Why Succeed when you can Survive?

Michael Jordan, in a confession that would be endlessly reproduced in motivational screensavers, admitted that he had “missed more than 9,000 shots in my career”. He continued, “26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again. That is why I succeed.”

Perhaps Chris Grayling has a knowledge of basketball that belies his suit-straining paunch, as the Transport Secretary seems to have taken up Gatorade’s challenge to Be Like Mike, quickly compiling his own catalogue of failures.

Last week proved Grayling’s commitment to cock-ups, with his role in not one but two costly scandals again putting his position under scrutiny.

Like Mike? Chris Grayling in Kent

On Thursday afternoon, the government was forced to pay £33 million to French transport company Eurotunnel in an out-of-court settlement as the Seaborne Freight fiasco reached its farcical conclusion. 

Eurotunnel had taken the government to court on the grounds that the procurement process that saw Grayling’s Department for Transport award a £14 million contract to Seaborne Freight was not sufficiently thorough and transparent, meaning their business case was not given a fair hearing. Seeing as Seaborne Freight turned out to have no ships and no port to land them in, Eurotunnel probably had a point.         

On Friday, a vintage Grayling blunder from 2013 was brought up from the cellar by the National Audit Office (NAO), with a price tag north of £400 million to the taxpayer. The NAO's report reminded Parliament that in his stint as David Cameron’s Secretary of State for Justice, Grayling had applied the trusted Tory tonic of privatisation to Britain’s probation services with his typical combination of diligence and flair.

Grayling was Justice Secretary before Michael Gove

The eye-wateringly expensive experiment yielded poor results, with a 2.5% drop in the number of offenders proven to commit another crime more than offset by the number of offences by reoffenders rising 22%. Fans of mass incarceration could at least be cheered that the number of offenders recalled to Britain’s famously safe and rehabilitative prisons after breaching a licence condition increased by almost half, from 4,240 to 6,240.

Grayling’s week from hell, alongside previous failures such as a rail timetable reshuffle that left platforms across England looking like the Battle of Thermopylae, ought to make his position untenable.

Indeed, Labour’s shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald and deputy leader Tom Watson have both clamoured for “heads to roll”. However, it might yet be too soon to expect a resignation.

Here's one he made earlier: passengers queue amid rail timetable chaos

Theresa May has repeatedly spoken of her admiration for Geoffrey Boycott, but it appears Grayling plays the role of another English cricketer within the Tory cabinet. It’s likely that May sees her Transport Secretary as a John Edrich figure, the fearless Surrey opening batsman who was once likened to a ‘human punching bag’ when facing the dreaded Australian duo of Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee.

Jeremy Hunt did a similar job in his hapless stint as Health Secretary, somehow clinging on for six years as waiting lists lengthened, survival rates fell and medical staff quit. These dour, grey ministers have turned incompetence into a bizarre virtue, much admired by the Tory leadership for their ability to shrug off the concept ministerial responsibility and ride out media storms, rather than display any skill in governing.

Accident waiting to happen? Jeremy Hunt visits a hospital

Whereas Michael Jordan used his failures as a platform to become the greatest athlete of the last 30 years and Edrich blocked, cut and hooked his way to 12 test centuries, the likes of Grayling and Hunt embrace failure as their signature.

Although regularly confronted by the miserable results they have overseen, they know that any resignation would damage their party’s hold on power. So they hang grimly on, and are handsomely remunerated for their subsistence politics. Their only merit is understanding that modern society’s ever-accelerating news cycle will soon move on, the scrutiny will fade and new catastrophes will snatch the public's attention.
 
Oh - have you seen the news about Storm Freya?

Daily Mirror article on Voting in 2017 General Election

Take a look at my guide to voting in the 2017 general election, originally published by the Daily Mirror:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/need-polling-card-vote-uk-10576714?service=responsive

Foul play finds a home online with General Election looming

The Crown Prosecution Service last week confirmed it will not press charges against members of the Conservative Party over expenses relating to their “battle bus” in the run-up to the 2015 general election.

While Jeremy Corbyn admitted he was “surprised” by the CPS's decision, it is perhaps more startling that this was an electoral controversy focusing on traditional, offline campaign tactics. Intrigues around recent overseas elections suggest that any foul play is now much more likely to be conducted by digital means.

Old School: The Conservative Battle Bus of 2015

With Britain heading to the polls again in a little over three weeks' time, the prospect of online subversion is already looming as a threat to the integrity of the general election. Facebook has been sufficiently concerned to place a full-page advert in a number of British newspapers, providing ten tips on how to spot “false news” online. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the site has also removed tens of thousands of bogus accounts in a plan to tackle what it describes as “spam, misinformation or other deceptive content”.

