Arts in the UK post-Brexit

[Bryn]

Although this, like Beefy's example of what now been downsized to a sixth form college, may not translate to a general rule, when, in the 1960s, my father having got a new possition in Bracknell, I transferred from a Swindon grammar school to one in Windsor, I was barred from continuing with Music 'O' Level due to the Windsor school not accepting singing as a perfromance mode. I learned, too late, that had I gone to a more local comprehensive, I could have continued with music.

[french frank]

Agreed, those who did not pass the 11 Plus often received a second-rate education.

A situation not unlike public school v. comprehensive now. It's simplistic to think of the old grammar schools as 'meritocratic'. In my small village school, where there were 10-12 pupils per year, you could pick out the ones who would get to grammar school, even before they took the 11 Plus: it was the middle class kids. The country children went to the nearest secondary modern.

The only difference between now and then is that the middle class kids who passed the 11 Plus didn't come from the kind of moneyed class that now sends their children to public schools.

[Stanfordian]

In the "old days" you didn't need a scholarship to receive a free grammar school education, though. Agreed, those who did not pass the 11 Plus often received a second-rate education.

Of course I meant the 11 Plus not Scholarship.

[Cockney Sparrow]

A situation not unlike public school v. comprehensive now. It's simplistic to think of the old grammar schools as 'meritocratic'. In my small village school, where there were 10-12 pupils per year, you could pick out the ones who would get to grammar school, even before they took the 11 Plus: it was the middle class kids. The country children went to the nearest secondary modern.

The only difference between now and then is that the middle class kids who passed the 11 Plus didn't come from the kind of moneyed class that now sends their children to public schools.

Presumably we can agree that Grammar School entry had mixed aspects. Mine was different but a bit of a windfall. As would be consistent with my ID, I came from an overspill estate, having moved out of the East End in my early school years. I ended up at a new Primary School, where looking back the head must have been determined to break into the Grammar School system. In the year before the 11+ we were given a class teacher who I now realise effectively "hothoused" us (it didn't seem oppressive at the time). At the end of the January term we were moved on to our teacher for the final year at Junior school and the 11+ teacher took on the next cohort.

All in all, a bit of windfall for me - I didn't have middle class parents - they were intelligent sure enough, but had their horizons limited either by the circumstances into which they were born, or the disruption of the war. Mine is a particular story, I'm sure that the generality of grammar school entry is that the middle class positioned themselves to achieve the desired outcome. As parents today do for desirable academies, etc etc. Ironically, it looks like my grandchildren, when they come, will be in an area where Grammar Schools have continued.....

[Beef Oven!]

A situation not unlike public school v. comprehensive now. It's simplistic to think of the old grammar schools as 'meritocratic'. In my small village school, where there were 10-12 pupils per year, you could pick out the ones who would get to grammar school, even before they took the 11 Plus: it was the middle-class kids. The country children went to the nearest secondary modern.

The only difference between now and then is that the middle class kids who passed the 11 Plus didn't come from the kind of moneyed class that now sends their children to public schools.

In the road that we lived in that runs behind Homerton Hospital and is known as 'Murder Mile', the experience was different and I honestly don't think there were any middle class kids in my school whatsoever! and it was not at all obvious as to who was going to grammar school (although it was clear that some weren't!). My brother and sister got into grammar schools in Hackney, and although I was invited to leave my school in Hackney, I ended up in an excellent school in Walthamstow. This was back in the day when you could pretty much choose your school unlike now when people even buy hoses near a school to get their kids in. But grammar schools created the right conditions to bring out the best in people.

[Lat-Literal]

We have been here before.

Those of us who either passed the 11 plus and went to grammar schools - or as in my case, being only very slightly younger, passed the 11 plus under a different name and went just after the demise of the grammars in many areas on a scholarship to an independent school - had little prior concept of class background. However, that would often have been defined as lower middle class due to us being, just about, on the mortgage ladder. But at that time, there was hardly any distinction between lower middle class and skilled working class. No holidays to speak of in the 1960s. No car. No phone. No central heating. None of those things could be afforded. My parents were just relieved that they were in a home with electric light rather than, as in the late 1950s, in gas light. There were music lessons at the independent school in the 1970s. I was also in the choir. But to learn a musical instrument - no, that required additional money and while I wanted to do that, it wasn't possible financially. I think the opportunities for music would have been greater had I been to a grammar school.

