A friend visited this evening, one of those who can smell an open whisky bottle from five miles away, and helped me to kill off the last of the Glenkinchie I opened last night. I didn’t tell him about the Ledaig or we’d still be drinking now, although we’d have been doing it by candlelight.
As he left, the power went off. All of it. Fortunately I have one of those emergency battery units that saves the computer from crashing at such times, and gives me time to shut it down properly. It stayed off for an hour and a half. Anyone relying on a radio alarm tomorrow morning is going to get a nasty surprise.
It’s back on now (well, duh) and the first thing I found when I went into the news was the story of Bouncy Balls telling us how he’s going to ‘fix’ the mess of education. You know, the mess it’s not in if you listen to Labour spout tractor stats disguised as exam results. Michael Gove, someone I have ignored so far, had this to say:
Mr Gove said promises of personal tuition outlined by Mr Balls had previously been announced by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in June 2007.
And he told the Schools Secretary: “I know you relish your role as this Government’s attack puppy and your special vocation as the Prime Minister’s mini-me.
I’m starting to like this Gove chap. This is a nice change from the barely-heard voices of the opposition so far in this government.
“But when will you realise that simply repeating the same old nonsense over and over again ad nauseam hasn’t exactly helped the Prime Minister to new heights of popularity and it won’t help you.”
It’s a taste of things to come. Balls is practising to be the next Prime Monster, so he’s emulating the style of the current droning sack of saggy misery because obviously, that’s really worked well. It’s produced excellent results at the polls. For every party other than Labour.
Tory spokesman Michael Gove said Mr Balls was offering “old material” and told MPs introducing legal obligations on schools to drive up standards was evidence that Labour had failed to do so in the last 12 years.
There go the ‘legal obligations’ again. Not content with making it illegal to be poor, the government now want to make it illegal to be stupid. Of course, the poor and the stupid won’t be the ones punished, because they are ‘the criminal’ in this law. Under the Labour legal system, the criminal gets understanding and compensation while the victim (everyone who isn’t poor and/or stupid) goes to jail. We’re all to blame for poverty because we earn money by working and don’t want to hand it all over to those who don’t want to work. We’ll all be to blame for stupidity because we listened at school, learned things and worked at getting qualifications. Those who didn’t, well, its not their fault they’re stupid. It’s those capitalists hogging all the qualifications for themselves.
Mr Balls had said that teachers will in future need a “licence to teach” which would be regularly reviewed.
What can he mean? Some kind of teacher training system where teachers learn how to run a class? Why didn’t we think of that before! We did? So, what he means is a licence that can be revoked if the teacher doesn’t comply with New Labour indoctrination teaching methods. The kids must all come out equally stupid or it’s rip up the licence time. Can’t have those terrible elitists learning things. Everyone must be stupid to a level equal to that of a Labour minister. It’s quite a challenge.
Labour are trying to get their party handbook made law. The trouble is, their handbook no longer makes any sense at all. The Tories will have to scrap the entire statute book (is it a statute library by now?) and start from scratch. It’ll be quicker than trying to pick out all Labour’s petty and generally insane legislation.
This Gove might be worth watching. He has a way with words.
UPDATE: The Daily Politics has it on video.