Making Work Pay

When you were younger, did you ever play with that one kid who kept changing the rules in the middle of the game? You remember how much fun it wasn’t? Well, thanks to the DWP's recent introduction of emergency legislation to retrospectively invalidate a court decision against them, we now have some indication of what that kid went on to do when he grew up.

Retroactive legislation is bad for a whole host of reasons, and this is hardly a recent development in constitutional thought: Article One, Section Nine of the Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787, explicitly prohibits the Congress from passing ex post facto laws. We don’t, of course, have a codified constitution in the United Kingdom, nor is there any guarantee that if we did it’d contain the same kind of ban on retroactive legislation.

A moment’s thought, though, would point up the utility of having one in a society founded on the rule of law.

Although in this case Parliament’s power to fix legislation retrospectively isn’t being used to criminalize behaviour that wasn’t criminal when it occurred, which is the first and most obvious abuse of this kind of power, its intention – to “strike down a decision by three senior judges and deny benefit claimants an average payout of between £530 and £570 each”, a sum owed purely as a result of badly-drafted legislation and misleading advice given to jobseekers – can only have the effect of undermining citizens’ right to legal recourse. If you know that the Government can, and will, deny you the redress you’re entitled to (and this isn’t the kind of ‘entitlement’ attitude that gets Daily Mail readers hot under the collar – this is a legal entitlement recognised by an independent judiciary), then why even bother bringing a case against them in the first place?

The net result will be a sloppy attitude to drafting future legislation and a renewed sense on the part of jobseekers that the system’s tilted against them, which is not what you’d call a desirable outcome. As if determined to provide the textbook example of adding insult to injury, a spokesman for the DWP justified the Department’s behaviour thus: "This legislation will protect taxpayers and make sure we won't be paying back money to people who didn't do enough to find work." The general approach seems to be: when in doubt, or when in significant error, blame the guy without a job.

I’ve never met ‘the taxpayer’, but for some reason whenever I try to envision this mythical creature in my mind the image that comes to me is Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, some great elemental beast lurking under the Treasury and demanding blood sacrifice. Call it a quirk. I can’t speak for ‘the taxpayer’, but I can speak as a taxpayer, and as a taxpayer I’d rather my money went towards the redress of wrongs perpetrated by my government than the continuance of them. Particularly – and here is the key part – when the DWP considers corporate subsidy to Poundland and other participating businesses, enabling them to bolster their bottom line by employing workers at well below the nationally­-determined minimum wage, to be a productive use of that same money.

It does not take an economics professor to determine the likely consequences for the national economy of such a policy, putting aside the question of whether it’s acceptable to mandate that the unemployed join work programmes (just to prove that this blog isn’t written by your standard outraged lefty, my personal answer to that question would be ‘yes, in certain circumstances.’) If a business is allowed to fill unskilled labour vacancies with workers who it doesn’t have to pay; who can’t quit, because their benefits will be stopped; and to whom they have no legal obligations as an employer, then those vacancies vanish from the actual job market. It does not make you a socialist to believe that, if Poundland has shelves that need stacking, then they should advertise for a shelf-stacker and pay the expected wage: it merely requires you to have read a bit of Adam Smith.

The legislation that inspired this post addresses this issue, as well: “The new bill would also put a stop to any potential claims for the national minimum wage, which could otherwise be due to those who spent weeks working for no pay at high street chains such as Tesco, Matalan and Argos.” My position on this is actually significantly more libertarian than the Government’s. The idea that private business should receive a subsidy from the public purse in order to subvert the normal operation of the market is an astonishing state of affairs to persist in a capitalist system, and a giant middle finger to the Invisible Hand. (Don’t believe them, incidentally, when they say that these are ‘training’ schemes. It does not take multiple weeks to teach a university graduate, or indeed anyone with a functioning brain, how to put things on a shelf so’s they don’t fall off.) A thriving capitalist economy is not one in which the Government colludes with a select number of private businesses to depress wages, but that does appear to be what we have.

There’s an argument that the minimum wage itself is a distortion of the fair market price for labour, which I don’t quite buy but at least has the advantage of being intellectually consistent (more on this in a later post, after I’ve broken out my copy of The Wealth of Nations for a reread). However, if we as a democratic nation have decided that we’re going to have a minimum wage, then it’d behoove the Government to not attempt a covert end run around it. That is what workfare represents: an entitlement programme for private industry, at a time when entitlement programmes are being slashed across the board. As with the rule of law, the operations of the market must apply equally to every participant, or there isn’t a lot of point in having one.

