National 5 Reading
Higher Reading
For each of these articles, complete the following:
1. Summarise the main points of the article in your own words. (5-6 bullet points or sentences)
2. State the purpose of the article. Note that many articles may have multiple purposes (e.g. to entertain and persuade). Identify what you consider to be the main purpose, explaining your reasons in part d) if necessary.
• To entertain
• To inform
• To persuade
• To examine/explore an issue
• To describe/report
• To instruct
3. Explain your choice of purpose by quoting word(s) or phrase(s) from the article to support your answer to part 2.
4. State the target audience of the article. Try to be specific – consider age, gender, lifestyle, background, interests, etc.
5. Explain your choice of target audience by quoting word(s) or phrase(s) from the article to support your answer.
6. Identify the tone of the article.
[Note that many articles will contain a variety of tones. You should identify one significant tone, or the tone which seems to pervade the article.]
7. Justify your choice of tone with evidence from the text.
Quote words or phrases from the article and analyse how they create the tone you identified in part 4.
8. Identify 3 techniques which have been employed by the writer.
Analyse each technique and explain its purpose or effect.
[Basic techniques to comment on include: word-choice, imagery and sentence structure.]
9. Quote 3 words from the article that are unfamiliar to you.
Look up and provide their definitions from a dictionary or .
Many words have several definitions. Be certain to only provide the definition appropriate to the context in which the word is used in the passage.
[If you cannot find 3 words that are unknown to you, choose 3 words which you think are particularly complex, sophisticated or interesting, and look up their dictionary definitions.]
10. Think about the ideas, opinions or issues involved in the article you have read and write a short, personal response to the article where you evaluate its content – what is your opinion or reaction to the topic/issue? What questions does it make you ask? Do you agree or disagree with the article’s stance? What did you find interesting, puzzling or informative about the article?
Libraries: Cathedrals of Our Souls
Caitlin Moran, Columnist, Author, 11/09/2012 3:07 pm
Home educated and, by seventeen, writing for a living, the only alma mater I have ever had is Warstones Library, Pinfold Grove, Wolverhampton.
A low, red-brick box on grass that verged on wasteland, I would be there twice a day--rocking up with all the ardour of a clubber turning up to a rave. I read every book in there--not really, of course, but as good as: when I'd read all the funny books, I moved on to the sexy ones, then the dreamy ones, the mad ones; the ones that described distant mountains, idiots, plagues, experiments. I sat at the big table and read all the papers: in public housing in Wolverhampton, the broadsheets are as incongruous and illuminating as an Eames lamp.
The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books--but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I've ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I'd heard of--then waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas. I had to wait nearly a year for Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire to come: even so, I was still too young to think it anything but a bit wanky, and abandoned it twenty pages in for Jilly Cooper. But Fleurs du Mal, man! In a building overlooked by a Kwiksave where the fags and alcohol were kept in a locked, metal cage, lest they be stolen! Simply knowing I could have it in my hand was a comfort, in this place so very very far from anything extraordinary or exultant.
Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawn--lit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rain--which allowed a girl so poor she didn't even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the dead--Dorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte Brontë, Spike Milligan.
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate "need" for "stuff." A mall--the shops--are places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthy's taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
Last month, after protest, an injunction was granted to postpone library closures in Somerset. In September, both Somerset and Gloucestershire councils will be the subject of a full judicial review over their closure plans. As the cuts kick in, protesters and lawyers are fighting for individual libraries like villagers pushing stranded whales back into the sea. A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading "WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL."
While I have read a million words on the necessity for the cuts, I have not seen a single letter on what the exit plan is: what happens in four years' time, when the cuts will have succeeded, and the economy gets back to "normal" again. Do we then--prosperous once more--go round and re-open all these centers, clinics and libraries, which have sat, dark and unused, for nearly half a decade? It's hard to see how--it costs millions of pounds to re-open deserted buildings, and cash-strapped councils will have looked at billions of square feet of prime real estate with a coldly realistic eye. Unless the government has developed an exit strategy for the cuts, and insisted councils not sell closed properties, by the time we get back to "normal" again, our Victorian and post-war and 1960s red-brick boxy libraries will be coffee shops and pubs. No new libraries will be built to replace them. These libraries will be lost forever.
And, in their place, we will have thousands more public spaces where you are simply the money in your pocket, rather than the hunger in your heart. Kids--poor kids--will never know the fabulous, benign quirk of self-esteem of walking into "their" library and thinking, "I have read 60 percent of the books in here. I am awesome." Libraries that stayed open during the Blitz will be closed by budgets.
A trillion small doors closing.
