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If you haven’t watched my introduction already, please click http://goo.gl/CoVvY before you begin.

I have a new toy – a webcam. I am still trying to get to know it, and get it to know me. The first one I used hummed to itself while I spoke to it and, when I bought myself a separate microphone, it took umbrage and didn’t want to repeat what I was saying at all.

I got my money back and tried another. This, too, has a mind of its own, and from time to time tells me it isn’t listening to me, like some people I know or, rather, isn’t recording me. Same thing.

The other thing I have to get used to is its constant staring accusing eye that it fixes on me from the top of my printer. “Are you expressing yourself with total clarity so that people can fully understand what you are saying?” I thought that the first time I recorded myself.

I am now up to the sixth.

So why this new toy?

I sense that you need a signpost to show you around my new website www.deathofanightingale.com, and I should provide it. A webcam allied to YouTube gives me that opportunity. The spoken word can now supplement the written word of this Blog.

On the other hand there is a limit to the time people will give to listen, so the two need to work together.

I now open up a new thought that I call “The Fly in the Ointment”.

Why do we lurch from one mess-up to another, each one worse than the one before? Why? SEN is a small mess-up. Understanding how and why this happened may help you to understand bigger ones, especially in education.

I know that many people blame inequality.It is much more obvious now than it ever was, and very unfair. They then feel that they have to promote the idea of Equality.

However, as I argue elsewhere – visit ispy – promoting Equality is very divisive, pitching “have nots” who want more against “haves” who do not want to have less.

It has a terrible provenance which many totally forget. After Liberté, égalité, fraternité of the French Revolution came the bloody “Terror” with the guillotine. After the Russian Revolution came the Gulag, purges and the massacre of millions. And after that, anyone who owned anything in Germany ran scared of a Russia style revolution in their counry and embraced Nazism, National Socialism, with its own racially perverted version of Equality.

Orwell saw the problem, of course. All people are equal but some are always “more equal than others.” Correspondingly there will always be people far less equal than others.

Fair play is much less divisive and much more realistic; Britain at its very best when it asserts it, Continental Europe stained with blood and vomit at its hideous worst every time it rejected it.

The other trouble with Equality is that we spend far, far too much time trying to make people equal when they are all very different. Equality and Diversity are presented as two sides of the same coin. But where is that coin?

That was where my thinking was up to.

Then I had another thought. Mankind could be its own best friend or its own worst enemy in a breath of time. It wasn’t inequality that fucked things up. It was our fallibility, our frailty, the fault lines in human behaviour that turned our dreams into nightmares, some you couldn’t wake up from.

Kindness or bullying, wisdom or folly, excellence or mediocrity, honesty or lies, principles or corruption, loyalty or betrayal, courage or cowardice, caring or indifference. There is no shortage of antonyms. I have seen them all. I would guess that you have too and, maybe, can add a few more of your own.

Experience one and let your spirit soar. Witness the other, and weep for the fallen.

There are some minds WIFI’d into the challenges of the new millennium and others still mired in the last. There are some who use money and power well and others who abuse it. (Money and power are the twin engines that drive our world whether you like it or not, but it is amazing just how irresponsible some people can be in handling money that is not their own and power that has come, one way or another, into their hands); and for every humane act there is another that lacks all humanity.

Read history, and mourn the dead.

I remind some politicians, some in academia, some “human rights lawyers”, some would-be social engineers,  all of whom have a way of driving blind, what I heard a wise speaker once say to his audience “Point an accusing finger at someone , but look where the other three fingers are pointing.” They should try it!

It is where wisdom begins.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the State or with the Market, or with Faith for that matter, just as long as you take into account human fallibility. You have always got to remember that they are in the hands of people who are not perfect, sometimes very imperfect, people who always have their own agenda that may or may not coincide with your own.

Death of a Nightingale opens a small window on all this. See and understand one little mess – SEN, see and understand others, not least in the world of education.

And how do you deal with this once you have seen it? Not by ignoring it, and just hoping for the best. The least worst may be preferable.

One or two suggestions to show what I mean.

End the culture of the “cover up”; instead use the Internet to ensure that people are accountable for their actions in the glare of public opinion. Piggies won’t like it, but the prospect of that would be a check on their overeating. A “no-no” to self regulation. Piggies just love the opportunity to control their own diet. Extend the role of the Ombudsman and remove his deliberately restrictive shackles. Visit ispy page 83 Another Bite into a Wormy Apple.

Now, follow this through. Here is a challenge for all those who truly wish to advance democratic values against State Capitalism, Chinese style, that may seem to have some attractions when times are good, but unlikely to be quite so attractive when they are bad.

In short, start swatting flies.

In the Mad Hatters Committee Meeting, a short piece of satirical writing you will find in my book and on this website, I close with a line that sums up what I am saying. As night follows day and day night, if you don’t take account of human fallibility “the fly will suddenly turn into a wasp and sting you right on the tip of your nose.”

That is what these “flies” do, always have done ever since Adam and Eve were given notice to quit the Garden of Eden.

