When what you see makes people uncomfortable

I realise that political people are not supposed to be interested in the folklore of fairies, and yet I am. This blog may require me to hand in my political blogger's licence, but so be it. The die is cast.

I have been sent the most extraordinary book, largely because of my last foray into the world of fairy beliefs online, when I unexpectedly found myself quoted in Folklore, the academic journal of the Folklore Society.

That in turn derived from a visit I made to the Society, then in an underground bunker under University College, London, when I was trying to develop a television documentary about fairies some decades ago. I was given an address outside Dublin, the last known contact for the Fairy Investigation Society, which had by then escaped seriously underground.

I wrote to the address and was told they had gone, but they also weren’t interested in talking to me. This was something of a contradiction, and was one of the many reasons I have stayed interested.

Because of what I wrote about that, I’ve been in touch with a folklorist and academic, Simon Young, who has researched the Society and written about its strange history. He has also written the introduction to the newly published book by Marjorie Johnson called Seeing Fairies.

Marjorie Johnson began collecting first-hand accounts of sightings or experiences of what people choose to call fairies in 1955. She was then 44 and she didn’t finish the book until 1997. It was published in German and Italian before she died in 2011, aged 100, so she never lived to see it published in a language she could understand.

It has now been published by Anomalist Books in San Antonio, and we can all read the 500 or so incidents she collected from people. It is true that you don’t need to plough through all 500 to get the general idea, and I haven’t quite finished doing so myself.

But there is a fascinating shift apparent for the folklorist. The incidents span about a century from the 1890s to the 1990s – that’s what comes of writing a book for 60 years – but the vast majority are described as wonderful, shining, uplifting experiences, deep somehow in nature.

The influence of Rudolf Steiner is apparent. So is the influence of J. M. Barrie (some of the fairies have wings).

They are a million miles from the stories of the 1850s and before, when fairies were frightening, troublesome, meddlesome, amoral things which you encountered at your peril. Something has shifted.

But there is another reason for being interested, and it is why I suppose I am. People are relatively open about seeing ghosts, and they seem unable to stop telling people if they have seen UFOs. But they keep quiet if they interpret their peculiar experiences as fairies. These are not socially acceptable oddities to have run across.

To see so many of these experiences side by side makes me realise that stories that fly in the face of accepted reality tend to get suppressed – not just fairies but anything that conflicts with conventional belief or widely accepted scientific paradigms. It takes a lot to make people re-consider.

I am not suggesting that what people say they saw was somehow objectively the case. I am saying that, despite what we might imagine, people’s experience of some kind of natural phenomena they call fairies is actually surprisingly common.

You wouldn’t think it, would you.

What has this got to do with politics? Well, everything, actually. It is all about looking the truth squarely in the face. Noticing what conflicts with your ideas, even if it is uncomfortable to do so.

These skills are equally in surprisingly short supply (cf. the current controversy about Rotherham).

When health professionals threaten parents

I met a woman once with an exhausting history of mental difficulties who was married to a headteacher. Her husband had charge of her medication and she told me she couldn’t help noticing that, when they had any kind of argument, he increased her dose.

I mention this now because it is one of the unwritten rules of public services that people in a pseudo-parental role can often get carried away – muddled about the boundaries between their opinion about the good of the person in their care and an over-riding moral imperative.

That is, anyway, my explanation about why the health authorities – and the Crown Prosecution Service – could have been so mistaken about their arrest warrant for the parents of Ashya King, the boy with the brain tumour.

You might imagine them intervening in the case of feckless parents who didn’t care. But to have the loving parents of a very ill child put in jail in a foreign country, forcing them to abandon their child alone in hospital there, just because of a disagreement about the best treatment – that really takes things to an extreme.

Nick Clegg was the first of the government leaders to speak out on the issue, and he has a sure touch on family issues – as he had here.

There is something about the way that ‘safeguarding’ has been interpreted in public services which is occasionally tyrannical to loving parents who see the world differently to professionals.

And often, bizarrely, the child seems to be the last person to be considered, such is the zeal among the safeguarding industry to punish. Ashya King gets abandoned in hospital. The daughter whose mother lost control, and hit her with a hairbrush – an isolated incident – was removed from her parents. The supposed victims of satanic abuse in the Orkneys (a phantasm, as it turned out) were seized from their beds by police in the middle of the night.

