A number of Head Teachers and Governors from state schools have signed a letter publicly backing plans to give autonomy to state schools, giving them more power of the curriculum, staffing, admissions and budget, as well as the key ares of contention over examinations. They have argued for radical reform after more than a decade of being bounced around and tied up with all of Labour’s bureaucratic indolence.
The Jury Team are delighted to be reading such endorsement of what has been one of their key policy suggestions for quite some time! The government should pay for school education but parents, not the government, should have the main responsibility for deciding where their children are educated. Government should pay schools according to how many pupils they educate and it should pay them more for disadvantaged pupils so that these can have more resources. However the government does not need to run the schools. In Holland 67% of schools follow such a funding model, and it is 55% of schools in Ireland. Furthermore, the US Charter schools, which have generally been very successful, work on the same model.
There should be a ballot in every school to decide whether to opt out, which would be initiated by the governors or by 5% of the parents requesting this ballot. It would require a 55% agreement with at least 50% of the families voting and to avoid being tied up in a repetitive campaign where it is clearly not popular, a ballot could be held not more often than once every five years.
Jury Team clearly agree with these Head Teachers in the belief that independence gives back to teachers their professional respect and, subject to the governors, gives Head Teachers the right to manage their school without interference. They understand, unlike the main three parties, that a school must succeed otherwise parents will simply stop sending their children there. Better still, it allows undersubscribed schools to take measures to improve, and it is shown when such efforts are made the results are tremendous. Furthermore, this gives parents a choice, makes the children the key focus, motivates staff and raises aspirations.
This General Election vote with YOUR HEAD!
Perhaps the best result the Tories could have is this:
Conservatives – 34%
Liberal Democrats – 30%
Labour – 28%
This would give Labour an unjustifiable but largest number of MPs, and with it all that Gordon Brown feels he needs to hang onto Number 10.
But here’s what happens under his first properly elected premiership. Gordon has to beg for the support of the new larger number of SNP MPs, who under Alex Salmond demand what they have had their mind set on for decades, which is the return of all that oil revenue they believe to have been ’stolen’ by Westminster. English and Welsh taxes will be diverted up to Edinburgh – the SNP now having forgotten their earlier pledges of allegiance with Plaid Cymru – thereby restoring the power of any bank with the word Scotland in it’s name. Brown will also have to impose cuts to everything to survive this drain on resources and the imposition of demands from the International Monetary Fund – cuts to civil servant’s paypackets, impoverishing cuts in provision of all public services including the NHS, cuts to the military fighting in Afghanistan.
The Public, already very angry at the party coming third being still in charge, will join together and the resultant strikes through first and ‘Autumn of Discontent’ followed by a ‘Winter of Discontent’ will be fed up of Gordon Brown once and and for all. The Hung Parliament will hang itself and the Liberal Democrats will not support anyone government who doesn’t agree to the first Bill on the Statute Books being the introduction of Proportional Representation. The Conservatives will rally a vote of “No Confidence” in the Government. Brown will have no option to go to the country for the second time in 2010, and……. the angry electorate will boot Labour out for a generation.
The question really is, does a politician have the courage to bide their time? Perhaps someone should lend David Cameron a history book with the page turned over on Stanley Baldwin (around the election of 1923).
First past the post is set to go. What will happen after that will depend on David Cameron’s courage. If he gets it right, he WILL be Prime Minister. If he gets it wrong, PR could remove Conservative government forever. One way or another, the outcome of the 2010 General Election will see a big name – Labour or Conservative – fall from power for a long time to come.
Get ready! It seems like a Hung Parliament is a’coming. So, swot up ahead of time and appear learned about the events we’re likely to see unfold. Journalists are salivating over the overdrive of excitement we’re about to witness.
Despite the possibility that Gordon Brown might have ‘lost’ the election, it may be that Britain wakes up to find him still there as Prime Minister. Even though he has lost his majority and even though he no longer represents the largest party, Gordon Brown is the PM until he resigns. He can (and given desperation most likely he will) seek approval to prepare a Queen’s Speech as if the election has not ever happened.
When a PM resigns the Queen invites someone else to become PM, immediately. There must be no period without government. The Queen will not get involved in any way with anything that could be deemed partisan and so will not be personally embroiled in negotiations – something that is more to the liking of the parliamentarian end of the gene pool in her realm. The key thing here is that the Queen is looking for whoever is most capable of getting a Queen’s Speech and Budget passed in the House; usually whoever is leader of the largest party, but not necessarily so.
