

On the other hand Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail nails it:

Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture...

This was what might be called 'cultural Marxism'. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped...

These ideas gained general traction within the intelligentsia, the universities and the media - which is why the BBC is so institutionally skewed towards political correctness. Totalitarian However, the terrifying fact is that they form a totalitarian mindset that replicates the way communist societies clamped down on any other than permitted views...

This mindset also led to the belief that a sense of nationhood was the cause of all the ills in the world, precisely because western nations embodied western values. So transnational institutions or doctrines such as the EU, UN, international law or human rights law came to trump national laws and values...

When the Berlin Wall fell, we told ourselves that this was the end of ideology. We could not have been more wrong. The Iron Curtain came down only to be replaced by a rainbow-hued knuckle-duster, as our cultural commissars pulverise all forbidden attitudes in order to reshape western society into a post-democratic, post-Christian, post-moral universe. Lenin would have smiled.

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Finally, the truth emerges?

The furore over last week's Question Time and the appearance of the BNP's Nick Griffin, and the media speculation as to whether it has helped or hindered him and his odious band of brothers, should not be allowed to overshadow some information on the immigration issue which emerged at the end of the week and which, if accurate, is breathtaking in its significance.

Andrew Neather, who worked for Jack Straw when he was Home Secretary, and as a speech writer for Tony Blair, claimed a secret Government report in 2000 called for mass immigration to change Britain's cultural make-up forever.

Neather claimed that earlier, unpublished versions of the report made clear that one aim was to make Britain more multi-cultural for political reasons.

'I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date,' he said.

Nothing about the needs of the economy then, or the usual mantra about how booming Britain simply could not cope without mass immigration (this explanation has been allowed to quietly disappear of course, now that we're in the worst recession for half a century).

No, this was a social, cultural matter. In its political cynicism it is almost beyond belief. In the utter contempt it shows for the country at large, it amounts to a form of betrayal by the very people put in place to lead it.

If one needed any proof of the existance of a culture war (and trust me, there are many who do), this is it. If, before this was reported last week, one had claimed that the motives behind the encouragement of mass immigration was to permenantly alter the country's identity and spite your political enemies, one would have been accused of peddling paronoid conspiracy theories. But as Melanie Phillips points out today, we now have it from the horse's mouth.

This'policy' has led directly to the growth of groups like the BNP. It is surely no wonder that Straw looked so nervous on Question Time last week.

The Conservatives cannot afford not to speak out on this.   

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Culture is Right?

NCF Director Peter Whittle will be speaking at this week's Culture is Right two-day conference at the Unicorn Theatre, organised by Business of Culture Ltd.

Details of the event can be found here: http://cultureisright2009.eventbrite.com/

The other speakers are:

ED VAIZEY, SHADOW ARTS MINISTER

ALAN DAVEY, CEO ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND

MUNIRA MIRZA, DIRECTOR OF ARTS STRATEGY, GLA

ROY CLARE, CEO, MUSEUMS & LIBRARIES ASSOCIATION

TONY HALL, CEO ROYAL OPERA HOUSE & CHAIR, CULTURAL OLYMPIAD

GAVIN HENDERSON, DIRECTOR CENTRAL SCHOOL OF SPEECH & DRAMA/DARTINGTON SUMMER SCHOOL

COLIN TWEEDY, CEO, ARTS & BUSINESS

RICHARD HALL, EX CEO ADVERTISING SECTOR & CREATIVE COMMENTATOR

BEATRIZ GARCIA, DIRECTOR, IMPACTS 08, LIVERPOOL’S EUROPEAN CITY OF CULTURE RESEARCH PROGRAMME

TOM BEWICK, CEO, CREATIVE & CULTURAL SKILLS

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The Lessons of Education

Education has become less and less a means of passing on knowledge, and increasingly the method of transforming society, says Guy Stagg

Much ink will be spilt over the last word on New Labour. And yet Tony Blair wrote his project’s epitaph twelve years ago. Thrice. The wide-eyed promise of ‘education, education, education’ is now dimmed with cynicism and disappointment. However, as a final judgement, it will do.

Labour’s promise has failed at every level. Over nine years the UK has fallen from third to 11th in the OECD international education league tables. We still have among the largest primary school classes in the Western World. 40% of boys beginning secondary school are unable to write fluently and correctly. One fifth of children leave secondary school without a single C at GCSE, and more than half of those leaving comprehensives fail to get the basic requirement of five passes.

Beyond compulsory education, the failures become more telling. The Office of National Statistics confirmed in 2007 that A-level students capable of getting only a C two decades ago could now expect an A. Having sat exams year after year, teenagers find that their list of qualifications carry about as much weight as the CVs they are printed on. They can progress to become the first lot of students hit with top-up fees, and graduate just in time to enter an empty job market.

Following the Second World War, education became less and less a means of passing on knowledge, and increasingly the method of transforming society. But it was New Labour that anointed education as the emblem of all policy. Education was a political playing field, upon which they fought a class war. As Blair characterised in 2000, it is 'a first-class ticket for life’; as university think tank Million+ argued more recently, it is ‘the engine of social mobility’.

And social mobility is the cause that has failed most significantly. This summer 13,000 children got three As at A-level. A hugely disproportionate number came from independent schools. Only 189 were eligible for free school meals; the poorest eighth of society accounting for less than 1.5% of the top grades. And comprehensives have served to further this divide between state and private education. Furthermore, with the removal of assisted places schemes and the majority of student grants, the higher levels of education are more than ever an indulgence for the middle classes. The government have hindered the very mobility they hoped to encourage, punished the very people they hoped to protect. This is why the failures of education condemn the New Labour project.

The LSE has found that amongst advanced nations Britain has the least social mobility. What is more the opportunities gap between rich and poor is growing. Education must play an important role in countering this. However Labour have fundamentally misunderstood this role. Education should enable and encourage social mobility, but not drive it. Education as egalitarian engine gives us inflated A-level results, unrealistic university admissions targets, and was the reasoning that saw off grammar schools. Such top down, big government policies have defeated themselves. Michael Gove’s proposed education policy seems to recognise this, and offer instead the devolution of responsibility to individual schools and the expanding of opportunity to individual parents. This autonomy of choice is an expression of liberal conservatism. For at this debate’s heart is the difference is between the Right and the Left’s understanding of a liberal society: you can facilitate freedom, but not force it.

I graduated this summer, nursing a hangover and £21,000 of debt, and joined the ranks of the ‘Lost Generation’. Together we have grown up with a government that tries to put a price on ideology, and measure the value of an education. The idea is that a degree is not only a ticket to a better life, but that the value of that ticket can be calculated, and printed to the nearest pound. And so the irony of the recession is rather brutal: the value has plunged and the plane is full. But this irony teaches an important lesson: engines and tickets – the metaphors with which New Labour have articulated the function and worth of education – demonstrate a profound failure of understanding. We have a lot to learn.

Guy Stagg graduated this summer, and currently works at the Telegraph

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