Extension Task
Answer the following questions:
1. What is the ‘alma mater’? 1
2. Quote an expression which shows how often the writer visits the library. 1
3. Identify a use of sentence structure which shows how much she has read from the library and comment on its effectiveness. 2
4. How effective is the writer’s description of the library in line 3 and why? 2
5. What is the meaning of ‘incongruous’? 2
6. What is the purpose of the writer’s use of punctuation in the second paragraph? 2
7. How is the writer’s excitement conveyed in paragraph 3? 2
8. In paragraph 4 what do the final authors all have in common? 1
9. a) Quote an expression used to describe the environment in paragraph 4. 1
b) Why has the writer chosen this expression? 2
10. How effective do you find “a balancing power” at this point in the paragraph and why? 2
11. Explain the use of block capitals in paragraph 6. 2
12. Explain the effectiveness if the conclusion to the paragraph as a whole. 4
13. With reference to the passage as a whole, how well has the writer conveyed her love for reading and libraries? 6
30
If he says he is anti-racist, why is Cameron guilty of ‘othering’ refugees?
Private individuals are stepping in where governments refuse to tread
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent, Sunday 31 January 2016
I was on BBC Question Time with the forthright Jess Phillips last week. Since then, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley has become the most reviled woman in the Midlands and beyond. She is accused of betraying Brummies; on planet Twitter mad men rip and maul her. So what did Phillips say to provoke such ire?
We were in Stamford, Lincolnshire – a place, I thought, that would be ferociously anti-immigration. But, on the migrant crisis in Europe, the audience was largely sympathetic to the wretched men, women and children who take to the seas because they want to live, to get a better life. Then a young chap brought up the sexual assaults on women in Cologne by some asylum-seekers and asked if there was a danger that hideous, unreconstructed behaviours would be imported into Europe. Phillips accepted his concerns and then went on to remind him and the audience that British men also groped, fondled, baited and molested women in the streets of our cities, naming as an example Birmingham’s Broad Street. That led to the witch-hunt.
She is absolutely right, of course. Some honest people in Birmingham have come out to confirm that the harassment of females is a “massive problem”, and that British men can be and are predatory and sexually incontinent.
This row encapsulated both the new misogyny that is sweeping across Britain and a resurgent, 21st-century xenophobia. Prominent women in public spaces must, it seems, be punished. Freedom of expression is a restricted right, available only to powerful men.
Phillips is not only a mouthy woman, but she daringly pointed out the hypocrisy and bigotry of some in our society for whom there is one rule for them – the “others” – and one for true Brits. Their kids can perish, their benefits be slashed, their human rights crushed, their stories disbelieved, all so that “we” can carry on living the good life.
David Cameron, allegedly a caring Tory, shows no compassion or even basic concern for fleeing families on wrecked boats, calls them “swarms” and “a bunch of migrants” – the last demeaning phrase repeated on Question Time by Patrick McLoughlin, the loyalist Tory Transport minister. They do not mention the wars they made or backed in Iraq or Libya which created the outflow of people, or mention the arms we sell to tyrants. Such small details are easily forgotten by these busy, busy men.
On Saturday night in Stockholm, once a city of humanitarian and civil values, a gang of up to 100 men in black masks went marauding and beat up refugee children. Children. Did that create the shock and horror of the Cologne attacks? Did Cameron get up to condemn these violent fascists who betray European values? What would he have said if these had been Muslim extremists or angry asylum-seekers? This happened just days after Holocaust Memorial Day, about which our leader moralises a great deal.
More seriously, the Government and its coterie are now also successfully pitting settled “good” immigrants and their families against troublesome Muslims and those who are trying to claim asylum. Yesterday, we were presented with yet another Cameron avatar: the adamant anti-racist who is determined to get men and women of colour into and up the ladders of state institutions, the private sector, the Establishment. Britain should be mortified, sayeth he, that a “young black man is more likely to be in prison than studying at a top university”.
Trevor Phillips is impressed by Cameron’s “astonishing declaration”. I am not, not at all. Maybe that’s to be expected: Phillips is in with the powerful; he thinks Muslims are not “like us” and that asking them to integrate is “disrespectful”. I think that, thereby, he endorses cultural apartheid. He garlands the Prime Minister while I am revolted by insincere, scheming gesture politics. If Cameron continues to show callous indifference to and contempt for those seeking refuge, his avowed anti-racism is a sham and a displacement tactic.
This is the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War. Private individuals are stepping in where governments refuse to tread, while EU leaders are criminalising doctors, volunteers and food suppliers. Eric Kempson has lived on Lesbos for 16 years. After he saw a child’s life jacket on a beach, he started a humanitarian initiative to help the thousands of refugees arriving on the 10km of beach in front of his home. He is sickened by official deterrence policies: “They are following the logic of fascism by telling us to let people drown on our doorstep. And the way Greece is being victimised is disgusting. We are not going to stop helping. We will keep on going and we need the world’s help to do it. They will not stop us acting with humanity.”
In Calais, volunteers report cold and sick children, some needing to be resuscitated. In Italy, asylum-seeking children have gone missing and are thought to be with sex traffickers.
