Someone please explain the following logic:

An exam board is removing a poem about a knife-carrying violent loner from its anthology for GCSE English because of fears over teenage knife crime.

The AQA exam board has decided to withdraw the poem Education for Leisure written by Carol Ann Duffy.

The exam board is writing to schools to advise them to destroy the copies of the anthology - and says it will send replacements not containing this poem.

Why? I’ve read the poem; it hardly glorifies knives. Far from it, the protagonist seems the model of mental instability: he kills because he’s bored, and it makes him feel as though he counts. At most, it provides a decent model of some of the reasons behind gang-membership without glorifying death:

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

Emphasis mine. Today’s youth find themselves locked out of the political system by a generation of greedy boomers; hence are “ignored.” Some (many?) go to school and find much irrelevant - Shakespeare is, “another language,” and life-skills are firmly off the curriculum. Without those skills, and on the verge of a recession sparked by 29 years of economic vandalism, employment for some very much becomes a choice between shovelling shit for a wage barely worth itself, or leaving an empty “autograph,” at the JobCentre. And that leaves nothing to do; so the streets become, “grey with boredom.” In those circumstances, are we really surprised that that some turn to gangs and crime? The system, economic and social, abandoned them - so they’ve little incentive to work within it.

Youth crime is a complex issue, and needs a complex approach. Simply removing poems which address it from the curriculum won’t help at all; a problem won’t go away because you resolutely ignore it. Teenagers, after all, probably know far more about their own world than adults - so changing the school curriculum to avoid that world won’t help them avoid it. If you want to educate someone out of a habit, then you need to educate them in the first place. And does this really look like that?

…this time in Northern Ireland. There, the “Family Education Trust” wants the state to withold a vaccine against STDs and cervical cancer from teenage girls on the grounds that it’ll encourage early sex, and that parents should emphasise abstainence.

The base idiocy of this position is well established. Abstinence only sex-education doesn’t work, and simply encourages the spread of disease through ignorance. The desire for sex is a perfectly natural instinct, and one that won’t be quashed because a collection of pompous prigs stand in front of a class and say that it’s naughty. Teenage experimentation will happen; I speak as a teenager who has experimented, and would’ve done so in most conceivable circumstances.* But, because these teenagers have only been told to abstain, they might not know to wear a condom, or about how syphilis/chlamydia/AIDs/etc are spread; so they don’t take precautions. And then teenage pregnancy and STD infection rates go up.

The case for the vaccine is still more simple. The state exists to preserve and extend the freedom of its citizens; one such freedom is from infectious disease, and from dangerous ignorance. A lack of knowledge of how infectious diseases such as this cervical cancer because you’ve only ever been told to avoid sex counts as dangerous ignorace. Therefore, the state must offer full and detailed sexual education, for the sake of the individual and public health. And if a vaccine exists which can prevent the spread of potentially deadly diseases, that needs to be available too; if they vaccinate against meninghitis in schools, why not cervical cancer?

Ah, but doesn’t all this infringe a parent’s right to raise their child as they wish, you ask? Not so. A child does not exist as an extension of their parent’s will; it exists as an entity in its own right. If a parent plans to put that child at risk of infectious disease for the sake of the parent’s beliefs, then someone else must look to the child’s rights and future. It’s in the teenager’s every interest, both in the present and the future, to be safe from disease and ignorance. If they themselves objected on strong grounds, religious or otherwise (and I note this is an offer of a vaccine), then there’d be grounds to withold its provision. But not otherwise. A child is an individual in its own right, and one that exists in a community as well as a family. If it serves that individual’s interests more, then that community must also play a part in raising them.

So, frankly, the “Family Education Trust” can fuck off (preferably wearing condoms, of course.) There are no legitimate grounds to withold a vaccine against a potentially deadly disease from teenagers; especially when it’s an offer rather than a compulsion. Individual and public health must comes before parental sensitivity - and this is no exception.

*Could there be a more unfortunate sentence?

Alistair Darling is like the slightly dim child at the back of the maths class.  He can cope with exercise 1.3, but when the added complexities of 1.4 come along, he’s suddenly out of his depth.  He looks around to his classmates, all of whom are pointedly staring at their own papers, and flounders.  How to deal with 1.4?  He fails the end of unit test, but pre-empts a telling-off from his teacher, Mr Brown, by complaining that he was never taught how to answer the more complex questions.  Instead, he complains about how unfairly difficult that exam was, and argues that his low mark reflects the test more than his abilities.  He quietly ignores the fact that his classmates, in equivalent jobs around the world, at least passed the test.

