The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
ISBN 0745139302

Also available online here

It would be difficult to provide spoilers for this novel because most people know practically from the title the conceit of the narrative: Dorian Gray has his picture painted, the painting degenerates and ages while he retains his youthful good looks.

This is not a moral book although it is about morality. Victorian times were full of improving novels which would tell the reader to do good things and never do bad things. Unusually Oscar Wilde invites the reader to *think* about good and evil.

The main characters were all reflections of Wilde's personality. He had the same reputation as Lord Henry Wotton as a man who makes brilliant epigrams which are at variance with the moral dictums of the time.

He wanted to remain young and beautiful like Dorian Gray and he sought to be an artist in the field of literature as Basil Hallward is in the field of painting.

There is an astonishing homoerotic theme to the relationships given the Victorian world in which homosexuality was illegal and certainly no novelist could openly allude to it.

The victorian society was very like Dorian Gray with the appearance of innocence and the reality of corruption. Prostitution and drug addiction were rife in a society with apparently strict moral rules.

The reluctant cannibal

Boris Johnson is still refusing to apologise for his remarks about the people of Papua New Guinea being cannibals.

He thinks schoolboy jokes about Papua New Guinea and cannibalism are still funny. He was presumably misled by Flanders and Swan's "The Reluctant Cannibal" which contained the memorable line "If the Good Lord had meant us not to eat people, he wouldn't have made us of meat." Of course Flanders and Swan had wit and style and musical ability whereas Boris Johnson is Boris Johnson.

I can imagine an eve of poll election broadcast showing the Shadow Higher Education's more memorable stupidities - his attack on the people of Liverpool and his parlous performance on "Have I got News for You". In all seriousness is that what you want running the country? Is this the kind of thing the universities should be teaching?

Kelly Osbourne supports Tony Blair

Kelly Osbourne has spoken in support of Tony Blair as he struggles to maintain his well-paid job.

She decided to voice her opinion on the British Prime Minister as he is hit with demands to leave his position - many from his former close supporters.

"She told Contactmusic: "The way I see it, we've voted this guy in to run our Government and we can't just turn against him. It must be the hardest thing in the world to run the country - I know I couldn't. Poor Blair. That said, I always try to stay out of politics."

Perhaps she was right in her decision to stay out of politics. Tony Blair needs her support like a hole in the head. He is paying the price for his lies over Iraq. Thousands of others have paid a much higher price.

The latest rumour is that he will stand down when the weapons of mass destruction are found

Socialism 2006

Socialism 2006 is a weekend of discussion and debate hosted by the Socialist Party, taking place on 25 and 26 November 2006.

Socialism - is society still divided into classes, can socialism be achieved in a globalised world, could a socialist-planned economy save the planet?

There will be a wide range of seminars with lively discussion and debate.
3-5 pm Saturday 25 November 2006
10-4.30pm Sunday 26 November 2006

Smart Bombs - a short story.

As he got on to the tube train, rubbing shoulders with the men and women, almost tripping over the push chair, his mind was filled with those other men and women; people stranded without food in the rubble of their homes, bearing bloodstained makeshift bandages, searching without hope for loved ones among the slain.

These people did not know what that was like. They were going to find out.

The train pulled out of the station. It was crowded, he had to stand. One or two people eyed his rucksack and then looked away. If they only knew.

Today his family were going back. They had no comfortable lives, no smart suits and mobile phones and ipods. They didn’t have to “imagine no possessions.” They had the clothes they stood up in and those needed a good wash. Their home might be there. Mr Blair and Mr Bush might have sent over one of their smart bombs to destroy it. How smart is that?

If it was gone they would camp near the rubble of their house and try to rebuild their lives, just like before…and the time before that. The smug faces around him hid minds which did not know what that was like.

This was a war of the rich against the poor. The rich have always been at war with the poor. And they conscript the poor to fight their battles.

And suddenly he realised there were men in flak jackets on either side of him. A gun to his head and the carriage was being evacuated. They pushed him to the ground and held him down. Then they were kicking him and shouting questions at him. The contents of his rucksack were strewn all over the carriage.

And then the policemen were laughing and they stood on the sheets of paper. “What the fuck is this? Bloody poetry? Do you think you can win a war with ideas?”

He didn’t say anything but inside his head he whispered, “yes.”

