The UK Border Agency (UKBA) says student attendance at London Metropolitan University is not being monitored and that many have no right to be here.
As a result, the university will no longer be allowed to authorise visas

Cue for the BBC to get out the onions with tear jerking quotes from bosses at London Met and, naturally the National Union of Pizza Eaters and Beer Drinkers (aka Nat Union of Students – funded by us the taxpayers of course…)

Cobblers

The UKBA says London Metropolitan University had “failed to address serious and systemic failings” identified six months ago.
Immigration Minister Damian Green said London Metropolitan University had failed in three particular areas:
• More than a quarter of the 101 students sampled were studying at the university when they had no leave to remain in this country
• Some 20 of 50 checked files found “no proper evidence” that the students’ mandatory English levels had been reached
• And some 142 of 250 (57%) sampled records had attendance monitoring issues, which meant it was impossible for the university to know whether students were turning up for classes or not.

Fact is that the London Met (nothing to do with the prestigious University of London) is the worst performing university in the UK and has been relying on foreign students to subsidise it’s inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Hence it’s willingness to turn a blind eye to either the legal status of foreign students or their attendance. Indeed I would not be surprised if the rolls at London Met are as full of dead people as the Chicago Electoral Register…

…and all that stuff about no other uni in the same position? Biggest porkie pie of the year – most of the low level performers are at it. London Met was selected pour encourager les autres. Hopefully at a large number of pseudo universities urgent e mails are being sent to staff presently sunning themselves on beaches across the globe telling them that the gravy train has reached the buffers and that from the start of next term they must start keeping proper registers instead of making them up.

Even better maybe once the word of this crackdown spreads across the globe there might even be a loss of income for these institutions. Some of the phantom departments could close….OMG….those that remain might have to start doing some actual work!!!!!!

Trouble is at the trade union for the great and the good the BBC is pretending to be shocked but is actually full of glee for nothing gets BBC mouths salivating better than an issue containing the words “student” “illegal” and “immigration”. Already, no doubt, documentaries are being commissioned and a foreign student storyline inserted into “East Enders”…

So – will the government stand firm?

Probably as firm as a meringue…

Pubs, by their very nature, can be lively, noisy, boisterous places especially as the evening moves on and the alcohol keeps flowing. Some, of course, because of their clientele, project an atmosphere of potential violence where a word or even a glance can generate a challenge. My father, who had been brought up in one of the tougher parts of South London and then, as a soldier, became a frequent patron of pubs throughout Britain and bars around the Mediterranean, took great pains, when I came of drinking age, to induct me into the self preservation strategies that allow a drinker to sense trouble a half minute or so before it breaks out and head towards the most appropriate exit.

So I doubt that, if I had lived in Bolton, I would have gone within a quarter mile of “The Flying Shuttle”, described by the Daily Mail as probably the “toughest pub” in Britain. It appeared to be open all the time, in defiance of the licensing laws, not because the landlord held an open house but simply because the bar staff were too frightened to call time. In the end it took thirteen police officers to close it down and even then there was a mini riot.

But in the midst of even the most terrifying indictment of human degradation something can sometimes sparkle through the darkest gloom. Although the patrons of the Shuttle appear to be a mixture of drug dealers, thieves, gangsters and whores there is at least one person who seems to have not only a rather dry sense of self deprecating humour but also (very rare amongst the denizens of our underclass) a grasp of the English language and an ability to spell…….for he or she could turn The Flying Shuttle

….into The Lying Slut…

What’s that sound? It’s Will Shakespeare chuckling up there in the big library in the sky……

h/t UK Daily Mail

Young American conservative blogger Tina Korbe at Hot Air is shocked

U.K. schools to kids: No best friends for you!

One speculative quote, no evidence but still a neat hook for a slow news day. I actually like Tina’s more personal style but when she edges towards this going to hell in a handcart schtick all it does is bring out the endoftheworld brigade who always lurk around the edges at Hot Air and fantasise about “socialist” policies and/or Britain becoming a province of the new caliphate.

FYI I have five delightful granchildren who are all in different UK schools and a permanent strand of their conversation is about friendships including the making and the breaking of the same.

Almost all parents and teachers get involved in the fall out when best friendships go sour. I would bet that most of us then advise the child to maintain a wider circle of friends to alleviate the extent of the heartache when these relationships drift apart – which is, I suspect, the reasoning behind the original quotation.

There is no official policy in this matter, no UK government diktat and it was a tad misleading to imply such in the headline and in the opening paragraph….”apparently, they’re a thing”

As in the USA we in the UK have enough official fruitloopery to befuddle our brains without having to invent them so, Tina, do use a little shoeleather to tease out the background before waving flags like these.

