Gove and Marr (revision with 28/6 update link)

Sitting in the garden on what could be one of the best sunshine days of the English summer (should that be a capital S for summer?) watching the runner beans grow, one feels that the best things in life are the simplest. 

I'm pleased to be relaxed once more (in the background is playing Q Radio, which isn't plagued by too many advertisements, but on the down side is playing Snow Patrol. This is considerable progress, since my heart rate was dangerously raised by watching, earlier, Education Secretary Michael Gove on the Andrew Marr(ed) Show, spouting off in oh-so reasonable terms about the upcoming strike action by a small selection of public sector workers on Thursday next. As a foil to the argument, Marr did all that was required of the BBC (read, Tax Payers' Alliance) to thrust forward questions that Gove might parry with ease, whereas an interviewer with a different agenda might have pierced that pouting lip of the Tory (who in his misspent youth actually went on strike, he admitted!). Bully for him! But, what an enlightened turnaround by Gove in the face of reason and the greater good, one is led to believe!

Gove's Sunday-morning claim is that the British public won't look too kindly on the strikes, which will possibly require one of the parents of unschooled and unsupervised offspring to stay off work or do something parentlike to arrange cover for their kids who are damned to be deprived a day's schooling. Oh, what disruption... the British public barely knows the meaning of the word! 

The Marr & Gove Show this morning was the perfect example of how the BBC (counter to any claims made to the contrary that it is peopled by Grauniad-reading and Tribune-contributing lefties) fulfils its role as mediator between public opinion and the Government/Establishment. Gove went to bottom-lip quivering pains to suggest that Britons popularly want more anti-union legislation to stop such future disruption to their routinised existences (almost Stepford and, indeed, alienated), endured under the 'benevolent' canopy of capitalism. Militancy, apparently, is not what we're about in England (Gove used "the English way," as a phrase, quite unabashedly for someone from Edinburgh.).

It is disgraceful how this sort of performance is expedited. Where were the incisive questions, Andrew Marr? Is this the state of political interviewing today?; a friendly sofa'd chat, bound merely to stimulate the sense of injustice of aspiring families whom, for 30 years, Gove claims, have suffered from an education system inferior to the up-and-coming go-getting nations (a list of which he reeled off, as if we needed to know what a country actually is). Bizarrely, those darling Canadians were grouped in with the nasty Chinese as peoples that will be advantaged ahead of British youngsters in an increasingly global marketplace. There are, of course, many problems in the education system, much to do with under-investment, and perhaps Gove, in a world without briefed statements on party policy, might have some reasonable thoughts on the subject.

As for the imminent strike action, taken reluctantly by a few lap-dog unions (the TUC's Brendan Barber and the Government are in league here) it will, as always, be a flash in the pan. The opposing parties will come to agree terms after the one-day event (mark my words (although Long & Walker are more optimistic)), which will presumably stimulate the appetites among the general public for more legislation against those angry/militant/threatening (choose your own adjective, which might ignore the wonderful work that our union representatives quite often do in defence of individuals bullied and harrassed by aggressive managers and employers) unions.  The meda will be abroad in an effort to interview the least articulate of the protesters so as to undermine the cause. The red-top dailies and the increasingly Marvel Comics-like Telegraph and Times and, indeed that Silver Surfer of a newspaper The Daily Mail will rouse their  uncritical readership into accepting yet another assault upon the working classes, whom I would wager most of you readers should count yourselves amongst, even though you might aspire to something greater. Indeed you are the proletariat, the mass with the voice, should only you care to make it heard.
As for me, I shall continue to enjoy the rays and wish that you all enjoy your Sunday, too. I'm sure those runners have grown an inch in the time it's taken me to type this!