100% Attendance Certificates: why I’m 100% in favour

Over the last couple of weeks, one of edutwitter’s hardy perennials has been poking its head above the soil once more: schools giving awards for high attendance. As far as I know, this isn’t an issue which fits neatly into the usual right/trad/Gove-left/prog/human split which characterises most such disagreements. Indeed, I’ve seen people with whom I am normally nodding in agreement taking a hostile view towards such awards. For the record, I’m a fan. And to explain why, I’m going to tell you a story.

My youngest daughter, B, is one of the three most beautiful souls on the planet (along with her two sisters). Like all adopted children, she had about as rotten a start to life as possible. She has a number of challenges which she will need to continue to bravely face for the rest of her life. In early primary, for example, she was identified as being in the bottom single percentile for fine motor skills, which means that even today she can struggle with many tasks, and her handwriting is slow and unsteady. Even her speech can be affected, particularly when trying multisyllabic words. Like many children who had difficult early life experiences, her working memory is quite poor. She finds all schoolwork a struggle, although she loves to learn new facts, but she tries her best and works hard. Her teachers, while recognising her difficulties, tend to love her because she is so innocent and friendly, never giving any trouble at all, and always being cheerily willing to help when asked.

Like many children with Aspergers, she doesn’t understand the world, and particularly other people, as easily or in the same way as most do. Girls with Aspergers can often be seen to be trying to learn to mirror the myriad behaviours and nuances and complexities of their peers’ behaviours and language, even if they still don’t really understand them. B does a fair bit of that. Even now, though, she still doesn’t ‘get’ sarcasm, irony or wordplay, and finds all but the most obvious slapstick jokes mystifying. When I make a quip, however outrageous she’ll now say “I know you’re joking, dad”, while looking at me suspiciously. We’ve learned that we have to confirm that I am, in fact, joking, no matter how unlikely the statement just made, in order to put her mind at rest (eg “Where’s mum?” “Ah, she was abducted by aliens”; pause, stare, frown; “I know you’re joking, dad”, “yes B, I am joking, sorry”) .

She is very young for her age, and even by the end of primary school, when other girls were starting to try out the half-understood adolescence approaching them like a train, all B wanted to do was play the same imagination games she’d played since infants. This didn’t help with the social exclusion.

When she was in Year 3, I found B  sitting looking out of her bedroom window, clearly troubled. When I asked, she said that she was sad because the other children didn’t want to play with her, and she didn’t understand why. She said she thought it might be because “I have a croaky voice”. It was the first time in my life, I think, that I truly understood the phrase “heartbroken”, as I swear to this day that I felt something internal physically wrench.

Every adult who knows her, loves her. But as we all know, children can shy away from difference. B’s challenges don’t stop her from wanting what all children want: friends. But they do make those friends much harder to come by. While only a minority of children have been actively unkind, most have simply avoided her, looking instead to other children who are more like them. That’s understandable and very human, and they’re in no way to blame for that. Sometimes, life is just hard and unfair and there isn’t a straightforward solution to it. There have been one or two special children along the way who have embraced B as the person she is, and have given her the friendship she so desires. Those children don’t know it, but when I win the lottery, they’re in for a very large windfall.

Because B finds the world so confusing, she likes the small certainties of routine. She simply cannot deal well with unpredictability. Approach B with an unexpected “Go and do X now”, and even if it’s something she has no objection to, she’ll refuse and even get upset. We learned to say “At 6.30, can you go and do X”, and having established it in her mental diary, it becomes part of a safe, predictable world, so she’ll do it with no problem at all.  So she likes clubs, like guides or sea cadets. There, where things are always done *this* way,  that routine provides her with a security which allows her to participate in a world which too often seems frighteningly  inexplicable to her.

