How have the British Muslim men involved in the Rotherham child sex grooming gang been treating their own wives?

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent


The Pakistani Muslim men – three brothers and an uncle – who groomed, raped and destroyed young girls in Rotherham have been given long sentences. Two local white women have also been convicted of supplying girls to the men. The reactions to these verdicts are instructive. Racists are red with righteous rage; this is what happens, they say, when you let “coloureds” into the country. Many anti-racists, just as blindly furious, assert race and ethnicity have nothing to do with what happened. The white female procurers are their alibis. The rapists’ relatives and community leaders stand by their men. They believe the blokes took what was freely offered by trashy females – children, daughters. Muslims who condemn the exploitation, in their eyes, bring shame on the community. That’s how twisted their values are.

The one question nobody asks is how these men have been treating their sisters and wives. Most of them behave just as abominably and cruelly indoors as they do outside when they prey on young flesh. They want control; they abjure equality. Some – a small minority – do feel a kind of love for the women and girls in the family but many have monstrous views on sexual equality and feminine desire. Home is a cage in which no pleasures are permitted, where hopes and freedoms expire. Activists have sought to free these women for decades. The terrible truth is that as society becomes more permissive, the number of caged birds increases. One caveat: I am not saying all Muslim girls and women are oppressed. What I am saying is that sexual predators from traditional Pakistani families and many other minority communities think all women and girls are low-life. I was looking at my wedding pictures the other day. On a cold, snowy December day, in 2000, I married my English husband in Ealing Town Hall. On the steps we had photos taken. It was freezing cold but I was in a silk sari, as was my mum. My Asian friends in their finery were shivering and smiling happily. The most striking, gorgeous person in the crowd was Humera (not her real name), who had stayed with me several times over the previous two years. She was from a northern town and had escaped a forced marriage. Her family had made her marry a man from Pakistan who had then raped her nightly for months. A social worker helped her escape. I heard of her case and offered to have her live with us for a while. The bruises on her thighs and breasts took months to heal.

She was one of countless such victims, all hidden and hopeless. Forced marriage has since been outlawed and girls have some protection and awareness of their rights but now we have Sharia courts in this country, which condone wife beating, marital rape, compulsory or child marriages, polygamy, paternal ownership of children and extreme sexism. Pre-pubescent Muslim girls are married on Skype. Imams praise this technology, which allows families to trade in their daughters – girls between the ages of six and nine among them. How did our rulers let this happen?

Political scientist Elham Manea, herself a Muslim, has written a new book, Women and Shari’a Law: the Impact of Legal Pluralism in the UK. She investigated 80 faith “councils”, which settle disputes and make quasi-legal decisions. According to Manea these courts are more hardline even than in Pakistan and many of their religious leaders issue horrendous advice. For example, a senior cleric in a British Sharia council pronounced that there was no “right age” for a girl to marry: “As you know, the earlier the better”. Humera’s family were not given religious authorisation to do what they did to her. Imams in the 1990s were conservative but not inflexible Islamicists. Today the human-rights abuses are validated by dozens of Muslim leaders as well as by influential Islamic institutions. Though forced marriages are a curse in Hindu and Sikh families too, they do not have systemised, pervasive doctrines to back their heinous behaviours.

Why is this even important when we are discussing the Rochdale crimes against white British children? Am I trying to deflect attention from those horrors? On the contrary; I am making vital connections. We should find out how those close to the three brothers and the uncle were treated. Was terrible violence meted out to them, too? Should we not know that? More than 1,400 vulnerable white children were abused in Rotherham. Thousands of others are being discovered in other towns. The numbers would shoot up if we also counted the family victims of the groomers.