Unless, of course, one UK school has decided to import an idea from…….the good old US of A……

BTW…this is an expansion of a comment I made on Tina’s article at Hot Air

Well, folks, so now you know. It’s all down to the white middle class again, the cause of almost all the world’s problems.
In fact this time we can narrow it down to a subset – those white middle class women teachers..

It found the majority of those training to enter the classroom were white, monolingual, middle-class women who were taught by people similar to them.
This, it is claimed, had led to “race equality issues to become hidden”, with often little discussion of issues surrounding ethnicity.

Who says so? Why it’s those academic highflyers at Manchester Metropolitan University (recently ranked 104th out of 118 of all UK universities) so it must be true.

Hidden race equality issues…..all those modern buzzwords….race…equality….ISSUES…and they’ve been swept under the carpet, hidden away….oh dear, what are we going to do?

No need to panic, folks because Dr Peter Hick is on the case. He’s not scared of those white middle classes and has given them a very stern warning…

We cannot rest on our laurels as racial equality remains under threat.

…and to make certain we don’t rest on our laurels he has come up with a twofold solution

Employ more teachers from ethnic minorities

Give the remaining white middle class teachers a very large dose of equality training and make it regular and continuous in case they lapse into their old blinkered ways.

Job done.

Let’s get rid of the quaint, old fashioned idea that we need to have teachers who can give children a basic grounding in how to treat other people as well as an understanding of those areas of knowledge that keep our society going. We don’t want teachers who can teach science and maths and history and literature. We want teachers who are racially and ethnically aware. There needs to be TRAINING…..so we’ll need TRAINERS. Moreover those trainers will need to be paid (by the taxpayer, of course) and someone will have to provide them.

Who on earth can step into the breach?

No need to worry – step forward once more Dr Peter Hick…equality expert extraordinaire and his team. No doubt as a result of this “survey” he already has a well thought out bid for the juicy tranche of government cash that will be diverted into equality training after the great and the good get chivvied into a moral racism panic by the BBC and a prial of bishops. More money for his department at Manchester Met and more feathers in his academic hat.

White middle class female teachers of England – Peter Hick is going to sort you out.

What was that? Maybe some of the students in our schools need to be given a bit of training in respecting their teachers, especially their female teachers?

What are you, some sort of neanderthal? The reason you’re being sworn at, punched, kicked or pushed up against a wall is because, as a white middle class woman teacher you are simply not “culturally competent in teaching an increasingly diverse pupil population.”

But slip Dr Hick at Manchester Met a million quid and he’ll show you the error of your ways, no problem….

The sad news about the death of Ray Honeyford, a brilliant head teacher whose career was broken in 1985 by the zealots of multiculturalism is made more poignant by the fact that subsequent events have proved him right. As head of a school with a largely Asian intake he warned against the dangers of multiculturalism which, during the 70s and 80s was the official policy of the educational establishment, aided and abetted by the great and the good of the media, the political elite and the lords of academe.

According to this policy, ethnic minority children were encouraged to cling on to their cultures, customs, even languages, while the concept of a shared British identity was treated with contempt. Honeyford thought this approach was deeply damaging.
He feared that it promoted division, hindered integration and undermined pupils’ opportunities to succeed in wider British society.

He was subjected to a campaign of unrelenting vilification from the liberal left and the race relations industry and was given up as a sacrificial lamb by his terrified employers with little, if any, support from the Thatcher government.

….and it made me think of Enoch Powell….

Enoch Powell was a brilliant academic (Professor of Ancient Greek at age 25) and also a combative conservative politician who possessed the remarkable gift (extremely rare amonst UK conservatives) of being able to connect with the man or woman in the street.

His views on immigration and the EU struck a chord that resonated with the majority of British people at a time when those same opinions were deemed unacceptable by the cultural elite that dominated – and continues to dominate – politics, the media and academe. As a result he was ostracised and ignored by the establishment and remained a political outsider from the late 60s onward.

Though popular with everyday folk he never deliberately courted popularity. Indeed some of his views (he was opposed to capital punishment) went against the grain of public opinion. But this independence of mind merely served to endear him even further with the public. There was always the feeling that with Powell you had a politician who was totally honest, never self serving and always ready to tell you the truth however unwilling were your ears to receive it.

Naturally he was given the cold shoulder, not just by the left but also by many of his Conservative Party colleagues who wanted a quiet life free from the strictures of the BBC and the UK Guardian.

Naturally all his warnings about the impact of uncontrolled immigration, European integration and lax fiscal policy have come to pass….