It’s all back to the drawing board if a PM loses a vote of confidence and they have to resign, causing the dissolution of Parliament. That said the Queen could refuse Parliament this right given Parliament has only just been elected.
It looks like the once forgotten “smoke-filled backrooms” of old will come into their own again as Nick Clegg’s and David Cameron’s henchmen play out a game of political poker with the winner taking to the steps of Number 10.
The ‘X Factor” election now becomes more like “Big Brother’s Little Brother” with Sue Barker asking “What happened next?”
When voters go to their polling stations on May 6th , those unsure of who they should vote for might want to take a moment to consider how generous they have become. Whilst it may seem a little harder to get treated under the NHS in the coming years because of austerity measures by whoever is elected as Prime Minister, they can remain confident in the fact that overseas visitors to the UK can access the very same emergency treatment totally free of charge as the British taxpayer. Regardless of residential status treatment will remain free of charge courtesy of the NHS, which is paid for from the pockets of the British worker’s taxes. Such generosity by the taxpayer comes from the National Health Service (Charges to Overseas Visitors) Regulations and means that the UK is the only EU country providing totally free healthcare.
The charitable generosity of the British is yet again proven to rise above all other nationalities, so we all deserve to pat ourselves on the back for paying these bills for non-residents to the UK.
So, as the proverbial axe falls on the NHS budget, and you as a British taxpayer are sitting in A&E wondering why your child is not being seen by a doctor to help relieve their pain, or your sister is not being treated at the oncology unit because your hospital is a bit strapped for cash, or the operation you were hoping for has been delayed yet again, bear in mind that if only Britain did as other countries in Europe did (eg. Ireland) and required non-EU nationals to have health insurance in order to be treated in a British NHS hospital, then the £4 billion that would have been saved, should this private medical insurance have been a requirement in order to come to the UK, might have been spent on someone more deserving, namely You!
Clegg-mania still lives on, this time through the Sky TV run Prime Ministerial Debate tonight. The bubble doesn’t seem to have any intention of bursting for the Liberal Democrats. Far from it if the number of new voter registrations in the first-time voter category are anything to go by. They seem to have latched onto this ‘new kid on the Westminster block’.
This “X-Factor Election” strides on, waking up the people from a slumber of ineffectualness of the past six parliaments. The journalists, excited in the belief they finally have an intently following audience (maybe that’s over-egging it a little) are telling us to “Watch this space!”.
There has been much talk about Boundary Changes affecting the outcome of the coming general election in Britain. This always happens and it is always talked about. So what is actually going on and what is going to happen?
The new House of Commons will start with 650 seats. Something the Jury Team say is ridiculous as some constituencies are elected upon with 120,000 electorate (such as the Isle of Wight) whereas others have less than half that number of electorate, such as many of the North England inner city areas that typically favour the Labour Party. That said, boundary reviews generally favour the Conservatives Party simply because the trend is for people to move out of inner city areas towards the suburbs.
So, we find the 2010 changes create 13 new seats (10 notionally Conservative and 3 Liberal Democrat) with the abolition of 9 seats (two-thirds being Labour). This means that on the current set up, should the 2005 election have been held now Labour’s majority would have been 36 rather than 64. That said, though the new boundaries favour the Tories, in reality the effect is only marginal. Under the 2005 boundaries Labour would lose it’s majority with a swing of 2.2%, but under the new this is slightly better for the Conservatives who now only require a swing of 1.5%. And it’s a swing of 6.9% (as opposed to the previous 7.4% to gain an overall majority in the House).
But though the task has been made that little bit harder for Labour to hang onto power, it seems the Conservatives have hardly been making real headway to secure victory.
See you again in another five years for yet more boundary changes!!
The Jury Team continue to argue for larger constituency boundaries and less MPs in the House. They propose for legislation to be introduced in the next Parliamentary calendar for the Boundary Commissions in each of the four nations of the UK to recast the constituencies in time for the general election in 2015. And with each MP costing an average of more than £600,000 the proposed reduction in the number of Westminster MPs would allow for a saving of more than £130 million for the same job being done. A better, more efficient use of the public purse.