Public Service Private Profit

Dispatches last night was a detailed expose on the private finance initiative. It is reviewed here:

Socialist Teachers' Blog

Channel 4 website

Dispatches on PFI

Dispatches on Channel 4 on Monday 14th August was a detailed expose on the costs of PFI to the public services.

The government can borrow money cheaply, PFI means that the public sector has to pay a higher rate of interest. However once a hospital, road or school has been constructed a much lower rate of interest is possible. This enables PFI companies to refinance their loans and make millions, sometimes hundreds of millions. Under pressure they might sometimes pay back a fraction of this to the taxpayer.

Liam Halligan compared PFI to going on a shopping spree with a ludicrously expensive credit card. The amounts do not appear on the government’s books but there will be an almighty payback in the future. Any student with a loan will know just how that feels.

Financiers openly talk about “sweating” resources. Once they have a guaranteed income stream from the government they can seek to minimise their costs. The program showed one example after another of corners being cut in PFI projects. The public institutions can complain as much as they like, they are locked into 25 or 30 year contracts with the private sector willy nilly!

The program also showed in detail how companies like HSBC legally avoid paying UK taxes on public sector contracts. For example, they have transferred a £311 million Home Office contract into an offshore fund .

They also detailed how companies can manage to tell their shareholders they are making a profit and the taxman they are making a loss. The profits seem to disappear into subsidiaries which do not have any employees but manage to provide “management services.”

Some opf these companies are making an extortionate 123 percent on capital investments. Instead of locking them up for profiteering, New Labour award them further contracts.

Liam Halligan has done an excellent job exposing this public scandal. How interesting that HSBC and numerous other financial institutions refused to buy advertising space around this program!

It was not his job to provide a political alternative to PFI but this is all grist to the mill for the Campaign for a New Workers Party.

Relief at foiling of terrorist plot

There is a sense of relief that an apparent terrorist plot to blow up aircraft has been foiled. It will be a bit of a nuisance for people who have to carry GTN (which is actually nitroglycerine!) for angina. I do not look forward to explaining that one. However it seems a price well worth paying.

Unfortunately there has been an unsubtle focus on the muslim community which is irrelevant. Calling Osama Bin Laden a muslim is like calling the Rev'd Ian Paisley a Catholic. The constant linking of "terrorist suspect" and pictures of mosques is not subtle.

The Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer used to show pictures of synagogues alongside pictures of rats for the same reason. What Der Stürmer did was to take every crime which was committed by a Jew and use it as a way to label all Jews as thieves, rapists and murderers.

And of course the old "innocent until proven guilty" palaver is replaced with a journalist muttering "alleged" occasionally.

The terrorists are making repression and the loss of civil liberties easier.

Terrorism is the other side of the coin from repression. The government can use terrorism as pretext to take away old fashioned "pre 9/11" concepts like freedom of speech or trial by jury.

If they didn't have terrorist plots then they would have to invent them. You can bet good money Dr John Reid will end up with much more power when all this is over and done with and he will be oh so reluctant to relinquish it.

Fake "war on terror" in Lebanon

The "war on terror" happens to be a war of rich nations against poor nations, with terrorism as a pretext.

Bush and Blair have no objection to terrorism - for example the terrorism of the Contras or Posadas, when it serves their purposes. The rulers can claim no high moral purpose.

Now they must be laughing up their sleeves as they arm the Israeli Defence forces to the teeth and send them off to fight their battles for them. In this war there will be no embarrassing death tolls of American or British soldiers, no irate mothers camping out to demand to know why their sons have been killed.

It is all being done by proxy. The terrorists are doing the imperialists' dirty work for them by providing a pretext and the imperialists are boosting the terrorists. In Lebanon people could understandably see Hezbolla as a resistance movement, the only people apparently fighting back as the American proxies kill civilians.

At the moment Israeli and Lebanese civilians are the main victims. And Blair is enjoying a nice holiday.

Churchill’s Hour

Churchill’s Hour
Michael Dobbs
ISBN 0753124386

This is the third historical novel by Michael Dobbs in the Winston Churchill series following Winston's War and Never Surrender. Dobbs has mined the seam of Churchill’s larger than life personality, the cult which grew up around him during the war and added some rather fanciful conspiracy theories from his own imagination.