Given Beef Oven's comments as well as these ones, I think it is very possible that it is this outlook which may have tipped the vote in the referendum towards Brexit although I voted to remain with no belief. The grammar school mentality was leftist early on. I think he and I both were. Now it isn't anything much among many of us, although I can't/wont speak for him. We see the entire spectrum as having actively pushed many people down into an underclass across many decades. No money combined with the worst of upper middle class "values".

[Beef Oven!]

We have been here before.

Those of us who either passed the 11 plus and went to grammar schools - or as in my case, being only very slightly younger, passed the 11 plus under a different name and went just after the demise of the grammars in many areas on a scholarship to an independent school - had little prior concept of class background. However, that would often have been defined as lower middle class due to us being, just about, on the mortgage ladder. But at that time, there was hardly any distinction between lower middle class and skilled working class. No holidays to speak of in the 1960s. No car. No phone. No central heating. None of those things could be afforded. My parents were just relieved that they were in a home with electric light rather than, as in the late 1950s, in gas light. There were music lessons at the independent school in the 1970s. I was also in the choir. But to learn a musical instrument - no, that required additional money and while I wanted to do that, it wasn't possible financially. I think the opportunities for music would have been greater had I been to a grammar school.

You've reminded me of something. We had a phone. But no car, carpet, heating, toilet or bathroom. I never undertood how we had a phone which was an out and out luxury. One day in my twenties I mentioned it to my mum and she said that dad set up a trades union at his employer at Hackney Wick and the union required him to have a phone, so they paid for it, the rental and the calls. I suppose that was one good thing that came from my dad's misguided socialist principles

[Lat-Literal]

You've reminded me of something. We had a phone. But no car, carpet, heating, toilet or bathroom. I never undertood how we had a phone which was an out and out luxury. One day in my twenties I mentioned it to my mum and she said that dad set up a trades union at his employer at Hackney Wick and the union required him to have a phone, so they paid for it, the rental and the calls. I suppose that was one good thing that came from my dad's misguided socialist principles

That is absolutely right.

There were no fitted carpets. There was a cheap mat, I think, in the middle of the floor in the kitchen. Credit was to be avoided at all costs although the one concession was a minute black and white television on a next to nothing rental. We had progressed to a toilet and bathroom although my grandparents hadn't. And from early on I was used to being pushed by pram and then walking up mile-long one-in-nines not only routinely but whenever there was a medical emergency as the only alternative to contacting a doctor would have been on a note carried by pigeon. All this, of course, in rock solid Tory suburbia - it went way, way beyond Labour inner London - and to the media backdrop of Carnaby Street and the Beatles.

In the last month, my parents have lost their car and I don't have car. They are now walking up the very same hills. We are in that sense again prior to 1968 except they are now 88 and 87. It pains me. My refuse has not been collected since August. This is back to the late 1970s when the stench caused by strikes went from a communal chute into my family's flats except this time there are no strikes. It is being caused by a bungling Labour Council. Post 1979 Tory policy from Conservative, Liberal and Labour Governments has returned half a generation to a pre 1960 position of not standing a chance of buying their own homes with implications on half of all generations. There are homeless people on drugs in every city, town and village from Berwick on Tweed to Polperro and others with enough money to rent a room and to drink themselves into oblivion because they are in the wealth gap. Enough money to consume. Nowhere near enough to purchase anything really significant. The left has no more answers than do the right. Both focus on artificial distinctions like generational differences when any recycling of money would simply affect the same people where several generations are together in the same boat. There is nothing forward looking in any of it.

Could you pass me the salt please?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-45878164/pepper-the-robot-tells-mps-about-artificial-intelligence

[MrGongGong]

The delusions some people have about education and the way in which they extrapolate their own experience into regarding it as somehow universal.

Having been to many schools of all types to do music projects
I would say that some are great and some are sh*te
Some don't have any music at all anymore
but that has precious little to do with whether they are (and still are in several places) "grammar" (or even Grammå) schools, private schools or the like.

