GCSE DEBACLE ILLUSTRATES GOVT’S CONTEMPT FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

THE debacle over the downgrading of GCSE results serves to deliver a harsh but important lesson to Britain’s young people about the grim realities of Tory Britain.

You have to wonder whether Education Secretary Michael Gove had been getting ideas from the old adage about taking candy from a baby when he decided to deliberately downgrade GCSE-results mid-year.

Yet this whole fiasco strikes me as a powerful metaphor which encapsulates the flawed policies of this Government.

And the message is clear: the deal you get from the Tories isn’t about equity or fairness but about circumstance.

I mean, seriously, how low is this Tory-led Government prepared to go?

I’d like to see Mr Gove try to justify his excuse that the policy was to counter so-called “grade inflation” to the many 16-year-olds who have been affected.

Those young people must carry a D-grade on their CVs instead of a C-grade for the rest of their lives – just because their coursework was submitted in the summer instead of the winter.

It is patently unfair. But then fairness doesn’t appear to be a word the Tories comprehend.

They certainly weren’t thinking about fairness when they decided to offer a tax break to Britain’s millionaires in the last budget, while simultaneously heaping more pressure on those struggling to make ends meet.

Fairness wasn’t on the agenda when the Government announced changes to council tax benefit schemes which will force local authorities, against their wishes, to turn the knife on society’s most vulnerable forcing many into poverty.

Nor was it fair when student tuition fees were pushed through the roof, when the public were denied a judge-led inquiry into the Libor banking scandal, or when the Tories proposed hair-brained taxes on charities, caravans, skips and even pasties.

But it is not just the unfairness of the GCSE grading farce which baffles me; moreover it is the apparent lack of thought, logic or justification.

If Mr Gove really believes the step was necessary due to steadily improving grades over a number of years, then why do it mid-year?

Surely this will just muddy the waters for years to come because 2011-12 will forever be the academic year for which the statistics were twisted by dodgy accounting. It would have made much more sense to make such a change between academic years rather than during one.

Yet there is little point in analysing the whys and wherefores of this decision – to do so gives the Government too much credit.

The reality is that there was no logic to the decision because it was taken hastily without proper consideration. It is not the first such action since the Tory-Lib Dem coalition stumbled into Government and I’m quite sure it won’t be the last.

And that’s the lesson that our young people can learn from this shameful situation.

While the travesty over GCSE grades might seem to some like a fairly minor sham compared to some of the others we’ve seen along the way, it is indicative of what this Government stands for.

The social experiment being forced on Britain is neither about fairness nor logic but about political dogma. We’ve got a shrunken, battered economy to show for it along with a growing list of victims.

The 16-year-olds whose GCSE papers were marked down are the latest to join that list, but the light at the end of the tunnel may yet be that it is the Tories and Lib Dems whose scores ultimately suffer at the ballot box.

HIGH RENTS TRAP WOULD-BE HOME OWNERS

BRITAIN’S housing crisis continues to deteriorate. The latest twist was the revelation that the cost of renting in the private sector has risen for the fourth month in a row. Average rents now stand at their highest ever recorded level.


It seems almost insane, but nowadays most homes being advertised for rent are often more expensive than what the equivalent mortgage repayments would be on the same property.

Consequently, large numbers of would-be owner-occupier’s are trapped and unable to get a foot on to the first wrung of the property ladder. The high rents leave insufficient disposable income to save for the huge deposits demanded by banks and building societies to obtain a mortgage.

The absurdity of this situation was highlighted in the Resolution Foundation’s ‘Squeezed Britain’ report earlier this year. It found low and middle income households would need to save for 22 years for a deposit on an average first home, compared to three years when Tony Blair was prime minister!

The same report found that nearly half of all low and middle income earners aged under 35 are renting. This represents a threefold increase since the late 1980s when the figure was only 14 per cent. And in the past six years the number of home owners in this age and income group has plummeted from 51 per cent to just over a third.

Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s rhetoric about a property owning democracy has turned into a 21st century sick joke for millions of aspiring home owners. The Government’s shamefully pathetic and counterproductive response to this calamity is destroying people’s hopes and dreams.

Its reaction to rising rents is to impose a housing benefit cap. But it was a previous Tory housing minister, Sir George Young, who in January 1991 said: “If people cannot afford to pay market rents, housing benefit will take the strain”.

And Government has set its new definition of ‘affordable rents’ at 80 per cent of market rents, which in some areas is actually above its own housing benefit cap. Consequently, even people living in social housing in these areas will find it increasingly difficult to save for a deposit to buy a house on the open market

Downing Street’s solution to the woefully inadequate supply of social housing is to endorse a rightwing think tank’s recommendation to build cheap houses by selling off council houses in expensive areas. But such an approach would undermine balanced communities and would not release anywhere near enough funds to deal with the scale of the problem.

In one of the more affluent suburbs in my home city of Derby for example, there are only around 30 council houses, and all of them are occupied. Even if those tenants were forcibly evicted and rehoused elsewhere in the city, the capital receipts from selling these homes would make little impact on Derby’s council housing waiting list.

It is time for a radically different approach. We need action to address the scandalous mortgage drought, a determination to build desperately needed homes and an end to the ideologically driven attacks on low and middle income households.

GOVERNMENT IS STILL FAILING TO GENERATE EMPLOYMENT

With long-term youth unemployment in my constituency up by 333%, our young people are still paying the price for this Government’s economic failure

But ministers are still clinging to the failing policies that have driven our economy back into recession.