Mothers are so terrified that they send their kids into the unknown. And our government takes in a derisory number of the most vulnerable, makes vague promises and robotically talks about funding refugee camps in Syria – camps that cannot save people from daily bomb attacks.
Faced with this epic tragedy, our leaders are dismal, divisive and callous. History will judge them harshly for failing to save lives, for “othering”, for demonising the displaced. You want to be anti-racist, Mr Cameron? Start with the boat people. Build some moral capital so that we can trust you and your commitment.
This awesome dissection of internet hyperbole will make you cry and change your life
Exaggeration is the official language of the internet. Oversteer and oversell, all the time.
Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, Monday 6th October 2014
The other day I was talking to a music fan who’d recently gone to see one of Kate Bush’s widely praised live appearances. Naturally I was keen to hear a first-hand account of this era-defining event, so I asked what it was like.
“The first half was great,” she said. “But the second half got a bit boring.”
Well that was jarring. For weeks I’d been told by seemingly everyone on the internet that witnessing Kate Bush live was a life-changing event; a transformative experience of staggering magnitude. Attendees described a sort of positive version of the climactic ark-opening sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark, of thousands of people simultaneously overpowered by a work of supernatural genius. Apparently these people didn’t simply attend a rock concert – they were French-kissed by God. So majestic was the performance, all the molecules in their bodies were disassembled and temporarily rearranged into a pulsating jellyfish of pure enjoyment, basking helplessly yet blissfully on the shores of Lake Kate, before the stunning finale finally healed and reformed them and sent them on their way. They crawled from the venue on all fours, uncontrollably weeping and soiling themselves all the way home. Hours later, once they’d finished shaking, they went on Twitter and explained how even the typographical layout of the ticket stub had made them cry nine times. And yet here was someone shrugging at it all.
And make no mistake, the person I’d spoken to was a bona fide Kate Bush fan herself, yet one who described feeling so disconnected from the feverish level of excitement and sense of occasion other audience members were displaying – even on their way in, before a note had been sung – she was left feeling almost like an imposter. I suspect that partly explains the shrug. It’s too big a build-up. Nothing can match that level of expectation.
Perhaps the impossible-to-live-up-to tidal wave of praise came about in part because Bush had been clever enough to ask people not to stand around like mindless absorption pods, dumbly filming the gig on their smartphones. Maybe, with those smartphones tucked away, a sizeable percentage of the audience was being shocked by the reality of their first non screen-parlayed experience of the past five years. It must be like eating salt and vinegar crisps for the first time after weeks of a sense-numbing heavy cold: the sheer rush of unmediated reality almost takes your face off.
But maybe the praise reached deranged heights because nothing’s allowed to simply be “very good” or even “great” any more. We’ve ramped up the hyperbole: it’s amazing; it’s awesome. We focus on the personal impact: it’ll rock your world; it’ll change your life. You’ll be so stuffed full of wonder you’ll split at the seams.
Generally, as a species, we used to avoid these kind of exaggerated emotional outpourings. Still do, in person. But online, people routinely claim to have been reduced to tears by YouTube clips, Facebook posts, newspaper articles, and inspirational gifs. You cried at that? Honestly? Pics or it didn’t happen. And if your face leaks that easily, step away from the keyboard and call a plumber.
All this babble about being blown away, overcome, and reduced to a state of stunned amazement used to be the preserve of creepy people in adverts, the kind of grinning fictional gimps who’d burst into song if they enjoyed their fish fingers. At least they were being paid to exaggerate their opinions. We’re just trying to fit in, which is infinitely sadder somehow.
We’re trying to fit in because exaggeration is the official language of the internet, a talking shop so hopelessly overcrowded that only the most strident statements have any impact. Hence the rise of Buzzfeed-style click-bait headlines: The Late Leonid Brezhnev Just Invented the World’s Most Awesome Dance Move. What This Teacher Tells Her Class Will Change Your Life Forever. You Won’t Believe the State of this Guy’s Asshole. And so on.
The same digital ecosystem that gave rise to click-bait headlines is working its magic on the rest of us. Something about the way the online world has coagulated around social networks that subconsciously convert everyday conversation into a form of entertainment – with a follower count providing a running score – is turning us into click-bait people. Perform, entertain, exaggerate. All oversteer and oversell, all the time.
And of course in this increasingly binary world, if good equals amazing, bad equals catastrophic. Any disappointment, any setback, anyone who steps out of line – all instantly labelled the Worst Thing Ever. Displease the hive mind, and the same people pretending to shed sentimental tears over a kiddywink’s school project on YouTube will only stop screaming for your blood when the next hate figure stumbles into view.
I never thought I’d say this, but I sort of miss “meh”. “Meh” used to be the standard internet response to anything even 1% less than astounding. “Meh” was obnoxious: the sound of personal entitlement and sneery dismissal; the noise a spoiled child emperor makes when the pyramid his slaves have built turns out to be half a metre lower than he expected. But it was infinitely more honest than pretending to cry.