Fake news first came into the public consciousness in the wake of Donald Trump's victory in last year's US Presidential race, with an array of outlandish news stories circulated on social media. An article reporting that Pope Francis supported the Republican candidate's campaign was a particularly successful hoax, receiving almost a million shares on Facebook.

Pope Francis: Not actually a Republican

Trump's team, while not openly condoning the dissemination of fake news, have acknowledged the power of social media as an electoral influence. Gary Coby, the Republican Party's director of marketing, enthuses: “If you are on Facebook, I can match you and put you in a bucket of users that I can target”.

While Trump's campaign spent around $70 million on Facebook advertising to hammer home key messages, it has also been widely alleged that a more underhand digital campaign was secretly underway, in collusion with Russian hackers.

FBI director James Comey's dismissal this week, against the backdrop of the Bureau's ongoing investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia, has done little to quell suspicion. The FBI probe centres on Kremlin-sanctioned e-mail hacks against the Democrats which destabilised the party's White House campaign, and Trump's security advisor Michael Flynn has already been dismissed after covering up his meetings with Russian officials.

Departed: Former Trump security advisor Michael Flynn

A similar hack on the eve of run-off voting in France also threatened to derail Emmanuel Macron's successful Presidential race, with Macron's team claiming that hackers added fabricated messages to “five entire mailboxes” of stolen e-mails. Cybersecurity experts have since attributed the breach to the APT-28 hacking group, who have been linked with Russian military intelligence and also orchestrated last year's leak of Western athletes' medical records.

The hacked emails, hosted on anonymous document-sharing site Pastebin, failed to make an impact on the outcome of France's election as Macron stormed to 66% of the vote. The constant threat of online interference in the run-up to the polls, however, means that democracies now have to work harder than ever before to protect the integrity of their elections.

Theresa May's Mask Slips in Grammar Schools Discussion

After Monday’s announcement that Article 50 will be triggered on 29^th March, and before the horrifying scenes that unfolded around Westminster Bridge and Parliament Square on Wednesday afternoon, Theresa May had a brief window of opportunity in which to focus on running the country.

The NHS might be in crisis and the Scots may be making a dash for the Second Referendum lifeboats, but Prime Minister’s Questions at noon on Wednesday gave Theresa May the opportunity to promote her pet project: the repeal of a 1998 law outlawing the building of new grammar schools.

Jeremy Corbyn, these days the only leader operating out of North London capable of making Arsene Wenger look popular, pressed the Prime Minister on the wisdom of spending £320 million to open the floodgates for new grammars, when her government’s funding squeeze has already imperilled the finances of some 9,000 state schools. Reciting a letter from Eileen, a headteacher who has seen her staff reduced to purchasing their own stationery for primary school classes, it was a well-directed line of questioning from Corbyn, who looked re-energised by the latest round of internecine squabbling within the Labour Party.

Theresa May set out her vision for education on Wednesday

With Corbyn pressing the Prime Minister on whether budget cuts would result in “larger class sizes, shorter school days, or unqualified teachers”, May pointed to grammar schools as one of the “choices” that will enhance opportunities “for every child”.

After the Leader of the Opposition converted an open goal by querying the value for money of new grammars when existing schools are struggling to afford pencils and notebooks, May hit back that Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary and Shadow General Attorney had both sent their children to private school, while Corbyn himself had benefited from a grammar school education. In the Prime Minister’s eyes, this was “typical Labour – take the advantage and pull up the ladder behind you”.

May’s response was at first glance a stinging retort, and was cheered by the Tory benches, but her lunging attempt to expose Labour hypocrisy actually served to expose the utter folly of expanding the grossly outdated grammar school model.

Her tone, focusing on the “the advantage” of private and selective schools, removed the pretence that these schools can function as part of a “diverse” and universal suite of education options. Her words cleared the smokescreen of parental choice, and laid bare the fundamentally elitist agenda of her proposed reforms: grammar and private schools – with their advantages in teaching quality, funding and academic prestige – are for the parliamentarian class, whether they happen to be coloured red or blue. All other schools are to be consolation prizes.

Corbyn noted that even former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (by comparison a progressive rose between the retrograde thorn thickets of Michael Gove and Justine Greening) couldn’t bring herself to support the proposals of her party, noting in The Guardian that “all the evidence is clear that grammar schools damage social mobility”.

More than this, however, May’s personal slights against the Labour frontbench offer a preview of British society once grammars have been reintroduced to mainstream British education: a new dividing line of privilege between the “academic ” (officer class) and the “vocational / technical” (proletarian) streams of schooling. It will be a society in which the middle class grammar school students will progress smoothly to Britain’s elite universities, accompanied by a cohort of working class quota-fillers for the PR managers to focus on, while the rump population can quietly shift to second-class schools and pursue second-class qualifications in preparation for second-class careers.
     

With contemporary Britain already bitterly divided along economic, regional and cultural schisms, the temptation to further divide the population by educational background must be resisted.