Now little webcam, you can tell me whether I have expressed myself with total clarity here.

BUY Death Of A Nightingale With ispy edited By Jan Woolf Direct FROM THE PUBLISHERS http://goo.gl/vbcDO Read More

…. Even when it stares them in the face

It ain’t necessarily so
It ain’t necessarily so
The t’ings dat yo’ li’ble
To read in de Bible,
It ain’t necessarily so.

I am sorry if the lyric from Porgy & Bess offends you if you believe otherwise. I am not actually writing here about the Bible. I am making a general point. There are lots of places where things that yo’ li’ble to read ain’t necessarily so.

I had an unexpected illustration of this when I met up with Peter Batty, he slightly older than me, but the age differential relevant when we were pupils at Bede Grammar School in Sunderland before finding our way to Oxford. I knew his name. I didn’t know him. There were still plenty of things to talk about when we providentially met on holiday in the Balkans.

I had just visited Tito’s Mausoleum in Belgrade that confirmed to me that Tito and his partisans had served the Allies well in World War II, had stood out against Stalin and kept Yugoslavia one country during his lifetime. Wikipedia elaborates this at length.

Well, it ain’t necessarily so, and students of politics should buy Peter Batty’s recently published book Hoodwinking Churchill – Tito’s Great Confidence Trick, a good read and very well researched while he was producing and writing episodes in the internationally -praised TV series The World at War. This is truly a tragic horror story of duplicity and inhumanity, compounded by the naivete of the liberal “left” as well as by the cynicism of the reactionary “right”, invariably a toxic mix.

The comparison between Wikipedia and Peter’s book is not so much a lesson in living as a lesson in learning.

There is so much disinformation about and it can cast a long shadow. Here disinformation about Tito’s role in World War II and afterwards colours what we read today. It is not necessarily telling porkies. It is encapsulated in the Latin tag – suppressio veri, suggestio falsi. I am sure you do not need me to translate that.

I had another illustration of that just last week, another small sin of omission.

Special Educational Needs – Hiding the Truth

Figures released for the first time showed that three-quarters of pupils who make a slow start in the three-Rs fail to catch up in the last four years of primary school – leaving them poorly equipped for the demands of secondary education.

All sorts of reasons were given for this – socio-economic backgrounds, targeting, teachers concentrating on middle-ability pupils &c. Some said these facts didn’t matter anyway.

Nowhere did I see any suggestion that this could be part of the price of “Inclusion”, including most children with special needs in mainstream primary schools, in many cases to their disadvantage .Yes, they can survive there, but will they thrive there in the hands of classroom assistants instead of highly trained, dedicated teachers giving them all the time that they need? Does one size fit all? No-one wants to ask that.

Official league tables also showed four-in-10 pupils seen as high-fliers at the age of seven are struggling to reach their potential by the time they sit end-of-school tests at 11.

This is another consequence of the same policy, the Holy Grail of Equality and Inclusion, the “Wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-land” that ideologues of the Left find so appealing.I call it “Never-never-land”. For me, in a global very diverse world, the Holy Grail is Fair Play. Very different, much better, and much more realistic. Read ispy.

Chris McGovern, a former headmaster and chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, describes the present situation: “It is a disastrous state of affairs and a terrible waste of talent.”

Of course if you are one of those who believe in Equality this will cause you no great concern. If you believe in Opportunity, on the other hand, it should worry you a lot. Are we doing our very best to help the future “winners” in our world succeed? No-one wants to ask that either.

If you are fighting to get a good special education for your child, not just the run of the mill stuff, Notes & Quotes in this website will give you more facts for your fight, facts you might not otherwise come across if you depend on the media to supply them. Some people, you see, never want to know.

This is my Christmas or my Chanukah present to you. Take your pick.

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I sent the following letter to David Cameron on 3rd December. I don’t know whether it reached him personally. I hope that it does.

3 December 2011

Rt.Hon David Cameron MP
House of Commons
Westminster
LONDON

Dear Prime Minister

I believe that there is an answer to the present financial crisis, and the best analogy I can give you is that of a blood transfusion, here “good” money replacing “bad” or non-existent money, with the “money donor” regenerating what he has given.

I detail this in the paper that I enclose.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Share

Enc.

cc. Rt. Hon. George Osborne MP
Rt. Hon. Nick Clegg MP
Danny Alexander MP
Nick Boles MP

A Financial “blood transfusion”

(amended 28 December 2011)

This article will explain how it is totally possible to create “good” money to replace bad or non-existent money quickly, effectively and almost painlessly.

Are we really stony broke?

Clearly the banks are impoverished having speculated in valueless derivatives and over-priced sovereign debt. And now they cannot fulfill their one basic function – lending money – without substantial reserves of capital, which they do not have. And China won’t act as a fairy godmother. Why should it?

National coffers are empty too, having bailed them out.

But does that really mean that UK plc or the Eurozone equivalent is “broke”?