It’s enough to make you weep. Or rather not weep. And pretend you did.
From Kanye and Kim to politics, we're too cynical
Necessary scepticism has tipped into contemptuous finger-pointing and mockery.
Elizabeth Day, The Observer, Sunday 1 June 2014
Two people got married last week. I don't know if you noticed. The groom was a rap star and the bride was famous for having made a sex tape and being on a successful reality television programme and together they hired various European palaces in a nuptial spree of excessive proportions that involved engraving their guests' names into marble tables, building a golden toilet and posing winsomely for about 800,000 Instagram photos (filter: pre-revolutionary). Jay-Z gave the happy couple a giant bottle of Chianti as a wedding gift, dipped in gold with a diamond cork.
As it happened, I was in America when Kim Kardashian and Kanye West got married. My hotel television gave me access to the E! entertainment channel and I was able to follow every overblown detail as it unfolded. They had a correspondent posted outside the Palace of Versailles for the pre-wedding shindig who reported faithfully on whether Justin Bieber was going to turn up (he didn't) and who told us that the chocolate eclairs were "delicious", the bride looked "stunning" and the happy couple had been "overwhelmed" by fans. The interesting thing about the coverage was that it was entirely non-judgmental. There was no sneering about the ludicrous extravagance and no supercilious sense of who-do-these-people-think-they-are-flashing-their-cash-around-and-isn't-it-all-a-bit-nouveau?
When I got back to the UK, the tone was totally different. Kardashian was "whale-arsed", the whole thing was "tasteless" and their choice of venue for the ceremony (a 16th-century Tuscan fort) represented "a clash of high and low culture". Admittedly, some of the coverage was extremely funny.
But there is a difference between poking fun and being unnecessarily mean-spirited. At times, it seemed too easy a target, as though various media outlets were snootily covering something that didn't merit their attention by … er … giving it yet more attention. There was an implied superiority about it all that I found uncomfortable, a sense that it was all beneath our contempt but – here – have a bucketload of contempt anyway. Of course elements of the wedding were hilarious and absurd. But do we really need to pour bad-tempered bile over the proceedings to show our disapproval?
We are becoming an ever more cynical nation, where necessary scepticism has tipped into contemptuous finger-pointing and derisive mockery. In Britain, where we have a long and noble tradition of satire, not wanting to be duped is practically a national characteristic. But the recent failure of our big institutions – the MPs expenses scandal in Parliament, phone hacking in the fourth estate, corruption in the police and allegations of historic sexual abuse at the BBC – has left us innately suspicious of other people's motives. To be open-minded is seen as being somehow gullible, unforgivably naive. We are convinced someone is trying to get one over on us, all the time.
Last week, researchers found that cynicism could even be bad for your health. Scientists at the University of Eastern Finland said that people with high levels of cynical distrust and who agreed with statements such as "I think people lie to get ahead" or "It is safer to trust nobody" were twice as likely to develop dementia.
Cynicism, when it stops being a tool of inquiry, a means of probing beneath the surface of what we're being sold, becomes something nastier and more blinkered. It becomes suspicion. It is cynicism of our mainstream politicians – the belief that they're all the same, all out for what they can get apart from that nice Mr Farage – that has been largely responsible for Ukip's recent electoral success. And it is cynicism about immigrants – the notion that people are coming to this country to milk our benefits system and take our council houses – that has aided this lurch to the right.
We should be sceptical. We should be inquiring. But cynicism runs the risk of becoming prejudice. And that goes for Nigel Farage as well as the golden Portaloos.
School uniforms: turning our kids into soulless conformists
These days, every educationalist from Michael Gove down is a fan of the dreaded blazer/tie combo. Exactly how do they really think they're helping prepare kids for the 'real world'?
Suzanne Moore, The Guardian, Wednesday 29th August 2012
Would you like me to tell you what I am wearing? Not in a chatline kind of way – this is the Guardian, for goodness sake. I am wearing the Guardian uniform, which is whatever you imagine it to be. Earrings made of chard? Hemp waistcoats? Some colour blocking? It is, bizarrely enough, not a shirt and tie and blazer, but these are the extremely odd clothes we make children wear to "instil discipline" in them. All right-thinking people say that. But I don't. Having had to buy a school uniform this week, I felt as dispirited as ever by the ridiculousness of it.
Unsurprisingly, I was never a fan of my own school uniform, which was bottle-green with knickers made of felt. We were constantly lectured about the activities we were not allowed be seen doing in it. In a hazy way, I remember them as basically eating chips and talking to boys. "I'll just take it off then Miss," I used to say, for I was annoying then as I am now.