Grooming and domestic rape often go together. Police and journalists need to be as concerned about the latter as they now (thankfully) are about the former. Families and communities will resist such probes, lob accusations of racism and “insensitivity”. But it has to happen. Females of all backgrounds should be protected from sexual savagery and misogynist Sharia courts. There must be one law for all.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump look like saviours to voters who feel left out of the American Dream

The Harvard moral philosopher and author of the highly acclaimed What Money Can’t Buy Michael Sandel in The Guardian  examines the febrile mood of his nation

‘Donald Trump has defied conventional wisdom by challenging the complacencies of the political establishment.’ Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images




The tumultuous early months of the US presidential primaries reflect a populist moment in American politics. Among Democrats, Bernie Sanders, the only self-proclaimed socialist in the Senate, has shown surprising strength against former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was expected to win the Democratic nomination virtually unopposed. Among Republicans, Donald Trump, the billionaire businessman and television personality, has vaulted to front-runner status over a crowded field of politicians, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the brother of former President George W Bush. Despite having raised more than $100m in campaign contributions, Jeb Bush failed to connect with voters and ended his candidacy.

In different ways, both Sanders and Trump have defied conventional wisdom by challenging the complacencies of the political establishment. Although Clinton remains the front runner for the Democratic nomination, polls show her lead over Sanders among Democratic voters has shrunk from 25 percentage points two months ago to only six percentage points today. Clinton’s shrinking lead has partly to do with voters’ doubts about her honesty and trustworthiness. Many voters find Bernie’s gruff, plain-spoken manner refreshingly authentic, in contrast to Hillary’s cautious, calculating style.

Young people are especially attracted to the 74-year-old Sanders, who draws large, enthusiastic crowds. In the first three primary and caucus contests – in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada – more than 80% of voters under 30 voted for Sanders.

The two candidates differ in substance as well as style. Sanders has risen from obscurity on a platform of reducing inequality, breaking up the big banks and challenging the power of money in politics. He argues that Clinton, like other Democratic politicians in recent years, is too close to Wall Street to stand up to the banks. Her campaign has received $15m from the financial industry, while his is funded by small donations from ordinary Americans. She also benefited personally from corporate largesse, earning more than $20m from paid speeches after leaving her job as secretary of state. The investment bank Goldman Sachs paid her $675,000 for three speeches.

Sanders does not think the regulatory reforms that followed the financial crisis of 2008 went far enough. He wants to break up the big banks and to separate commercial banking from high-risk investment banking. He would levy a tax on financial speculation and use the revenue to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. Sanders also wants to go beyond President Obama’s healthcare reform, which left private insurance companies in place, and create a universal, single-payer health system. Clinton argues that these proposals are unrealistic and favours more modest, incremental reforms. She claims that Sanders’s emphasis on economic inequality and the power of money in politics makes him a “single-issue candidate”. Clinton cites her extensive foreign policy experience as evidence that she is better qualified to lead America in the world. Sanders replies that good judgment matters more than experience. He voted against allowing the Bush administration to go to war with Iraq, while she voted in favour.

Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, on the stump in Oklahoma. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

The surprising success of the Sanders campaign reflects frustration with the deepening inequality of recent decades and the failure of the Democratic party to address it. Income inequality has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. Most of the economic growth of recent years has flowed to those at the top. The wealthiest one-tenth of 1% (0.1%) now own as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined.

This concentration of income and wealth has made itself felt in politics. The deregulation of the financial industry that set the stage for the financial crisis took place in the late 1990s, during the presidency of Bill Clinton. When Barack Obama took office in the midst of the financial crisis, he appointed economic advisers who had promoted the deregulation of Wall Street during the Clinton years. Heeding their advice, he supported the taxpayer bailout of banks and investment firms while demanding little in return – no break-up of the banks, no separation of commercial and investment banking, no meaningful curbs on executive pay and bonuses, and little help for homeowners unable to afford mortgage payments on houses whose value had collapsed.

Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court struck down restrictions on corporate spending on political campaigns, arguing that spending unlimited amounts of money to make one’s views known was protected by the right of freedom of speech. Big money could now dominate politics without restraint. An analysis by the New York Times found that, in the early months of the current presidential campaign, about half of all the money donated to Democratic and Republican candidates came from just 158 wealthy families.

