Don’t snatch defeat from Brexit victory
Students are as thick as a plank
WHAT is the difference between knowledge and intelligence? A question that constantly assails those like me who watch general knowledge quizzes, or listen to them, or do GK crosswords to test the old grey cells.
Time and again one sees a puzzled contestant with the three options on the screen wrestling helplessly with a possible choice, then making the wrong one, when the obvious solution is screaming from the wording of the clue.
The clear answer is: knowledge is knowing things, intelligence is being able to work them out. That is why the smartest people on our side in the war were at Bletchley Park. They broke the unbreakable German war codes.
Some of those on the screen, utterly bewildered by a crystal-clear clue, proudly announce that they have just left university, evoking from this household a muttered: “Oh Gawd, is that what we have come to?”
Now it seems I am supported by Tim Firth, principal of Wrekin College in Shropshire. He has gone public with the observation that, since number caps were removed, universities, many of them ex-polytechnics, are cramming their entry lists with any old applicant, regardless of A-level grades, for the money.
Which confirms this old codger’s long-held view that for an employer three years on-the-job apprenticeship is probably worth more than three years boozing, doping and submitting the occasional essay on medieval German poetry (or whatever) for a 2:2 BA, from a redbrick.
Of course, I would say that. Back in 1956 I swopped a chance at Clare, Cambridge, for two years in the RAF and three as a cub reporter with the Eastern Daily Press in Norfolk. So at 22 I got a slot with Reuters, the best news agency in the world.
MOST of us prefer simplicity to complexity and the good news is that in our present election campaign the issues are refreshingly simple. First things first. The populations of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are fewer than 10 million, so about 12 per cent of our overall national figure. Even if they all vote with majorities against the Tories – by no means a certainty – the key is the massive English vote.
So those of us east of Offa’s Dyke and south of the tartan border have only three choices – all of them clear.
You can vote for Moscow about 50 years ago, the days of Yuri Andropov, now reincarnated as Jeremy Corbyn. I remember him well. Terribly frail and mad as a frog. Nearly brought us to ruin in the days of the RYAN emergency. Never mind the details – thumbs were poised above red buttons for a few days and it was a bit sweaty. Today Mikhail Suslov, the communist ideologue, is not in the Kremlin any more but at Labour HQ. If you want an economically destroyed country, that’s your vote. Guaranteed ruin.
Or vote for vassalage government under the rule of Brussels in perpetuity. Beck and call of people we didn’t elect and cannot pronounce. It’s called the Lib Dem party now. Neither liberal nor democratic but never mind. Commanded by the just-arrived Jo Swinson. One hesitates to be ungallant, but thick as a plank is a tribute. Otherwise, nice lady, kind to beggars, which we will all soon be if she or Jezza take over.
There’s only one left. You can vote for Britain. Remember? The place that bore and raised us. Not perfect but on balance not half bad either. Still home, the place where we pay its taxes (after swallowing hard) and abide by its laws (which are sometimes passed by our Parliament). Now synthesised as the Conservative
WHY do big companies, who you are trying to telephone but who have put you “on hold” for hours, and airlines that have you hanging around stationary on a taxi track miles from anywhere, thank you “for your patience”? It’s not patience. It’s enraged helplessness.
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LAST week a brief trip to Hamburg brought me a short moment of schadenfreude. British Airways got me there after a flawless journey bang on time to the minute.
Next day my German interviewer could not show up. He was stuck in Frankfurt. His train was broken down
Party and headed by a jolly fellow with a blond mop where most of us have tufts of hair. Looks like a foregone conclusion unless we have all gone collectively bonkers. But there is a buzzing fly in the unction. A bit of a wide boy called Nigel. Runs a one-man [himself], one-issue outfit whose pointless interference could hand us over to nutcases A and B [further up the page].
There are two phrases we are going to have to remember. “First past the post” is one and “Split the Vote” is the other. FPTP is the voting system
in a siding and Lufthansa was on strike. Like Windsor Davies I thought “Oh dear, how sad. Never mind.” We British used to be like that.
Then on Friday BA got me back to London 90 minutes late on an 80-minute flight. So back to the way it used to be. we use in this country and the candidate with 40 per cent of the vote, though less than half, takes the chalice against those with 30 per cent, 20 per cent, and 10 per cent. Seems unfair, but it works. It gives us a manageable number of parties on the ballot paper and a stable House of Commons, both of which are lusted for worldwide.Well, it used to be, and could do again.
Only when a plausible rogue steps in with a menu that looks attractive but almost exactly mirrors the most popular party and splits their
■ vote in two can an “Oh-my-Gawdwhat-have-I-done?” vote snatch the constituency.
So that is the only peril I perceive that might yet rob us of a return to sound policies inside a once-again sovereign nation. So some national hero is needed to give the wide boy a large bung, a busty blonde and a villa in Cyprus; and persuade his cohorts to return to the party they abandoned for a dream of perfection – in other words a return to reality.
Four weeks to go.Top up the claret, they’ll fly by.