The price of the uniform itself was an issue. The wear and tear of it was an issue. We couldn't afford it. Once I had a Saturday job that helped, but naturally I bought myself some lime-green plastic platforms. Weirdly they were not acceptable as school shoes unless my mum wrote a note. What medical condition required the wearing of these beauties I can only guess, but my mum's notes I now look on with awe, the end line nearly always being: "She is in a phase."
Did this uniform instil in me a sense of oneness with my school, or Ideological State Apparatus as I would later realise it to be? Did it resolve the class issue? Er … not exactly. In those days we didn't have stupid fashion words like "vintage" and "pre-loved", we had hand-me-downs, and really, I don't know a modern child who wants a second-hand uniform.
The myth of uniform is that it is a social leveller, an equaliser. And pushes up results? Then show me how. Many European countries with good schools don't have uniforms. Bill Clinton thought back in the 90s that it might be the answer to gang-related violence. It wasn't.
No uniform does what it says on the tin. It is about conforming. It heartens many a parent to see their child as somehow ready for work. Mr Gove of the Bible loves a uniform. Indeed the fetishisation of school uniform is no longer a pervy thing; it is education policy. The academies are bonkers on it, parents like it and many children say it makes their lives easier. Labour and Tories think much the same.
Teachers vary, some reporting that too much of their time is spent on policing clothing violations. If education is to be about conforming and not drawing out talent, I guess that's fine, though the kind of overall worn in France for science or art would surely suffice. Uniform covers up many social ills. Sometimes, even poor parenting. ("Well they were always clean and in the right uniform.") The signifiers of class and money are simply rejigged around bags, phone and pens. It is as it ever was.
This nostalgia for a uniform, reinforced by the retrograde fantasy of Harry Potter, is based on emotion not reason. Evidence does not come into it. Does all this produce better results? Happier children? Does apeing private schools in appearance but not resources gloss over the dire reality? What we really have, alongside the increasing prevalence of the ghastly blazer/tie combo, is increasing social inequality. You could map it out but don't ask me to, as I missed an awful lot of school on account of this kind of attitude. "Don't ask questions, girl, and put your tie on properly."
Don't ask questions about the world of work that we are preparing children for. At the moment it looks as if some will work for free in some superstore uniform. Get them used to it early. Compliance. Zero tolerance. The best days of your life.
In the Uniform Me shop this week it was hot and sweaty, as nasty polo shirts were pulled on. Skirts must be knee-length. That will stop teen sex, I am sure. And I note the return of over-the-knee socks, which of course do not resemble stockings in any way at all. At least the stuff I bought was cheap. Some inner-city uniforms are close to £300.
When I have had jobs where I had to wear a uniform – in restaurants and hospitals – I just got on with it. I saw the need. But to learn? To learn what? Again, I ask: where is the evidence that uniform works?
Since I bought my daughter's uniform she has, of course, had it on all the time, though school doesn't start until next week. She is expressing herself or getting at me. She makes me laugh. But the idea saddens me that when she gets to secondary school individuality must be knocked out of her as early as possible via the reinforcement of petty rules about shirts. This is indeed preparation for the real world. Of uniform thinking.
Even Labour should be able to capitalise on Tory disarray over Brexit
Iain Macwhirter, The Herald, 1st September 2016
Theresa May gathered her cabinet together for a brainstorming session at Chequers yesterday. About time. Two months on from the EU referendum, and while we all know that “Brexit means Brexit”, we’re still none the wiser about what “Brexit” itself means.
International Trade Secretary Liam Fox seems to think it means he should take over large parts of the Foreign Office, and anything to do with trade and Europe. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is equally certain it does not. Nemo me impune lacessit, as the self-styled classics scholar might put it – don't mess with me.
Brexit Secretary David Davis says it is “ten times more difficult than the Schleswig Holstein Question”. If so, answers may not be forthcoming for some time. Lord Palmerston said of Schleswig-Holstein in the 19th Century:”Only three people have ever really understood it: the Prince Consort, who is dead, a German professor, who has gone mad, and I who have forgotten all about it." There are now three UK cabinet ministers in charge of Brexit and they may be going the same way.
We’ve heard practically nothing from the voluble former Mayor of London except those cryptic remarks in Brussels in July about Brexit not meaning Britain leaves Europe “in any sense”. We've heard a lot about musical chairs in Whitehall as ministers bicker about who should get the biggest offices and the most civil servants. But there have been no significant policy statements from any of the lead ministers on the most important constitutional and diplomatic issue facing Britain since we joined the EU in 1973.
As for the Prime Minister, saying she is all over the place would be an insult to people lacking a sense of direction. We were initially led to believe she was going to bulldoze Brexit using her powers under Royal Prerogative. “Like a Tudor monarch”, as the Labour MP Barry Gardiner put it. This didn't go down too well with the opinion-forming classes because we are supposed to be a democracy. Referendums are advisory and MPs are meant to take these crucial decisions in our sovereign parliament.