So school has always been something of a sanctuary in that regard, with its timetables and uniforms and rules. And, like all children, she has wanted to do well. She joined lots of school sports clubs (but the near total lack of physical co-ordination made that a little tricky), art club (ditto), she’s put herself forward for school councils (lack of popularity doesn’t help there), school plays (can’t sing or dance or remember lines). She’s also always tried really hard with the academic work she finds so difficult, but if you ever want to understand why I am so implacably and vociferously opposed to a system which demands one third of children are classified as “failures” every year, then you don’t need to look much further than B.

B hasn’t had a great deal of good fortune come her way, and most of the traditional routes to “success” are, and always have been, closed to her through no fault of her own. The one area where she’s been fortunate is her general health. That (and very mean parents whose general view is that you should go to school even if you’ve got a major artery bleed) means that her attendance has been very high. And as we approached the end of Year 6, she was told by her class teacher that she was looking at a 100% attendance certificate.

These certificates were to be awarded at the school’s final day, where parents turn up and sit in the playground as their children go up to accept awards for all achievements: academic, sports, creative and social alike. All those areas which were always closed off to B. But on this day, she would be able, for the first and only time of her primary school years, to walk to the front, and be given a certificate in front of the whole school. After all her efforts, and all her clubs and joining in and doing her best, she would finally join her peers in being recognised for something.

We knew this mattered to her, because she kept mentioning it in that slightly off-key learned-experience way of hers. She’d suddenly say, in the middle of dinner, apropos of nothing: “I can’t believe I’ll get a certificate”, and then, because her older and more worldy sisters had taught her that it’s not cool to be too enthusiastic about such things, she’d add “I’ll be so embarrassed”. But she’d say that while grinning. And as her parents, knowing the mountains she climbed every day just to keep functioning, we could see how much that meant to her.

So the day came, and we all sat in a sweltering playground, and listened to the speeches and the songs. Then the awards began, and one by one dozens and dozens of children walked up and had their hand shaken by the head while the parents and other children clapped. All the time, B was sitting next to me, and kept squeezing my hand and saying “I can’t believe I’ve got 100% attendance. I’ll be so embarrassed going up there.”

And then the attendance awards were reached, and the children of each class were called up in alphabetical order. And as it got closer, B got ready for her big moment, straightening her uniform and wriggling excitedly in her chair. Except when her class was announced, and the other children were called up for their attendance certificates, she wasn’t. Her name wasn’t called. We went straight from A to D without stopping at C.

She looked at me first in confusion, and then, as her classmates all moved to one side and the next class was called, with some distress. “Maybe they forgot me”, she said, with the tone of someone who saw being forgotten or overlooked as a normal experience. And then, because she’s one of the three most beautiful souls in the universe, and she felt that she had let her family down somehow, she said “never mind”, it doesn’t matter dad”. But I could see it mattered. I was right back in that room hearing her resignedly accepting her lack of friends because “I have a croaky voice”.

Leaving her with empty words of reassurance, watching as the remaining children were called and awards given, I went to her class teacher and asked what was happening. She looked as confused as I was, and said she’d find out. Five minutes later she was back with an explanation. We were in the process of moving to the Isle of Wight, and the girls’ new secondary school had asked us to take them for an interview/familiarisation day. So the previous week, we’d had to take them down there on a school day. It was agreed well in advance with B’s primary school, but it was unusual because obviously it took a whole day, whereas most of her peers were out of school for just a couple of hours visiting a local secondary for their equivalent slots. Someone in the school office had recorded this as an authorised absence, and removed B from the list of 100% attendees.

No certificate for B. No going to the front. No applause.

If you’re a parent whose child doesn’t get awards or recognition or success, you will probably have half an inkling now of how it felt to see your child have even that slightest chance of “success” denied to them again, and to see the disappointment and, worse, the resigned expectation of that disappointment, in their eyes. I can still feel it now, writing this, more than four years later.

As this was happening, the event was concluding. The “One More Step Along The Road I  Go” song had been sung to sniffling parents. Younger siblings were chasing each other around the playground. People were gathering smiling children clutching their certificates and yearbooks, and chatting for the last time in some cases to those they’d been meeting at the school gates for the last 6 years. The caretakers were clearing the chairs away.