I won’t spoil it for you by detailing the clever and just-about-possible “inside stories” which exist in these books. What I will say is that the most incredible events in Churchill’s Hour are the landing of Hitler’s deputy in Scotland and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour – you really couldn’t make them up.

The intelligence or lack of it surrounding Pearl Harbour has always been a mystery and few people have been able to penetrate what was going on in Rudolph Hess’s brain at the best of times.

The truth in these books really is stranger than the fiction.

Tommy Sheridan 1 Rupert Murdoch 0

Rupert Murdoch, millionaire and muckraker, won't engage in an honest debate over the ideas of socialism. He prefers to concoct stories about socialists. He received a beating from Tommy Sheridan in court. The News of the World claimed their story was "substantially true" - which is a legal way of saying that it wasn't actually true but a bit like the truth. The verdict of the jury was that it wasn't even that!

The full text of Tommy Sheridan's speech after beating the News of the World in court follows.


"On behalf of my wife and I, can I first of all thank my two sisters and John Aberdeen, from Orkney, for being the best amateur legal team in the world.

"We have over the last five weeks taken on one of the biggest organisations on the planet, with the biggest amount of resources to pay for the most expensive legal team, to throw nothing but muck against me, my wife and my family.

"Well, brothers and sisters, what today’s verdict proves is that working-class people, when they listen to the arguments, can differentiate the truth from the muck.

"The working-class people on the jury who have found in our favour have done a service to the people of Scotland and have delivered a message to the standard of journalism that the News of the World represents.

"They are liars and we have proved that they are liars.

"I could never have conducted this case without the loyalty and support of my wife, my mother, my father, my sisters, my family and thousands upon thousands of working-class people in Scotland who want me to get out of this court and start fighting for the things that matter most.

"Against poverty and inequality in Scotland, and against war and against nuclear weapons.

"Those are the things that matter most, brothers and sisters, and I assure you we will retire for a few days to spend some quality time with our 14-month-old daughter, whom we have had to be apart from for most of the last five weeks, and that’s been the largest and most difficult thing to countenance.

"We’ll spend some time, quality time, with our daughter Gabrielle over the next few days but then I guarantee you, the people of Scotland who believe in their hearts in justice, who believe in their hearts in fighting poverty and inequality and who believe in their hearts in the need to fight against war, I’ll be back on the streets calling for the Israeli troops to stop killing innocent people in Lebanon, calling for the scrapping of nuclear weapons and to call for an independent socialist Scotland

"I want to finish, brothers and sisters, by saying one thing. Gretna have made it into Europe for the first time in their lives, but what we have done in the last five weeks is the equivalent of Gretna taking on Real Madrid in the Bernabeu and beating them on penalties, that’s what we’ve done."

Against the slaughter in the Lebanon

National demonstration
Saturday 5 August: Assemble 12 Noon
Speakers Corner, Hyde Park, London
March to Parliament Square for rally

A game of chess

White Black
1. c2-c4 e7-e5
2. N-c3 N-f6
3. g2-g3 d7-d5
4. c4xd5 Nxd5
5. N-f3 N-c6
6. NxNd5 QxNd5
7. d2-d3 B-e6
8. B-d2 O-O-O
9. B-g2 Q-b5
10. N-g5 Qxb2
11. BxN b7xBc6
12. NxBe6 f7xN
13. Q-c1 Q-b6
14. Q-c4 R-d5
15. O-O B-c5
16. e2-e4 Bxf2+
17. RxB R-f8
18. Ra1-f1 R-d6
19. B-b4 RxRf2
20. RxRf2 R-d4
21. Qxe6+ K-b7
22. B-c3 Rxd3
23. Qxe5 Q-e3
24. B-a5 R-d6
25. K-g2 c6-c5
26. R-b2+ K-a6
27. Bxc7 R-d2+
28. RxR QxR+
29. K-h3 Q-h6+
30. K-g4 Q-g6+
31. K-f3 Q-f7+
32. K-e3 c5-c4
33. Q-c5 K-b7
34. B-e5 g7-g6
35. Q-b5+ K-c8
36. Q-c6+ K-d8
37. B-f6+

Ted Grant 1913-2006

Ted Grant

I was sorry to read about the death of Ted Grant in The Socialist 27 July. I first met Ted in 1968 when I was 16. One of his strengths was his ability to patiently explain the fundamental principles of Marxism to young and inexperienced socialists. I didn’t feel patronised. For him the movement and the ideas were all important; he was painstaking and perfectionist in relation to ideas and fond of open debate.


