Progressive admission policies can help make all our schools great schools

Britain, or rather England, remains almost unique amongst OECD countries in the degree to which the allocation of a secondary school place determines a child's future life chances. That's why school 'choices', rather than house prices,dominate the discussions at Islington dinner tables. The angst of middle class parents, as their children reach the age of secondary transfer, is reaching epidemic proportions. The pressure put on their children is indescribable. And every year children from many of the nation's poorest households, are routinely allocated to schools which parents with higher aspirations are determined to avoid.

This is because secondary school admission policies remain the secret scandal of our education system. Gove et al are trapped by the rhetoric of parental choice, locked in by a tabloid league table agenda of what constitutes a `good' school and unwilling to confront the evidence about selective admissions policies.

Current secondary school admissions policies institutionalise inequality. They intensify social, cultural and ethnic divisions. They foster delusions about consumer choice and reinforce outdated perceptions of quality in education. They have produced an educational apartheid that creates vast ghettoes of under achievement which then suck in vast amounts of public money to compensate for structural inequality. They hold back overall levels of achievement.

is there a solution? Well, the Code of Practice on School Admissions already excludes selection by ability as an admission criteria to all primary schools, why not extend it to include secondary schools? A policy focused on parental choice would throw open hundreds of thousands of places in good schools to parents who have previously been excluded from applying. The winners would far outnumber those who would be anxious about loss of privilege.

Is Britain sleepwalking towards a hard-right future?

What ever happened to ‘Compassionate Conservatism’? The Tory intake of 2010 don’t appear to be the hood-hugging, vote blue go green, compassionate, one nation idealists we were promised by Mr Cameron. The truth is the Tory leader's attempt to ensure that candidates at the last election were selected to reflect the caring and compassionate side of the Tory party spectacularly failed. This, of course, has given heart to the Thatcherite wing of the party and caused the likes of Ken Clarke to ponder where it all went wrong.

In 2009 Conservative Home carried out a survey of Tory PPCs which makes for a sobering re-read. I commented at the time that the questions asked were probably just as interesting as the answers. For example the survey contained not a single question on housing, education or health - apparently the public was more interested in whether Tory candidates supported the right of Catholics or other religious adoption charities to decline to place children with same sex couples. Candidates were asked about Iran but not about Iraq, about nuclear power but not about the need for more renewables.

What happened is that Tory Associations up and down the land selected candidates that reflected their own, traditional - often reactionary – views, having said that Cameron himself has changed. Following the 2007 summer of despair Cameron was warned by his whips that he needed to embrace more "traditional" core Tory issues like Europe, crime and the family. Yet again a newly elected Tory leader was forced (by his own reactionary right wing) to move to the right in an attempt to hang on to the Tory core vote.

Progressive politics? Today’s Tory party is largely Eurosceptic, pretty much pro-nuclear and believes that England does not get a fair deal in terms of the distribution of the nation's finances. What goes around comes around, the hard right is back and we need to expose them for what they are, who they are and what they stand for.

Why Labour must make 16 a progressive number

The voting age in Britain was last reduced nearly 40 years ago. Since then, there have been major changes in society's expectations of young people, and in young people's contribution to their local communities and wider society.

Currently, 16 and 17 year-olds can work, pay taxes, join the armed forces and get married. They are often invited to set up school councils and youth councils, urged to take part in consultations, sit on local government and Ministerial boards, volunteer in their local community, keep out of trouble and work hard at school. Many will have caring responsibilities, a lot will have a job, some will be parents, and a minority will be leaving care or custody but they cannot elect those who govern them.

A few years ago the Electoral Commission carried out a public consultation on the voting age and found that 72% of respondents favoured a lowering of the voting age to 16. Interestingly the consultation attracted huge participation including 8,000 young people which suggests that when made relevant to them, young people are more likely to vote and engage in issues of public importance.

The next general election will be decided in super-marginals like the my own constituency of The Wrekin. Motivating younger voters is therefore both the right thing to do and it could make the difference between Labour winning and losing the next time round. That is why I strongly believe that as a party we must take young voters much more seriously. Rather than young people being uninterested in politics (as opposed to voting), we seem to have become uninterested in them. We bolt on campaigns for young voters rather than build them into what we do. This needs to change, and we now have a once in a generation chance to make that change and listen to what young people are saying.

Young people’s belief in politics could be helped by them knowing that they had a direct influence in choosing who represents them. In Austria - where they recently lowered the voting age to 16 - in local and regional elections the turnout amongst 16and 17 year olds was close to 75%.