I returned to B and had to explain to her about what had happened. Her sisters hovered defensively behind her, knowing what this had meant to her, doing their best to make light of it. She tried – she really tried – to put a brave face on it, but that made it worse, if anything.

I generally don’t name other private people in my writing, because I think they’re entitled to privacy. So when I break that rule, there has to be a good reason. In this case, there is. So step forward Mr Hinds, then deputy headteacher of Balgowan Primary School, who switched the microphone back on and asked for everyone’s attention.

Mr Hinds told the quietened parents and children that there’d been a little bit of a mix-up, and that one child hadn’t received their certificate by accident. Then he asked B to step forward and receive a handshake in front of all those present.

And she did step up to get that handshake. Then she was clapped by the parents, while her classmates and peers cheered and shouted her name. And when she turned to face us, she was wearing a smile which could have powered a small town.

Mr Hinds, if you ever need *anything*. Money, chocolate, a new kidney – just ask.

So this is why I support attendance awards. It’s absolutely true that there are children who, through no fault of their own, can’t achieve 100% attendance. It’s also absolutely true that the vast majority of children through no fault of their own, can’t achieve top academic grades. Nor can most excel at sport. Few are excellent singers, or dancers. Most will never win popularity contests. B, and the many other children like B, never had a chance at success in any of those areas. Yet that’s not a reason to abolish any such awards or prizes or stop recognising those achievements. Rather, it’s an argument to find a way to recognise every child for something. I don’t begrudge awards to the children who are academically able, or sporty, or musically talented. Those children deserve every certificate and every handshake and every round of applause they can get. And so do those who get their awards for attendance. Because it’s not about the award. It’s about the child.

No child is a failure. When we label children as failures, or allow them to think of themselves as such, that is *our* failure, as adults. The world is hard enough for those with few advantages without seeking to restrict any sense of achievement to only those fortunate enough to be blessed with many. So find a way to make all children feel special. Give awards for attendance, art, sport, helpfulness, kindness, neatness, effort, quietness, loudness, anything. It doesn’t matter what. Just find a way.

However we do it, if we have an opportunity to make *any* child feel special, we should take it. Never humiliate a child. Never make them feel isolated, or worthless, or a failure, and don’t support any system which does so. Because every child has a beautiful soul, and every child deserves to know that about themselves.

Teachers: are they the frontline troops of 1916 or 1944?

On battlefield trips with my school, we used to visit the site of the massacre of the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel on the Somme. The trenches and shell holes can still be seen, as can the old German lines, a ridiculously short distance away. On 1st July 1916, 800 Newfoundlanders climbed out of their trenches and began their short walk to death. Just 68 were alive to answer roll-call the next day.

 

In a display of the sort of cloth-eared obtuseness which supports the stereotype of the officer class of World War 1, their divisional commander, rather than being appalled and angry at the waste of life, said “It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.”

 
Students often asked the question directly “Why did they get out of the trench with all the machine guns and artillery? I wouldn’t have.” I usually responded with an attempt to explain the power of comradeship, or the fear of shame, or, more prosaically, the occasional presence of an officer with a loaded pistol behind the troops or the threat of a firing squad. But inside I was always asking myself the same question. Would I have got out of the trench?

 

Those men weren’t any more or less stupid than you and I are. They knew that many would die or be horribly maimed. Their best hope was that they’d be lucky. Yet they got out of the trench, and walked to their deaths in an attack which symbolised the catastrophic failure of their senior officers; a group which included rather too many who subscribed to Haig’s view that each of their deaths was justified, even essential, as long as more Germans died eventually.

 

Novels like “Her Privates We” by WW1 veteran Frederic Manning reveal that there was a lot less deference and stiff upper lip in the trenches than popular myth suggests (and a LOT more swearing). However, there was a very high degree of acceptance of murderous orders. That acceptance was inextricably linked with a class system in which many of those walking towards their death didn’t yet have the vote because they weren’t wealthy enough. Those giving the orders occupied a far more privileged world in every respect.

