Why I am Leaving ATL

As you all know I no longer blog - unless something really makes my blood boil which it hasn't for a long time. However the decision by ATL to join the strike action on 30th June has really wound me up. I did vote in the ballot and I did vote No but sadly I was outnumbered.

Anyway I have today cancelled my membership of ATL and I thought I'd publish the letter I sent here so as to explain my reasons clearly.

"Dear Sir / Madam,

Membership No: --------
Branch: --------

I am writing as I wish to terminate my membership of your union with immediate effect.

I joined ATL as it had a strong 127 year history of not striking. I feel industrial action should always be a last resort - used only when people's civil liberties are under attack or, especially in the case of education, where you are unable to perform your job correctly.

That ATL has decided to strike over an issue of personal finance, one which will affect every person not only in this country but the world around, is utterly gobsmackingly shocking to me. For 127 years you have chosen not to strike over classroom conditions, equal pay for men and women, teaching and learning standards and the impositions of the national curriculum. I cannot believe that the straw that broke the camel's back comes down to the fact that teacher's pensions - which were already far sweeter than anything the rest of workers on equivalent wages receive - are being reduced in a time of economic crisis.

This strike is pure selfishness. It will not change the governments mind. It will affect teaching and learning. It will cause parents to have to spend money on childcare or lose a days pay taking the day off work.

Globally the world is facing the problem of an ageing population. Retirement ages will have to rise, pension plans are not sustainable, changes need to be made. This is not an argument you can or should win.

You have decided to break with your tradition which was the only reason I chose to join you and in my opinion you have chosen to do so over the most petty of issues that has faced the teaching profession in the last 127 years. As such please terminate my membership with immediate effect. I shall be joining The Voice - who have an actual written policy of not striking so I trust them to stick to their word.

Yours faithfully,

Caroline Hunt"

Do Not Forget Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

A few months ago this women was all the rage in the western media. Condemned by the Iranians to stoning for adultery she made a good story. However as with all stories that don't involve Brits, the media has lost interest over time and she has been shuffled to the World news pages of broadsheets where few people dare to tread.

Lest you forget Ms Ashtiani was convicted by a Sharia court in 2006 of committing adultery with two men who have never been named, following the death of her husband. She was then publicly given 99 lashes.

Stop for a second - lets not even move on to the larger issues and what happened next. How many people do you know who have committed adultery? Would you see them whipped publicly? In front of their children? Or even at a comparable scale, how many people do you know who have been accused of adultery - whether with evidence or not - again do they deserve public corporal punishment?

Since then Sakineh has been sentenced to the death penalty, her lawyer has had to flee to Norway and now her children have been arrested while trying to flee the country looking for asylum.

Barack Obama spoke a few weeks ago to the Iranian public. He said that he knew they as a group did not agree with the way their country was run. He was right. But if we stop international focus on this story and many others like it than the extremist minority win - they get to carry out whatever they like and let the silent majority of Iran feel that the international community is not behind them.

Please do not foget the story of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani - let Iran know we care, we will not stand for it and we know that their population is screaming out for change.

Liberal Youth Killed My Internet Community

Many people think posting on internet forums is a deeply lame pastime that only pathetically lonely and sad people take part in. Well that may be true but I still enjoy it. Or in fact I have enjoyed posting on one forum in particular for five long years. In that time there have been complex debates, silly arguments, quizzes and laughs, anger and even tears. I have met many of the members in person and would even be willing to use the word friend to describe some of them.

Finding a good online community is a hard thing to do - most suffer from over trolling and many aren't well looked after enough to be effective long term. But I had found a reasonable, fun, sensible forum where the administrators were nice enough to make me a moderator so I could keep the spam down and enjoy a daily examination of politics with a wide range of reasonable people.

This is all surprising enough but what may surprise some people even more was that it was a Lib Dem forum. Original the forum of LDYS, in recent times they changed their name to Liberal Youth but the forums lived on with many members of the community lifers like me. We had a Lib Con coalition of agreement going on long before it was trendy and the conversations on that forum are the main reason I was very accepting of the coalition as I know how much common ground the two parties really have.