Mounting anger and frustration with a political system unaccountable to ordinary Americans has also fuelled the candidacy of Donald Trump. The populist moment in American politics finds expression on the right as well as the left. Like many European populists of the right, Trump has seized on the issue of immigration. He would deport the 12 million immigrants who reside in the US without legal permission. To prevent others from entering, he promises to build a wall along the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border. And, much to the delight of his campaign audiences, he declares he will make Mexico pay for the wall.

Trump’s tough stand on immigration appeals to working-class voters who fear that their jobs and wages are threatened by immigrants. But his appeal runs deeper. His hard line on immigration is part of a larger promise “to make America great again”. He rails against America’s trade deficit with China, against Isis terrorists who “chop off people’s heads”, against a “disastrous” deal with Iran to end sanctions in exchange for limits on its nuclear programme. Wherever he looks, Trump sees the failure of American power and will. “We don’t win any more,” he complains. His campaign is fundamentally about reversing American disempowerment. This is why Trump appeals especially to working-class men who feel the economy and the culture have left them behind. “When I’m president,” he boasts, “we will win so much you’ll get tired of winning.”

Despite their ideological differences, Sanders and Trump are tapping into similar sources of discontent. Both speak to Americans’ sense of disempowerment in the face of big money and unaccountable power. And both are critical of mainstream politicians, Democrats and Republicans, who have, over the last three decades, become captive beneficiaries of the system. Unlike their opponents, both Sanders and Trump have refused to accept the support of so-called “Super Pacs”, funding organisations that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on behalf of candidates, provided the spending is not directly controlled by the campaign. Their alternatives to “Super Pacs” differ, of course: Sanders has raised millions of dollars online in small contributions (averaging $27 per donation), while Trump, a billionaire, is funding his own campaign. In proclaiming the virtue of paying for his own campaign, Trump speaks bluntly about the corrupting effect of the current system of campaign finance, which effectively permits big corporations and wealthy individuals to buy influence with politicians. (He freely admits that, as a businessman, he, too, lavished campaign contributions on politicians in hope of future favours.)

On several other issues, Trump also has more in common with Sanders than with his fellow Republicans. He has heaped scorn on wealthy hedge fund managers who, thanks to a tax loophole, pay a lower rate of tax on their earnings than their secretaries pay. In language more likely to win applause at an Occupy Wall Street rally than at a Republican convention, Trump declared: “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky… These guys are getting away with murder. I want to lower the rates for the middle class.” Trump has also criticised free trade agreements that lead to the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries. Like Sanders, he opposes the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), a pending trade deal among the US, Japan and 10 other nations, negotiated by the Obama administration and supported by Republicans in Congress. (Under pressure from Sanders’s challenge, Clinton broke with the Obama administration and now opposes the trade deal, despite having supported it while in office.)

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front runner, is coming under intense pressure from Bernie Sanders. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

In perhaps his most brazen break with the Republican party establishment, Trump has denounced the Iraq war as “a disaster”. During a debate in South Carolina, a state with strong military traditions, Trump declared that President George W Bush lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction, as a pretext for going to war. When Jeb Bush claimed that his brother had “kept the country safe”, Trump denied it, reminding the audience that the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center occurred during Bush’s presidency. Despite this apostasy on the legacy of George W Bush and the Iraq war, Trump won the South Carolina primary by a comfortable margin.

The unexpected resonance of the Sanders and Trump campaigns does not represent a decisive turning of American voters towards the left or towards the right. It represents a populist protest against a neoliberal economic order embraced by the establishment wings of both parties, which bestows lavish rewards upon those at the top and makes life precarious for everyone else.