 

By the Second World War, there is considerable evidence that, collectively, British soldiers in WW2 were more willing to question orders and challenge what they saw as unreasonably risky plans, either directly or through their subsequent actions (or lack of actions). To their credit, there was also a significantly greater chance that some of their officers would question apparently reckless orders on their behalf.

 

Historians have noted the understandable phenomenon that soldiers in the armies of democratic states were significantly more risk averse than those of the totalitarian states. They were still willing to place their lives at risk, but were much more likely to demand, and be given, massive preparation, force build-up and the minimizing of inevitable risk through artillery, armour and air support. Would WW2 Tommies have left the trenches in the same circumstances that the Newfoundlanders did? Maybe, maybe not.

 

Deference is dangerous. Assuming the “top brass” are always competent, or care much whether individual soldiers will live or die, is not a view which survives much historical study. Read any military history and you’ll soon find yourself discovering great generals who would issue orders without any sense of emotional turmoil, which would result in many deaths, but would then record how upset they were at some real or imagined personal slight from one of their peers. Removing a senior officer from command would often be a matter of great delicacy and frustration, whereas removing a few hundred private soldiers from life is barely worth a mention.

 

It is, in short, very easy for leaders of large armies or societies to find themselves consciously or unconsciously proving the accuracy of Stalin’s dictum that “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”.

 

Yet every single one of those Newfoundlanders, and all the other British soldiers who died on 1st July 1916 or in any other pointless, badly planned, suicidal engagement, had a life of their own, with family, friends, hopes, dreams. They existed, and then they didn’t. And the difference between their existence and their extinction was a decision taken by someone who was willing to see them die as, at best, a mildly unfortunate but necessary side-effect of what they saw as a greater goal.

 

Individuals have to matter. It’s vital we don’t return to a society where hundreds of thousands of individuals can see their lives ended by reckless decisions taken by those who do not share the same risks. That was always, in my view, one of the reasons why we continued to observe Remembrance Day as a solemn, thoughtful day of reflection, rather than the jingoistic flag-waving parties this government prefers.

 

And so, let me make the rest of this blog as clear as I possibly can.

 

Children can and do catch Covid-19, and can and do transmit it. The degree to which they transmit it, and how they transmit it, remains opaque. Children themselves do typically suffer less pronounced symptoms than adults, but that is not the same thing as being immune or being unable to transmit the virus to others. Bear in mind that the government advises that children don’t visit grandparents if those grandparents are in a risky group. This would rather suggest that the government’s own view is that children can and do transmit the virus.

 

Up until 20 April, nearly a month ago, 47 teaching staff had already died in England from Covid-19, despite schools operating with only a very few students.

 

Teachers have no PPE, and will not be provided with any PPE. The advice issued by the government yesterday advises that masks are worn by those who cannot avoid being in buildings with other people. Except in schools, where they advise masks are not worn, despite being in a building with other people. There is no world where logic or facts rule in which those two statements can both be reconciled.

 

We rightly demand our NHS staff are given full PPE because they come into contact with people who have, or may have, Covid-19. Many applaud, weekly, what is seen as NHS workers’ bravery in exposing themselves to such risk. Teachers are being asked to expose themselves to potentially hundreds of children and colleagues daily, some of whom who will be carrying the virus, without any PPE, and with no plans to provide it. When some questioned the safety of this, the government unleashed its attack dogs in the Tory press to call them “the Blob”, and accuse them of being lazy skivers.

 

The government’s current advice to everyone outside school, as of 11 May, is that “You should stay safe when you leave home: washing your hands regularly, maintaining social distancing, and ensuring you do not gather in groups of more than two, except with members of your household or for other specific exceptions set out in law”.

 

There is no school in the country where this advice can be followed, even with only a selection of year groups called in. Thus, by the government’s own guidance, it will be impossible to “stay safe” in a school context.