Thoroughly Modern Monarchy

It would be difficult to name a great British institution that hasn’t, in the past five or so years, undergone one or other traumatic, existential scandal. The economy has transformed in the popular imagination into some kind of financial horror movie, featuring zombie companies, vampires of all shapes and sizes, and profits that melt when exposed to sunlight. Expenses have done for Parliament, Leveson for the press. The NHS have their Mid-Staffs; the BBC have their Jimmy Savile; and, although the police retain some level of respect, it’d be hard to argue that dodgy tactics, dodgy payments and (God forgive me for typing this word) Plebgate haven’t put a patina on those metal badges. Membership in political parties is at an all-time low, and confidence in economic recovery can’t be far behind (which, owing to the ‘clap-your-hands-if-you-believe’ principle on which modern capitalist economies operate, is actually hampering growth in and of itself. High finance is increasingly starting to resemble a branch of theology.)

The overall effect has been to create a kind of institutional gridlock: the level of generalised disillusionment in the country is so high that broken systems stay broken, simply because everyone else who might be in a position to fix them suffers from the exact same public mistrust. Venal politicians can’t regulate an irresponsible press; an irresponsible press can’t hold venal politicians to account. Breaking up institutional cosiness within the police by allowing external candidates to bypass the normal process and come in at the top seems like replacing the devil you know with the other devil you also know. The Bible warns us against attempting to cast the mote out of our neighbour’s eye before we’ve first removed the beam from ours: what we have here is a room full of people with beams in their eyes the size of California redwoods, occasionally colliding and blaming the other each time.

One institution seems curiously impervious to this growing malaise, however. It’s hard to remember a time when the monarchy has been more popular – with the royal wedding in 2011, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, and the impending birth this year of the next heir to the throne, we’ve been in an ever-renewing cycle of Royal pageantry for almost as long as the present Government has been in power. At a time when the day-to-day running of the country covers all who involve themselves in it in opprobrium, the Queen seems to rise above it all, as unimpeachably pristine as the façade of Buckingham Palace. It’s not that the stories haven’t been there – between Prince Andrew's friends, Prince Charles' lobbying and the many escapades of Prince Harry, there’s been enough to report upon. It’s that people don’t care. (When the Queen was reported as having enquired of the Home Office why Abu Hamza remained a fixture of these fair isles, and wouldn’t it be nice if something could be done about the situation, the nation – myself included – collectively set a new world record for ‘largest synchronised shrug’.)

I’m not a political republican, for the same reason that I don’t make a habit of banging my head against a wall. There is no mood in this country for abolition of the monarchy, and anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves. (During the wall-to-wall coverage of the royal wedding back in 2011, I recall reading a desperately hopeful press statement from a republican pressure group, which expressed the view that people were – despite all appearances – getting quite sick of the Royal Family. This was around the same time that Harold Camping was insisting that the end of the world was definitely nigh on May 21, with much the same degree of accuracy). 

It’s quite trendy to take pot-shots at the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, but neither’s done anything to harm me, and so I wish them the best in the same way I’d wish the best of any young couple expecting the birth of their first child. Who, it seems now, will almost certainly be our future monarch: born to reign over us, be they King or Queen. The recent proposal to equalise succession for men and women represents another step in the ongoing process - you could put it back to the Magna Carta, if you liked, but I think the cat was really out of the bag with Royal Family in 1969 - of proving that the monarchy and modern sensibilities can coexist without issue. 

The problem is that they really, really can't. Fortunately, the solution is that no-one seems to mind that much. 

If you know what you’re looking for, the haphazard liberalisation of the monarchy is quite an entertaining spectator sport. Specifically, it’s fun to identify the points at which token concessions to contemporary sensibilities run up against relics of a political ideology that is pre-Renaissance, never mind pre-modern. Discrimination on the basis of sex is unjust (and quite right too), but discrimination on the basis of primogeniture is apparently acceptable – if the first­-born daughter can succeed, why not the second-born? 

Heirs to the throne remain prohibited by Act of Parliament from marrying a Catholic: a nasty little bit of bigotry lodged at the heart of our constitution, and one that there’s been a lot of recent noise about dislodging. The most recent proposal is to remove the ban on heirs marrying Catholics, but to retain the ban on Catholics succeeding: a fairly pathetic half-measure, one would think, but short of disestablishing the Church of England (which I personally think is a rather good idea, and the last Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with me), it’s hard to envision how a hypothetical Catholic monarch could be the supreme ruler of the Church of England and at the same time defer spiritual authority to the Pope.

