The article in question, where Jeevan Vasagar is admitted into the top-secret workings of the Cambridge admissions system makes interesting reading. Leaving all prejudice aside, one would come away with the notion that it’s a gruelling admissions system, but ultimately a fair one.

But you can’t help but wonder how accurate a portrayal this is. I’m not suggesting the Guardian is in the pay of the university vice-chancellors. But would academics behave exactly the same when discussing admissions in the presence of a journalist?

One is reminded of the countless stories of public bodies holding heart-to-hearts to predetermine decisions, so that controversy escapes the gaze of the Freedom of Information Act.

There is some revelatory reporting here. This must be one of the first times that the rather-indulgent antics of the Cambridge ‘winter pool’ have been described in such detail. But when Vasagar comments that it is “surprising” that race does not come up in conversation, in spite of accusations of racialism levelled at Oxbridge, it rather smacks of naivety.

Does he really expect that in the presence of a Guardian journalist, academics will reveal what is the most frowned-upon prejudice in our society?

Even with the self-regualation that a journalist’s presence imposes on such discussions, there are some real scorchers in this piece.

The pace is swift, despite the meeting lasting five hours. It is occasionally leavened with a touch of humour, or avuncular kindness. One of the academics, looking at a file photo, sighs: “Oh he’s young – he looks like one of the Bash Street kids.” Another remarks, of a different candidate: “You could conduct a biology study in his hair.” Recalling an over-caffeinated and under-dressed teenager, one says: “The T-shirt, oh yes, the T-shirt …”

So no questioning of why it is necessary for Cambridge, uniquely among British universities, to request a photograph. “Avuncular kindness”? I’m not sure that’s how future applicants, reading this article, will feel when they discover that their looks are being patronisingly assessed and laughed at by those who proclaim to judge on academic capacity alone.

Cambridge is my university and for much of the year my home. I applaud any efforts to redress the current gross imbalance in favour of those from private and selective schools. But I’m not convinced that an article which reinforces the notion that two of this country’s universities naturally need to have a different admissions system to everywhere else. We have some great university courses all over this country, some of which are more over-subscribed than any at Oxbridge.

Maybe admitting more students from comprehensives would encourage more students from comprehensives to apply? Now that would be very original.

While Britain slept off its Christmas excess, Jamaica went to the polls on 29 December. Overnight, result after progressive result rolled in as the votes were counted.

The scale of victory for the People’s National Party (PNP), the main left-wing grouping, was a surprise. Poll after poll in the last weeks had shown the election on a knife-edge, with most showing the governing right-wingers slightly ahead.

In the event, it was a contest of policies and records. Poverty had skyrocketed under the incumbents, who also faced negative publicity from their connections with Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, the drug dealer who made global headlines last year when the island’s government refused to extradite him to the US.

But behind all this lies a remarkable woman: Portia Simpson-Miller. Despite her youthful appearance and manner, she has been on the country’s political scene for the best part of three and a half decades, entering parliament seven years before Tony Blair first graced the green benches.

Continue reading at Labour Uncut…

On BBC Radio 4, we had Thinking Streets, a documentary about the theory of shared space. In a gross simplification, this is the theory that if people and motorists think for themselves around roads and public spaces, the result, rather than chaos will be harmony.

So take down traffic lights and railings, and people cross where they like, when they like… and motorists have to act like real people rather than keeping their feet permanently on the accelerator until instructed by a machine to slam the breaks on.

It was all pioneered by a Dutch planner called Hans Monderman, who was fond of testing out his theories by walking backwards into the traffic with his arms folded.

I was looking back over the Camden New Journal’s coverage of the railings removal in Camden Town. This is ‘naked streets’, a small step towards shared space. ‘Shared space’ in Camden Town would no doubt also include taking down the multitude of lights and levelling the pavements with the roads.

But it was interesting to see in Tom Foot’s piece that Camden council had evidently stressed that they wouldn’t be expanding the zero-railings policy to outside schools. For in the Radio 4 documentary, they talk about when Monderman came up with the controversial idea of invoking shared space at a village primary school in Holland.

