Bag's Rants

Why career politicians always make daft choices.

Yet again. It seems like a politician with no experience, in the area he is responsible for, is making strange policy decisions that will impact on millions of people, cost a fortune and without any certainty his goal will be reached. Standard stuff really. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, is "seriously considering" raising the compulsory education leaving age from 16 to 18 and having schools open on Saturdays. Read here. He also approves the opening of a 24 Hour school. Read here. Although this doesn't look like part of his policy. Yet!

As Frank Chalk points out very neatly. It's not really the best solution. Read here. Nor is it a solution IMO. Why would allowing kids to go to school when it suits them make them learn any better when they clearly have no interest at all now? At least at the moment you can tell who is skiving because all the kids who are learning are in school. You won't with the proposed method. More parents are going to have difficulty keeping track of their kids. In particular the ones whose kids don't want to go but the parents ensure they do currently will lose track. 'Where are you off to at two in the morning?' 'I'm going to school, Mum' while he goes out with his mates visiting people houses while they sleep. There will be a lot more skiving as they find out how easy it is especially with their mates encouraging them and it will become apparent quickly nobody can do anything about it. How are parents expected to keep track especially as a particular teachers skillset will mean that lessons can only be at particular times due to working time directives? The scheduling alone will be a nightmare. Jeremy's physics is at 07:30 but he can't do biology until 16:30. He can go home during the day. Yippee! Unfortunately his mates are doing Chemistry at 14:00. So he'll be bored and go shoplifting instead with his new mates. His new mates who have plenty of free time during the day as their work, advanced additions, using more than 1 digit, being at 18:30. That will go down well. How do we fit the ASBO curfews in when school times need to be considered? Sorry, John can't have a curfew at 19:00 as his stage two ethics classes are at 20:00. Unless of course we double or triple up on all skills and have class sizes of five or so. Who wants to pay for all that so a few dossers who can't be bothered have the world revolve around them. It's not cost effective. Better paying the dole for the hard core 20,000 dossers than spending a hundred times that in an attempt to educate them. Screw them if they can't be bothered. Most will end up in the nick anyway.

Politicians lately seem to react in a way that indicates they are not getting good advice. We pay a lot so that doesn't happen. Unfortunately, career politicians make their decisions based on criteria that is best for them not the public and, it seems, contrary to advice given to them by real experts. This enables them to do something to fix the problem in a fanfare of publicity so they can move on to the next step in their career in another area where they don't have any experience either. We have to put up with the botch up and later have to pay yet again to put it right. In the meantime, in this case, we end up with another generation of kids who are barely literate and with limited skillsets.

We seem to have this level of expertise in every government department at the moment. Does anyone know what they are doing? Even the non policy politicians seem not to be able to get anything right.

It's the politicians dilemma in action. We should really get rid of career politicians and get people that know what they are doing involved in politics. After all politicians only skills appear to be smiling, avoiding questions and lying. Our schools are churning out people with only those skills now. Jeez, unless we act we will have more useless people running for government.

Once we have sorted the politicians then we can move to individual areas and get skilled people in there as well. Without the politicians to help them we can get rid of the DH managers responsible for clinical issues who's sole skills are statistics. Police chiefs who's skills are in zoology or whatever. The list is endless. It's all jobs for the boys and it is currently screwing up everything just a little bit more than our politicians leave it. No initiative, no matter what state it is in, will be left without someone else sticking their oar into it and screwing it up that little bit more. Then on down to the next person in the chain. By the time it gets to us it doesn't work, it's plain it's crap and yet no one seems to take responsibility.

Why don't people in other careers enter politics after a lifetime, or a few decades of work in their fields? The experience they have would be immeasurable to the country. I would imagine that to make certain jobs, such as Chief Constable, etc. elected would be a good start. There must be something that could be done to encourage more of this sort of responsibility.

posted by Bag @ 3:14 pm