We are clearly not Papua New Guinea. Look around. There is a vast amount of accumulated wealth. The world is the substantially the same world as it was fifteen years ago. The only thing that is different, very different, the digits on a computer screen.

Recently the Times argued that it would be better to tax wealth in order to reduce tax on corporate and personal earnings. It could have another even more important benefit. It could help to refill empty coffers.

The problem of course is how? given that what you cannot easily value, you cannot easily tax. And wealth owners would not take kindly to the suggestion.

Read on.

I need you to use your imagination. When you stand on Tower Bridge I invite you to see the layers of £50 bank notes of varying thicknesses between the buildings you can see all around and the land they are built on. Trillions of £s of them. Trillions of £s more in every European and American city. 1% of them would be trillions of £s.

But how do you get at them? It shouldn’t be impossible.

 The Philosopher’s Stone to turn base metals into gold has proved elusive, but I am asking you consider how to turn God’s good earth into digits on a computer screen.

The answer is to tax commercial land values. I know that this may be an anathema to a Conservative led Coalition Government, but desperate circumstances need desperate remedies. And the saving grace of the Conservative is that he will always be prepared to give up his garters to save his gaiters. The same cannot be said for some on the Left.

Getting confidence back into capitalism and getting a sense of fairness into it require something more than just tinkering and hoping that boom will follow bust because it always has. This is almost as stupid as thinking that there will be no more boom and bust.

So let’s think the “impossible” and make it possible.

If you tax the value of the land with the charge on its users, they will have to find the money to pay the tax. The banks can print it for them and lend it to them.  In this instance it will not be “funny money”. There will be collateral for the loan, the land. None better. Immeasurably better than valueless mortgage backed securities that it would effectively replace.

It is not for me to calculate the rate of tax, whether it should be an annual tax or a one-off levy, how much money it should generate or the terms of the loan but, on the analogy of Calouste Gulbenkian, a 5% levy on all commercial land valued over £x an acre to exclude, and thereby benefit small shop keepers,  feels about right.

I can suggest that, playing a long game, the terms of the loan in relation to the repayment of capital and the payment of interest can safely from a bank’s point of view be generous. There need be no immediate financial burden at all. Its introduction could be as painless as buying a suite of furniture with four years interest free credit with nothing to pay for a year.

Meanwhile the Banks would have their capital reserves and the national exchequer would have its money, and quickly.

When the Government receives this new money it can use it to reduce the tax on corporate and personal taxation and re-energise capitalism. By the time the landowners are called upon to repay capital or interest, their land will have appreciated in value and the users will be paying less in other taxes and so will contribute.

Furthermore re-capitalising the Banks with a stake in UK’s wealth will force the Banks to play the long game as they do in Germany, and combat short-termism that is the curse of the City and the UK generally.

Also the banks would be well positioned to discourage ill-deserved bonuses – much better positioned than shareholders to do this – poacher turned gamekeeper, why not? Long time ago I used to fear my annual visit to my bank manager.

 Altogether this will make capitalism a healthier place to be in.

That is why I give you the analogy of a blood transfusion.

A short time ago the Conservative MP Nick Boles urged this tax in The Financial Times, pointing out that this was not just an old idea going back to Henry George but one now adopted in parts of the world.

This produced a response suggesting that the idea was “bonkers”.  Land values were plummeting. How could you base a tax policy on that situation?

I have two answers to that. Employment is plummeting. Does this invalidate Income Tax? But, more importantly, if values are plummeting this is actually an argument for the tax, if it re-energises the capitalist system and helps  land values to appreciate.

The other criticism leveled against Nick Boles was that if agricultural land and residential land were excluded, you were left with only 15% of land to tax. I’d happily swop that 15% for the other 85%. It’s a bit silly to say you shouldn’t fish for salmon simply because there are no halibut there.

The one argument you cannot level against it is its impracticability. It is already levied in New South Wales, Singapore, Estonia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and will shortly be levied in the Republic of Ireland.

Apart from freeing up Capitalism to everyone’s benefit including the landowners themselves, there are four other arguments in favour of it that have some merit.

First it is fair, and fairness is significantly absent at this time. If fairness (not equality) is the guiding spirit in taxation policy – and I believe it badly needs to be – this is where some of the tax burden should reside.  It is also fairer and more broadly based than the proposed TOBIN tax.

Secondly, if you owe it you cannot avoid it or escape it. You cannot move it to the Channel Islands or the Cayman Islands.

Thirdly, it encourages people to make best use of the land they own or sell it to someone else who will.

Lastly if it encourages those whose operations could be just as easily undertaken elsewhere in the UK out of London, they will move there, and this will help to rebalance the country. That must be a good thing.

In short, the great merit of this policy is not just that it validates printing money but it gives the State money to fund its social responsibilities that can make it less necessary to tax corporate and personal earnings, giving a new sense of purpose to capitalist enterprise.

Remember one simple thing – a magician can always pull a rabbit from the hat as long as he knows how.

And the rabbit?

 Capitalism that works again and delivers and, furthermore, Capitalism without guilt.

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