If these questions put you in mind of the kind of political debate that seems better suited to the 1600s, rather than the 2010s, it’s because any detailed consideration of the monarchy’s place in the modern world throws up questions like these. When it was being seriously mooted that a second-born son might challenge a first-born daughter’s right to the succession, my very first thought was ‘Wasn’t this a plot in Game of Thrones?’ The debate has focused around the marriage of a Protestant heir to a Catholic lad or lass, but a truly modern monarchy would have to be equipped to deal with a bevy of issues above and beyond this. What if the heir wished to marry outside their religion entirely, and raise their children as Jews or Muslims? What if the heir were openly gay or lesbian, and wanted to adopt, or employ a surrogate parent? (I call this the Maildämmerung scenario.)

The Queen is the Queen because, once upon a time, we believed that God chose our rulers for us (and that God’s preferences generally favoured the person who could put the biggest army into the field, for some reason). We sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at our sporting events; we put Dieu Et Mon Droit on our currency; we link God and the monarchy in a hundred different ways every day, and I suspect that the British people as a whole don’t believe particularly strongly in either, but like having them around nevertheless. There is a point at which attempts to modernise the monarchy founder in their own self-contradictions. This isn’t to argue against them – anything that removes a little bit more prejudice from the laws we all live under is a good thing – but, rather, to gently send them up. 

In an increasingly secular nation, we’ve knocked away the fundamental justification for monarchy, and what we’re left with is almost the opposite of the institutional gridlock I described earlier: something supported only by the instinctive feeling of mild goodwill it engenders amongst the populace. The Royal Family would be unsustainable if its members exerted any influence on the democratic process: therefore, when they do, we agree to pretend they didn’t. Perhaps, with our waning faith in every other institution in the British political landscape, we simply can’t bear to be disappointed again.

The Ends of History

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. – George Santayana 

Those who fail history are doomed to repeat it next semester. – Anonymous

Beyond a generalised sense that curricula should be toughened across the board, it’s hard to think of many subjects in which the average person – neither an educationalist nor a subject specialist – feels qualified to dictate specifics of what should be studied. When it comes to the history curriculum, however, it is gradually becoming clear that everyone’s a critic. A young man or woman leaving school who couldn’t tell you who’d won at the Battle of Hastings, or who’s unable to put surnames to the many Annes and Catherines of Henry VIII, seems to offend us on a level deeper than the same person’s inability to tell you what an oxbow lake is or explain that, in contravention of all schoolboy and schoolgirl logic, Twelfth Night really was written with the intention of making people laugh. 

Make no bones about it: this is a political battlefield as much as a pedagogical one, and those with opinions on the subject tend to divide into two camps. (Or, rather, I have divided them into two camps, for ease of caricature.) On the one side, you have the fact-oriented, narrative-minded traditionalisers, whose spiritual leader is, of course, Michael Gove, and whose representative on Earth – or in the Guardian, at least – is Niall Ferguson. In the red corner, you have the counter-argument: skills over facts, depth of analysis over breadth of coverage, and oriented towards critical examination of traditional narratives, as if the ultimate aim is to fill our primary schools with armies of six-year-old Jurgen Habermases. (Habermii?) It was Ferguson’s article that inspired me to write this post, mainly because although my every instinct screams to dismiss out of hand a man who has written a book entitled "Civilisation: the Six Killer Apps of Western Power" and does not appear to be ashamed of that fact, he has raised issues that can’t be so easily dismissed.

The division between ‘facts’ and ‘skills’ is, of course, a false dichotomy, and I won’t pretend that I haven’t oversimplified the argument in my sketch of the situation. Nevertheless, the division is indubitably there: Ferguson himself is happy to frame the argument in this way, contrasting himself with the distinguished Oxbridge duo of Richard Evans and David Priestland, who, in their commitment to "the existing breadth and ambition of coverage, critical method and historical debate" – quoth Niall – suggest “an almost wilful ignorance of – or indifference to – the parlous state of historical knowledge among young Britons.” To Ferguson, this is ivory-tower elitism at its most counter-productive, taking a syllabus fashioned for undergraduates or postgraduates who have already made a positive commitment to the study of history and assuming that it will fit the uncluttered minds of our primary- and secondary-schoolers just as well.