 

Politicians, especially Johnson’s Tory politicians, often seem to lie as easily, and as often, as they breathe. They’ve lied about numbers, they’ve lied about PPE, they’ve lied about ventilators, and they’ve lied about testing. They have no compunction whatsoever about lying. But scientists tend to be less comfortable lying, so here’s Chris Whitty, answering a question about whether re-opening schools will increase risk for teachers.

 

As you can see, his answer is “yes”, but he adds some waffle about unspecified things which could be done to mitigate the extra risk, while acknowledging that even then it remains a risk. It goes without saying that the government’s guidance appears to have been written by someone who has no concept of what a school is, let alone how it operates.

 

Social distancing which comes even remotely close to the government’s own guidance for what is safe, is impossible in schools. Schools exist precisely to encourage and facilitate social engagement. They are the very last places where social distancing is possible because their entire purpose is the reverse.

 

That’s why they have always – as all teachers experience – been extremely effective incubators and transmitters of disease, from winter vomiting, to the common cold, to nits. Cruise ships aside, it’s actually quite hard to think of any place of employment which is less conducive to social distancing.

 

So if schools reopen with whole year groups, then we will be opening up thousands of human petri dishes in which the virus will spread from child to child, from child to teacher, and then to the families of children and teachers outside the school. There is no way that can’t happen.

 

We know, because we have the data, that dozens of teachers in England have already died from this virus. We know that schools are recognised by epidemiologists as places of transmission. The entire purpose of closing schools in the first place was because we recognise that they have a role in transmitting the disease.

 

If we open with many more children, before bringing infections under control and having a functioning and effective trace and test system, then it seems inevitable that more teachers will contract the virus, and some will die.

 

Our current officer class, every bit as callous as the worst cliché of their 1916 predecessors, appear to have decided that the deaths of some teachers, and of some family members of those children who return to school, is a price worth paying for ending what they see as the greater (overwhelmingly, but not entirely, economic) costs of remaining closed. They have, like their predecessors, decided that sacrifices must be made for what they perceive to be the greater economic good. Those sacrifices will be made, inevitably, by someone else: teachers.

 

Even writing this makes me pause. How can that be true? Can I really believe that a government would wilfully and knowingly sacrifice the lives of some of its citizens in order to pursue economic goals? But the answer is that, historically, this is the norm, not the exception. And I suspect even this government’s own supporters would be willing to acknowledge, privately, that in Johnson, Cummings and Gove, we have a triumvirate of three of the most dishonest sociopaths ever to darken the doors of Downing Street. Would they lie outrageously, causing harm to millions, in order to achieve personal ambitions? We all know the answer to that already – it was written on the side of a bus in 2016.

 

The teaching profession is being lined up on the firestep, and Johnson, Cummings and Gove are preparing to blow the whistle. The profession as a whole, and teachers as individuals, now need to decide which historical example they want to emulate. Will it be deferential self-sacrifice to a remote and callous government which is knowingly ordering a course of action which will kill some of them? Or will it be the demand that the officer class do a better job *before* throwing the troops into harm’s way. For the sake of all my friends and ex-colleagues who are still teaching, I hope we have learned the lessons of the past, and don’t allow lives to be lost unnecessarily.

School’s Out: I Predict A Predicted Grade

The government has belatedly announced the closure of schools, and with it, the cancellation of the traditional summer GCSE and A-Level exams. Clearly there’s no plan about what to do for the cohort whose exams will not take place. I’m not surprised by that, as matters are moving very quickly. So there will now rightly be a discussion about exactly how to proceed with this year’s cohorts.

 
For what it’s worth, these are my thoughts and my recommendation. Disclaimer: I have a daughter in Year 11, so I’ve a vested interest in this being a sensible decision.