For a taster one clip and two quotes

Powell on the race card

Powell on “Western guilt”

We are told that the economic achievement of the Western countries has been at the expense of the rest of the world and has impoverished them, so that what are called the ‘developed’ countries owe a duty to hand over tax-produced ‘aid’ to the governments of the undeveloped countries. It is nonsense—manifest, arrant nonsense; but it is nonsense with which the people of the Western countries, clergy and laity, but clergy especially—have been so deluged and saturated that in the end they feel ashamed of what the brains and energy of Western mankind have done, and sink on their knees to apologise for being civilised and ask to be insulted and humiliated.

Powell on “Europe”

We are taunted—by the French, by the Italians, by the Spaniards—for refusing to worship at the shrine of a common government superimposed upon them all… where were the European unity merchants in 1940? I will tell you. They were either writhing under a hideous oppression or they were aiding and abetting that oppression. Lucky for Europe that Britain was alone in 1940.

Finally a must-read….Simon Heffer’s magisterial biography of Powell….

As a former schoolboy (a long time ago) and a teacher (now retired) and an amateur actor (still mumbling) I must confess enjoying a moment of guilty pleasure when I watch that Blackadder clip…

It came to mind when I learned a day or so back that I had just landed myself a part in our amateur theatre group’s Shakespeare spring production of “The Winter’s Tale”….not a particularly big role but, as Private Eye might say, it’s small but perfectly formed…..

I love being involved with a play, be it on or back stage. For a few weeks you are part of a joint endeavour with a group of people for one common purpose. You share all the ups and the downs, the crises and the celebrations, the laughter and the tears. Forget those familiar dividing lines of social intercourse age, sex or experience. You are pitched together like a close family battling the world. Then the set is struck and you go your separate ways. Once or twice the bonds made during a run might hold long after the scripts are filed. But more usually, once the play is done, the connections dissolve and disappear down memory lane.

The Bard, however, raises different issues for he is the broccoli of drama. We are told how good he is for us yet so many leave him on the side of the plate. Amateur groups feel he has to be performed even though quite a few tickets will be left unsold.
Shakespeare is often the amdram equivalent of a loss leader.

But he shouldn’t be. The characters are fascinating. The language is powerful and vivid. The themes are universal. He is part of every school’s curriculum.

We all have studied Shakespeare – and there’s the rub.

He is studied because he is a Good Thing. In school we have all analysed and dissected Billy S like a specimen on a laboratory bench. We have discussed characters, motives, meanings and symbolism, turned over metaphors and deconstructed references and laid bare every bone, muscle and sinew. His words are revered like a biblical text, a scientific hypothesis or a philosophical treatise. There is a vast Shakespeare industry employing thousands of actors, academics and gushing media scribblers and talking heads.

The guy’s works are being adulated to death – so here’s a thought.

Let’s turn off the tap for five years. Embargo the puff pieces. Deep freeze the academics in a cryogenics unit. Remove Stratford’s name from all road signs and sat navs. Ban Billy S from being mentioned in the school classroom. Perform the plays with zero hype. Hang anyone who dares to say “the bard”

Shift his library classification from the doom laden “Literature” to cheap and cheerful “Entertainment” – because that was how he was regarded by the noisy, bawdy riotous townsfolk who watched his plays in Elizabethan and Jacobean London.

As a schoolboy in 1950s England any chance of appreciating Shakespeare was ground out of my consciousness by hour after hour of mind numbing analysis until the very mention of the name would cause my eyes to glaze over and my brain to slip into neutral.

Then one evening in 1955 I went with my bus driver dad for our weekly cinema visit. He had misread the bill and was expecting to see a gangster movie. By the time we realised it was Laurence Olivier’s film of Richard III our tickets had already been purchased so we went in, expecting to be bored to tears.

How wrong we were. It was magical.

At the end, as the final credits rolled the audience in that packed cinema in a working class suburb of South London sat motionless and silent for a few brief moments. Then as we walked out into the night there was a massive buzz as we all began to talk of what we had seen and my dad looked at me and said “That wasn’t the Shakespeare that was hammered into me at school. That film must be the real Shakespeare….what have I been missing all these years?”

So, unlike Blackadder, it’s not the real Will Shakespeare I want to punch on the nose – it’s the polystyrene cultural idol created by the termites of the Shakespeare industry that I would like to target with my custard pie.

Mind you sometimes I do find Colin Firth a tad irritating……

Sarkozy & Merkel discuss plans for their new ship while the Titanic is sinking under them

Never upset a swordfish

After you have argued with someone it is never advisable to invite them to tattoo your back…

Misogynistic sadists with a medieval mindset doing rather well in some parts of the UK

Am I alone in not caring a fig about Sarah Jessica Parker’s insecurities?