The Labour party was founded on principles of fairness and responsibility and out of a desire to look to the future not live in the past. 16 is a progressive number, young people are our future and we should allow them a greater say in how it is shaped.

Shropshire hospitals pay private firm £10,000 per week to administer car parks

My recent Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust has revealed that it collected £1,314,035 in the last financial year from car park charges.

The Royal Shrewsbury Hospital (RSH) collected £751,944 and the Princess Royal £546,776 with £15,315 being collected via fine enforcements. It also reveals that the private company that administers both car parks was paid £526,677 for its services.

I will be writing to the PRH Trust asking for all charges to be capped at £1 per visit until 2013 and for the Trust to bring forward proposals to scrap the charge altogether by 2014.

The founding principle of the NHS was that it would offer free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare. Surely this should apply whether you go to hospital as a patient, as a visitor or a member of staff. For patients attending the PRH for out-patient treatment and visitors concerned with the health of their families, worrying about the cost of parking is the last thing they need, and as hospital procedures are notoriously unpredictable, having to rush out after a couple of hours to move their car will in many cases just not be possible.

The present charges constitute a tax on the sick and I seriously question whether paying a private company over £500,000 to administer both car parks constitutes good value for money.

Compulsory voting?

A period of opposition provides Labour members and supporters the time and the space to think through how it can set about renewing its structures, its systems and above all its ideas and policies. One area that will continue to be debated and discussed at local, regional and national levels is the need for electoral reform.

So far we have heard a good deal about PR, AV and House of Lords reform but little about any reforms to the voting process itself. One possibility is to investigate the introduction of compulsory voting. The term 'compulsory voting' is a bit of a misnomer, it really is about compulsory casting of ballots (pedantic I know but important nonetheless).

Personally I am quite attracted by the idea of making ballot casting compulsory, mainly because:

1. It can help improve turnout
2. It leaves parties free to campaign on policies, rather than focusing huge efforts on 'getting out the vote'. It can also reduce the impact of better finance campaigns and reduce the incidents of negative campaigning.
3. It can help create/enhance a sense of community, as everyone is in it together. It is also a means of reducing social exclusion where those that don't vote end up without any policies geared towards them.

I know that there are many reasons why we shouldn't make voting compulsory but I do think we need to have the debate nationally, indeed can we afford not to?

Faith and politics can mix, indeed they must

A couple of years ago Michael Sandel delivered his excellent second Reith Lecture and looked at the relationship between morality and politics, more specifically the interaction between religiously inspired morality and politics. He argued, correctly in my view, that you cannot remove morality from political discourse and so it is far better to have it out in public.

As the recent protests outside St Paul's have demonstrated, in the UK we tend to discourage our clergymen from talking about politics and our politicians from talking about faith, we famously ‘don’t do God.’ Why?I believe that it has long been the case that too many people – particularly those who take a left of centre approach to politics – make the mistake of failing to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives.

With debate raging about the rise of the far-right and the failure of the body politic I wonder if it isn’t time for those who espouse the “progressive” agenda to debate just how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy. Too often politicians try and avoid any discussion about religious values altogether – fearful of offending anyone and claiming that politics and religion should never mix.

In 2007, when addressing the 50th anniversary convention of his own denomination, the United Church of Christ, the then Senator Barack Obama, argued that the religious right had “hijacked” faith and divided his country by exploiting issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and school prayer. More interestingly he then went onto praise the people of faith who were using their influence to try to unite Americans against problems like poverty, AIDS, the lack of universal health care, Darfur and the effects of climate change.

Yet surely the reality of all political engagement is that we have to meet people where they are – even if we do not agree with or even approve of where they are. If so called ‘progressive’ politicians are to communicate their hopes and values in a way that is relevant to the lives of others, then they cannot abandon the field of religious discourse.In my view secularists are wrong when they ask – more often insist – that believers leave their religion at the door before entering into the arena of public debate.

The majority of great reformers in British history – from Wilberforce to Keir Hardie – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. I recognise that democratic engagement will and should make demands of religious believers. It will demand that those who are religiously motivated act to turn their concerns into universal, rather than faith-specific, values. Democratic engagement will also demand that the values espoused by people of faith be subject to argument and debate.

What is needed is a sense of proportion and a willingness – on the part of both believers and non-believers – to engage in public debate openly and fair-mindedly. Many people in Britain today are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion and politics.

This then is the challenge for those who describe themselves as progressive politicians. They too must become more “fair minded” more willing to engage with people of faith so that they might recognise some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of modern Britain.