I ended up working with Ted and the others (in a very minor role) with Militant. He was not the easiest of people to work with but the role of Militant in that period is well-documented and we were all caught up in the work and the ideas and consigned personalities to their proper place.

He will always be remembered as someone who kept the ideas of Marxism alive under the most difficult of circumstances in the UK.

But Militant grew. It was very far from being a “one man band” like some of the “piddling little ultra-left sects” Ted used to laugh at. And in the heat of the Poll Tax campaign and the struggle against Thatcher, new tactics were called for.

When I knew him, he was fond of saying, “Events, events, events will teach the broad masses of the working class more than any pamphlet or manifesto.” And events (the symptoms of the degeneration of New Labour) were to invalidate the position he came to adopt – seeking signs of life in the corpse of the Labour Left. He remained wedded to a tactic which was doomed to failure.

He is rightly honoured as a pioneer. He is not honoured by those who seek to gloss over his mistakes.

In the Moodle

In the past “Virtual Learning Environments” were regarded with suspicion by teachers as a sci fi concept in which teachers are replaced with computers. After attending Moodlemoot ’06 at the Open University, I can honestly say that Moodle, the open source course management system, is actually whatever the teacher wants it to be.

The course seminars included teachers from diverse disciplines from Science to English to Music and of course ICT who all used Moodle to teach in the way which suited them.

Although the system is based on a social constructivist model of education, teachers frequently start out using it to replicate traditional classroom activities like essay-writing, feedback and redrafting or quizzes/tests with the slight difference that these are self-marking and pupils get instant feedback. Teachers only then go on to some of the more unusual features of Moodle like Wikis, blogs, asynchronous discussion groups and podcasting.

And because it is Open Source free software, teachers can contribute to the future design of Moodle without some acquisitive corporations we could mention seeking to block them under the pretext of “business secrets”.

Moodle is now used by over 100000 registered users, including the Open University. It is free to download and use and many schools and local authorities who have poured hundreds of thousands of pounds into the coffers of Microsoft are keen to find free software.

If you want to find out more there is a website which talks about the conference and demonstrates the program at the same time. It is called http://moodlemoot.org/ and all of the conference is available as audio or video files. I recommend the audio file because the video quality will depend on the quality of your computer.

WSTA on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is fast becoming the standard online repository of all knowledge and wisdom. Although it contains much that is inaccurate, the rigorous scrutiny each new entry received from around the world means that inaccuracies do not remain on the books for long.

There is even a page about the West Sussex Teachers Association

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSTA

And like everyone else on the internet, you can edit it.

Church school bans "Imagine"

A church school in Devon has banned children from singing the John Lennon classic, "Imagine". Obviously people have a right to their religious beliefs but this is supposed to be a free country and there is such a thing as freedom of speech. Banning songs is one thing. How long before they start burning books too?

The lyrics of this wicked song are as follows:

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

World leaders impotent to help the Lebanon

According to Democracy Now!

"The humanitarian crisis in Lebanon continues to worsen. At least 500,000 people have been displaced from their homes. Scores of roads and bridges have been hit making it hard to transport food or humanitarian aid. Recent Israeli strikes have targeted the country’s largest milk factory, a major food factory and two pharmaceutical plants. Earlier bombs hit water processing plants, power plants and grain silos. On Tuesday a convoy of two trucks carrying medical supplies donated by the United Arab Emirates was hit. The trucks were destroyed and both drivers died. The Israeli military has denied targeting the factories or aid trucks. Two ambulances were also bombed on Tuesday. They were carrying Lebanese soldiers who were injured in an Israeli attack on their base that had killed eleven soldiers. A Greek Orthodox Church also suffered a direct hit. Inside the church were civilians who had taken refuge. At least 10 people were injured. "

This is particularly horrifying for people who remember when Beirut was a byword for violence and instability and the massacres at Sabra and Chatilah where Christians murdered women and children while the Israeli army stood by with its arms folded..