Sabisky, Eugenics, and Me

At the beginning of 2018, Toby Young, the well-known misogynist and eugenicist, was finally forced to resign from his government role. I played my minor part in calling for that resignation, largely by simply retweeting daily examples of his misogyny and support for eugenics. So the Sabisky scandal is more of a sequel than an original. However, unlike Young, who I’ve never had much to do with apart from directing his poison back at him, I actually know Sabisky. “Know” in that social media sense of having consciously exchanged numerous messages with him. We first ‘spoke’ some years ago, when he was keen to engage supportively over one of my blogs. So when his name cropped up in these circumstances, I went back to re-read that blog, to find out what he would have found to appreciate in the writings of someone like me, when my recurring theme is that we need an education system (and society) which treats vulnerable or less academic children better than it does.

Notes from the Cult: It was the Campaign wot [didn’t] won it

This is the third in a mini-series of post-election blogs which are setting out the experience of the campaign from the perspective of one of the tiny handful of constituencies where Labour increased its vote. People already in shock about that actually happening probably need to sit down before learning that it was the Isle of Wight.

 

We didn’t win, of course. That’s for next time! But we did increase our vote and our vote share when Labour was losing votes and vote share pretty much everywhere else. We squeezed the votes of the LibDems and Greens in an election where the LibDems and Greens were not only increasing their votes nationally, but were being recommended as the tactical option locally by every one of those tediously irritating tactical voting sites.

 
So the result may not have shaken even David Cameron’s garden shed to its foundations, and nobody’s going to write a book about how the Isle of Wight Labour Party marched triumphantly from second place to, er, a slightly better second place. But this was an accomplishment which very seriously bucked the national trend nevertheless. I don’t think the Labour Party, as it currently tears at its own entrails in grief, should leave any stones unturned in seeing how it might go about the next election better. And just off the south coast of North Island, the Isle of Wight is a particularly large and lovely stone to examine.

 

Firstly, I’ll set out what we felt were the main factors for our relatively successful campaign. I don’t think anyone will find these things particularly original or shocking. It’s just the basics of good campaigning.

 

Secondly, a little sting in the tail, because I’ll make some comparisons with campaigns in our top defensive and target seats, and those comparisons aren’t great. The party’s factional war has moved to a new battleground over whether the loss was the fault of the Right for forcing a change in Brexit policy, or the Left for installing Corbyn. Yet there’s a “forgotten front” which is being neglected, which is that in some places, our campaigning appears to have been just not good enough. For those who want to skip to this bit and ignore the local campaigning bit, scroll on down to the sub-heading, you brutes.

Notes from the Cult: Fear, Loathing and nationalised gardens

This is the second in a short series of 2019 election blogs which I’m putting out while everything is still completely fresh, and before my recollections are re-shaped by emerging narratives. I’m writing this as someone who, after being PPC in 2017, was very much involved in the 2019 campaign as CLP chair and campaign organiser. Our constituency was one of a very small number which improved the Labour vote both in absolute and vote share terms. I don’t say that to seek cheap applause (although if you’re offering, go ahead), but because I think there is genuine value in the thoughts and discoveries of one of the few Labour campaigns which could be described as in any way successful in 2019. There are vital lessons in defeat, of course, but the urge to offload responsibility for defeat is a strong one, and can lead people to look for simplistic answers and suffer confirmation bias. Explaining what went wrong from a position of relative success can allow us to view a different perspective.

Notes from the Cult: A Tale of Two Elections

I’ve been heavily personally involved in just two General Elections. The first in 2017 when I became an accidental candidate, and the second this year when, as chair of the CLP, I was eyeballs deep in running our campaign. In both those campaigns, our Labour vote has gone up in both absolute and percentage terms. In the context of yesterday, that makes us one of only a tiny handful of seats to make that claim. I’d gladly have swapped the honour for a different national result. I say I’ve been involved in two elections. Strictly speaking that’s true. In practice, I’ve been involved in three, because this election was two separate elections rolled into one.

 

Notes from the Cult: Hope and Dread

This election is driving me nuts.

I am, by nature, a little cynical and jaded. However, underneath the cynicism (or perhaps the root cause of the cynicism) is a disappointed idealist. This election is bringing out both the cynic and the idealist; often at the same time. I can’t wait for it to be over. But I also dread its end. I am a one-man symbol of Britain’s political mental breakdown.