And this wasn’t just outside the school gate. Motorists were driving through the playground to access the village. Kids were playing on the main road. There were chalk marks and skipping ropes. And apparently it worked a treat, not just for that road, but for the whole village.

And those of us who have been to the countryside know that it’s a complete myth that roads are safer there anyway. But can you imagine the Daily Mail outrage if Camden did such a thing?

Of course, there are other issues about access to primary school playgrounds. It’s quite possible that in Holland they don’t have enclosed playgrounds, and so there would be no added paedophile risk from such a move.

But even if a British local authority tried to take down railings outside the school gates, I think it would be very hard to pull off. Lots of emotion.

In other news on this subject, Anna Minton has a new edition of her seminal work Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City out this month. My copy arrived yesterday. I reviewed it when it first came out, and interviewed her about the shocking issues it raises. Now there’s a new chapter on the ‘true olympic legacy’ and the policies of the Tory-led government.

I should be reviewing this before long. But keep an eye out, follow her on Twitter and take an interest in this fascinating area.

I wanted to link to this interview I did back in September 2009, and found the Spinebreakers website had it down as ’404 Not Found’. So here it is. A new edition of Ground Control is out this month, with updates. But see my (slightly) more recent post for that.

***

I read Ground Control by Anna Minton when it was published earlier this year, and from the moment I picked it up I knew it would be a book I’d always remember. Minton describes the outrages we’ve seen in the world of planning, public space and the tackling of crime since the 1980s; through this, she explores the role of cities, what citizenship and society is all about, and the way in which we live our day-to-day lives.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the book is how she has managed to condense so much information, previously available only in forms barely understandable to the ordinary person, into a concise, readable book. This has obviously taken a great deal of passion. But what was her initial inspiration for writing on the subject? “I think writing a book comes out of a really complicated mix of motives,” she tells me at the British Library in Kings Cross, “so there’s probably a lot of things I’m not fully aware of.” Minton is not a professional working in planning, but a journalist, although she has been writing about the themes she covers in Ground Control for a number of years. “The very first spark of it was an article in the Guardian I wrote, about mixed communities, where I wrote about gated communities and ghettoes in the US.” At this point, Minton stresses, these issues had less of a presence in Britain. “In 2002, gated communities were still a relatively rare phenomenon [in Britain], but by the time I came to write the book, most new development is being built in that way.” I am told the trend continued even while she was writing the book, which she says sustained her interest. It is plain her passion is to spread her thoughts on these topics to a wide audience: “I want people to read them.” She continues: “What I started to do was read these really fascinating accounts in journals, which nobody ever read; these are really, really important issues, and they have to be translated into an accessible language for a mainstream audience.”

Many are keen to dismiss any writing about city planning as boring and irrelevant, but is this really what Ground Control is about? “I don’t think it is a book about town planning,” Minton argues with some conviction, “I think it’s a book about fear, and emotion relating to the landscape and environment we live in, and how the places we live in make us feel and react and cooperate with each other as citizens.” She would even go far as to say a book focusing on planning would be out of date: “It’s much more of a book about the property economy than planning, because planning really doesn’t feature anymore, that’s one of the aspects of the book, planning has basically been discredited, it’s been disempowered – following the planning disasters of the 50s and 60s, planners have no power.” Minton certainly argues against the way many British city centres are now run. “Instead of trying to create a city which has got the most healthy and sustained environment – the main issue is if you create a place where your main aim is creating maximum profit from that place, you’re creating a more segregated, divisive and fearful environment.” The priority, Minton argues in Ground Control, ought not to be profit but developing community and trust.

Any reader of Ground Control should be prepared to be shocked; for me it was that we, the public, had let those with power hand over so much influence to profiteering corporations from the citizen. One scheme that Minton comments on is the Pathfinder ‘regeneration’ project, under which almost a million sound Victorian homes, predominantly former social housing in northern town centres, are being compulsorily purchased and demolished, solely in order to maximise the property value and attract a higher class of residents. Despite having done much research on the subject, Minton describes having still be shocked by what she saw on travelling to Derker, Oldham, one of the Pathfinder hotspots. “I was quite dumbfounded by what I actually saw, in terms of experiencing the human cost and what these places actually look like. Nothing beats looking down a whole street of boarded up houses bar one, in which a terrified 82-year-old woman lives.” She describes how she felt after her fact-finding trips: “I really did think God I’m so bloody lucky, it’s stuff none of us have got any idea about.”