The rise of Sanders and Trump is less about ideology than about anxiety that the American Dream is slipping away. This is what Sanders means when he says that the system is rigged against ordinary Americans. And this is what Trump means when he says that America doesn’t win any more. Both give expression to a widespread sense that Americans are losing control of the forces that govern their lives.
The American Dream has never been about reducing inequalities of income and wealth. It has been about enabling people to rise and giving one’s children the chance to rise even further. This is why Americans have traditionally worried less about inequality than Europeans do. We may have greater disparities of income and wealth than do the welfare states of Europe, we would tell ourselves, but here, we are not consigned to the class of our birth. Mobility, not equality, is the measure of our freedom. In recent decades, however, this comforting self-image has begun to ring hollow. The long-standing faith that those who “work hard and play by the rules” will get ahead no longer fits the lived experience of working-class and middle-class Americans. The growing inequality of recent decades has not been offset by opportunities to rise. To the contrary, it has brought a hardening of economic mobility.

The US has less mobility than most major European countries. Forty-two per cent of American men born in the bottom fifth of the income scale remain stuck there as adults (compared with 25% in Denmark and 30% in Britain). Only 8% of American men rise from the bottom fifth to the top. Studies of mobility from one generation to the next tell a similar story. Class mobility is greater in Denmark, Norway, Canada, Sweden, Germany and France than in the US. The American Dream is alive and well and living in Denmark.

If the promise of upward mobility is no longer a realistic way to contend with inequalities of income and wealth, Americans may need to reconsider the place of equality in the American Dream. Whether this populist moment will prompt such rethinking remains to be seen.

The difficulty in saying sorry

When we are criticised it hurts our feelings, but the pain goes much deeper than that, says Paul Randolph

 

Breaking point: Michael Douglas stars in 1993’s Falling Down. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock


Paul Randolph in The Guardian


Why do sensible and rational people seem to lose the ability to act sensibly and rationally when they are in conflict? What makes some families tear themselves apart in a variety of squabbles which to outsiders may seem petty but which result in family members not speaking to each other for years? What drives neighbours to blight their daily lives with unpleasant, bitter and confrontational disputes? And how can otherwise placid and restrained people become almost unrecognisable when involved in road rage incidents – or even trolley rage in supermarkets?

The answer may be distilled down to one psychological phenomenon: self-esteem. It is one of the strongest motivating factors in conflict and generates powerful emotions. We all have self-esteem, whether corporate or individual; we all have a need to think well of ourselves, and for others to think well of us. Self-esteem governs many of the decisions we make daily, as we expend huge amounts of time and effort constantly maintaining and protecting our self-image.

The flipside of our desire for approval is our aversion to disapproval – or worse still, our dread of humiliation. An example of this is the fear of public speaking – a dread that can be greater than that of flying or even of death. It is explained by the fact that the disapproval of each person in the audience constitutes a potentially significant attack on our self-image. The larger the audience, the more overwhelming is the prospect of humiliation.

There is now neurological evidence demonstrating the effect that attacks on our self-esteem have on the brain. One study showed that “social pain” activated the same circuits of the brain as physical pain. Consequently any attack on our self-image is interpreted by the brain as physical pain. When we speak of “hurt” feelings, we acknowledge that any form of censure, from slight criticism to outright condemnation or rejection, affects our self-esteem and is felt as physical pain – hence our aversion to admitting fault or to accepting liability. The word “sorry” is one of the most difficult to express, despite it being the quickest, cheapest and most effective form of resolving a dispute. But our brain seems to indicate to us that saying sorry will be as painful as putting our hand into a fire.

The ability to monitor neural pathways helps us to see how our brain functions in conflict situations. For example, we now have a neurological explanation of our “fight or flight” instinct. This reflex is governed by the amygdala, two small structures in the brain that control our instinctive responses. Originally needed as a part of our evolutionary development, they enabled us to act swiftly and instinctively in the face of physical attacks in the wild.

Today the amygdala can be triggered by any attack on our self-esteem. When the brain perceives a threat, whether physical or on our self-image, the amygdala “takes control”, diverting the signals away from the cortex, the “thinking” part of the brain. This “amygdala hijack” prevents us from engaging in logical or analytical thought, instead creating instant defensive reactions.