Time for a new liberation theology

Watching events unfold around the protests near to St Paul's Cathedral in London one could be forgiven for believing that faith is mainly about escapism and that it can rarely be a force for good in society. I am not so sure. The strap line to my blog reads as follows: "Aspire not to have more but to be more." These were the words of Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980 by the pro-US military junta who then ran El Salvador.

Romero was an advocate of what became known as liberation theology, a movement which took root throughout Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s and focused on helping the poor and oppressed, even if that meant confronting political powers. It was a theology that was later to be severely criticised as a "fundamental threat" to the church by one Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now better known as Pope Benedict XVI.

In the past few years I have become something of an "armchair" Catholic. Why? Mainly because when I do attend mass I hear a good deal about the evils of gay adoption or about why I should no longer support Amnesty International but rarely do I hear any talk about the need for "preferential option for the poor." Our present Pope is, in my view, all to keen on encouraging his flock to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's". So too with some of the clergy associated with St Paul's who appear to openly advocate the view that politics and faith are separate arenas and that the two cannot, indeed should not, mix. This results in the Christian faith becoming increasingly irrelevant to the life of the modern man.

By modern man I, of course, mean the "poor man". It is easy to forget that the vast majority of people who inhabit the planet with us live below the poverty line, in poor housing with no access to proper health care and a life expectancy that is decades shorter than that of the minority who live in the affluent west. In today's economic climate there is an even greater need for the voices of liberation to be heard. The present global distribution of goods and services allows a relatively small minority of wealthy groups and ruling classes to use their power and influence to perpetuate macro-economic and political structures which exploit the labour and lives of the vast majority of the planet's population.

Or take the deep and widespread oppression of women, along with the elderly, and children dependent upon women, in all patriarchal societies around the globe where women and their dependants are dehumanised and depersonalised. Are the Christian churches working to further liberate women in these settings, or do they silently support the structures that keep things as they are?

So we either need a new liberation theology or we need the church to be liberated. We need a church that offers hope – not a jam-tomorrow kind of hope, rather the hope that the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard described as the "passion for the possible". We need a church that can show that it understands that what people need is to believe that things will, and can, be better. In other words, we need the church to renew itself and we need a theology that will actively seek and proclaim the liberation of people from poverty, injustice and persecution – all people, regardless of their faith or their background.

The true message of liberation will always result in some people feeling uneasy. To side, as many liberation theologians in the 1960s and 1970s did, against injustice, to commit one's life to the poor is not a political stance but a moral one.

The true message of hope, of a promise that the world can be fairer, more just and less divided often results in giving comfort to the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. If that was what I could hear and reflect on each week I would have no problem getting up out from my armchair!

Poppy pride or Poppy fascism?

In recent years Jon Snow, the excellent Channel 4 News presenter, has created a huge stir regarding his decision not to wear a red poppy on TV during the weeks leading up to Remembrance Day. A couple of years ago Snow stated:

"I am begged to wear an Aids ribbon, a breast cancer ribbon, a Marie Curie flower ... You name it, from the Red Cross to the RNIB, they send me stuff to wear to raise awareness, and I don't. And in those terms, and those terms alone, I do not and will not wear a poppy. Additionally there is a rather unpleasant breed of poppy fascism out there - 'he damned well must wear a poppy!' Well I do, in my private life, but I am not going to wear it or any other symbol on air."

Personally I like and admire Jon Snow. Indeed I think he is one of the nation's best - if not the best - broadcast journalists and rightly commands huge respect from both his peers and the public at large. But on this issue I am not sure that I totally agree with him. What is wrong with wearing the odd "symbol" on air and surely we can all make exceptions? Jon's logic appears to be that because he is unable to publicly promote all of the causes that he is asked to support he simply won't support any of them. This is a bit like arguing that because I can't give to all of the charities that ask for my help I won't give to any charity.

The poppy is 'The' symbol of remembrance. We do not diminish anyone by wearing it, least of all the veterans. Diminishing the debt we owe our predecessors would be accomplished by resigning ourselves to the notion that we cannot comprehend what happened. We undermine the notion of Remembrance Day by lack of reflection, not flippantly wearing, or not wearing, a poppy.

I strongly believe that focusing on the future is done by reflecting on the past. Wearing the poppy symbolises that an individual, at the very least, acknowledges the past. A poppy has never been a substitute for action - no symbol ever is - but we must be sure that what the poppy symbolises is not lost on those who seek to build upon our freedoms.

So I will be wearing my poppy this November. Out of some misguided sense of jingoistic pride? No. Out of respect and gratitude? Yes. Why? Because the act of remembrance and the wearing of a poppy is a very small price to pay.