....it has to be Johnson or Gove.
Johnson is a fundamentally shallow and nasty character doesn't stand for anything except whatever will play well with those he wants to appeal to in order to get himself further up the greasy pole.
Let's take his article on Salafi women who wear the niqab as an example (I have never seen anyone wearing a burka over here and I hang out in the right places), the one with the letter box jibe.
Now before anyone points out that Boris actually did not wish to ban Salafi women from dressing like this, his
modus operandi in this instance was to pick an easy target (as Salafis of the quietist variety are apolitical - a point emphasised in Anabel Inge's recent study) and write about them in a manner that plays well with types who twirl their batons and shake their pom poms in support of characters like Yaxley-Lennon. This is possibly why Mohammed Amin, the chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum has threatened to resign if Johnson gets the nod.
Turning now to Gove [this is a repeat post by the way for the next few paragraphs], it is worth remembering that Gove was once the Education Secretary and pretty much wrecked the state system during his time in office. The fall-out from his incompetence reverberates right down to the present day.
Basically, cash-starved schools have been using the increased managerial powers that Heads and Deputy Heads were granted by him not to identify and remove incompetent staff but to use that as a pretext to get rid of the older, experienced and therefore more expensive ones. This is one of the reasons why schools have been haemorrhaging staff, an exodus prompted by the fact that those with transferable skills who can see the writing on the wall and are young enough to get out have been doing so. Consequently, schools in many areas have been struggling to recruit teachers with relevant degrees in subjects like, say, Physics or Mathematics, to teach GCSE and A Level. Those of you reading this with children of secondary school age might find it fruitful to look around at the next Parents Evening and make a rough calculation as to the average age of the staff they can see. Younger ones are cheaper to come by. Another litmus test if your child is in Years 10 to 13 is to find out whether their subject tutor actually has a degree in the subject they are teaching.
A further reform Gove introduced was to ‘toughen up’ the GCSE and A Level courses due to concerns that they were ‘easy’. But what has happened with some subjects was that the courses were simply crammed with superfluous, additional content that is almost impossible to get through in two years. So teachers now simply cram from day one and the need to rote-learn far too much means that the more important skills of analysis and logical and lateral thinking get neglected. And the effects of the reforms have been nonexistent: the boards that examine are anxious not to lose their ‘customers’ and simply mark these allegedly harder terminal papers more generously. But the effects on the students themselves have been profound, and it is the brighter ones that suffer the most because of the amount that they have to learn and the all too frequent testing that they have to endure. Where I am, too many of the cleverer ones are self-harming or becoming crippled by anxiety, and this is not because they are lacking in resilience or part of a ‘snowflake generation’.They are simply getting overwhelmed by the new curriculum because they are well-motivated and conscientious.
It's also worth noting that in the subject I teach at 'A' level it is necessary to explore 54 topics in depth. But the terminal papers will only ask about 12 of them at most. Where's the sense in that?
Additionally, if any teacher fessed up to drug use either back then or now they would be out of the door very quickly. I suppose that it is a different matter if someone is working with children but it was Gove who once presided over a system where the professional standards are higher than those that he is being held to.
Johnson might be habitually mendacious and manifestly incompetent but Gove is ideologically driven in all the wrong ways and therefore utterly unsuitable for any kind of high office regardless of his past drug use.
The other day I was flicking through one of Hunter S Thompson's books at random and found that he had once written that giving the US electorate the option of voting for either Clinton or Bush was like making them choose between a Leech and a Gila Monster.
It's the same with this Tory leadership contest. It's a veritable bestiary that the Tory party has to choose from, a fucking freak show.
Is there any possibility of all of them losing?
In closing, I should just quickly point out that my loathing of the two characters I have singled out for special attention above does not make me a supporter of Corbyn by default or something like that. I'm just someone who wants to see the excesses of capitalism reined in a bit and rampant economic inequality in our society (the consequence of thirty odd years of neoliberal economics) reduced.
