Comments on: Community cohesion: Kelly falls at the first

By: Ban on violent internet porn? « Not Saussure

Ban on violent internet porn? « Not Saussure — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 18:41:56 +0000

[...] Footnote: Chicken Yoghurt has some good remarks, as always, on this government’s idea ofÃ‚Â consultation. Posted in Politics, civil liberties, UK | [...]

By: Cedalion

Cedalion — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 10:07:58 +0000

Ah Northern Ireland. Reading this article brought some Primary School memories charging back. They thought a good way of getting us to stop us cutting each other’s throats was to get us involved in Cross-Community quizzes. You had 4 teams made up from the local schools, two from a Protestant school, two from a Catholic school. Then the audience was provided by your classmates. I ended up be the captain for our team, we did fairly well, even though I was humiliated for answering “Des O’Connor” to the question “Who plays Indiana Jones?” (Hey, guess if you don’t know, and at 10 I still hadn’t seen any of those superb movies.)

Anyway, the penultimate quiz was held in the local Convent school. We didn’t win. For the next 30 minutes after the quiz my friends ran up and down the corridors of the school singing the Sash and the Billy Boys. With some inkling of why we were there, I embarrassedly ran about trying to stop them, pleading with them to stop. Didn’t they know they were in a Catholic school? “Exactly, its full of fenians!” If you are going to do inter-community, don’t feed the kids Coke and Wotsits beforehand. Thats my advice for free.

There was a sequel 3 years later at the Secondary School version. Tiebreak question, “What R was the the bird that Noah first released from the ark.” My Catholic colleague beat me to the buzzer… “Robin.” I promptly started strangling him until in the interests of intercommunity harmony they let us through anyway.

By: Michael Z

Michael Z — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 01:13:42 +0000

This probably goes without saying, but the whole “Let’s have a debate”-mantra (much like that Big Conversation-thing Blair started back in the days of yore – remember that?) is basically New Labour speak for “I will say that there might be a feeble possibility of a debate, even though it’ll never happen, just to give you the impression that I give a toss what you think when in actual fact I would prefer to ignore and rule you like the autocratic, despotic little shit that I am”. This applies to Blair as much as it does to Reid and Kelly and all the other New Labour automatons.

And as prejudiced and biased as this may come across, I am simply basing this on their actions and words (or rather how they never quite seem to match) throughout the last nine years.

By: Steve G

Steve G — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 17:31:29 +0000

At least in England — it’s clearly not the case in Northern Ireland, and I don’t know about Wales or Scotland — the ‘apartheid of faith schools’ to which you refer isn’t so much a problem of the schools being unwilling to take children from families that aren’t members of the appropriate church as it is their using this as a way of dealing with their oversubscribed admissions lists. Since, rightly or wrongly, many parents perceive them as being a better option for their children regardless of the faith concerned, they try to control admissions by limiting a number of places to children whose parents are members of the church rather than ones who’ve been able to afford the local house prices, inflated as they are by being in the catchment area of a popular school.

One solution, since there’s apparently a greater demand — for whatever reason — for places at schools run by the C of E and the Catholic Church, at least, than there are places, there’s one very obvious solution: have more schools run by these two organisations so they don’t need to select students by whatever criteria. Somehow, though, I don’t think that’s the solution for which you’re looking.

By: Bloggerheads

Bloggerheads — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 08:53:02 +0000

Meanwhile……

Chicken Yoghurt – Community cohesion: Kelly falls at the first Europhobia – The politics of hope (but mostly fear) qwghlm.co.uk – Rise of the spineless fuckwits BSSC – Politice Craig Murray – “Murder in Samarkand” confiscated by Luton airport securit…