But it would, of course, be an abomination for parliament to simply reject the referendum. MPs don't have the authority any more to ignore such a direct expression of the people's will. However, nor is it acceptable for them to have no say at all, as Mrs May initially implied. So that was changed, and her official spokesman has now said that, of course, MPs would “have a say” on Brexit. Which only raises further questions about what having a say would mean. Would they have a vote? Would that vote mean anything? Would the House of Lords be able to veto a Brexit motion? And can it be amended by either chamber of parliament?
What about the Scottish Parliament? Does it have a say too? The PM has suggested it would. After her Bute House meeting with Nicola Sturgeon in June she said she wouldn’t begin the Article 50 negotiations on leaving the EU until there was an “agreed UK approach”. No one seriously believes this gives Ms Sturgeon a veto, but it did suggest there could be significant leverage.
But to have a deal, with sidebars and concessions, you have to have a negotiation, and until we know what is being negotiated, there can't be any meaningful talks about it. Which brings us back to yesterday's Chequers brainstorm. It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall, and no doubt the many flies around the table were taking mental notes. Forget the motor industry, the prospects for British publishing have never looked more rosy as ministers and civil servants plan their memoirs. Mr Johnson is probably onto his second draft.
Mrs May insisted we are definitely leaving the EU and there should be no loose talk of a second referendum, as advocated by Labour leadership challenger Owen Smith. This doesn't mean the Brexit process couldn't be stalled or that another general election couldn’t intercede before negotiations are over or even begun. The PM says Article 50, won’t be invoked until January 2017 at the earliest. She is likely to wait until the German and French elections are out of the way later in the year. This means negotiations with Brussels, which take a minimum of two years, may not be completed until the very eve of the 2020 general election, which could itself become a de facto referendum on the Brexit settlement.
If by some miracle, Labour is elected in 2020 on a Remain ticket, Britain could theoretically find itself negotiating re-entry to the EU even before we’ve actually left it. What would Brussels say about that? Probably: you'll have had your Brexit, live with it. The EU may anyway have assumed a rather different shape by then, with a deepening of financial and military integration, and a renewed determination to impose the single currency on all its members. It seems most unlikely Britain would vote to adopt the euro.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Loosely speaking, Brexit currently has a range of meanings in the UK cabinet. Chancellor Philip Hammond and, we understand, Mr Johnson, are arguing for a soft Brexit in which Britain remains in the European Single Market (ESM). They're expressing the interests of what might be called the Whitehall-industrial complex – the UK civil service and the big corporate interests that lobby Whitehall and overlap with it. Richard Branson, the banks, car manufacturers and above all the City of London want as little disruption as possible and believe remaining in the ESM, while out of the EU, provides the best bet for continuity. They envisage joining Norway in the European Economic Area. (Actually, Norway is not terribly keen on big Britain being in this small nation club, but that's another issue).
At the other end of the Brexit spectrum are the true anti-Europeans like the former Chancellor, Lord Lawson, and Tory backbenchers like Jacob Rees Mogg who said yesterday that: “staying in the single market is code for rejecting the referendum result itself”. He says the ESM is the heart of the EU and source of the vexatious regulations and of free movement, neither of which the British people will tolerate. These Brexit hard-liners want nothing to do with Europe and hope to renegotiate Britain’s trading links with the rest of the world from scratch through the World Trade Organisation. Brexit Secretary Mr Davis is thought to be with the fundamentalist faction.
This division is about as deep as it gets and you wonder how these two views can co-exist in one government. If Labour could only pause their civil war for one moment, they would realise the Tories are probably more divided than they are. Tomorrow, Nicola Sturgeon will be announcing her third relaunch of the next independence campaign. But it's difficult to know what she can say about the nature of the Union Scotland would be leaving, given the lack of clarity about the EU the UK is leaving. It's a Brexit imbroglio. Westminster has simply stopped making sense.
Are we being well-served by elderly sitcoms remakes? Even if the old jokes still amuse some, Aidan Smith finds the BBC’s celebration of its comedy classics far from funny
Aidan Smith, The Scotsman, 29th August 2016
As you watched the revival of Are You Being Served?, with its gags about inside leg measurements, wobbly wands, big Bristols, perfumed ladywipes, floating balls and – phew – Jimmy Connors’s balls, what were you thinking?
That it was a tribute, a send-up and postmodern irony, all wrapped up in a Grace Brothers bag, which of course you wouldn’t have been charged 5p for? That you were allowed to laugh at the creaky gags but only in a knowingly superior way, because of course they’d be derided as appallingly un-PC if they turned up in a contemporary sitcom? That AYBS? was really best enjoyed with a bag of Twiglets and a packet of Matchmakers – and, while you’re scrubbing the oven, love, can you fetch me another glass of Liebfraumilch?
Or were you thinking what Frankie Boyle was thinking at the Edinburgh Television Festival last week when he declared that TV comedy, because it was frightened of taking risks, has gone stale and regressed decades?