Arts post Brexit?
Nah

This is about it though

https://freemovecreate.org/news/2018/freemovecreate-letter-in-response-to-the-migration-advisory-committees-final-report-eea-migration-in-the-uk

[gradus]

A situation not unlike public school v. comprehensive now. It's simplistic to think of the old grammar schools as 'meritocratic'. In my small village school, where there were 10-12 pupils per year, you could pick out the ones who would get to grammar school, even before they took the 11 Plus: it was the middle class kids. The country children went to the nearest secondary modern.

The only difference between now and then is that the middle class kids who passed the 11 Plus didn't come from the kind of moneyed class that now sends their children to public schools.

Not my experience at a thoroughly working class primary school in London and subsequently at a Grammar, where there were plenty of boys from working class backgrounds, perhaps because the school was situated in a working class area. I guess it's all a bit subjective.

[Lat-Literal]

Schools have never been fit for purpose. I didn't, for example, need five years of Physics and Divinity. Free guitar lessons instead would have been preferable. I have been talking for years about lessons in filling out forms on money matters but many schools still haven't got round to it. Now that the emphasis, by necessity, would be on benefit forms rather than mortgage forms, I may have gone cold on the idea. It wouldn't encourage of employers a decent day's pay for a decent day's work along with reasonable conditions. The lower middle class Charlton fans were, I feel, very "old grammar school" in their protest of throwing bags of crisps onto the pitch. This, after the alleged news that an employee of the Belgian owner had felt it necessary to ask if she could eat crisps at her desk.

In the main, I am not especially in favour of opting out. I tend to think that virtually being forced into the Combined Cadet Force for 18 months was good for my character, albeit a real shock to my system at that time. On the other hand, if I could have avoided active sporting afternoons, being chosen there by colleagues for their teams second or third to last, I would have appreciated it. That was based in the competitive laws of the jungle. Alternative options would have had to have been relevant. "Please Mr Y, could Lat-Lit be excused the hockey afternoons because he wants to spend the time instead walking the North Downs or, if not, learning to play golf if your school will pay for it". I do think along these lines even today. If he wants to study, say, butterflies and moths, then let him.

We had gone on holiday once in the 1960s. It was to a caravan in West Wittering where we had to wear plastic bags on our feet to get through the mud to the communal sinks. A hotel had taken pity on us and invited us in to their general room just in time to see the Beatles on TV doing "All You Need is Love". My walking pal has now been in touch to discuss Lewes to Rye via Hastings in November : "You will roll your eyes but how would you feel about sharing a caravan in Pevensey? It's only £27 a night and it has flexi-dine." A man who enjoyed £4 weekend deals via The Sun in various Butlins-but-no-longer-Butlins outposts, he is 75% serious. I do like the idea - no robots and this needs no tokens - but would prefer it if we were closer to Dungeness where I would find it easier to compose.

[Lat-Literal]

Back in the spring, Peter Kellner, 72, ex posh Haberdashers Aske and of understandably troubled, European heritage, had one or two things to say that I felt I had proven were factually incorrect. I managed to track him down via an academic e-mail address. He kindly replied but chose not to address the points, saying that he was on holiday. Since then there has been a barrage of paper articles from him claiming that Brexit supporters are dying. The "neutrality" is that pointed so that it is heartfelt determined bias revelling in other people's demise.

The gist of it is if......if...….everyone stuck with what they had voted for, and if......if.....there was a second referendum, then the result would change. All those awful old people who are presumably long passed an old 72 would have been got rid of. Hey, we can save the world from another Belsen, which in truth many of those much older than him helped to address to provide a civilisation. As someone an old 17 years younger than the old moneybags, who would change my vote if.....if there were next year as he says to be a second referendum. I am heartily sick of this kind of deathwatch propaganda, largely in many people with immortal egos projected off their old ages onto others who they are just about to become age-wise.

I wanted to say that I am not being represented in his articles on what would be my change to leave; about being a founder member of the SDP from which many in academia like him never really developed; and that my specialist subjects were psephology, tackling racism and solutions to Northern Ireland in that order. But try finding a contact address for him now.

