'Nother Solent

I often like to muse on how vastly superior I am

compared to those younger and older than myself. Compared to the rising generation I am better educated, have better morals and more elevated pleasures, and am more honest and peaceable. Compared to the old I have fewer grey hairs and smoother skin. And I can do sit ups, which a lot of them can't, you know.

Despite my evident superiority I do try to see these crumpled-looking creatures as fellow human beings (fellow citizens, even!) with the same rights and duties as the rest of us.

Do you think I am over-optimistic? Would it be more realistic of me to think that, like toddlers, old people should be ignored when their bellowing disrupts social functions?

Along with half the country, the leadership of the Labour party seems to think so. I didn't see, either on film or in person, Walter Wolfgang being ejected from the Labour conference, so I don't know if the amount of force used was reasonable or not. (Perhaps I still wouldn't know even if I had seen it; like sporting fouls these things are difficult to judge from outside.) If the fulsome apologies coming from the Labour leadership are for excessive force used upon an elderly man then apologies are right and proper. However from what I have heard they are apologising for the ejection itself.

Why? Surely the Labour party is entitled to set the rules for its own conference. If the rules specify "no heckling" then hecklers old or young must expect to be ejected - although the stewards should be careful to use no more force than is absolutely necessary, and be doubly careful if the heckler is old or frail.

But that wasn't the only way in which the apology seemed misdirected. Buried in the story and not, at first, attracting much comment was one thing that left me flabbergasted. For this Tony Blair and his entire government should get down on their knees and humbly beg forgiveness, swearing at the same time not to rest until the harm they have allowed to flourish is undone:

Police later used powers under the Terrorism Act to prevent Mr Wolfgang's re-entry, but he was not arrested.

I am amazed to discover that the WRP still exists.

Years ago they were the outfit Bernard Levin always used to call "Vanessa's Loonies." The party had a brief moment of tabloid fame in the mid-eighties when its onetime leader, Gerry Healy, was denounced after one of its innumerable splits for activities that gave a whole new meaning to the phrase "revolutionary congress". In one of the columns in his collection Now Read On, Levin speculated that

"if a quarter of the conquests attributed to Mr Gerry Healy (Vanessa's chef de cabinet) were real, he must have spent very considerably more time at, er, bonking than at planning the expropriation of the capitalist hyenas, which may account for the fact that the capitalist hyenas are still unexpropriated."

History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second as farce.

So said Karl Marx. A fine saying - pity about the rest of his legacy. He would not have intended it to cover such a frivolous sort of history as the doings of playwrights and players, but it does, and the little bit of repeated history I would like to post about features some of his most loyal devotees.

The BBC has cast Corin Redgrave's Marxist wife as Margaret Thatcher according to the Telegraph.

In what could be seen as a perverse insult to Lady Thatcher, the BBC has cast Kika Markham, a member of the Left-wing Redgrave dynasty and supporter of the Workers Revolutionary Party, as Britain's first female prime minister.

I think we can dispense with the "could be seen"; of course it is an insult, although not a particularly peverse one. Who cares? Political insults are the stuff of life, and books and plays. For all I know the results will be splendid. Ms Markham is saying the right things:

Markham said: "I think portraying someone like this can be more difficult if you are a socialist because you have such strong preconceptions and views about her. As an actor, however, you have to wipe those away. You have got to be as truthful and objective as you possibly can."

Then again, if she's a supporter of the Workers' Revolutionary Party she may have an idiosyncratic view of the meaning of the words "truth" and "objectivity."

Perhaps Ms Markham could go for advice to her sister in law.

In 1980 I watched a TV movie called Playing for Time, written by Arthur Miller. The film told the story of Fania Fénelon, who played in the infamous camp orchestra at Auschwitz.

Vanessa Redgrave played Fénelon. (Vanessa's brother Corin is Kita Markham's husband.) Her performance was widely praised, and I remember it as being excellent.

Yet I also remember catching one of those short "personal view" programmes where someone talks direct to the camera about some issue dear to his or her heart. The speaker was an old woman, Fania Fénelon herself. She described how hurt she was that her life story, that of a Jew persecuted for being a Jew, had been depicted on film by a woman who said that the remaining Jews had no right to find refuge in Israel.

"Cooing should be a thing of the past," says a newly famous ward sister at Calderdale Royal Hospital, where visitors to the maternity wing have been ordered not to fuss over babies lest the babies' right to privacy be violated.

Staff in one of the wards have put up a display of a doll in a cot with a message saying: "What makes you think I want to be looked at?"

Since you ask: the custom and practice of all cultures past and present; the massed opinions of psychologists, paediatricians, doctors and midwives; and the instinctive and joyful reaction of every new parent that I have ever met.

The hospital is now backtracking like mad and saying it's all to do with avoiding infection. Fair enough, I can see that might be a problem for premature or sickly babies. But the slogan on the doll didn't mention infection.

If you do not read

the Britblog roundup you will die!

Eventually.

"Students' writing skills have worsened

so dramatically that lecturers at some of the country's most prestigious universities are calling for undergraduates to gain literacy certificates before submitting coursework," reports the Independent. The article continues:

Despite ever-improving A-level results, academics at universities such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow complain that school-leavers arrive ill- equipped to perform the most basic essay-writing tasks. To deal with the growing problem, institutions are now being forced to offer remedial classes in English, and lecturers want students to prove they have reached a certain level of competence.

It is a teensy bit unfortunate that the next paragraph begins:

With drop-out rates risisng...

The Blackboard Jungle - wilder in Suffolk than Glasgow

JEM writes:

My wife used to teach in one of the worst comprehensive schools in one of the worst sink estates (Drumchapel) in Glasgow.

Nowadays she teaches in a so-called specialist technical secondary school in rural Suffolk, not far from Cambridge.

Admittedly, she ceased teaching in Glasgow some twenty years ago when we moved here, but nevertheless she keeps in touch with her old teaching colleagues and so still has a pretty firm finger on the pulse of the educational situation up there as well as in East Anglia.

She is quite certain that discipline, quality of teaching, and educational outcome is far worse here than in Glasgow.

Pupils are not models of good behavior up north, but those in Suffolk are distinctly worse, with far higher levels of serious classroom disturbance and violence, suspensions and incidents requiring police intervention.

Teachers in Scotland are on average more professional than in England. This is because in Scottish secondary schools only honours graduates can teach, and then only the subject they graduated in.

A number of Scottish secondary pupils do not know the alphabet or cannot tell the time, but that's much more common here. And examination results have not been nearly so devalued in Scotland; 98% pass rates remain unknown.

JEM