You will notice the lack of hyperlinks on the words Liberal Youth. I see very little point since their website has been down for over a week now. With it the forums are down. It's not the first time there has been a massive disruption to service - last year they were down for almost two months but that was a choice on the part of the people running the show at the time and the website was still running. This time apparently Liberal Youth are having problems with their servers and all their websites and email addresses are down as well. I have been told they have no ETA on when things will be back up.

Frankly this is no way to run a youth politics organisation. I do not know any ISP or hosting company who would cause a weeks disruption and provide no information on what had caused it and when it was going to be fixed. If I had to put up with that sort of service I would sack them off at a moments notice.
Equally if I was running Liberal Youth I would see the value of a vibrant and thriving political youth forum where interested and reasonable people took a regular interest. Sadly it seems every year we are fighting a tougher and tougher battle to keep the thing going with regular service disruptions and almost no support from the Liberal Youth exec themselves.

In my humble opinion Liberal Youth need to pull their finger out - in the meantime I've got an emergency back up going from last year. Feel free to come along and enjoy.

CF Democracy

While I'm not blogging I suppose I should say a word about the latest Conservative Future elections. Interestingly enough the last time there were CF elections was around the time I shut down this blog. Then I was hoping for a victory from the illustrious Matthew Richardson but sadly this was not to be. In came Michael Rock who's rapid approach to the top age limit of the organisation didn't seem to bar him from hanging on to the top job while the party was apparently too busy anticipating a General Election to re-elect a chairman.

Anyway that is all in the past and yet again the desperate scramble to the top of the youth wing of the Conservative party is underway - but of course this time things are slightly different - we're in government. The next Chairman of CF will be responsible for representing and promoting the youth wing of the largest party in Parliament, which in some ways is a lot harder than it was in opposition. Not only that but they will be the first chairman of Conservative Future ever to be chairman when the Conservative Party was in government. I'm sure the Hon. Gentleman Mr Moorcraft can tell us all a lot more about the various ups and downs over the years though so I shall leave that sort of thing to him.

Long and short - on Friday there was a hustings and I did want to go, honestly I did. But sadly it was also my last day of term which as you can imagine involved a certain amount of celebrating. And then I decided to go to the hustings, in my merry state, and did not arrive until after the actual hustings part of the evening. But no matter - I arrived with plenty of time to interrogate a few of the contenders.


Craig Cox:


Sadly I missed Mr Cox but I do of course know him from days of yore. I even discovered I blogged about him back in 2007, sadly not in a positive way. The interesting fact about that blog post is I have absolutely no recollection of what all that is about so CF wannabees should at least hold on to the fact that none of these minor disputes really matter. So judgement on Cox? I didn't meet him, I don't really remember him very well but what I do remember was we disagreed a lot and finally a quick search of my gmail account reveals a fair few unfavourable comments from 'back in the day' - so he's not getting my vote.


Simon Cavalier-Jones:

The last candidate I met. A new face for me and a hard man to track down judging by how hard I found it to get him to have a conversation with me - then again who wants to talk to a drunken harpy at the Barley Mow around 11 at night! When I eventually barracked him into answering an interrogation from me I was disappointed by the lack of substance. A lot of good sounding words and phrases but very little of it sounded to me like precise practical plans. I have no embarrassing information about his past though so that does at the very least stand in his favour.



Ben Howlett:

I first met Ben in August 2006 when I was running for chairman. He took the time to meet me, get to know me, ask me what I wanted to do as CF chairman and only then chose to give me his support. I extended the same courtesy to him - asked his views and I have to say I was very impressed. Ben seems to me out of the bunch the one with the most sensible thoughts on precisely how CF should be run and how to make the system work better. And he is of course also a lovely young man.

So of course in an ideal world I would like to see the soundness that is Andy Peterkin elected as Conservative Future Chairman (as pictured at the top) - he'd bring class, elegance and a shitload of champagne to the post. But if I can't have that then I suppose my vote has to go to Ben (if I get one!) and I would urge anyone who is not sure who to vote for, to trust my (not entirely) infinite wisdom.

Why Tim Montgomerie winds me up

Just to be clear from the start - I'm not blogging again. However as all of us who spend time writing crap on the internet know sometimes something just spurs you onto an online rant that you cannot resist. For me today it was sitting on the tube reading the Evening Standard. On page 6 was an article saying that David Cameron was facing a grassroots rebellion on the basis that the Conservatives were riding high in the polls and apparently that means we should call an election. The main source and basis for this article was something posted by Tim Montgomerie on ConservativeHome suggesting a snap election to dump the Liberal Democrats.