It doesn't exist. It is fast becoming with these people a one-way authoritarianism. Such so-called neutrals, wealthy and privileged and not in boots that dig long into England, will outlive me. I predict that. Equally they too are on the way out. But most would have been pensioned off at 40, 50 or 60 with no say in it. I was. I'd like the population to be more media critical. Kellner is married to an arch European Blairite on whom David Owen for one - and I'd agree with him - would laugh out loud at any idea she represented any sort of Social Democracy. Europe aside, both are, in my humble opinion, equidistant from what was the SDP in 1981 - or whatever it claimed to purport which may have been 60% genuine - with Jeremy Corbyn.

So perhaps they did move on, hoodwinked under their talents and ambition, expecting everyone else to be hoodwinked too. But not all of us went from Oxbridge to blinkered influence. Perhaps once he has done what the rebellious ladies of Southwark did in the 19th Century which was to spend a week in the gutter "investigating", he might get to grips with the lives of black and white people from several generations of British heritage - both lots as a trend have offspring too young - and then feel insecure enough to provide a new contact address.

[MrGongGong]

What on earth are you on about ?

[aeolium]

I would like to make some comments in respect of a report about divisions in British society that was discussed in the Guardian today:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/17/divided-britain-study-finds-huge-chasm-in-attitudes

Insofar as this report discusses attitudes towards immigration, it does relate to the issue of free movement within Europe, and therefore free movement for artists post-Brexit which has been discussed above. But it has a much wider resonance and if it is deemed to be too political and the issues too contentious to be discussed here, then any Host can feel free to consign this post to the oblivion of the basement.

I have for some time thought that attitudes to immigration, not just here but across Europe, were inseparable from the economic conditions of the individuals and communities in which those attitudes were held. In some cases this resulted in apparently paradoxical or irrational attitudes being expressed, for instance hostility towards immigrants in places where immigration levels were very low. I suggest that, as the authors of the "Hope not Hate" report seem to conclude, the attitudes towards immigration are those which people "present" (in GP's parlance) when in reality the underlying issues are those of economic hardship and deprivation. The authors comment that "people in deprived communities often saw immigration as part of 'a broader story about dissatisfaction with their own lives'....Immigration has become a totemic emblem for the many grievances people feel in modern Britain". And I don't think this applies merely in Britain, but in many parts of Europe (perhaps also the USA). One can clearly see, again and again, that the areas where hostility to immigration is most pervasive, and hostility to the EU and pro-EU parties is also higher than average (and where the Leave vote was highest), are those where there is significant economic deprivation: here in the North and East of England, in declining coastal towns, in the Welsh valleys; and across Europe in southern Italy, Eastern Germany, North-eastern France, poorer parts of Sweden.

This implies several things: that controlling immigration will not necessarily lead to an improvement in the lives of those suffering economic hardship, since their problems are not primarily related to immigration; and that unless the EU, and the governments of its member states plus the UK post-Brexit, make correcting regional and class inequalities a top priority rather than the damned Project which they are always going on about, then the political volatility will eventually be so great as to threaten the integrity of Europe and the stability of nation states within it. The recent trends are already serious: one of the largest member states of the EU has voted to leave, one of its original founder members, Italy, is now governed by a coalition essentially hostile to the EU, populist opposition parties are growing in strength as traditional centrist parties are becoming more enfeebled or in some cases endure electoral wipe-out. The status quo, economically and politically, is unsustainable and it seems idle to me to pretend that merely by trying to oppose the trends without offering significant remedial measures to correct the economic failings the rise of populism can be stopped and reversed.

I'm not sure what all that means for "the arts post-Brexit" but it seems to me that tackling economic inequality is, after the challenge of climate change, the most important challenge of our age.

[Demetrius]

I assume it is in response to an opinion or article by this guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kellner

If we could get the article or some bullet points of what he said, it would be easier to understand what you are arguing against. From what I understand, Kellner seems to have suggested that there would be certain groups of remain voters who would vote to leave in a second referendum, presumably including somewhat more conservative parts of labour voters/ social democrats.

One thing though: marriage does not equal similar political positions. One example being Kelly Ann Conway, whose husband has been vocal in his opposition to Donald Trump. Whether his wive is a Blairite or not should therefore surely not matter when it comes to his position.