That is why we recoil at any allegation of fault, whether in business, within the family, behind the wheel of a car – or in the supermarket. It is an assault on our self-esteem, and it is painful. It is at these moments that we need to shrink our egos, to tell ourselves that our self-esteem is unnecessarily getting in the way, and that it is far more productive to try to see things from the other’s perspective.

Chhattisgarh Government Strips Forest Community of Land Rights

Manon Verchot

In an unprecedented move, the Chhattisgarh government cancelled land rights of tribal communities in the Surguja district to make way for coal mining.

Land rights of people in the Ghatbarra village were written off after land was allocated to the Rajasthan Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (RVUNL) and Adani Minerals Private Limited.

The Gram Sabha (village council) of Ghatbarra gained their land in 2013 as part of the Forest Rights Act. Under the act, the government can divert forest land use for different purposes with the consent of tribal groups. In 2014, Ghatbarra and 19 other villages opposed mining developments on their land, but the government overrode this opposition earlier this year. There are no provisions for the cancelling of the land rights, according to Nitin Sethi of Business Standard.


What is the Forest Rights Act?

In India, millions of people depend on forests as a source of livelihood, but most of this land belongs to the government. These communities are often victims of bonded labour and extortion, and are regularly evicted from their homes.

The Forest Rights Act (FRA) was established in 2006 to protect the rights of tribes and traditional forest dwellers. It grants forest communities the right to collect non-timber forest products, access to grazing grounds and water bodies, and the right to claim land.


The FRA provides for the diversion of forest land for non-forest use by obtaining free and prior informed consent from the communities who have a claim over the forest patch in question. It clearly lays down that such diversion should happen only at the Gram Sabha level – 3/4th of the members of the Gram Sabha should be present and 50% of them need to agree to the diversion. The specific process is clearly laid down in the Act and any other process is in contravention of the FRA and unconstitutional.Priya Pillai, Senior Campaigner, Greenpeace India

A villager transports fodder on his bullock cart on the outskirts of Raipur. This image is for representation purposes only. (Photo: Reuters)


What Are the Consequences of Cancelling Land Rights?


Forest communities are dependent on forests for their livelihood, but without any rights, they will lose access to the resources they depend on.

This development is very worrying because it is the first time rights have been taken away. It sets a very bad precedence. It is going to have huge implications all over the country.- Tushar Dash, Forest Rights Researcher, Vasundhara

According to Dash, there are around 150 million forest tribal people in India, and 1 lakh 77 thousand villages affected by forests in India. Government actions that deny the rights of these people would have repercussions that would ripple throughout the country.

The final offer made to junior doctors was too generous – they should stop striking and get on with it

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

You know things have reached a pretty pass in any dispute when the combatants start to invoke the spirit of deceased politicians. But when two men who have reached the top of their political trees also start invoking their own mothers – as Jeremy Corbyn and David Cameron did at Prime Minister’s Questions – well, the possibility of any agreement looks remote indeed.

Yes, after a merciful, but all too brief, period of remission, we are back in the heat of the junior doctors’ dispute. The Labour leader accused the Government of showing bad faith and “misrepresenting” statistics (about hospital deaths at weekends); the Prime Minister returned to his mantra about people not getting sick only on weekdays. Whatever else the Government may be ready to compromise on, it appears not to be a “seven-day NHS”.

And quite right, too.

“Our” NHS is not run for the benefit of the staff, however long they have spent in training, however mountainous their student loans, however arduous and responsible their work. A great many people would probably like to work only Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, especially if highly-paid overtime for additional hours comes virtually guaranteed. But this is not the reality for most people, and there is no reason, when so much in this country now functions 24/7 – with the staff on rotas and little, if any, overtime paid – why it should still be such a struggle to get the emergency services to do the same. Yet it is here the overtime culture has proved most resilient.