I sat there and I got angry. "Why does whatever Tim Montgomerie feels like saying about the Tory party seem to carry so much weight with the media?", I thought. In my opinion Tim does not represent the views of the majority of Conservative party members. In fact in my years in the party I met hardly anyone whose views are aligned directly with those of Tim Montgomerie. Yet week after week, month after month I seem to be faced with him as the spokesperson of the grass roots in every media outlet. "ConservativeHome members say this in a survey" seems to be a byword for "Every member of the Conservative Party agrees with this" rather than the a logical assumption that the result of a ConservativeHome survey reflects the views of readers of ConservativeHome, who are a select number of Conservative Party members. In fact in recent months I have found myself responding to ConservativeHome surveys more often just so a wider range of views are reflected in the results of the surveys.

At this point let me lay my cards on the table. I have been well out of the world of politicos for two years now. I love my new career and I don't regret the choice for a second. I say what I say with no knowledge of the current Westminster village feeling or even grassroots members feelings. However I do know a fair bit about the man on the street feeling. I work in an inner London comprehensive which is truly a cross section of society. If you don't agree then you've been reading the Daily Mail too much. It's not even like I'm the only Tory teacher there! The feeling I get from people there is that there has not been a Damascan conversion to Conservatives, however people are interested in what this new government is going to do. They don't instantly criticise every move - they look at them and consider them. Some moves have been so radical, such as the NHS reform, that people who would normally be sure of the result of every government initiative have said they genuinely are interested to see how it turns out. People are also interested by the coalition. They want to know if co-operative politics can really work - and they really seem to hope it can. There is a real feel that democracy is changing, for the better. Yet people are cynical and don't expect it to last.

And this is why I got so angry. I'll admit I was thrilled by the coalition. I have been saying for years that most Lib Dems would be Tories but they think we're all bigots and that's the only thing that keeps them out of our party. A coalition between the two parties will see solid civil liberties protection, realistic economic policies and a determined commitment towards localism. It neutralises the lunatic fringe of each party. So when I see Tim Montgomerie trying to tear the coalition down before it's had a chance to get started it really gets my goat. This is a new politics - not a bullshit fantasy slogan of the new Labour era but an actual new way of doing politics and I want to see what it can do before it is ripped down by those too joyless to give it a chance. I expected the people who'd do that to be the press - that's their jobs. However when I see people who profess to care about Politics trying to tear this coalition down it makes me angry and I will not stand for it.

Of course then I went on ConservativeHome to read the article in question - it turns out it was actually a Twitter post and Tim Montgomerie says that wasn't what he was saying at all. In my mind it doesn't remove the fact that I have shouted at the radio/television/newspaper quite a lot over the last two years whenever Tim or ConservativeHome were cited as speaking for the Conservative Party and the many many many many many times I have disagreed with his position.

So why did I post for the first time in nearly two years over what was essentially a non-story? I sat there and wondered why everyone listens to Tim Montgomerie's views. Then I realised - it's because he puts them out there. If you want your views to be heard you have to put them out there too.

And so it ends...

I've been thinking about doing this post for a long time, but I couldn't quite bring myself to, but it's really time to. I am bringing a close to proceedings on this blog. I've just run out of time and steam. A full time job means I just don't get to devote the time I want to to my writing anymore. This blog was at it's best at the beginning of 2007 when I wasn't working and all day long to work out what I wanted to write about and what I wanted to say. My blogging has now been reduced to me firing off a few sentences on the top news story of the day and frankly I'm embarrassed by the quality of it.

On top of that it seems like a good idea to go out on a relative high. I was so chuffed to do well in Iain Dale's rankings this year. In many ways this is just a good way for me to avoid being horribly disappointed next year by a massive plummet in the rankings.

Anyway - thank you everyone who's been reading this blog, I do look at my stats and there is a little band of loyal readers out there and I thank you very much for putting up with my random rambles.

I doubt I'll be able to give up blogging altogether. I'll keep reading them and maybe one day I might start a new one, although probably anonymously this time!

So in a nutshell - it's been fun, see you again one day.

Oh and one final thing - Vote Richardson for CF Chairman

Well DUH

What does it take though to get Brown's government to take responsibility for anything?