“To me it seems like television is now back in 1978,” said Boyle, a comedian you’d never describe as risk-averse. “Most shows are variety shows and most sitcoms are family friendly. They’re remaking a lot of the old sitcoms and you wouldn’t really know there had ever been alternative comedy.”
Surely Boyle is right. Straight after Are You Being Served? on Sunday came a reheating of Porridge. Till Death Us Do Part will be disinterred on Thursday and in the coming weeks there will be new outings for Steptoe and Son and Hancock’s Half Hour.
These shows –some of them updated to the present, some taking the form of karaoke cover-versions, others using old scripts of episodes negligently wiped – are billed as a celebration of telly comedy. It’s 60 years this summer since the first British sitcom began, Tony Hancock introducing himself with a stammer that might not pass today’s rigorous inclusivity rules. (Though obviously this wouldn’t be as big a challenge to them as Alf Garnett calling his wife a “silly old moo” or Albert Steptoe scoffing at his son Harold’s new smoking jacket and calling him a “poof”.)
But what are these retreads if not soppy evidence of a nation that doesn’t really know where it’s going, only that it believes that the past was better? This season was planned before Brexit but, happening now, it seems to capture a mood. The past isn’t a foreign country as far as Britain, with its newly hardened attitude to the nations round about us, is concerned. The past is a good old British-made sitcom.
Look at Mrs Brown’s Boys, declared Britain’s favourite sitcom just as Boyle was getting to his feet to bemoan how safe and ratings-driven comedy has become. It’s a contemporary show which looks like it belongs in the hoary old 1970s. Some have claimed that because of the informal production style, with on-stage malarkey encouraged and retakes left in the final edit, it is playing with the traditions of sitcom and that makes it a meta-sitcom, clever and edgy. Here’s what I think: it’s complete pants and I’ve never laughed once.
At the same time as this poll the BBC announced it was working on a new comedy with John Cleese, despite him last year accusing the Beeb’s commissioning editors of having “no idea of what they’re doing” and vowing never to work with the corporation again.
I’m not sure Boyle will be thrilled about this and I can’t say I am. My five-year-old daughter bids farewell by saying “Goodbye ding-ding-ding-ding” because once upon a fantastic era for comedy Cleese did this in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Fawlty Towers would be my specialist subject on Mastermind – Q: Name three things you cannot see from the window of a Torquay hotel. A: Sydney Opera House, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain – and I would surely win it. But anything else Cleese does always suffers in comparison.
Following these classics is impossible and his memoirs and a revival of Fawlty for a commercial make me doubt he has anything new, or that funny, to say. And the BBC’s head of comedy, Shane Allen, doesn’t really inspire confidence in the new project when he says of Cleese: “He’s a comedy god and the door is always open to him. There are certain people who have earned their badges, who have got the right to do what they want.”
Seventies comedies are great, just as long as it’s still 1973 out there, and much as I often want it to be, and for all sorts of reasons, it’s not anymore. The comedy we watch right now will be time-capsuled, turning up later in those list-shows which attempt to shed some kind of light on the state of the nation at any given moment through the popular culture it liked. By 2066, 2016 is going to seem a strange, backward-looking interlude in our history indeed, when Mrs Brown’s Boys and all those old, old shows are recalled.
I thrilled to these sitcoms first time round. Before my critical faculties were developed to the frankly stunning level they exist at today, I thought Hugh and I, starring Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd as flatmates always dreaming up hare-brained wheezes, was the funniest. This was what I told my mother at least, so I’d be allowed to stay up past 8pm on Mondays to watch it. One sitcom per week was the rule, but I had a wheeze and it worked. By Thursdays she’d forgotten about the earlier deal and I also got to see Steptoe and Son, truly the greatest of them all.
Stuffed bear, anatomical skeleton, gramophone, grandfather clock stuck at quarter-to-two, cardboard box full of dirty old man Harold’s cast-off false teeth … to compete for Mastermind’s Champion of Champions I’d choose the contents of that mingin’ cowp of a front room.
But, loved it then, don’t need to see it again.
Young and dyslexic? You’ve got it going on
As a child I learned to turn dyslexia to my advantage, to see the world more creatively. We are the architects, we are the designers
Benjamin Zephaniah, The Guardian, Friday 2 October 2015
I’m of the generation where teachers didn’t know what dyslexia was. The big problem with the education system then was that there was no compassion, no understanding and no humanity. I don’t look back and feel angry with the teachers. The ones who wanted to have an individual approach weren’t allowed to. The idea of being kind and thoughtful and listening to problems just wasn’t done: the past is a different kind of country.