Politics is just new history. History is just old politics. What Cromwell had to say about Johnson and Brexit.

Below is the text of the speech I gave as Isle of Wight Constituency Labour Party Chair to the rally in Newport today to protest against Johnson’s attacks on democracy.

As a rule, I dislike demos. Often cold, usually met with looks of confusion or – very English, this – acute embarrassment by passers-by. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion sometimes that you’re basically just talking to the same people you last talked to in the branch meeting. Except through a dodgy megaphone. And with no tea or biscuits.

So I generally attend demos from a sense of duty, not through any great personal desire to shout at strangers on a street. Which is probably a good thing. However, I do take the view that if you’re not wound up enough to get off your couch when a far-right government led by a pathological liar, whose chief of staff is a known psychopath, are attacking your democracy, then you probably deserve what you get when the 4am door-knock arrives.

So today, armed with megaphone, statutory red shirt, and the usual heroic activists who will pretend to listen to me drivel again while hoping it doesn’t rain this time, I went to the centre of Newport and addressed those good people who had the time and inclination to turn out to register their protest at Johnson’s constitutional outrage.

Health warning – as any amateur politician without access to those fancy glass prompt screens knows – what you write in the morning and what you remember in the afternoon when you’re delivering it in the street while holding a megaphone which weighs a ton, are not always word for word the same thing. But I think the main bits got through.

The dogs look deeply unimpressed about the threat to their democratic rights

Here it is.

“Welcome friends.

 

As a history teacher, I always appreciate historic parallels. In the church behind you, can still see where the Parliamentary soldiers chiselled off the King’s name while guarding him in Carisbrooke Castle.

 

 

Why did they do that? Because an unelected, arrogant, anti-democratic aristocrat had decided he could simply get rid of Parliament when it refused to give him what he wanted.

 
What lessons could that offer to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, I wonder?
We’re here today not to chisel any pulpits or chop any heads. But that thread of English radicalism, and that commitment to democracy, is a thread which links us to our ancestors four hundred years ago.

 
There is a great deal wrong with our democracy – an unelected House of Lords, foreign oligarchs and criminals funding the Conservative Party, a press which would make Joseph Goebbels blush. But that makes it all the more important that we fight Johnson’s attempts to suspend the democracy we DO have – our elected representatives in the House of Commons.

 
You are part of that proud history of English radicalism, and commitment to democracy. You should be proud that you’re willing to get off your backsides to defend it.

 
You’ll note I said we’re here to defend democracy. That’s why I’m here. No other reason.

 
The right-wing press and the shocking liars and rogues around Johnson, are lying – as they always do – about our intentions. They want people to believe that we’re here solely about Brexit. They want to portray our outrage about their abuse of our democracy as just another anti-Brexit protest. They want Leave voting-citizens to look away or, worse, to support their assaults on our democracy. They want to drive a wedge through our society as deep as the divisions which separated those Roundheads and Cavaliers all those years ago.

 
Friends, we must not let them. That is why the Labour Party called this protest. Not as a remain protest against Brexit. But as a citizens’ protest – Leavers and Remainers – against an attack on our democracy.

 
I honour those Leave voters here today indeed. That, my friends, is real moral courage. That is real principle. To stand up in protest against Johnson’s attack on democracy, even knowing that it is intended to deliver the Brexit outcome you want, is a principled stand which we should all applaud, and I do so now.

 
Yet let us also be honest with ourselves. There are few Leave voters here, compared to those who support remaining in the EU. On an island on which 62% of the population voted Leave.

 
Why is that? Are Leave voting citizens any less democratic than Remain-voting ones? I don’t think so. How have we reached a point where so many of our fellow islanders, with whom we agree on so much, feel unable to come to a gathering to defend democracy?

 
Everyone acknowledges that our society is horribly divided – certainly more divided than any time in my lifetime. This issue of Brexit has divided friends, families, communities and political parties. I am sure I am not alone in cursing David Cameron and his arrogance for unleashing this tempest of division before walking off to leave others in the mess he created.