The areas explored in Ground Control, which range from the private-controlled ‘business improvement districts’, where political protest is often banned, to youth work (Minton speaks of equal shock at youth provisions in Salford to that at the atrocities of Pathfinder), are continuously developing, so I ask Minton what has come up since the book was published which has interested her. “There’s relevant stories all the time,” she says. “Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility was just another example of totally wrong-headed, missing-the-point policy making. It was a typical example of them saying it was the elitism of the old boys’ network that is hampering social mobility in Britain, and if we had more work placements or something, social mobility would miraculously improve.” Minton then shows the deeply-rooted connection with some of the issues discussed in her writing. “The problems are just so much more profound, and relate to the increasingly segregated city environment that people live in and grow up in. There’s an unholy alliance between housing and property prices and education, which has created a totally two-tier education system. That’s the fundamental issue, and not work placements.”

And what of the future? “I think Pathfinder may have had its day. It’s been a market led policy, which has come down with the market, and I think it may be abandoned, simply because of what’s happening with the property market.” I find hearing Minton say this quite reassuring, given how disturbed I was when reading of this project. Minton’s hope, however, is admittedly limited. “Would I envisage that either another Labour government or the Tories would significantly improve things in the way I’m discussing, well, no, sadly,” she explains. The approach taken in the new development of the Kings Cross railway lands (almost adjacent to the British Library, where we are sitting), however, is encouraging to some extent. Camden council will retain control of the streets, she informs me, and public spaces will be governed by standard by-laws. “If the streets remain in public hands, that’s very important. Certainly that’s an exception, that’s the only development that has done that. But if you go round much of the development it’s very much in keeping with the high-security feel.” Ground Control holds this ‘high-security feel’ at least partially responsible for Britain’s culture of fear. We shall, of course, discover if the ‘Kings Cross Central’ development is a positive step for sure when it finally ‘opens’ in the next few years.

What is most admirable about Anna Minton is how she has developed thoughts on so many different areas into a clear and inclusive view of how our failures in these areas have led to society becoming more fearful and less happy. Her ability to engage with these issues as they emerge, and inform a wider audience of them, is refreshing in an area where it often seemed there is little hope at all. If there is ever a major turnaround in these areas, it would be hard to imagine Minton and her deep passion not being somehow involved.

For more details of Ground Control visit www.annaminton.com

And we can thank our lucky stars that we’re not as smart as we like to think we are!

This is a song with some real gems, lyric wise. One of the best moments of my retail career was asking a customer, who had put his card into the wrong chip and pin device, to ‘slide over here’. It’s a phrase which should give every sane person the shivers, but the moment was so perfect I just couldn’t turn it down. And he seemed to think it was perfectly normal.

I can’t imagine it making number 3 now, but this was the 70s, when extensive saxophone solos performed by badly-lit – presumably as the attention couldn’t be diverted from the main act – saxophonists were in fashion. Just look at Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street (which I genuinely think is alright as a matter of fact).

But despite it’s cheesiness beyond the level of anything else I’ve heard in my life, it makes great contributions to conversations. But although I know many a Lisa, I’ve yet to find one who still goes around as if she is always stumbling off a cliff. Maybe historically, but not still.

So here it is. By the way, I forgot to say, your endearing mother called today.

It’s an interesting piece. I give it to him for starting at the bottom as a proper teacher, rather than, like that Toby Young, thinking that a career in failure is all that is required to run a school.

But unfortunately, the fact that Hyman is prepared to buy into Michael Gove’s pet project says a lot about the mindset of what I like to call the “far-centre”.

Never mind the fact that these schools will compete and divert money from existing schools struggling to survive in a climate where middle-class parents, whose pushiness is sometimes exactly what each school needs its fair share of, opt out and choose more exclusive options.

Never mind the fact that free schools have greater flexibility over their admissions policy. And when any new school is struggling to prove itself, who would turn down the opportunity to get better results at GCSEs and A-levels in the first years of exams?