The real problem here is that there is something about the current regime which has strengthened the Philip Larkin tendency in childcare (“they fuck you up, your Mum and Dad”) which is deeply suspicious of everything unofficial and unbiddable, like parents.

It is this tendency which has happily decanted children into care homes, where – as we know now – the real abusers lurked.

There is a Liberal issue here, which is why the Birmingham MP John Hemming has so bravely taken up the cudgels on behalf of children wrongly removed from loving families, often – as it turned out – to meet targets for children taken into care.

This is not a fashionable point of view, but the case of Ashya King is not as isolated as it seems. If you are not articulate, or middle class, you often find yourselves regarding professionals as a threat – and the sad thing is that, sometimes, you would be right to.

Carswell and the prospect of a thoughtful Ukip

Years ago, when I was a reporter in Oxford, I remember a curmudgeonly old Labour councillor who used to put post from his constituents unopened into the bin, if they had the temerity to write to him at his home address.

We’ve come a long way from the days when the public weren’t allowed to attend council meetings, let alone contribute to them.  The fact that we have moved on since the days of Local Government Life on Mars is largely down to the revolution wrought during the 1980s and 1990s by the Lib Dems.

It was their collection of radical devolutionary ideas that provided the necessary edge to the local government revolution.  It was a revolution that was long overdue, and they were the Chosen Instrument of its coming.

I’ve been thinking about this since the news of Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip.  The truth is that I’ve always rather admired Douglas Carswell.  Not that I agreed with him on everything, by any means, but because he was a thinker and a radical (and may still be).

Westminster has shied away from any uncomfortable thinking about the design of money, but Carswell didn’t.  You would find him popping up in a range of less than popular radical causes, because that was where his thinking had taken him.  It was refreshing.

Everyone has been discussing the implications of his defection for the Conservatives, and of course there are some.  But I’ve been wondering about the implications for Ukip and for that Liberal radicalism that once turned local government inside out.

Carswell may well lose the by-election which he is bravely fighting, in which case perhaps this doesn’t apply.  Farage is a shrewd debater, but the party does seem to be short of radical thinkers. 

Quite the reverse, they seem to be populated by venal types from the John Major years, mixed in with a rather exhausting collection of very angry people who hate what they suppose people like me stand for.

Their stance on the future of the UK seems barely to have been thought through at all.  They are obsessed with the tyranny of Europe and apparently blind to the tyranny of the USA or the global trading system as a whole.  They appear to be characterised mainly by what they hate; it isn’t at all clear what they are for.

But Carswell is different.  He is another radical devolutionist.  He is clearly no Liberal, but his commitment to people power is important and far more thoughtful than Farage’s.

And here again, the debate misses what for me is the main point.  Will Ukip target Labour voters?  Quite obviously, they will.  It also seems to be obvious to most political commentators that they are hardly going to target Lib Dem voters.

Yet with people like Carswell, thinking through a powerful potential set of radical democratic ideas, they are nonetheless a major long-term threat to the Lib Dems.

Not perhaps for the votes of the disaffected – they already have those – but for the theft of the main Lib Dem purpose for existing: as a radical democratic force, capable of putting a coherent set of new ideas into practice. 

There is an antidote.  For the Lib Dems to be a good deal more angry themselves, a good deal less safe and to remember the urgent job that needs doing: to renew democracy now that it is so seriously under threat from the two ends of the spectrum - medieval terrorists and technocratic corporate power.

How to avoid war in Europe

I’ve never claimed that this blog provided any kind of authority on foreign affairs. Public services is the main area where I have things to say that I feel might be useful, and even then authority hasn't been exactly my strong point.

But the prospect of some kind of open war between Western Europe and the Russians over the Ukraine has been talked up over the weekend by the Telegraph, and we don’t need to be Telegraph readers to be nervous about that.

I have been putting finishing touches to a book about the Christmas Truce in 1914 (to be published by Endeavour Press) and it has made me more sensitive than I might otherwise have been about the accidental and unexpected outbreak of war.

You don’t have to condone the brutal tactics that Putin has been using in the Ukraine, nor his gargling with the nuclear threat, to understand the basic forces that are causing this escalation – and to realise how counter-productive the European Union’s tactics have been.

It would clearly have been intolerable for Russia to have had a neighbouring state like Ukraine as a member of Nato and the EU. It was where they parked their fleet after all.

Nor is this exactly unreasonable, just as it would have been intolerable in 1962 for the Russians to have put nuclear weapons in Cuba.