There will be those – and I admit to being among them – who saw the final offer to the junior doctors as too generous. By preserving a system of overtime, for Saturdays after 5pm and all Sundays, it leaves in place the idea that doctors can expect to work something like traditional office or factory hours with additional rewards for anything else. Those expectations need to be scotched.

Junior doctors, and their many vocal supporters, have tried to turn the contested statistics about weekend fatalities to their advantage, suggesting that a “cut-price” seven-day NHS would simply raise death rates around the week. Anyone who visits hospitals on weekdays and at weekends, however, will be familiar with the glaring disparity in staffing – at every level, and what sometimes appears to be a surfeit of employees, especially in the least skilled jobs, during standard working hours. There is surely money to be saved here, that could offset the cost of more staff at weekends.

Nor can the junior doctors’ dispute be seen in isolation. Their new contract is just one part – if a large part – of reform of the NHS that is yet to come. If next in line are to be the consultants, for whom the junior doctors are often deputising at nights and weekends, you can understand why the Government might be keen to hold the line.

What occasioned the latest sword-crossing in the Commons was the announcement by the British Medical Association earlier this week that the junior doctors would hold three more days of strikes, and would fight the Health Secretary’s imposition of the new contract through the courts. In the first instance, this means seeking a judicial review.

On precisely what legal grounds the BMA intends to fight is not yet clear. For all the perception that the English judiciary has become more politically engaged in recent years, it is hard to see a judge ruling that an elected government is not within its rights to set the terms of a contract for public sector employees, particular when in line with a manifesto commitment. Going to court is only going to inject more poison into this already toxic dispute.

It is beyond time that the BMA called it a day and recognised that the junior doctors have won as much as they are going to – more than they could have expected at the outset and more, indeed, than may be wise for the future health of the NHS. The BMA’s continued insistence a “safe” seven-day NHS is somehow beyond the country’s means is defeatism of the first order, and really not junior doctors’ call to make. It is the stated policy of an elected government.

That said, the extent to which this dispute has become politicised has made it infinitely harder to resolve. Jeremy Hunt has not just been defending his government’s policy of a seven-day NHS, he has been engaged directly in negotiating the small print of a new contract. This has enabled junior doctors, and the BMA on their behalf, to cast the project as a heartless Tory plot.

The most senior non-politicians – the chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, and the medical director, Sir Bruce Keogh – have both been conspicuously absent from the fray. This may be because, if heads had to roll, the Health Secretary is deemed more dispensable than either of them. But here, perhaps, also lies the key to change. For 10 years or more – most recently in the Conservatives’ 2010 election manifesto – proposals have been mooted to separate the NHS from politics by placing it under an independent board. Policy, such as the creation of seven-day service, and the overall NHS budget would be set by central government, leaving the rest to professionals. Each time, however, a consensus evolved to the effect that the NHS was so integral a part of national life and the sums of money allocated so vast, that there had to be direct political accountability. The scandal at Mid-Staffs augmented that view.

But the downside of the argument is again before us. Junior doctors and a Conservative government at loggerheads; there is talk of relations blighted for a generation. One solution might be for the Government to return to its election manifesto of 2010 and divest itself of managerial responsibility for the NHS. If junior doctors can cast that as a victory, so be it. But there is no reason why the sort of hands-off arrangement that is considered good for the BBC and – increasingly – for schools should not be good for the NHS, too.

