Darling won’t use the N-word

After the rumours, final confirmation this afternoon that even though Alistair Darling was unable to bring himself to use the N-word, Northern Rock has been taken into public ownership. The Chancellor was at pains to stress that the Government’s intention is that this should be temporary ownership only, and that deposits and savings will “remain safe and secure”.  In his post The nationalisation of Northern Rock on Coffee House, Peter Hoskin asks whether we can really trust the Government to run a bank. George Osborne certainly does not think so. According to the FT he told Sky News:

“We have had months of dithering and delays and ended up in the catastrophic position, on a Sunday afternoon, of the chancellor announcing this decision to nationalise Northern Rock. They have dithered for months and months trying to create a private sale that was never really there.’’

Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper on the Channel 4 News was far from convincing in her support of the embattled Chancellor. This story has legs. If you were thinking that Alistair Darling’s reputation for competence was damaged by the non-dom ‘crisis’ then the Northern Rock debacle will bury it.

Another betrayal of trust

Another reason for disliking Gordon Brown. Watching Friday’s BBC News on the coroner’s inquest into the death in action of Captain James Philippson in Helmand Province, I was most struck by the juxtaposition of a film of a grinning Gordon Brown meeting troops in Afghanistan, and the interview with Anthony Philippson, Captain Philippson’s father. According to the BBC, Mr Philippson said,

“He [the coroner] laid into them [the MoD] particularly badly for the lack of equipment. I do hold the MoD responsible for James’ death but it is not just the MoD, it goes much deeper than that. The Treasury and the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, will be really to blame for what happened. The MoD was starved of cash by the Chancellor”.

He was in fact far ruder about Gordon Brown, and the written report on the BBC website not only doesn’t give any feel of Mr Philippson’s cold fury, but edited some of it out. What he actually said (and the video is on the BBC website) was:

“It’s not just the Ministry of Defence, it’s the Treasury and the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, our present Prime Minister, the miserable, parsimonious Mr Brown. He’s really the person responsible for what happened.”

When recording a narrative verdict in which he said Captain Philippson was unlawfully killed, Mr Walker, the assistant coroner for Oxford said:

“They [the soldiers] were defeated not by the terrorists but by the lack of basic equipment. To send soldiers into a combat zone without basic equipment is unforgivable, inexcusable and a breach of trust between the soldiers and those who govern them.”

The organ-grinder’s monkey

The non-dom story that has been running all week points up a couple of unattractive features about the present government. First is the impression that senior ministers are mere cyphers, and that the only person who counts is Gordon Brown. Secondly, that when things go wrong, the responsibility is never the government’s. Rather, it is invariably portrayed as the failure of a government servant, and usually a very junior one at that. Fessing up is not something this government does.

For a balanced view about the matter, read What did you do in the non-dom wars in this week’s Economist.

“Calling the retreat [as Alistair Darling 'backed away from the most contentious of his plans to tax rich foreigners living in Britain'] a “clarification”, the Treasury claimed that many of its proposed new rules had been drafted in error. The deflection of responsibility was reminiscent of earlier attempts to make an unidentified “junior official” a scapegoat for losing millions of citizens’ tax details.”

and

“The crisis may have passed, but the non-dom wars have left their mark. Foreign financial folk do not feel quite as welcome in London as they did, or quite so sure that the government knows what it is doing. One casualty may yet be Mr Darling himself, whose reputation for competence has been sorely strained. But was it really his fault or Gordon Brown’s?”

The problem for Gordon Brown is that the buck for a lot of what is happening, will eventually stop somewhere. Like it or not, it will be with him.

Parlez-vous Français?

It would be difficult to make it up (although there are times when I wonder if the Telegraph does). Apparently oral tests are to be axed from foreign language GCSE examinations because they are regarded as being “too stressful” for pupils. In their article, Pupils ‘pass’ language exam without speaking in this morning’s Sunday Telegraph, Melissa Kite and Julie Henry report:

“The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will announce this week that teenagers will no longer have to demonstrate they can speak a language in the traditional oral exams that currently account for half the marks at GCSE level.

In the long-established oral test, students converse for about 10 minutes with their teacher in their chosen language. The exchange is recorded on tape and sent to examiners. In future, oral skills in lessons will be assessed by teachers who will award marks that will be moderated by examiners. It is not clear whether any oral work in class will be taped or how examiners will judge a teacher’s assessment.”

I liked the comments of the shadow Schools Secretary, Michael Gove (also reported in the same article):

“After being told they could get a pass without writing a word in a foreign language, now pupils are being told they can pass without speaking it. Once again this Government is moving the goalposts on examinations. Instead of proper rigour, we have got a watering down of standards. Language teaching is facing severe problems and our children’s capacity to succeed in an ever more competitive world won’t be helped if qualifications can be awarded without their actually acquiring proper skills.”

If only they knew it, the proper response might be “Sans blague”.

Catching up

One result of an over-busy week is catching up with posts, mine and others. Time runs away with me and it is only on a Sunday morning that I pause long enough to catch my breath. Among a whole raft of interesting press reports, feeds and posts, I really liked John Naughton’s post What – no comments? on 10 February on Memex 1.1. One of the questions my family asks me is why I blog, and whether anyone reads what I post (the answer, courtesy of WordPress’ Dashboard gizmo, is very few). John Naughton’s second reason for not allowing comments on his blog is:

“Secondly, although it’s nice to have readers (and I have no idea how many there are, because I’ve never done any kind of tracking) and I’m glad that people find this stuff worth reading and linking to, fundamentally I keep a blog for myself. I started blogging in 1998, and for the first three years or so, my blog was private. It was a personal notebook in which I kept stuff that I thought was noteworthy or useful. Because it had a search engine, it meant I could always cheat my poor memory by retrieving stuff instantly. (This, incidentally, is what started Tim Berners-Lee on the path that led to the invention of the Web.) I knew that if I had blogged about something I would always be able to find it again. This philosophy survived the switch to public blogging which took place, I think, sometime after 9/11. It’s just now that my personal notebook is publicly available to anyone who wants it.”

I go along with that.