He isn’t wrong, although his policy prescriptions probably are. For those of us who adore history, representing as it does the greatest assemblage ever chronicled of the weird and wonderful, the unlikely and improbable, the fascinating and the revolting and the truly humanising, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to recall what sparked that first interest. After all, none of us were born knowing who won at Hastings, Bosworth or Waterloo, and misconceptions or ignorance can persist well into adulthood unless one encounters – or puts oneself in the way of – something that will challenge that ignorance. (I won’t tell you how old I was before I realised that a pony was not simply a young horse.)

The key is curiosity. When a child has made the decision to learn in his free time, ninety percent of the battle has already been won, and the holes in 'common knowledge’ left by a history curriculum that - by necessity – cannot cover everything will inevitably be filled. The most effective way to address historical illiteracy amongst the youth of this country is not to argue endlessly about ‘facts’ versus ‘skills’, as if either can be separated from the other. It doesn’t matter whether the syllabus says a twelve-year-old must learn about Nelson or Nongqawuse if the twelve-year-old in question is counting the minutes until the bell rings, barely paying attention. Similarly, it doesn’t matter that she’s being encouraged to question whether the British Empire was a force for good or a tide of evil if, to be blunt, she couldn’t give a damn either way. 

History teachers – nearly all of whom by now are specialists holding degrees in their subjects and, at least in theory, are already turned on to the love of learning they’re trying to impart to thirty sceptical kids – have at their fingertips heroes and villains, wars and rebellions, love and treachery, faith and fervour, and a thousand gruesome and fascinating historical facts of the did-that-really-happen-sir? type. No syllabus can account for all of these, but nevertheless, our teachers must be freed up to employ them. 

What this means in practice is a more difficult question, but a less prescriptive syllabus would be a start, and possibly less early-years testing. A child who’s had her historical curiosity piqued by something interesting put in her way in her formative years will score better on the tests that really count than one who’s been drilled with 1066 or the Tolpuddle Martyrs until her head hurts. (For me, it was an detailed explanation – gruesome, in the way that your average seven-year-old boy rather likes to see – of the fact that if I’d been born a hundred and fifty years earlier I’d probably be dying up a chimney rather than sat in the back of my parents’ car reading about a kid dying up a chimney. This particular example came from Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories, a series that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone trying to get kids interested in the subject.)

Trust teachers? It seems like a controversial proposition at a time when ever-increasing measurement and incentivisation of teachers’ performance is the hot topic, but we can’t put an Ofsted inspector in every classroom, nor should we want to. If a man wrote his dissertation about the Reformation, then he should be allowed some leeway to teach his kids about the Reformation, if only because he probably knows some really good anecdotes about naughty monks and greedy lords that’ll catch the attention of the heads-down crew at the back of the classroom. If someone else is an expert on cultural images of women in ancient China, then – although there can’t, of course, be a standardised test for every aspect of history – why the hell shouldn’t she be allowed to sit her eleven-year-olds down and teach them about the practice of foot-binding?

The intention behind this isn’t to let teachers make up their own curriculum on the hoof. There have to be some centralised standards, both for an individual school and for schools as a whole across the country, and there needs to be testing to monitor progress (or decline, as may be the case). But in our classrooms right now we have a huge amount of specialised knowledge and an equally huge amount of apathy, and that is not a tolerable or a sustainable situation. Governments, of both the left and right, need to take one step back and – to quote a cliché – let teachers teach.

George W. Bush, in his inimitable style, once put the question to us: “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” He was right to ask. A child can be sat in the classroom, and pitched battles can be fought in the Commons and in the press about what he should be learning while he’s there, but is he learning while he’s there? Education is not something that happens to a child between nine AM and three PM, five days a week, for fourteen years of his life. Education is something a person does to themselves throughout their lifetime, and it begins with a single thought: “Hey, that’s interesting.” One of the functions of formal education has to be to light as many matches as possible and see what kinds of fires get started. (Not literally, obviously). A child who knows how interesting history can really be will learn facts and skills, narrative and analysis, in the natural course of things, and she will have fun doing it.

What we are doing, when we argue in party political terms about the teaching of history, is arguing about whether bricks or cement are more important in building a house while ignoring the great gaping hole where the foundation should be. We’re doing our teachers a disservice; we’re doing our children a disservice; and, if we’re interested in history as a discipline, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. We were not born wanting to learn: we learned that before we learned anything else. We have an obligation to ensure that the next generation are helped to discover it, too.