Jawaharlal Nehru University was never a bastion of open debate

Swapan Dasgupta in the Times of India

During the course of the acrimonious exchanges over a series of incidents that originated in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, some commentators alluded to a controversial motion —“This House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country” — that was passed by the Oxford Union in 1933. The argument was that universities are natural centres of heretical and unconventional views and that the authorities should not overreact.
Whether or not the Union home ministry and Delhi Police were guilty of astonishing stupidity by charging an excitable student politician with sedition for hobnobbing and sharing a platform with separatists is an issue that will prompt different responses. In 1933, for example, Winston Churchill described the Oxford students who voted for the grandstanding motion as “abject, squalid, shameless and nauseating” — sentiments that many who don’t possess the same measure of erudition would echo in the case of the JNU radicals. Indeed, the reaction of British society to the Oxford poseurs was unwaveringly hostile and evidence of universities harbouring spoilt brats. Likewise, there is little doubt that had the provocative slogans championing the breakup of India been chanted in public — and not within the safe haven of the campus or, indeed, the Delhi Press Club — the street reaction would not have been couched in niceties.

Echoes of a similar town-gown divide appear to be quite evident in the furore over the sedition charges levelled against a student — not that this excuses the disgraceful behaviour of some lawyers in Delhi’s Patiala House court. But what has complicated the situation is that the political opponents of the Narendra Modi government ranging from the Congress to the Maoists have joined hands to scream fascism. The assault on the government has been complemented by the international rent-a-cause brigade that has become accustomed to circulating pious petitions on issues that range from who Indians should not vote for to the state of higher education in India.

Part of the problem stems from the caricatured views the Indian Right and Left-Liberals have of each other, a process the civil war of journalists has added to.

In the normal course, universities should have been a forum for informed and intelligent conversations. Even if a dialogue didn’t narrow the political divide, it would have prevented demonology and the near-complete absence of social interaction and the ostracism of those who violate a consensus — Arnab Goswami is the most recent target.

To blame this ghettoisation on the Modi regime is being disingenuous. Contrary to recent mythology, JNU wasn’t ever the bastion of free, open and convivial debate. There was a pre-determined view of what was acceptable and what was beyond the pale. In political terms, openness meant a dialogue that involved all the 57 varieties of Marxism, Nehruvian and Lohiaite thought and, the new fangled ‘alternative’ currents emerging from Left orphanages. In recent years, and partly as a response to bleeding hearts in Western universities, even Islamism has been accommodated under the radical roof. What has been consistently shown the door are India’s indigenous conservative traditions and their contemporary expressions.

This exclusionary process was confirmed in a recent article upholding the ‘idea’ of JNU by an alumnus, Professor Peter DeSouza: “the liberal persuasion was not allowed the space it should have been given by the Stalinist Left. The political spectrum was wide but could have been wider. Analytical thinking was feeble and ideological camps gave protection to the less capable.” JNU reproduced itself ideologically over decades, a reason why its intellectual establishment initially thought there was nothing odd about students being associated with divisive slogans. The ‘sedition’ overkill provided an escape route from troubling questions centred on JNU’s relationship with nationhood.

The ideological bubble that sustained JNU was shaken by the post-2014 political change. The exclusion of its stalwarts from the new establishment has bred insecurity and added to its determination to paint the ‘outlanders’ as cretinous, semi-educated and aesthetically suspect. This phenomenon was also in evidence last week in the post-modernist ghettos of Jadavpur University.

The ‘sedition’ stir will pass but the partition pangs of Indian academia will have to be addressed. The question of whether India is merely a geographical mass or is also blessed with sacredness will be a basis of a wider polarization.

I see Ofsted for what it is – a purposeless farce

I love my job and don’t want to waste energy resenting aspects of it, so my new approach to inspections is: don’t panic and never ask for feedback

 

‘I had a fairly normal couple of days before the inspectors arrived: I planned my lessons and went home at a normal time because I was meeting my mate Rob for a run.’ Photograph: Peter Morrison/AP


The Secret Teacher




I have a certain sympathy with the concept of accountability: we all want to know if our local school is any good and that our taxpayer contributions are spent effectively. But the way this straightforward desire has manifested itself in Ofsted– and the way some managers in schools have chosen (and it is a choice) to implement the inspectorate’s criteria – has turned the entire process into a pointless, stressful, tick-box exercise.

