The Pete & Marty spendfest started in São Paulo, Brazil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I blogged a few weeks ago about the likely extent of the squandering of public money represented by Peter and Marty’s jollies to the Americas.

Today we hear the full extent of the rip-off.

It turns out that Pete & Marty, far from travelling alone, had an entourage of 6 helpers and a photographer.  ”Junior Minister” Jonathan Bell also made the trip.

Apparently the group’s travel costs amounted to over £155,000 for the main 8 – that equates to nearly £20k each.  That’s one hell of a trip.  Presumably first class flights and luxury hotels at tax-payers’ expense.

And, of course, neither Peter nor Marty have any particular skin in the game. The Northern Ireland departmental budgets continue to be provided as a result of the largess of the UK exchequer.  The Executive Ministers insist on telling us how squeezed departmental budgets are and how much the Treasury needs to bail us out of our woes. However, they can still carve out close to £1/4m of departmental budget to pay for luxury jollies to South America and China.

As I asked in a previous post, I look forward to hearing how they might calculate return on investment from these trips.

Integrated Education? Not applicable to disabled children.

A Guest post by Bernie Drayne

Let’s talk about integrated education – Northern Ireland style. Shared future, shared education – yes these are very worthy aspirations i.e. equality for all children to share their education and lives together. Yes, I’m up for that. Our society needs to move on.

However, our particular brand of integrated education does not chime with an international understanding of integration or inclusive schooling, which has the sharing of education with disabled and non-disabled children at its heart.

Our Northern Irish interpretation of equality and sharing for all seems like being a little bit pregnant – equality is only suitable or promoted for some children but not for all.

Sharing should involve all children, but disabled children have never been featured in any discussions of integrated education in NI.

Children who attend special schools and those who have disabilities and are in mainstream schools are the most segregated of all children in our society. There is no appreciation that children who are bussed out to special schools never actually become part of the communities they live in.

‘Special children’ do not become ‘special adults’ – few make it to university, very few may find work whilst others are relegated to day centres or living on benefits. Many have no contact with non-disabled peers and instead have to rely on parents who are their only friends. Others have to rely on Direct Payments to pay for someone to come and take them out of the house – paid friendship, in other words.

The arguments for integrated education here revolve around diminishing fear, prejudice, intolerance of difference  – these are all the same reasons why disability should be on this agenda. We need to tackle the mystique and tragedy of disability. We have got to stop the nonsense about ‘overcoming’ disability – we have to move to an acceptance not of the disabled child – but of the idea that disabled children and young people have the same thoughts and aspirations as their non disabled peers – and one major aspiration is simply having friendships, being included in their school communities as equals but not as inspiration donors.

Our school system churns out many talented students who enter the allied health and medical professions, yet many of them have never even spoken to a disabled peer…. and when ‘confronted’ by a child in a wheelchair, a non-disabled child will either stare in horror or will be quickly dragged away by their parent. Surely it is time to tackle this.

I queried the omission of disability in the integrated schools campaign with several local representatives. The eye-watering arrogance and hypocritical replies all centered on the ‘wonderful special school sector’ we should be grateful for – all wanted to rap my knuckles for daring to query this, whilst one representative exhorted me not to bring the subject of disability up – as it would damage the campaign. Thus, no interest, questioning, or analysis – don’t upset the applecart, it’s all lovely.

If the great and the good want to jump on the bandwagon of integrated education they also need to challenge disability issues. This elephant in the room illustrates naivety, indifference, and inability to challenge some really difficult issues and prejudices.

education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

The recent report on ‘shared education’ was more of a tirade against academic selection. I blogged about that a few days ago.

However, I wanted to address the point of ‘shared education’ – a concept that fits neatly into the ‘shared future’ nonsense that’s peddled by Alliance Party do-gooders.

‘Shared future’ like ‘shared education’ is all about institutionalising tribalism. It’s about constant referencing of the Prod/Nat “cultures” and “embracing” our shared “values”.  No doubt we’d all have to go on some type of shared future “journey” where enforced understanding of “perspectives” would be at the heart of the nonsense.

When I was holding on the phone to do my bit on the Nolan Show yesterday there was a lot of discussion about mutual understanding around the proposed “Conflict Resolution Centre” – what surely must be one of the most inflated examples of public spending poppycock ever seen in Western Europe. Most of us don’t need any kind of conflict resolution monument because we were never involved in conflict in the first place. Respect is not something taught by conflict resolution centres. It should be taught by parents.

Shared future and shared education are cut from this conflict resolution block. They represent a kind of politically correct dystopia where we’re caught in a never-ending tribal-speak and where, try as we might, we’re never allowed to escape the navel-gazing, pathetic circular argument that is Northern Ireland.