Never mind the fact that our democratically-elected local representatives will have little power to keep the school in check.

Of course, some will say it’s alright. Because Hyman will never subscribe to the full Gove ideal. He probably won’t. But on that basis, we could appoint a benevolent dictator rather than have a general election every five years.

The model is just plain dangerous. Less accountability and a divisive and damaging impact on the local area.

Others will say that in certain areas, in certain circumstances, we have to live with the fact that its not our preferred model and accept that a free school will be beneficial.

But can ideology be optional? No, as far as I’m concerned.

I know that that position isn’t universally held. So “for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world”*, I’ll give another argument:

How on earth is the left supposed to challenge a policy when we have Labour supporters promoting it. It’s embarrassing.

I’ll finish on a slightly different note. Hyman does seem quite sincere. But by the end of the interview, he was onto true Blairite education jargon. Maybe he wasn’t a teacher for the last eight years after all. Maybe he was a “project-based-learning facilitator”.

I should have known this from the start, from the name of the planned school: School 21. Sounds a bit like that failed private train operator which used to operate out of Liverpool Street…

*A beautiful and poignant phrase stolen from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

Is there such a thing, as David Cameron described the events of August, as “criminality, pure and simple”? As Suzanne Moore argued on Wednesday, if the PM was right about the riots, why then, and not before or after?

I would never defend the rioters and the destruction faced by predominantly-working-class communities. But can we look each other in the eyes and truly say that such events are apolitical?

In last week’s Radio 4 play Ancient Greek, this is the charge levelled at sixth-form student Alex King by his geography teacher Mr Ibrahim. Illegible graffiti have appeared; painted in corridors and etched into the deputy head’s car. And the culprit is the studious Alex, about to take up a place to study classics at Cambridge.

Read the rest of this article at Labour Uncut

Heading line stolen from the @LabourUncut Twitter account. The best possible way to describe this article!

But do you know what annoys me more and more each day? All the commentators who seem to think that they can speak on his behalf from beyond the grave.

Apparently, although I can’t clarify my source, Christopher Hitchens once claimed that Orwell would have supported the invasion of Iraq. When I interviewed Michael Foot about his friend back in 2009, he argued the opposite. But he went on to say that with someone like Orwell it was impossible to say what they would be doing in the modern age, as “quite a number of sections of his journalism were affected by the things he’d seen.”

Such self-restraint would be welcome in all Orwell clairvoyants.

Indeed, it seems so often that I read some commentator or other arguing that “Orwell would be turning in his grave.” I can just about stand this if it’s about CCTV Britain, but there seems to be a feeling that if you’ve reached the heights of columnism, you’re somehow awarded the privilege of being able to speak for the man who some would see as literature’s greatest voice of reason.

‘Cos Orwell was a columnist too, that’s what it is.

The latest example of this (sorry it took so long to get to it) is a piece published on the Labour right website and magazine Progress on the evils of the Occupy movement. The pleasantly-anonymous contributor writes: “George Orwell would see right through the mishmash of unfocused causes that make up the St Paul’s protest…”

Well, lets let s/he explain her/himself before we criticise. He goes on to cite Orwell’s “famous litany of left-wing cranks” as a justification of why the writer would given the tents a no show.

This, for those, like me, who aren’t familiar with The Road to Wigan Pier (it must be the only full-length Orwell not on my shelf) is that “the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

Hmm. If there was ever evidence for the problems with quoting Orwell as a solution to everything, then here it is.

It would have been nice to have an acceptance from Progress that fruit-juice isn’t confined to the most alternative of hippies these days. Or that the presence of sex-maniacs probably penetrates most groups in society.

Slightly more worrying is that the Progress-endorsed view seems to be that feminism is the preserve of nut-cases. Would the author like to shed his cloak of anonymity and say that again?

But back to fruit juice. Apparently there’s a passage in Wigan Pier in which Orwell argues that no-one would ever swap breakfast tea for the cheaper alternative of orange juice. ”The point is,” he argues, “that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing.”

He wasn’t always right. Orwell’s always great for a quote, but supporting a weak argument with “and Orwell wouldn’t stand for it” is just lazy.