Teachers in Ghana go on strike over students’ “Bowel Protest”

Austrians demand less theory and more practice when it comes to sex education in schools…

Whereas in France if you don’t regularly satisfy your wife in bed a judge will be very displeased…

Same report, different reactions….

Overheard at a Guardianista North London dinner party

Overheard in a pub in South London

Overheard in a golf club in Dorking, Surrey

In the summer of 2003 Aarti Naik, who lives in a slum district of Mulund, a suburb of the Indian city of Mumbai, failed a key school test. Her father, with very traditional views of girlhood decided enough was enough. She needed to leave school and start earning money until the time, hopefully, some nondescript drifter would marry the girl without a dowry and take her off his hands.

So for three years she worked, night and day, making ribbon flowers for sale, earning 9 rupees per days. She rarely left the family home, a 15x15ft single room divided into a living area and a tiny space for cooking and washing – her father disapproved of an unmarried young woman crossing over the threshold into the street.

A life of grinding, soul destroying poverty beckoned. She would grow up, like her mother and neighbours, in meek acceptance of her lot, ignorant and illiterate, her spirit crushed out of her by the prejudices of her father and her culture.

Howeve, in 2006, after three long years with the ribbon flowers, she decided to defy her father and retake her school tests – and passed. In another act of defiance she undertook a two year course to complete her higher certificate, graduating in 2008.

But those final years of study were hard because the girls were only taught to learn things by heart

She realised that many of her friends fell by the wayside because they didn’t know how to learn. So she set up her own tiny school and offered to teach the daughters of her neighbours – for nothing. She applied to a local NGO for some funds – and set up Sakhi (“female friend”)

At Sakhi, Aarti teaches them basic English and focuses on reading and writing. She encourages them to understand what they read and asks them to narrate or write down what they understood.
The kids are engaged in simple letter games like one involving a set of homemade cards — each carrying a letter of the English alphabet, which they must arrange in the proper order.
Aarti also ensures that they interact with each other in English, a language that is rarely spoken in the neighbourhood

What she soon discovered was that the girls’ mothers, who initially saw Sakhi as a means of getting their daughters off their hands for a few hours each day, suddenly realised that they had gained in self esteem as well as in terms of academic learning – which is why she saw the involvement of the mothers as the key to the success of her model.

At the end of the first year she organised an event to which the parents were invited. Each girl gave a little speech.

Parents who thought their girls were demure and didn’t talk much were surprised to see how confident they were outside of their homes.

Imagine the tears of pride at those moments of revelation.

Provided with seed money by local charities Aarti has a vision. She hopes to develop Sakhi as a model to get girls in slum communities across India to develop enough self confidence to lift themselves out of the cycle of poverty.

I think Robert Stacy McCain would agree that this is real women’s liberation. This is one tiny act of defiance against the bonds of ignorance and submission that hold so many women in thrall in societies across the globe. And it is from millions of such individual actions that true social progress can be made.

Read more about Aarti here – then visit her facebook page and ask to be her friend with a message of pride and respect.

She deserves no less.

Teachers at a Scottish high school have staged a flashdance in the middle of the canteen.

It was to say goodbye to students leaving Bell Baxter High School in Cupar, Fife.

At first Philip Black, the Rector (Headteacher), looks furious when the cheesy music starts blasting over the loudspeakers but then he strips off his jacket and does a routine with forty other members of staff.

Subsequent comments on YouTube about the performance describe the flashdancing rector as a ‘legend’. One says: ‘Mr Black you’re awesome!’ A surprised pupil at the school wrote: ‘Mr Black CAN dance!!! Go Mr Black hahahaha xx.’ Another says: ‘I loved every second. Great show from pupils and staff.’

Meanwhile an older spectator who watched the footage remarked: ‘Schooling has certainly changed since I was a lad.’ Mr Black is not the only member of staff coming in for praise – one fan declares on the website: ‘Mrs Livingstone lol, Legend.’

Mr Black said the dance – at lunchtime on Thursday – was a gift to this year’s school leavers, before they went on study leave on Friday. He said: ‘We are one of Scotland’s biggest schools, with 1,800 pupils, and we like to foster positive relationships with them.

Amen to that. After forty years of teaching I know one thing for sure. The most succesful teachers are those who set very clear boundaries but within those boundaries are not afraid to be at ease with their students.

As one veteran teacher said to me when I started my first job

Be firm with them and don’t stand any nonsense and they’ll do as you tell them. Be firm with them and don’t stand any nonsense but use your sense of humour to show your not a pompous asshole and they’ll do as you tell them without you having to tell them.