Shared education requires our children to recognise ‘the other side’ when many of them didn’t know there was another side.

My own daughter was asked in some type of focus group discussion – related to the shared education consultation – what she thought about sharing resources with other schools from the other tradition. She wasn’t even sure what the question meant. She attends a school that isn’t integrated but draws students from right across Northern Ireland and beyond (from parents of several religions and those of none). Few of her friends have any religious faith. The focus of her school is on academic excellence. To ask her questions about sharing resources with another tradition is weirdly counter-intuitive to someone who is supremely intelligent. The question barely deserved an answer. But she answered because she is kind and polite.

That’s the rub. We’re blighted by the shared future/education nonsense that’s peddled by people who just aren’t very bright – who fail to see that people can see beyond the trivia of Northern Ireland’s two-tribe-machine. This society is normalising. It’s more accepting, more tolerant, less incendiary than it ever was. The Internet has made it more included in a global culture that moderates extremes and creates debate. The Internet has made this place less insular in a way that no other local cultural development could ever have hoped.

Our children and our adults are leaving behind the nonsense of the past – despite the shared future nonsense-mongers that follow us around and sap our public finances.

But it’s time to leave well alone. Leave our schools alone. Leave our children alone. Leave our people to just get on and move on. Because they’ll do it without any need for money, community workers or shared future initiatives.  Although we could help things along by kicking the clerics out of all of our schools.

Dawn Purvis should be asking parents that she used to represent just how important they consider education to be.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today’s shared education “report” produced by a grand-sounding “Ministerial Advisory Group” – for the Sinn Fein Education Minister John O’Dowd – is merely commissioned propaganda.

Sinn Fein has a long track history of commissioning “reports” to come to conclusions that it wants – that prop up its failed policy objectives.

The three authors behind the latest propaganda are carefully chosen.  We have a former Principal of a Catholic Secondary School – PJ O’Grady; Dawn Purvis, the former leader of the PUP, the political wing of the loyalist paramilitary UVF; and Paul Connolly, an academic from Queen’s University.

Hardly surprisingly, the report concludes that academic selection should be outlawed.  This makes for handy headlines for Mr O’Dowd who has failed to get rid of the 11+ in the face of parental choice to keep it.

Recommendation 18 of the report states that the NI Executive should, without delay, introduce the necessary legislation to prevent schools from selecting children on the basis of academic ability.  The report argues that instead of selection we should have egalitarianism – in short the same lefty ideology that has been imposed on Great Britain over the last decades, resulting in falling standards of academic attainment.

However, the report authors overlook a few key facts. The first is that the current system of selection is managed by two independent bodies. The Grammar schools work with these two bodies that were essentially created by the grammar school system itself (and parents). If the Executive were to make academic selection illegal (which is highly unlikely – we’ve been here before) it would, in effect, make illegal the activities of our finest grammar schools and grammar school principals.

Therefore the recommendation that egalitarianism be legally imposed simply will not happen.

Meanwhile, the committee has failed to address the more fundamental problem in our education system – namely that too many children from our poorest and most deprived areas fail to achieve even basic levels of numeracy and literacy.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with academic selection. Our education system fails the benefits-class from sink estates.  Few children from the Protestant housing estates that Dawn Purvis represented get to sit academic selection tests.  Many parents from such estates boycott the tests – or aren’t even aware of the tests’ existence in the first place.

There is much wrong with our education system – but the greatest wrong is a working class culture that fails to encourage educational attainment from age 5 – never mind age 11.

“I think it’s a matter for the whole community to realise that times are different now. If this place is to survive and prosper it needs to look at things in a new way and there’s no time to go back and do things in the way they’ve been done in the past and any institution which is locked in those traditions is irrelevant.”

The quote above is from John Cunningham of Camlin Group. He was interviewed by the BBC programme The View, broadcast last night.  Camlin is a Lisburn based company that supplies products for the power industry.

Cunningham’s frustration with the nonsensical, circular squabbles of tribal politicians is absolutely on the nail, of course. He’s right to make the point that Stormont would, indeed, be bankrupt if it were a business. It runs at a huge loss – requiring annual fiscal bail-out. And the Stormont C-suite bleats constantly about lack of funding while doing next to nothing to address the gargantuan waste of public money that it oversees.

But the institution of government here – as it is currently constituted – will never be able to do things differently. Our political infrastructure is locked in a time-warp of sectarianism. The constant tit-for-tat point scoring and bickering is hard-wired into the political psyche.

The machine needs to be broken before it can be fixed.

I used to be of the view that breaking the system required a wholesale replacement of our tribal political parties with the ostensibly secular political discourse of Britain. The attempt to bring left-right politics failed – largely because of the incompetence and silliness of both the Conservative and Labour Parties. Therefore in the absence of wholesale change the only hope that is left is that we’ll see the emergence of splinter groups and parties and independent candidates that might start undermining the pointless and irrelevant tribal squabbles with more practical politics.