I’ve been teaching in secondary schools for 16 years and have just been through my fifth Ofsted inspection. I never used to think much about inspections, but now they’re seen as a life-altering, career-defining Armageddon. It’s hard to identify a tipping point that led us to the current state of affairs, where colleagues try to redefine teaching and work idiotic hours to invent lessons that achieve the impossible. I saw one teacher sob uncontrollably in the staffroom because he’d been up until 4 am preparing a lesson which wasn’t inspected. A colleague and I tried to console him, but finding words of support did not come easily. I found myself angry and frustrated that educated adults and experienced professionals were being reduced to tears.


Driving home that day, I was determined this wouldn’t be me. I’ve no problem with being held accountable for my students’ achievements, but if I wanted to keep doing the job I love, I needed to find a new way of dealing with it.

So now I treat Ofsted inspections as a purposeless farce and never ask for feedback on my lessons. I care about my students’ outcomes great deal, but making judgments about a lesson based on a spurious grid of phrases that defy consistent interpretation has become so lamentably futile there is nothing left to do other than laugh.

At my last school, I had a lesson inspection conducted by two assistant headteachers during a mocksted. The lesson was graded as “good” so I asked them what I could do to make it “outstanding”. They looked blank and eventually suggested I should have spent a bit longer during a discussion section of the lesson. I pointed out that this would have reduced the time for plenary reflection – the latest targeted initiative – and they agreed. I never did get a clear answer on whether it was even possible to make the lesson “outstanding”.

Fast forward a week and the headteacher dropped in on me unannounced. By pure chance I was teaching the same lesson (with some minor tweaks) to a parallel year group of almost identical ability range. The head deemed my lesson “inadequate”. I pointed out that her two assistant heads, one of whom is in charge of teaching and learning, thought the same lesson was “good” – her reponse was to dispute whether the lesson was the same.

I could feel a sense of overwhelming frustration building up. I pointed out at some length that my GCSE and A-level results had been above the school average and that student uptake and retention had grown since my appointment, and then asked to be observed again to prove I know what I’m doing. She never came.

My current school was inspected by Ofsted late last year. As the meeting was called to tell us of the impending visit, I immediately reflected on how my previous experiences could help me. I decided that while I can’t choose when or if I will be inspected – nor what the outcome will be – I can choose how I respond to it.

As expected, senior management went into overdrive with last-minute initiatives and tick-box exercises. But I had a fairly normal couple of days: I planned my lessons normally and went home at a normal time because I was meeting my mate Rob for a run. I told my department what I was doing and that we’d all be best prepared for the next few days with a decent night’s sleep. I said that under no circumstances should they change their evening plans: I trusted their judgement about how best to plan their lessons, and that we would deal with the outcomes – good or bad – afterwards. I’ve no idea what senior management thought, but I assured my department we weren’t going to be sacked for leaving before 9pm. Sure enough, the next day an inspector wandered in to see my year 11s. The lesson passed without hitch, and he invited me to see him at the end of the day for feedback.

I didn’t go. What’s the point? He wasn’t a specialist in my subject and he was only going to tell me his interpretation of a grid of lesson descriptors that has changed virtually every year for the last decade. As far as I know, no-one has been fired or had their pay reduced directly as a result of one Ofsted lesson inspection alone. Some colleagues thought I was mad or disrespectful, but if the inspector had a problem with my teaching and results, he could have found me and said what was wrong and why. Any good teacher knows that students’ progress is neither linear nor predictable, or consistent across subjects and time. Any good teacher also knows that building skills of resilience, humility, determination, awareness, ambition and curiosity cannot be measured by a grid.

I’m not a maverick. Maybe other teachers are worried about the consequences of taking a different approach because some school managers continually “motivate” staff by waving a big Ofsted stick.
But it’s my choice. I’m going to care less about Ofsted and put my energy into my students. I love my job and I don’t want to waste energy resenting certain aspects of what it has become. I know at times this will be easier said than done, but to continue doing what I do best, I need to make sure I keep what is lacking in the current climate – perspective.