Out of touch ministers need to wake up to the jobs crisis they're responsible for and take urgent action now. They should start with Labour’s Real Jobs Guarantee and get our young people back to work."

The headline fall in unemployment today is a welcome respite in a blizzard of bad economic news.

But today’s figures show we've got to redouble our efforts to get Britain back to work.  Unemployment throughout the Midlands increased, and 90% of the fall in unemployment across the country was in London. Long term youth unemployment is still going through the roof and part-time work has hit an all time high as people struggle to find a full time job.

Crucially, there are now huge-warnings signs on the road ahead.  Our economy is not even in the slow lane – it’s in reverse.  Britain is only one of two G20 countries in recession, and the Governor of the Bank of England says there is little more low interest rates can do.

That means the government has got to act now to put more fuel in the tank of its back to work plan starting with a tax on bankers bonuses that could create the funds to kickstart the construction sector and get over 100,000 young people back to work.

TODAY MARKS GREAT BRITAIN’S REAL GLORIOUS TWELFTH

Great Britain celebrates its gold medal triumphs at today’s Olympic closing ceremony. But away from the spotlight, shooting fanatics will be taking to the moors in Derbyshire and other uplands around the country for the official start of the grouse shooting season.

A number of rich and powerful people secured a lifelong injunction against me in 1981 preventing me from going onto certain Derbyshire moors during the grouse shooting season. They wanted to prevent me from witnessing what can only be described as a gruesome spectacle of animal abuse.

August 12th is often referred to as the so-called ‘Glorious 12th’, which marks the start of a mass slaughter of birds by wealthy gun-toting bloodsports enthusiasts. In sharp contrast to this brutish behaviour, London 2012 has witnessed numerous medals won for Great Britain by genuine sportsmen and women. And it’s this that should be celebrated as 2012’s real Glorious Twelfth.

There is nothing glorious about grouse shooting. Each year, from August to December, picturesque moorlands are invaded by groups of men and even children armed with guns, having paid for the ‘pleasure’ of shooting and injuring thousands of terrified birds.

The cruelty associated with grouse shooting doesn’t stop there. Other wildlife including badgers, foxes, deer and even pets are killed or injured through the use of snaring and other predator control used by the industry to protect game stocks.

The fact that the grouse numbers are depleted this year simply means that a higher percentage of the population will be killed, which may affect long term population recovery.”

The League Against Cruel Sports’ recent exposé of the game-shooting industry highlights the reality of commercial shooting away from the spin and propaganda peddled by the industry. Further information and the film can be found by logging onto: http://www.league.org.uk/content/300/Shooting

CONSTRUCTION CONTRACTION CAUSES CONTINUING CONSTERNATION

The latest Construction Trade Survey has been published today hot on the heels of last month’s GDP figures, published by the ONS, showing a deepening recession led by sharp falls in construction activity.

The survey provides the depressing detail to the headline figures produced by the ONS. All parts of the industry have seen a sharp fall including current workloads, new orders and tender prices. It illustrates the continuing woes and growing uncertainty for the UK economy as a whole.

As public sector investment continued to decline, in line with the government’s counterproductive austerity programme, there was no sign of any private sector recovery to offset these cuts, leaving the sector with very little optimism for recovery in the near future.

Key survey findings include:

• Large and medium sized building contractors reporting output in the second quarter of 2012 lower than during the first quarter of 2011, which in turn was lower than Q4 and output has fallen in four of the last five quarters.

• Building contractors continuing to report that order books are falling. The overall orders balance stood at –25% in the first quarter and deteriorated to –50% in Q2.

• In 2012 Q2 30% of building contractors, on balance, reported rises in costs.

• In 2012 Q1, nearly a third of firms, on balance, reported that profit margins reduced yet this had increased to almost half of all firms, 49% on balance, by 2012 Q2.

• 45% of heavy side firms reported that sales fell between Q1 and Q2. However, 20% of light side firms, on balance, reported that sales rose between the first and second quarters of 2012.

• 6% of heavy side manufacturers, on balance, reduced headcount in the year to Q2. 8% of light side firms, on balance, increased employment over the same period. However, employment remained static for the vast majority of firms.

• 45% of heavy side manufacturers and 73% of light side manufacturers invested in product improvement.

Representatives of the construction industry were understandably gloomy. Noble Francis, Economics Director at the Construction Products Association said: “The position for construction in the UK is now looking very bleak indeed, as this is the fourth such fall in the past five quarters.”

Stephen Ratcliffe, Director of the UK Construction Group, spoke about the need for investment now, not in several year’s time. He said: "Declining public sector spend and a lack of confidence amongst private investors, means action is urgently needed to kick-start the construction economy. Recent announcements on infrastructure guarantees and rail investment have been welcome, but we also need ‘shovels in the ground’ today. More resources could be directed to social housing and repair and maintenance projects – these are labour intensive and can be got off the ground very quickly.”

And Julia Evans, Chief Executive of the National Federation of Builders added: “The country is basking in the feel good factor of the Olympics which aims to inspire a generation. However, with higher costs, rising numbers of insolvencies, falling output, lower demand and rapidly depleting skills the construction industry is in danger of losing an entire generation of talent. “

The industry is united in its calls for Government action and the nation is crying out for a change in direction. But Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Clegg et al seem fixated on their austerity programme. The obvious damage this is doing to the economy and the hardship it is causing millions of British people is unforgiveable.