I do my best to focus on the content of your statements but I’ve noticed that you have a tendency to go back over territory you’ve already explored. I thought you had already given us the benefit of your thoughts on the use of mobile phones in schools but you must have decided it was so interesting the first time, we’d want to hear about it all over again. On 29 June I read this: “The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, said he wants a ban on mobile phones,” having read almost the same on 7 April.
Geoff Barton, head of the headteachers’ union the Association of School and College Leaders, batted you away. In the spirit of Zoom conversations, I’ll pretend to bring Mr Barton in on this. Geoff began by telling the Guardian: “The education secretary appears to be obsessed with the subject of mobile phones in schools.”
(Yes, Geoff, that’s what I was beginning to think.)
Barton: “In reality, every school will already have a robust policy on the use of mobile phones. It isn’t some sort of digital free-for-all.”
(But, Geoff, Gavin doesn’t seem to know or want to know this.)
Barton: “Frankly, school and college leaders would prefer the education secretary to be delivering an ambitious post-pandemic recovery plan and setting out how he intends to minimise educational disruption next term, rather than playing to backbenchers on the subject of behaviour.”
(Ah, but good behaviour is what government ministers tell us to do but not do themselves.)
Let us muse on the tone deafness of you lecturing schools on “behaviour”, Mr Williamson, when some of your colleagues so obviously need it more.
But then you’ve also contributed to the world of education with a new national anthem. Haven’t we got one? I know people have toyed with this before: Billy Connolly thought the Archers’ signature tune would be good. I thought a simple, easy-to-sing, easy-to-remember one would be the Greenwich time signal. We could all get behind beeping six times. But this new British anthem is not instead of the national anthem; it’s in addition to it.
Your department encouraged schools to take part in One Britain One Nation day on 25 June, when our children would sing it. The campaign website urged schools to “do the following as a MUST please”: encourage every child to clap for a minute to recognise and pay tribute to all those who helped during Covid and also sing the OBON Day 2021 anthem”.
You called this project “amazing” and said it was “incredibly important that schools take part”. In fact, you indicated that you had been pro-active about this: “We have asked schools to participate, and I am happy to reiterate the endorsement of the project from the dispatch box and to encourage them to play their part in it.”
Unfortunately, you hadn’t noticed that children in what are still British schools in Scotland wouldn’t actually be in school to sing it, having finished for the summer, and then the Welsh government pointed out that education is devolved and said it was not “engaged” with the project.
So not “One Britain, One Nation” after all.
Which brings us to the words of national anthem 2. It urges us to think of Britain as “one great team”, a metaphor that unfortunately draws our attention to sporting teams. Aside from the Olympics, there’s not much evidence of British teams. Even rugby has now recognised that calling the Lions “British” was a decades-long misnomer (now rectified), as some of the players come from the Republic of Ireland.
The first verse tells us, “We’ve opened our doors”. Well, historians say, sometimes we have and sometimes we haven’t. Immigration acts have been around since at least as early as the Aliens Act of 1905, and the whole purpose of them is to close doors to some. For example, though governments love to celebrate this country’s welcome to Kindertransport children, this often overlooks the fact that many of those children never saw their parents again. “Our doors” weren’t open to them.
The verse goes on: “We celebrate our differences …”
Do we? Is that how you would describe the “hostile environment”, the Windrush scandal, and the government-led mocking and downgrading of multiculturalism?
The verse closes with “United for ever, never apart”. I suppose this line has the advantage of teaching children the meaning of the word “hubris”. The Scottish referendum vote was pretty close and are you really sure that Northern Ireland will always be part of the UK?
Bizarrely, you’ve given your imprimatur to a song that talks in the second verse about “different races”. Surely there is no room in schools to have children singing such unscientific tosh. Why would you encourage them to do so? The American Society of Human Genetics has said the very idea of “race” is a lie, as reported also in Scientific American several years ago. It said: “The Human Genome Project has confirmed that the genomes found around the globe are 99.9% identical in every person. Hence, the very idea of different ‘races’ is nonsense.”
After this, the song fades away into repeated exhortations to unity, greatness and strength. It’s all very muscular isn’t it? For me, one of the “great” things that’s happened recently is how the NHS (and allied scientists) – using minds, hearts, energy, love, training and science – has coped with a terrible pandemic, invented a vaccine and delivered it.
Should we ever need national anthem 3, perhaps it could invoke care for one another instead.
Yours, Michael Rosen
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