At school my ideas always contradicted the teachers’. I remember one teacher saying that human beings sleep for one-third of their life and I put my hand up and said, “If there’s a God isn’t that a design fault? If you’ve built something, you want efficiency. If I was God I would have designed sleep so we could stay awake. Then good people could do one-third more good in the world.” The teacher said, “Shut up, stupid boy. Bad people would do one-third more bad.” I thought I’d put in a good idea. I was just being creative. She also had a point, but the thing was, she called me stupid for even thinking about it.
I remember a teacher talking about Africa and the “local savages” and I would say, “Who are you to talk about savages?” She would say, “How dare you challenge me?” – and that would get me into trouble.
Once, when I was finding it difficult to engage with writing and had asked for some help, a teacher said, “It’s all right. We can’t all be intelligent, but you’ll end up being a good sportsperson, so why don’t you go outside and play some football?” I thought, “Oh great”, but now I realise he was stereotyping me.
I had poems in my head even then, and when I was 10 or 11 my sister wrote some of them down for me. When I was 13 I could read very basically but it would be such hard work that I would give up. I thought that so long as you could read how much the banknote was worth, you knew enough or you could ask a mate.
I got thrown out of a lot of schools, the last one at 13. I was expelled partly because of arguing with teachers on an intellectual level and partly for being a rude boy and fighting. I didn’t stab anybody, but I did take revenge on a teacher once. I stole his car and drove it into his front garden. I remember him telling us the Nazis weren’t that bad. He could say that in the classroom. When I was in borstal I used to do this thing of looking at people I didn’t want to be like. I saw a guy who spent all his time sitting stooped over and I thought, “I don’t want to be like that,” so I learned to sit with a straight back. Being observant helped me make the right choices.
A high percentage of the prison population are dyslexic, and a high percentage of the architect population. If you look at the statistics, I should be in prison: a black man brought up on the wrong side of town whose family fell apart, in trouble with the police when I was a kid, unable to read and write, with no qualifications and, on top of that, dyslexic. But I think staying out of prison is about conquering your fears and finding your path in life.
When I go into prisons to talk to people I see men and women who, in intelligence and other qualities, are the same as me. But opportunities opened for me and they missed theirs, didn’t notice them or didn’t take them.
I never thought I was stupid. I didn’t have that struggle. If I have someone in front of me who doesn’t have a problem reading and writing telling me that black people are savages I just think, “I’m not stupid – you’re the one who’s stupid.” I just had self-belief.
For my first book I told my poems to my girlfriend, who wrote them down for me. It really took off, especially within the black community. I wrote “wid luv” for “with love”. People didn’t think they were dyslexic poems, they just thought I wrote phonetically.
At 21 I went to an adult education class in London to learn to read and write. The teacher told me, “You are dyslexic,” and I was like, “Do I need an operation?” She explained to me what it meant and I suddenly thought, “Ah, I get it. I thought I was going crazy.”
I wrote more poetry, novels for teenagers, plays, other books and recorded music. I take poetry to people who do not read poetry. Still now, when I’m writing the word “knot”, I have to stop and think, “How do I write that?” I have to draw something to let me know what the word is to come back to it later. If I can’t spell “question” I just put a question mark and come back to it later.
When I look at a book, the first thing I see is the size of it, and I know that’s what it’s like for a lot of young people who find reading tough. When Brunel University offered me the job of professor of poetry and creative writing, I knew my students would be officially more educated than me. I tell them, “You can do this course and get the right grade because you have a good memory – but if you don’t have passion, creativity, individuality, there’s no point.” In my life now, I find that people accommodate my dyslexia. I can perform my poetry because it doesn’t have to be word perfect, but I never read one of my novels in public. When I go to literary festivals I always get an actor to read it out for me. Otherwise all my energy goes into reading the book and the mood is lost.
If someone can’t understand dyslexia it’s their problem. In the same way, if someone oppresses me because of my race I don’t sit down and think, “How can I become white?” It’s not my problem, it’s theirs and they are the ones who have to come to terms with it.
If you’re dyslexic and you feel there’s something holding you back, just remember: it’s not you. In many ways being dyslexic is a natural way to be.
What’s unnatural is the way we read and write. If you look at a pictorial language like Chinese, you can see the word for a woman because the character looks like a woman. The word for a house looks like a house. It is a strange step to go from that to a squiggle that represents a sound.
So don’t be heavy on yourself. And if you are a parent of someone with dyslexia don’t think of it as a defect. Dyslexia is not a measure of intelligence: you may have a genius on your hands. Having dyslexia can make you creative. If you want to construct a sentence and can’t find the word you are searching for, you have to think of a way to write round it. This requires being creative and so your “creativity muscle” gets bigger.
Kids come up to me and say, “I’m dyslexic too,” and I say to them, “Use it to your advantage, see the world differently. Us dyslexic people, we’ve got it going on – we are the architects. We are the designers.” It’s like these kids are proud to be like me and if that helps them, that is great. I didn’t have that as a child. I say to them, “Bloody non-dyslexics … who do they think they are?”
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