He is out of his depth, and is panicking.  No wonder he has come out against a reshuffle.

(A half-hat tip to BenSix.)

Gordon Brown is about to begin his latest relaunch.  (Is this number 7?  8?)  But, as with all of his previous attempts in the last 15 months, a relaunch will be extremely costly for the public purse.  Joey Jones, on the Sky News Blog:

Imagine you’re Alistair Darling. Right now you’re need cash for all this…

-The anticipated u-turn on vehicle excise duty.

-The 10p tax compensation package (funded by borrowing for now, but that’s not a goer forever.)

-And now of course Gordon Brown’s make-or-break/last ditch/not a relaunch, honest/”we feel your pain” energy giveaway.

Now don’t forget, the Treasury is shorter of cash than it would have been having cancelled the 2p rise in fuel duty. And it’s widely understood other taxation revenue is drying up.

So how to pay for the splurge upon which Gordon Brown is pinning his hopes of remaining in Number Ten? Goodness only knows….

The government tried non doms…. then retreated. They tried capital gains tax reform…. retreated again….

So who else has got deep pockets?

Political parties ravaging the economy to protect their own backides is nothing new.  But in Brown’s case, the economy is being ravaged to keep his backside in the Cabinet Room despite most of its other occupants wishing it were not there.  Apart from being disgustingly selfish, this is simply bad government.  I do not begrudge paying tax, but I think it should be spent sensibly.  To see Brown borrowing money that my generation will be paying for, at inflated rates, just to stay in office for 18 months longer - that’s a disgraceful misuse of an election mandate.

If only I could believe that any of the opposition wouldn’t do the same…

I have already made comment on the new Number 10 website.  It seems as if  the design was stolen from the Themes Database, and badly botched before being put online.  Full comment with outgoing links from the theme’s author.

This just goes to show how monumentally divorced the government is from the real world.  There is no excuse in hiring a company to make a website on an open source platform and then not declaring copyright disclaimers.  If the press released shouted “open source”, even the most technically unaware individual in the Number 10 office should stop and think “wait, that means we didn’t make it ourselves.  Maybe the copyright notice should reflect that”.  It is a disgrace.

It really gets to something when government cannot even deliver a simple Wordpress website without messing up.  I have used loads of Wordpress themes in the past, all with appropriate copyright notices.  It was with a slight smile on my face that the latest theme for this website went live with my name at the bottom, not anyone else’s - I built it from scratch, line by line.  Apparently the Number 10 website cost £100,000, but it is no more technically advanced than this site, and whoever put it together could not be bothered to design it, or even steal a design properly.  I am obviously wasting my time, when I could be making government websites for ludicrous sums.

As a wannabe web nerd, I spend some time browsing professional Wordpress theme designs.  Today I spent some time mocking up a design for my own website, which I will begin building in the next few days.  It was with interest, then, to find that the much-trumpeted Number10 website has been unveiled - built on Wordpress!  Get Gordon, all trendy and open source!  Just today I read an article by a blogger on the problems with pushing Wordpress too far beyond a simple blog format, trying to decide whether the platform can really cope with uses beyond those which it was designed for.  In short, I love Wordpress and am happy to mould it to suit any purpose, but the kind of site at Number10 should really be on a more robust content management system.

(I suspect at this point that most readers will not care greatly about the intricacies of Wordpress as a publishing system, so I shall leave the issue aside.)

The visual identity of the site is remarkably different to the old one.  What was once a practical website that looked as if it was created by a team of civil servants with solid scripting knowledge, but little eye for design, is now reasonably professional but not remotely official-looking.  It feels like the website for a small business, not the gateway to the seat of power.  But the simplicity and closeness is not necessarily a bad thing.  The colour scheme works well, and the use of white space is a stark contrast to the overbearing mass of information dumped by the previous incarnation.

This is genuinely web2.0.  Not only is it open source in software, it fully integrates feeds from Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.  This is, really, everything that WebCameron is not.  Where WebCameron is lacking, Number10 shows the Tories how it is done.  But where WebCameron works, this is too poor a comparison to look like an imitation.  There is no original blog content from the PM himself - why use easy-as-pie Wordpress if nobody is actually blogging?  And why on earth is all of the video contained in a TelegraphTV-style media centre instead of being embedded into articles?  Fundamentally, though, why use blogging software if there is no facility to comment?