 
Yet while we all agree that society is divided, how many of us take responsibility for our part in actually deepening those divisions? How many of us ask ourselves what we have done to try and heal those divisions?

 
I voted Remain. I would vote remain again. I hate Brexit, it’s causes, its lies and its consequences. I hate everything it says about us as a country. But after my initial grief – and it was grief – I accepted the result of that referendum. I supported the Labour Party’s policy of seeking a compromise outcome which minimised the harm, while recognising the outcome of the referendum.

 
It’s why I utterly reject any calls to simply revoke Article 50, or to cancel Brexit. The people gave that decision, and only the people can reverse it, either in another referendum or in a General Election. Anything else is just as much an attack on democracy as what Johnson is doing now. Because democracy cuts both ways. It’s not only worth defending when it serves my purposes. It’s worth defending even when it goes against what I want.

 
That compromise position has been squeezed and squeezed. Not just by the headbangers and fascists of the ERG and Farage’s Brexit Party demanding their hate-filled little-England fantasy. But there has been just as much intransigence, hostility and even contempt from some of those who refuse point-blank to accept the outcome of that vote in 2016.

 
Many – most, actually – of our politicians have decided that rather than seek to heal the divides and find compromise, they will instead just pick a side, and encourage the escalation of hostility. It is a dangerous game when our political parties no longer even attempt to represent or speak to half the population. It is dangerous indeed when or society becomes two mutually loathing, resentful tribes; occupying the same country, but not sharing it.

 
We will always have differences. But long ago we chose to manage those differences through democracy. Through regular votes with elected representatives in Parliament, we accept the rule of the majority while still protecting the rights and interests of minorities. That’s democracy. That’s why we’re here. That’s what Johnson, that cynical liar and fraud, is now threatening. And without democracy the future is dark indeed.

 
I started with some history. Let me end with a quote from the leader of those Parliamentary soldiers who chiselled that pulpit in there, Oliver Cromwell. He had won the war, and was desperate to, as he put it, “heal and settle”, the divisions of the nation. Yet everywhere he turned, on his own side as well as on his enemies, he found a refusal to do so.

 
Addressing Parliament, Cromwell said : “Here is a great deal of “truth”… but very little mercy. They are ready to cut the throats of one another….Look on this nation. Look on it! ….Every sect says “Oh give me Liberty”, but give it to him and to his power he will not yield it to anybody else.”

 
To Cromwell, the answer to those divisions was found in one institution. The very institution we are here to protect.

 
He said “Whatsoever is done without authority of Parliament…. will neither be very honest, nor to me very comprehensible’.

 
Well I agree with Oliver. The only hope to heal the divisions of our nation is through democracy. The democracy of our Parliament, the democracy of our people and the democracy our ancestors have fought for from the Levellers to the Chartists and the suffragettes.

 
We are a divided nation, but let us begin the process of healing by uniting around that one, vital principle: our democracy.”

Talking to Labour Party activists afterwards. Much better without a megaphone. Largely because they don’t have to hear what I’m saying.

Notes From The Cult: After EU. No, After EU.

Someone I know rather well is very much of the opinion that, unless there’s some sort of discomfort or self-denial involved in any activity, it’s not worth doing. There’s a puritanical streak in this philosophy which I recognise from teaching about the 17th Century, but initially, coming from a frankly hedonistic “if there’s chocolate on the table, eat it before anyone else does” background, I found it a bit weird and annoying. Actually, who am I trying to kid? I still find it a bit weird and annoying. However, the one advantage it offers is that events which cause intense irritation to the rest of us, make her feel nobler, even happier. So a thunderstorm on a day out is ‘bracing’; forgetting snacks on a long walk makes the food at the destination all the more deserved and enjoyable; spending hours stuck in a miserable airport somehow makes the holiday that much more fun. I have to tell you, however, that even she is struggling to find much of a redeeming silver-lining of godly sacrifice in the almighty kicking Labour got in yesterday’s EU elections.