When MPs don't engage their brains

Iain Dale is reporting that Sandra Gidley has called for competitive sports to be banned from schools. Apparently on the basis that someone must lose.

This is absolute nonsense. We all engage in many things which we could lose at, we need to learn this and how to cope with losing (and winning).
Rather than banning competitive sport, why not encourage children to do their best, praise them for that and encourage all children to find what they are good at. Some will be better at sport than others, that is natural. Others are more academic, others best with art or crafts or mechanical things. This is natural and healthy.

To isolate children from competition risks damaging the very foundations of a liberal society, the recognition of the differences between people and the enourmous value of those differences. Also the function of competition in driving progress. Without competition we would be static at the very least.

If this stems from hating sport at school, well I hated it. Not because I was poor at sports, which for the most part I was, but because of the crass nature of some of the teachers, who were little more than bullies (I'm thinking of a certain ex-England cricketer in particular). The better teachers did not get annoyed with you for failure, they got annoyed with you for not trying. I also didn't like the cold in winter, or to be honest, exerting myself. This has nothing to do with competition, the competitive aspects were often the best. They bound us together in houses, teams or as a school and helped foster a sense of community.

This sort of utterance from an MP is the equivalent of Tory MPs muttering on about Europe or sexual morality or religion, they reinforce stereotypes about the party, which are simply not true for most of the party. They are singularly unhelpful. This will get us classed as the loony-left (the stereotype of the sort of teacher who would call for this has to be the lefty, feminist, misandronist, NUT member, primary school teacher, not the image we want for our party).

Cheese and the EU

This story in the Telegraph is causing a great deal of fuss amongst the Eurosceptic and Euronihilist bloggers.

I am going to agree with them, it is a scandal. It is illiberal. It goes against the very principles of the Liberal Democrats.

Where I will disagree is the response that should be made. The calls to leave the EU are fueled by this sort of story. Those of us who support many of the concepts behind the EU are left stuck if we don't tackle this sort of thing. The silence of the pro-EU lobby at the moment only benefits those who want us out of the Union.

What should our response be? It should not be to ignore it, or just repeat, parrot fashion, the mantra of pro-Europeanism.

We must tackle problems like this. They run counter to what we want the EU to be, they show the current problems that beset the EU, the over bureaucratisation, the unaccountability, the power grabbing by the centre. Our government's response it supine, it takes badly drafted legislation, and then interprets it to make it even worse.

We cannot sit back and let Europe descend even further into the mess its becoming, inaction and blind support only serve to undermine the ideals of a Liberal Union of European Nations.
The Liberal Democrats should be vocal on Europe, we should not hide from the issue. What do we want from Europe? Why is membership in our interests? What can we do to change it? Where is it going wrong?

Our failure to engage in the debate over Europe will lead to the eventual withdrawal from the EU and further isolationism and protectionism. We must be true friends to Europe, speaking out on its behalf, but not supine acquiescence, and criticising the failures and errors.

Press releases

Like many readers, I receive emails from the LibDems with press releases. Sometimes I have to cringe, sometimes I'm indifferent. Yesterday's batch however contained two press releases which spark some interest in me.

One was the release about school trips. Although I react with scepticism to calls for new legislation, something needs to be done about this sort of thing. Unfortunately I think the school trips issue is a symptom of much deeper problem, which is the increasing infantalisation of people and the increasingly risk averse society.
Several things have helped this trend along, from government intervention, particularly in welfare leading to a sense of helplessness and wanting someone else to do everything for you, to the ever present Health and Safety guidelines. The Health and Safety aspect is particularly insidious, as despite some sensible legislation the Health and Safety Executive is a bureaucracy which by its nature seeks to create work for itself, thus coming up with more and more rulings. The effect of this plethora of regulation, combined with more and more myths about the regulation leads to people being afraid to act in a normal manner and do things which are safe 99.99999999% of the time, with any accident simply beyond their control.
Many others have covered this topic, and I'm sure you don't need to look very far to see stupid regulations.

The second press release is from Ed Davey in which he calls for financial education. This is something I called for whilst at school, we had the pointless 'Personal and Social Education' periods which were a waste of everyone's time. Instead of watching another poorly made video on bullying or whatever the pet topic was, why didn't we learn something about finance? After all, we were all due to be thrown into the big wide world...
This was rejected by others who preferred to do nothing for 40 minutes, but I think I would have benefited from some financial education.
Its astounding to me that something which nearly everyone in this country has to deal with is all but ignored at school, and most people have to go stumbling through life without much of an idea of what finance means to them. No wonder we have things like the Farepak collapse, people do not understand the risks of investment of any sort.