This could have been a great break for government to reach into new media.  To get the public’s attention where it is of most value - on the internet.  I have long argued for the internet as being massively more important for government than any other media source, including television and newspapers, and this site relaunch was the perfect opportunity for government to wake up.  But they are still slumbering.

The gesture of using Wordpress is thoroughly unnecessary.  There is no good reason for using a blogging platform for the kind of content the Number10 website hosts.  If the website were to contain blogs, or even comments under articles, Wordpress would be perfect.  But for the kind of use Number10 has, Wordpress is simply the wrong package to choose (even from the open source options available).  The (surely deliberate) attempt to look hip and trendy by straying into WebCameron territory is pointless unless the great benefits of WebCameron are realised.  Most argue that Cameron’s site did not go quite far enough towards interaction, and, fundamentally, failed to keep moving forwards.  Instead, it has stagnated.  The new Number10 has a ready stream of content to keep it fresh, but it is simply press releases and speech transcripts.  I want to see short video clips of Gordon behind his desk telling us “I’ve just got off the phone with Putin, discussing South Ossetia.  We are agreed on…”.  Such content can be put up within minutes, and would give the public at least a nudge towards believing that Gordon is actually serving a purpose behind that shiny black door.

This is a typical government Emperor’s New Clothes phenomenon.  You know the story: the Emperor is really proud of his new outfit and shows it off to everyone.  Blinded by the Emperor’s presence and the fact that everyone is enamoured by the outfit, everyone is amazed by this most brilliant set of clothes ever produced.  Until one thoughtful person points out that the Emperor is, in fact, stark naked.  Here is a blog: it’s built on Wordpress, it looks like a blog, it feels like a blog, it quacks like a blog… etc. In fact, though, it is nothing of the sort.  It uses blogging software where a traditional CMS would be more appropriate.  It integrates photos via Flickr instead of directly though the site simply because Flickr sounds trendy.  Likewise video is pumped via YouTube on the front page, because of brand association, and then via a different out-of-the-box system on a the video page because YouTube isn’t actually the best way to show video after all.  As for the use of Twitter: a nonsense gesture, and transparently vacuous.  Everything that makes this website look like a blog is inefficient and wrong: in short, only there to make it look like a blog!

They don’t seem to get it.  The Number 10 website could easily have become a fantastic blog-based hub of accessible government.  It could have featured regular minute-long video pieces from the prime minister, with comment facilities below.  It could have hosted the ability to discuss the vast number of press releases and speeches archived on the site.  It should, at the very least, have hosted a blog from Gordon Brown.  He need not have pretended he had time to log into Wordpress and hit “publish” five times a day, but if he can squeeze out three books while Chancellor and Prime Minister, he can knock off a few blog posts each week.

I do not regularly comment on new government website builds, but this one was different.  It was built up in the press as the dawn of a new era in prime ministerial closeness.  Instead, it is a perfect exercise in appearing to be everything that you want, but actually turning out to be nothing at all.  I am severely disappointed in this squandered opportunity: the Emperor’s clothes may be new, but they are not actually clothes at all.

It looks like I am holding the fort here at Scribo Ergo Sum while my esteemed co-writers are variously engaged away from broadband connections.  Only through such experience can I consider Harriet Harman’s plight at the moment.  Stuck in London while her boss is practicing pilates in a jacket and tie somewhere in East Anglia, Harman is the only senior Cabinet member at home.  Poor woman; I almost feel pity.

To avoid an embarrassing croquet-at-Dorneywood incident, Harman has been cleverly concealed away from the prying eyes of the press.  Smart.  The media machine rumbles on, slowly losing steam over the will-he/won’t-he of a Miliband coup.  The news channels are full of Olympics, taking up as much as half of each bulletin.  The Conservatives are continuing to drip out press releases each day, policy by policy, quietly preparing the ground for an all-out assault at Party Conference.  And we are all blissfully oblivious to the fact that nobody is actually running the country.

