Fluent Radical

News from Oxford University, the great appeasers:

Oxford colleges are to lose their 800-year-old right to select undergraduates in response to Government pressure to admit more students from state schools and lower social classes.

I tried and failed to get into Cambridge twice. Guess what? It never even crossed my mind that it had anything to do with me being from a state school. Fact: not until right now, 5 years later, have I considered the possibility. And rejected it.

Also is news:

Candidates will be able to state a college preference once they have been offered a place but in principle all successful applicants will be centrally ranked on the basis of their performance, then distributed randomly.

Idea: what OU needs … is a sorting hat!

Actually this leads to an interesting idea (it’s like that lateral thinking technique). If you’ve got a school with ‘houses’, as I understand some extremely posh schools did/do (anyone know?), then you should give all entrants an in-depth psych test. Then house 1 can be the studious and hard working, house 2 can be the sporty types, house 3 can be the irritating prodigy geeks, and house 4 can be the party animals. Wouldn’t that make school life go much more smoothly?

Last night was my first time out canvassing for the Conservatives ever. It was survey canvassing, so we knock, say:

Hello, sorry to bother you. We’re doing a resident’s survey on behalf of the Wimbledon Conservative party, and I was wondering if you had a few moments to give us your opinions on a range of local issues in this questionnaire.

Although the first time I tried it, it was more like:

hellosorrytobother youwe’redoingaresident’ssurveyonbehalfoftheWimbledon
ConservativepartyandIwaswonderingifyouhadafewmomentstogiveusyouropi
nionsonarangeoflocalissuesinthisquestionnaire.

thanksverymuchbye.

Some observations:

• Although terrified of knocking on a stranger’s door at first, by the end I was perfectly happy with it all. The two ladies I was out with - one a councillor - were very nice and supportive.
• There are more ingenious ways than you might think to hide or disguise your doorbell.
• In the two streets we were canvassing roughly one gate in five worked properly. This despite being a ten minute walk from a B&Q and in a fairly well-off area in Wimbledon.
• A well-kept garden is no guarantee of niceness.
• Don’t do streets at the same time as carol singers - people get confused.

I look forward to picking it up again after the new year.

*Sigh*

The reason posting has been so light on optimates for the past week is that me and a few fellow bloggers have launched a new blog.

The Cameron Leadership is the new place for news about David Cameron and Cameron’s leadership. Why not head over there now?

Any Internet Explorer programmers from Microsoft had better stay the hell away from me.

I just spent all day working on a new theme for a new blog (details later). It get’s to five o’clock and it’s a perfect layout in Opera and Firefox. I then fire up IE, and spend the next three hours fixing stupid CSS bugs. They call it the IE bug ’suite’ apparently. Haha. The fixes designers have to use to make IE work properly have their own little names. One is called the “holly hack”. How cute.

My theme is going on an adventure this weekend.

Martin Kettle, in the Guardian today offers his ten tips for the new Conservative leader. I don’t agree with everything he says but he’s not far off the mark.

So that’s not what’s irritating. This is:

Develop a more moderate and pragmatic internationalism, sceptical of both federalist Europe and neocon Washington alike. [my emphasis]

AAH!

For let us speak expertly about Europe, without knowing a thing about the subject. Actually the sentiment is a lovely thing, especially coming from an Guardian writer. Mr Kettle is right when he says that the new Conservative leader should not look to the EU for answers.

But federalism? Come on! A federal Europe would be an improvement over the current situation.

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Ravikiran Rao writes on the quality of blogs, and arguments against regulation. Read to the end to see how he turns it around.

Gary Monro, in the middle of an excellent post on responsibility and rape, tossed out “Blair and his neocon friends” as the culprits behind the recent repressive anti-terror legislation.

Neo-cons are, largely, ex-Marxists so the idea of oppression, ‘democracy’ at the barrel of a gun, 90 day detention without trial and imprisoning a man for ideological reasons fits the authoritarian thought patterns of such people.

This got me thinking about neoconservatism in the UK. Three questions: (1) is Blair a neocon? (2) is there such a thing as British neoconservatism? (3) is the anti-terror legislation the work of people with neocon tendencies?

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