Simon Jenkins's Blog, page 132

This bid to force all schools into line will end in failure | Simon Jenkins

The craving for uniformity in public services has become a frenzy, but Michael Gove cannot run every classroom

Another day, another league table. Today's report on local education authorities in England is clearly designed to show that local democracy cannot be trusted to deliver an equal standard of schools nationwide. Therefore even more power should be given to an all-seeing, all-caring central government under the ever-benign education secretary, Michael Gove. He is to set up a new re...

Give prisoners the vote. But not because Europe says so | Simon Jenkins

It's wrong that laws can be imposed by the court of human rights. But Britain signed up to this club and its rules voluntarily

British prisoners should be free to vote. Denying them is silly, an archaic spin-off from Britain's primitive obsession with locking up ever more of its citizens. The tabloids howl that villains, thugs and perverts have no rights, and are lucky to be alive. Parliament dares not disagree.

Yet it is one thing to demand votes for prisoners, another to want parlia...

Why Alan Bennett is wrong about the National Trust

His new play is a romp about attempts to save a crumbling stately home – with the National Trust as chief villain. Chairman Simon Jenkins has a few bones to pick with its elitism

Alan Bennett closes his new play People with his heroine saying: "Let lost be lost. Let gone be gone, and not fetched back." It is a neat way of rounding off Bennett's assault on the National Trust, and on "people" in general.

The play is a lightweight romp through Bennett's familiar fare of ancient institutions, male...

David Cameron's Hitler talk misses the real enemy in our midst | Simon Jenkins

The prime minister summoned the wartime spirit in his battle to revive Britain, but he has picked the wrong target

You can always tell when a debate has left the rails. Someone mentions Hitler. The prime minister is becoming ever more surreal. His words seem to emanate not from the seat of government but from the seat of his pants. Cameron is in part echoing his hero, Tony Blair, who after two years in power was showing his similar inexperience of high office by wailing of "the scars on m...

Leaders should be sacked for incompetence, not cheating | Simon Jenkins

US generals Petraeus and Allen had to bow to what feels close to mob rule. Is this how we do accountability now?

Most commanders humiliated by two enemies in a row can expect to resign. Not in America. There, you are done for if you have two mistresses in a row. David Petraeus could survive Iraq and Afghanistan. He could strike fear into the Mahdi army and the Taliban. His downfall was caused by Paula and Jill.

Not since the Duchess of Richmond's ball before Waterloo have warriors been so feted...

Bureaucracy has become the BBC's dieback disease | Simon Jenkins

So unwieldy is its vast, multilayered hierarchy that the corporation has lost all capacity to allocate blame for its mistakes

Who is next for the chop? Politicians, journalists and bankers have been butchered in the marketplace. My guess is that managers are the next victims of the media mob-rule that passes for accountability in today's public realm. There may be honest managers, but there were honest politicians, journalists and bankers, and much good it did their professions. Once a group i...

Bureacracy has become the BBC's dieback disease | Simon Jenkins

So unwieldy is its vast, multilayered hierarchy that the corporation has lost all capacity to allocate blame for its mistakes

Who is next for the chop? Politicians, journalists and bankers have been butchered in the marketplace. My guess is that managers are the next victims of the media mob-rule that passes for accountability in today's public realm. There may be honest managers, but there were honest politicians, journalists and bankers, and much good it did their professions. Once a group i...

The tribal grunts of left and right will not rescue us | Simon Jenkins

From the gulf between rich and poor, to welfare reform, old arguments are failing to find answers for a world in flux

Politics has never been so fascinating. It drips from the ceiling. It oozes up through the floor. It reeks across the internet. Reading politics, being informed about it, participating in it, should be the compulsory national service of the 21st-century state. Yet never can the toolkit of political debate have been so empty and the task of understanding the world so titanic.

Ame...

If politics must be brought into policing, let it be local | Simon Jenkins

Police commissioners may not capture the public imagination, but we reject any measure of democracy at our peril

I always suspect anyone who tells me not to vote. The campaign against next week's election of police commissioners is meretricious. The vote may be less than a quarter baked. The purpose may be obscure and the process mad. But so are American elections where the "winner" can get fewer votes than the loser. A ballot is the nearest a secular society gets to a sacred ritual, the votin...

Let us all see the Foreign Office anaconda | Simon Jenkins

London has far too many paintings, sculptures and museum objects hidden from view. Time for the 'anaconda project'

How much is an anaconda? The £10,000 paid by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to have theirs re-stuffed seems a lot. You can pick up a nine-footer from Cleethorpes for £250 on eBay, "mature, could be calmed down if you have the time." I am sure the FCO interns could pen it up, and use it to terrorise recalcitrant Tory backbenchers.

The FCO snake has attracted attention chiefly b...