The government’s response to South Ossetia is beginning to cause a bit of a stir (proving that journalists will literally write about nothing in August!) in the blogosphere and beyond.  But the problem extends far beyond foreign policy.  The SATs debacle is still on the agenda, and mercifully nobody is trying to brush it under the carpet.  The sad fact is that nobody is even in the building to pick up a broom to begin with!  Ed Balls is nowhere to be seen.  Nobody has adequately explained how the mess was allowed to come about to begin with, nobody is dealing with the consequences, and nobody is taking the flak.

Or take the economy.  Inflation is up to 4.4% today: well above double the government’s own target.  Alistair Darling’s attempt to reassure the public that he was “considering several options” last week was a resounding failure, not least because he indicated that people ought to wait until the Autumn for a better picture of the government’s plans for the housing market.  The result: people decide to sell in a few months, further hitting the ailing industry.  He appeared on radio with no policy to announce or explain, and no timetable for action to set out.  He wanted simply to show people that he was there, doing his best.  But his best was to speed up the property slump: a shocking failure.  After that miserable performance, it seems as if some wise advisers suggested that he should keep quiet for a few weeks, leaving all official Treasury business to be fronted by Yvette Cooper.  Who has done nothing but muddy the waters further.

I must admit to finding Silly Season a little refreshing.  One is not being constantly bombarded with suit-clad ministers running from studio to studio rubbishing the other guy’s latest lightbulb-above-head moment.  Sport and celebrity weddings take the place of reports and committees.  But there is a catch.

I like to see MPs as like police officers.  When all is well with the world, I don’t want to see them at all.  If the presence of police on a tube platform is slightly unnerving, the sight of MPs in summer is deeply concerning.  But if an attacker is approaching me 100 feet under Central London, I would dearly love a whole battalion of burly hi-vis-wearing coppers to march to my rescue.  Likewise, if everything is going up the spout, I expect to be lead by my government.  They were elected to govern, not have seaside photo-ops in a cat and mouse game of “I’m on a proper holiday”, “No, I’m on a more proper holiday. Look, I’m even wearing a T-shirt!”.  If some idiot contractor has screwed up exam result processing, I want someone to say “sorry: here’s our plan to avoid repeating this farce next year”.  If some idiot Chancellor has screwed up not trying to fix the economy until the Autumn, I expect him to either apoligise and announce a solid plan to save the economy, or to apologise and state firmly that there won’t ever be a plan to save the economy.  And if some idiot not-really-a-deputy prime minister cannot be seen to be taking control of government for fear of looking like she is positioning herself to depose her leader, then the whole sorry Labour party is far too fragile to be allowed anywhere near the corridors of power.

Giving the impression that you are on holiday, and letting the nation take a breather, is a fantastic skill in otherwise driven politicians.  But if you are the captain of a pleasure cruiser, currently heading for some rocks, you don’t grab a poolside sun lounger on the upper deck.  This government is cruising, rudderless, towards a whole series of crises at home an abroad.  And whilst they ostentatiously jump from the diving board boasting about who is on the most “normal” holiday, the cabin is empty and the warning lights are going unheeded.

The Police surrounding Kingsnorth Climate Camp were issued a booklet entitled “Policing Protest” by the sinister sounding National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit. Indymedia brings us a dropped booklet - and very englightening it is too. The pamphlet is very vague in places, with key terms defining what precisely constitutes an offence left to individual judgement and whatever’s considered, “ordinary,” by the office (see p7).

So, are there any dangerous extremists at Kingsnorth? I think it’s time to consult the booklet. Section 4 of the Public Order Act 1986 states:

An offence is committed:

I if a person uses towards another person threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or

II Distributes or displays to another person any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him or another by any person, or to provoke the immediate use of unlawful violence by that person or another, or whereby that person is likely to believe that such violence will be used or it is likely that such violence will be provoked.

So, in short - if an individual frightens another individual with the threat of violence. Did that happen at Kingsnorth? Why yes, comrades. You see that snarling man in the centre wearing a fluorescent jacket brandishing what looks to be a blunt object, as though he’d do violence against those unarmed citizens; he looks to be just such a dangerous extremist. And don’t those unarmed civilians look scared?

Note also that provocation to unlawful violence is an offence - one the Police already stand accused of. Baton charges and full riot gear aren’t usually deployed against pacifists and vegans. It’s uneccessary, and smacks of an attempt to intimidate said vegans. So when those baton charges are carried out, they become offences under Section 4A of the same Act:

An offence is committed if with intent to cause a person intentional harassment, alarm or distress, a person:

I uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
II displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

Not looking good, is it? Similar offences took place under Section 5 of the Public Order Act. Unless, of course, smashing the windows of supply vans and the confiscation of materials essential to basic hygiene isn’t an attempt to harrass protestors.