But the cold war warriors wanted to push the Russians into an impossible position. They wanted humiliation or over-reaction. They seem to have achieved the latter.

This is only a useful thought if it implied some kind of action now, and it does. You can imagine an agreement that might satisfy the pride of both sides:

1. Russian forces to help disarm the rebels.

2. A legal endorsed agreement the Ukraine would never be a member of Nato or the EU.

3. Ukraine to sign free trade agreements with the EU and with Russia.

4. Russia to pay a reasonable purchase price for the Crimea, along the lines of the Louisiana Purchase.

You could imagine this forming the basis for some kind of settlement, and the Financial Times proposed something along these lines over the weekend – but insisted that the Russians would have to withdraw before the negotiations could begin, which would make it extremely hard to happen at all.

Russian intervention is leading to greater Nato influence in eastern Europe.  It can't be to Putin's benefit.  But it would be insane for us to set up one global confrontation against Russia in the Ukraine and another one on the same side as Russia against ISIS.  It makes no sense.  We need a diplomatic settlement that can save Ukraine from dismemberment.

The perils of factory primary schools

I have some sympathy for the Department of Education.  They have only known for years and years that the population was rising and the birthrate shooting up, and could hardly have had time to plan for it.

And when children have to be found places - and the population hotspots have serious problems already - what can you do but add a new classroom on the remaining green space?  I understand that, but I have rather more sympathy for the local education authorities who have the responsibility for finding places but none of the resources with which to provide them.

It is one of the strange contradictions of the Gove years at the DfE.

Then again, there is a fatal preference even at local level for the quick fix.  Yet then again, maybe they are given little choice.

Unfortunately, the policy will have serious effects - plunging small children in to mega primary schools of over a thousand pupils can often be an alienating experience.  It needn't be, of course, but the greater the size, the better the management and the more inspirational the teachers will need to be.

One of the continuing themes of public service wrong turnings is the way that the professions are often still wedded to size.  It means higher salaries, more status, for a few of them - so the Whitehall tradition of economies of scale is not challenged as it should be.

In fact, what research there has been suggests that hospitals are more expensive, schools and police forces are less effective, the bigger they are.

Of course, this sounds a bit glib. I've altered my view about very small schools in the light of my children's experience.  You can imagine companies, factories, schools, hospitals or doctor’s surgeries that are just too small, or rely too much on one individual. What we have to do here is to strike a balance so that institutions stay human-scale.

That is certainly confirmed by most research into small schools over the past generation, which has challenged the idea that schools are better when they are bigger. It is a wonderful example of the way that 'evidence-based policy' tends paradoxically to confirm rather than challenge prejudices.

They seem to have started the Big Schools push in the USA after the successful Soviet launch of the Sputnik spacecraft. They persuaded themselves that somehow only huge schools could produce enough scientists to compete with the USSR. It is one of the peculiar ways that Soviet thinking filtered into the West.

The first challenge to it came from Roger Barker, describing himself as an environmental psychologist, who set up a statistical research centre in a small town in Kansas after the Second World War and researched the local schools to within an inch of their lives. 

It was his 1964 book Big School, Small School, with his colleague Paul Gump, which revealed that – despite what you might expect – there were more activities outside the classroom in the smaller schools than there were in the bigger schools. There were more pupils involved in them in the smaller schools, between three and twenty times more in fact. He also found children were more tolerant of each other in small schools.

Most of research has been carried out in the United States, rather than the UK, but it consistently shows that small schools (300-800 pupils at secondary level) have better results, better behaviour, less truancy and vandalism and better relationships than bigger schools. They show better achievement by pupils from ethnic minorities and from very poor families. 

But why should smaller schools work better? There is some consensus among researchers about this. The answer is that small schools make human relationships possible. Teachers can know pupils and vice versa. 

“Those of us who were researchers saw the damage caused by facelessness and namelessness,” said the Brown University educationalist Ted Sizer, who ran a five-year investigation into factory schooling in the 1970s. “You cannot teach a child well unless you know that child well.”

More about scale in my book The Human Element.  The point isn't that there are no such things as economies of scale, it is that these are very rapidly overtaken by diseconomies of scale.  There is still a tendency for Whitehall to look at the first and ignore the second.

And, as a report by the BBC suggests, there are still some members of the teaching profession who still think that big schools provide choice when - in practice - they tend to negate choice as they become more inflexible.