This review appeared in the weekly West End Extra newspaper, Friday 24th November, along with its sister papers the Camden New Journal and the Islington Tribune.

IN her 2001 book, the left-wing activist from Islington, Liz Davies, bemoaned that New Labour conference delegates were happy to accept a “non-speaking, walk-on part” but would never think of making trouble for their leaders.

If this play’s title were simply describing former minister Chris Mullin’s significance in government, “non-speaking” would be an apposite prefix.

But as John Hodgkinson, who plays Mullin, dances across the stage, he’s certainly got a lot of talking to do.

This is the tale of the former Sunderland MP, former minister, former political journalist and writer of the novel A Very British Coup, who shares with Alan Clark the distinction of writing diaries that are widely acclaimed rather than consigned to the Slough branch of The Works.

In this stage version of Mullin’s memoirs, we race from crisis to anecdote, as a talented, flexible cast of four moves from portraying Tony Benn to Tony Blair to George Osborne before you can say Yes, Minister.

It could be argued that writer Michael Chaplin would have been better off excising the Brown years, which seem somewhat disjointed when they conclude the play.

For this is a story of the Blair era – and of a very human search for old-fashioned values of decency and morality while attempting to climb the greasy pole… which seems greasier than ever before.

Until December 10
020 7478 0100

A tent city in London, a crisis in the Eurozone and more turmoil in Afghanistan. You’d think our politicians had more important things to discuss than the time.

But as Tory MP Rebecca Harris puts forward a proposal to move us to European time – an hour forward – make no mistake, it matters. In the age of distraction at the hands of Facebook and one-and- a-half-hour episodes of Downton Abbey, it wouldn’t be unfounded to say to suggest that such a change is minor. But if an hour is ever important, it matters in the morning, when keeping to the schedules of work, education and daily life is crucial.

If you’ve ever worked nights, or simply slept with the curtains drawn, you will have realised our natural instinct to wake with the light. Rising in the dark, however, is fundamentally unappealing, especially when in the cold; yet that’s what we’d be doing for half the year under the proposal to move to European time.

And if it’s bad for us in the South, spare a thought for those further afield. In parts of Scotland, the sun would not rise until the staggering time of 10am.

So how on earth can this be seen as a serious proposition? The government, previously opposed to the change, has been steadily clawing back, and now business minister Ed Davey says it is “only right” to consider the proposal.

As ever, it seems to be the ubiquitous ‘business lobby’ that is pushing for the change. No wonder: it’s a prime chance to squeeze in an extra hour of trading stocks with Europe.

In the early 90s, big business was key in securing the repeal of the ban on Sunday trading. While the law supposedly allows employees ‘family time’ off, this is frequently abused by employers, and when it is respected it is often given at times when children are at school. Religious or not, British people value Sundays as a day of rest and relaxation, yet this is increasingly a luxury rather than a right.

In his hit ‘The Manchester Rambler’, Ewan MacColl professes: “I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday.” Not in twenty-first century Britain.

More recently, huge swathes of our town centres have been brought under business control, and political activism and rough sleeping have been repressed – simply because businesses believe they reduce profitability.

Just look at the grassroots Occupy London Stock Exchange protest, which was prevented from convening in the (business-owned) Paternoster Square in the City of London. The Stock Exchange had decided it would be inconvenient for bankers and tourists, and so it was that the right to peacefully protest, won after years of campaigning and sacrifice, was lost.

Not content with controlling our economy, our employment rights and our cities, they want the time as well. If they can squeeze a few more million out, which will no doubt end up in the bonuses of City bankers, then they’re in favour of it.

Never mind the schoolchildren who will be getting up in the dark each morning, or the checkout assistants at supermarkets who will never see daylight at all. Or the millions of workers who thought they’d taken a job with civilized hours only to find that they’re brushing their teeth in the dark every day.

If you want to see how our society has changed, just consider that the last time we changed our patterns of time – the introduction of British Summertime in 1916 – Winston Churchill argued that it would enlarge “the opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness”. Now abolition is proposed for the convenience of big business.

That’s capitalism for you.

This article first appeared in Varsity, Cambridge’s independent weekly student paper. See it as it appeared on the page HERE.