Perhaps the Kent Police will fare better under Section 12 of the Public Order Act, which deals with public processions. It states that conditions may be imposed on activity if it might result in:

I serious public disorder

II serious damage to property

III serious disruption to the life of the community

IV the purpose of procession is the intimidation of others with a view to compelling them not to do an act they have a right to do, or to do an act they have a right not to do.

Let’s treat the columns of police vans that made their way to Kingsnorth as a procession. They’re guilty of all four offences, I’m afraid, thus:

I Baton charges rather count, I think.

II See exhibit A; note also the theft of soap, crayons, board games, essential building materials, etc.

III We can treat the Climate Camp as a community; it has its own food supplies, kitchens, and even neighbourhoods. The Police have surrounded this community, search anyone who wants to enter it, cut off its food supplies and stolen numerous personal possessions (see II). This seems likely to have disrupted the community.

IV Peaceful Protest is a right guaranteed under the Human Rights Act. The protestors haven’t yet perpetrated violence, so can be assumed to be peaceful; they’ve thus a legal right to do as they have. The Police have interrupted their protest, and so compelled them not to do an act they have a right to do.

Section 14 concerns spontaeneous protest, so we’ll let them off here; the Police have clearly planned this for a while.

We move onto the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 now. Section 42 concerns harrassment of the individual within their home. It states directions may be given should:

I that person is present outside or in the vicinity of any premises that are used by any individual ( “the resident”) as his dwelling;
II that individual believes, on reasonable grounds, that that person is present there for the purpose (by his presence or otherwise) of representing to the resident or another individual (whether or not one who uses the premises as his dwelling), or of persuading the resident or such another individual that he should not do something that he is entitled or required to do or
that he should do something that he is not under any obligation to do;
III that individual also believes, on reasonable grounds, that the presence of that person (either alone or together with that of any other persons who are also present) amounts to, or is likely to result in, the harassment of the resident; or is likely to cause alarm or distress to the resident.

We’ve already defined the Climate Camp as a settlement; it follows that tents and shelters contained in that settlement should be defined as (temporary) dwellings. The Police have entered into that settlement, patrolled outside the dwellings within, and taken possessions from those dwellings. That smacks of harrassment - and so, another offence against their own rules.

There follow a long string of inapplicable sections, before we reach Section 68 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. It states an offence is committed if an individual trespasses and, “does anything to intimidate persons on that land,” to deter them from any legal activity. So - how does entry into a private tent and taking soap, with the immediate intent to prevent protestors from engaging in the legal activity of washing, and the wider intent of making legal protest less attractive, sound? Like an offence, that’s what.

The section regarding Offence by Harrassment is obscured. But, given that we’ve already shown harrassment has taken place, we can assume the police are culpable here, too. Likewise Section 4 of the Protection from Harrassment Act 1997, which makes it an offence to, “pursue a course of conduct, ” which, “causes fear,” that violence will be used against them; that Baton Charges were threatened and occured incriminates the Police here. Preventing food supplies reaching the camp almost certainly required a public highway to be obscured; an offence under Section 137 of the Highways Act 1980.

So, that makes the Police at Kingsnorth guilty (at least) of offences under the Public Order Act 1986; the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001; the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994; the Protection from Harrassment Act 1997 and the Highways Act 1980. Quite a charge sheet. But where will we keep them all while they’re on trial?

The Police can only justify their existence when they protect liberty. And yet, at Kingsnorth, they’ve demonstrably abused the law - and broken it on numerous occasions. The Climate Camp protestors have exercised their democratic right to protest, and the police have tried to stop them. In a more firebrand mood (or when drunk), I’d denounce them - and their masters at Westminster - as enemies of popular freedoms who fully deserve to be torn apart in a wild and bloody revolution as the people reclaim their rights. As it is, I’ll merely shake my head and say that I really do worry…

(Hat-tips for evidence: Indymedia, JimJay, Coventry Greens, Stuart Jeffrey)

It isn’t a great week for the Home Office, is it? First, overt abuse of police power at Kingsnorth; and now the Lords splatter 42 Days. It’s just a shame it’s in August, where it’s easier for them to ignore the obvious by sitting on a beach…