The policy of brute force and ignorance has not brought peace to the middle east and yet Israel is giving it another shot with the blessing and the massive financial backing of the US. The Israeli Defence Forces are not "defending" anyone. By murdering hundreds of Lebanese civilians they are sowing the seeds for revenge attacks in the future.

The people of Israel and Lebanon are being betrayed by their governments and paying a price in blood. Imperialism cannot bring peace and its twin peaks - terrorism and Zionism - exemplify this.

Well you know what they say.

As a friend of mine put it, "Who are 'they' and how come they know so much?"

I have come in for the usual obloquy from English teachers over my use of "they" in place of the more correct "he or she". Comments have been roughly evenly divided for and against. I can honestly say that I don't use it to excess but here is the OED website on the topic:

"The English language unfortunately lacks a simple singular pronoun which does not specify gender. Various people have suggested new words to fill this gap, but none of them have caught on, or (frankly) are ever likely to: it is not practical to try to change such a basic element of the language by sheer will.

"However, children and adults alike naturally find the obvious solution to this conundrum: rather than using the formal and awkward formula 'he or she', they simply use they, especially after words such as anyone and no one which are strictly singular but often imply a reference to more than one person.

"This is not a new problem, or a new solution. 'A person can't help their birth', wrote Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1848), and even Shakespeare produced the line 'Every one to rest themselves betake' (in Lucrece), which pedants would reject as logically ungrammatical.

"If you do not find this usage acceptable, there are alternatives. You could resort to the awkward 'he or she' formula, or to the practice of writing 'he' when you mean 'he or she' (which many people find objectionable), or to recasting all your sentences to avoid the problem!"

The OED website is a mine of information on this kind of issue.

Teacher Power! A report on the National Education Conference

The first session was a fascinating speech from Mick Waters of the QCA. Most teachers think of the QCA as a very top-downwards, authoritarian body producing highly prescriptive “advice.” Mick Waters brought an entirely different perspective. While recognising the tension between national testing and local autonomy he was perfectly clear that “people in schools need to set their understandings of their children alongside the learning they should meet to create learning which is irresistible.” Unlike the run-of-the-mill bureaucrats he prefers to spend his time in the classroom working with teachers.

This set the tone of a conference which was about (apologies for the jargon) empowering teachers. Teacher power! It has a certain ring to it!

This was continued with a discussion of “personalised learning” and the somewhat ambiguous definitions available from the government. It was felt that “personalised learning” could be used to promote teacher autonomy (teacher power again) and the concept that learning should be related to the needs, aptitude and ability of the pupils. There was also a warning that “personalised learning” could be misinterpreted as a system which involved pupils interacting with computers without any teacher intervention and the delivery of education could be in the hands of unqualified staff.

Paul Crisp is the managing director of CUREE and although his presentation was heavily focussed on the research methodology of his work on mentoring of teachers, it is clear that much useful material has come out of this research which will be of use to Union Learning Reps in the future. Much of it is now available online.
click here

Elizabeth Wood of the University of Exeter talked about research on the issue of the underachievement of boys. Although she was restating much of the existing knowledge on this subject it is clearly important to go on stating it in a climate where the underachievement of boys is misunderstood. In many ways it is an oversimplification to talk about boys’ underachievement and her research was firmly based on the observation of children and her insights into the role of play. “When girls performed less well than boys it was not called underachievement. It was because they were all dumb blondes.” She has some very interesting and provocative research.

The future of the National Education Conference was a wide-ranging discussion somewhat depleted by some football game taking place at the same time.  It is proposed to promote the National Education Conference to teachers who take part in NUT Continuing Professional Development. They may well include the future leadership.

Maurice Galton’s research on “The Cost of Inclusion” tackled one of the conflicts in education at the moment. How can inclusion be helping pupils when the resources are not being provided to support the pupils being included? It is unsual for speeches to be interrupted by applause at the NEC. His remark that “these pupils have a right to be taught by qualified teachers” did receive a spontaneous ovation.

The final session of conference was a speech by Peter Mortimore who is not only an accomplished orator but also a powerful voice in educational circles. He had done a comparison between the NUT’s “Bringing down the Barriers” and the government’s Education Bill. The NUT had no input as to what his final result would be. The results are available online.
http://wsta.org.uk/mortimore.pdf

As Bill Greenshields concluded, “We are involved in a battle for ideas, every school is a fortress,”