Yesterday I marked some essays, did more work on preparing next term’s teaching, produced supporting materials for an ongoing political literacy schools project and had a productive online meeting with a postgrad about his dissertation. I followed a new recipe for green coconut rice, and made some red pepper and tomato sauce from garden produce; I had a cup of espresso by the pond, watching water boatmen, dragonfly nymphs and water snails; I detected six different species of bat. And this is all good, and helps keep me grounded, and helps fend off the VAST BLACK ABYSS FULL OF TOXIC FUMES AND ENDLESS SCREAMING THAT IS EVERYTHING ELSE.
Where do you start? Where do you stop? Every single aspect of the coronavirus response, from the complacency to the hopeless messaging to threats callous indifference to the double standards to the assumption that firms like Serco will always be better than local authorities or other public bodies to the handing multi-million pound contracts to firms without even the track record of Serco that just happen to be owned by donors or advisers. The willingness to wander aimlessly into a no-deal Brexit on the assumption that we’ll be too preoccupied with coronavirus to notice. The OH LOOK OVER THERE, BLACK PEOPLE IN BOATS! INVASION, CRISIS, CALL OUT THE NAVY! All the rest of the casual racism. That honours list. The constant lying. The dead cats all the way down.
And we have, what, another four years of this before we have any hope of getting them out? – unless they decide they’re in an unassailable position and decide to go early to reinforce their position. I can see the rationale for an opposition strategy of avoiding making any major errors or commitments, on the basis that there’s no election in prospect, but it’s scarcely inspiring. And imagine how much more damage they can do, given how little they care about people who don’t vote for them…
This has all been true for months; what’s triggered the current meltdown is the shambles over A-level results. How did anyone think it could be fair to downgrade individuals’ grades on the basis of past school performance, except as a means of ensuring that nice children from the right sort of schools do as well as their parents feel they’re entitled to? A basic principle that better-than-expected results from a ‘less good’ school must by definition be distrusted or downgraded. The immediate move to shift responsibility somewhere, anywhere else – so universities should keep places open, and it’ll be their fault if the end results don’t match whatever position on social mobility the government has decided to profess this week. And all this with the parallel threat of ‘reforming’ universities that run into financial problems – in the interest, as a friend remarked, of ensuring that no one is allowed to be rude about Toby Young and his crowd, and of rigging the HE market until it generates the desired results that actual market forces failed to produce.
Coronavirus didn’t steal your future, kids; it simply revealed that your future had already been stolen. Everything is basically crap. But we had a frog in the wildlife pond today.
Update: apparently this is my 500th post. Not inappropriate, I guess.
Sphinx 
Well, quite. Obviously I “liked” this mainly in that peculiar sense of “like” that the internet has given us. Except for the bit about the bats, which is marvellous.