I’d agree with John Cunningham that the nettles that need to be grasped are obvious. We need to reduce the role of the state in our economy. We need to remove taxation disadvantage. We need to appoint politicians who want to remove tax rather than saddle us with more (like the ridiculous plastic bag tax). We need to build business rather than pointless relics dedicated to the past (and paid-for by the public purse). We need to find it embarrassing to take constant hand-outs from the state. We need to be a contributor to our nation – not a leech upon it.  We need to educate our children in ways that ensure that they want to create wealth rather than become state serfs.

Margaret Thatcher (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Margaret Thatcher was ousted from power in 1990 I was serving as a Conservative Councillor in Dacorum Borough Council in SW Hertfordshire.

Just a few months before her fall from power I had attended Ian Gow’s funeral along with Dr Laurence Kennedy.  Gow was a staunch supporter of Conservative Party organisation in Northern Ireland.

Thatcher, who attended Gow’s funeral with most of her cabinet, sat in the front row of the church.  It was a long ‘high church’ service.  It made little reference to the manner in which Gow had died.  The overriding memory I have of the service was the apparent rock-solid unity of Thatcher and her team.  But that solidity melted away from her when she needed it most, just  a few months later.

The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) today published several quotations from people who knew Margaret Thatcher and respected her.

Writing in Today’s Times Lord Saatchi, CPS’ Chairman, said:

“Like Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson and all the great champions of liberal democracy, she recognised that a paternalist government, based on the benevolence of a ruler who treats his or her subjects as dependent children, is the greatest conceivable despotism and destroys all freedom. She saw that human dignity in fact resides in independence, individuality and self-determination. The guiding thread of her Conservatism was the need for humankind to be responsible for and master of its destiny — that the goal for each person is the fullest development of all their latent powers and abilities, their human potential. Her achievement was to capture those words for Conservatism.”

Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest Prime Ministers because she believed in the primacy of the individual. Her political agenda was to get the government off people’s backs. And by doing so she gave them the opportunity to be proud of themselves and their country.

If you missed it here’s the AudioBoo.

He had a particular bone to pick with the Prime Minister who had the audacity to push forward legislation to allow gay people to marry.  The legislation, of course, allows churches to opt-out of officiating at same-sex marriages. Just as they can opt-out from other types of equality legislation. For example, the Anglican Church also opts-out of equality for women, refusing to allow them to become senior clerics in their own church.

However, the church, years after the rest of us, will come round. It came round to the idea of women priests in 1994. It came round to the idea of not owning slaves by 1834 (having been one of the largest slave-runners in the Caribbean). It came round to the idea of contraception in 1958.

Anyway, I’m on the Nolan Show this morning tomorrow morning (at around 10.00am) to discuss why I believe secularism is a good thing and why I think that Christians – far from being oppressed – are simply being left behind by society.

Oliver and I – along with Vicky Chamberlin – worked together to establish the Conservative Humanist Association.  The CHA was an attempt to establish a secular strand of Conservative politics within the Conservative Party.  We launched the CHA - with Richard Dawkins as our guest speaker back in 2008.

Ollie represents a new generation of progressive Conservative thinkers that define their Conservatism on the basis of fiscal Conservatism and social liberalism.  I’m delighted he’s the new CF Chairman.  He’ll go far.

Peter and Marty do really, really important business stuff in Brazil.

So Peter and Marty are now on an ‘economic development’ trip to Rio – after visiting Sao Paulo and Brasilia.

This is the latest ‘economic development’ trip – following others to China, many to the US, Europe, Far East.

Today McGuinness tweeted a photo of the Statue of Christ the Redeemer lit-up green specially for St Paddy’s Day.  Handy that the British Exchequer is picking up the tab for his trip and his tweets.  No doubt Marty switches on data roaming when he’s travelling.

Business development trips are important, of course, for business people.  But Marty and Peter have never run businesses. They’ve never had to worry about making revenue targets or having enough money in the current account to make payroll. One wonders, therefore, what on earth they can contribute to the ‘economic development’ of Northern Ireland when they have no knowledge of, or experience of, business.

One wonders, also, how the hapless OFMDFM measures the value and economic return from these visits. No doubt Peter and Marty have a significant entourage. They are treated like proper statesmen. Do the dignatories in the visiting countries realise that Northern Ireland is smaller – in population terms – than Greater Manchester?  Do they realise that Peter and Marty are little more than elected local government officials – acting massively above their stations?

The trips are emblematic of the folly of devolution and the waste culture that sits at the centre of our jumped-up facade of an administration.