community

When will I become patriotic?

Come, love of country, fill my heart…

I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag on the car during the World Cup). So I really don’t want to sound like one of those annoying people who can celebrate Britain but only to the extent that it is mixed and polyglot (“food from every continent all on one street!” and so on). I also will not reject patriotism as some kind of moral defect (something for ‘gammons’ or Telegraph readers) or a false consciousness (a malign by-product of capitalism). Patriotism is a profound and probably necessary effect of birth and upbringing and rootedness.

But I don’t have it. It is, from my soul, absent. What am I to do? Will it one day just arrive? Will it land, eventually, on wings or something, in my vicinity, announce itself and then become part of my outlook? So that I might bristle appropriately when my nation is defamed or attacked? Proudly assert Britain’s superiority in matters military, economic and cultural?

I’m sorry to be flippant. This is a serious question. I’m an ordinary human being. I was brought up in a working class household in the approximate middle of England. I’ve enjoyed the benefits of living here for over sixty years. I went through the state education system like everyone else (well, most of us), my loyalty to the NHS is solid. Is there something wrong with me?

For all sorts of reasons I’m receptive to patriotism. But where is it? What has stopped it from lodging in my psyche? What do I lack? I obviously don’t buy any of the really dumb explanations for this sort of thing – I’m not more intelligent than the average patriot. I’m not better-informed or more open to the world or whatever. I have approximately the same intellectual assets as everyone else.

It’s obviously plausible that my broadly left-wing upbringing has brought this about. Mum and dad were both trade unionists, Labour Party members. But dad was in the army reserves ffs. Mum came to Britain from Ireland at 17 specifically to join the women’s auxilliary (ATS). Dad would sob through remembrance services and parades (he’d go out of his way to see a parachute display or a restored Spitfire). And I’ve inherited a lot of this. I’m not hostile in any way to nation or people or land. So where is my patriotism? I’m getting old. It’s overdue.

And I guess the reason I’m interested is because we’re now deep into a period of weaponised patriotism, of furious patriotic denouncements of every category of disloyal behaviour and beliefs. And, of course, of hateful racism premised on a lack of ‘assimilation’ or respect for British customs and norms. I look at the politicians and commentators whose patriotism is prominent, public, proudly asserted and I wonder, what is actually different about us? What caused this fervent love for nation to take root in you and not in me? Can it really just be our somewhat different political perspectives? That seems implausible. Political differences are – by necessity – essentially intellectual, superficial – not deep-rooted, not determined by my place of birth or my connection to this nation. Or did politics somehow short-circuit my patriotism? Divert its energy into something else?

I wonder if my 1990s entrainment with ‘global Britain’, with Blairism (and the tail end of Big Bang-era Thatcherism) – with technocratic politics and end-of-history pragmatism – has in some way neutralised any patriotism that did exist. Did the constant, strident assertion that there was no alternative to the globalised outlook leave me high and dry? A hollowed-out, unpatriotic shell? Likewise, did my later interest in internationalist politics – the whole idea of the Imagined Community and the general disdain for things national, local, parochial – innoculate me in some way?

And is this something I could work on? Should I just make more effort? Study the great patriotic texts? Find an online course? Is there a store of patriotism, a source that I could access? A place to go to tap into my lost patriotism? I’m serious about this too. I never decided not to be patriotic, never consciously rejected it or worked to exclude it. It’s just not there. Is this, in itself, a defect? Is there something wrong with me?

Anyway, I’m ready. If it does arrive I’ll greet it happily. I don’t presently own a flag-pole but there’s room for one out the front.

School governors. Representative or professional. Choose one.

Last week I spent a few hours floor-walking at a Fair Field parents’ evening, drumming up interest in our parent governor vacancies (I’m chair of govs and a parent myself). I love this bit of the job. You learn a huge amount and there are always surprises and insights. Thinking about it afterwards, the parents I spoke to fell into four groups:

Instant enthusiasm. Done it before, already doing it somewhere else, definitely think about it.
Curious. Aware of our existence, considered it before but never tried it. Might have a go.
No idea. A handful of parents didn’t know we existed, thought we were some kind of external body or had no idea parents could be represented. Some communication to be done here, evidently (makes note). In this group, also, were parents from foreign education systems or with English as a second language.
Most interesting group: parents who knew the governors existed, knew that parents were represented but had ruled themselves out: “left school too early”, “not good enough for that.”, “you wouldn’t want me” (actual quotes). One parent thought her dyslexia would rule her out. Included here are parents who think they don’t have time: “I’ve already got two jobs” was common, so was “I’m a single parent.” Difficult to argue with that, knowing how much time is needed.

We’ll get enough candidates to fill our two vacancies later this term and I hope this bit of outreach will have helped people understand what we do, who we are, why we exist.

There’s a tension here, though, which can only get worse, as the latest round of reforms takes effect. We want to broaden representation, get a wider range of stakeholders involved, make the governing body look a more like the parent body. But we also want to tighten things up, make things more professional, make our contribution more strategic, more effective. When filling governor vacancies, we instinctively want to recruit the kind of managers, lawyers and marketing people we’re going to need if we decide to go for academy status, for instance. And we want governors who need minimal support to get going, who know about how committees work and so on.

So can we do both? Can we bring in inexperienced governors who may lack confidence and the skills we need and hope they can make a strategic contribution? Or should we try to shamelessly target the people we need and worry a bit less about being representative? Either way, the current way of doing things doesn’t seem ideal: there are hundreds of thousands of governor vacancies in Britain and there’s a shortage of strategic skills almost everywhere. These are serious questions: Mr Gove wants governors to lift their game and Ofsted are paying more attention to governance than ever.

So could we try a different approach? If trying to be both representative and professional is too much, how about separating the two functions, concentrating on beefing up the strategic usefulness of the governors and handling the representation of parents and community differently? What if we set up an elected ‘parent panel’ of perhaps a dozen enthusiastic parents whose job would be to voice parents’ concerns, examine the governors’ decisions (and the school’s data) and bring the school’s leadership new ideas? (Google suggests that some schools already have parent panels…).

We’d still have to provide for the statutory representation of parents, of course, and our ‘panel’ couldn’t take on any of the legal responsibilities of governors but I think this approach might actually expand representation, make us more transparent and quite possibly improve our decisions. This is a half-baked idea, not a finished proposal. And I haven’t tested it with my fellow governors or with anyone else for that matter so I’d welcome your thoughts on this in the comments. Have you tried something like this? What have you learnt?

Magazine masterclass

Right, I’ve been very busy with my new thing: I’m blogger in residence at the BBC. Honestly. It’s really cool. Follow my comings- and-goings at the special blog I’ve set up for the purpose at commonplatform.co.uk (the feed’s here). More about the whole thing here later…

In the meantime, I just want to share with you a small masterclass in how to run a web site and talk to your customers if you’re a magazine publisher. Mark Ellen and his team over at Word Magazine are in a tough market up against some pretty big-and-ugly competitors and their web site is full of lessons on how to make that work to your advantage.

Check out this brilliant forum thread about subscription prices, in which senior staff, including publisher David Hepworth, make funny and honest contributions that must have influenced the opinions of the complainers who started the thread and probably even sold a few subs. It’s the kind of thing that would almost certainly have been supressed or ignored by an EMAP or a NatMags but which the tiny, independent Word turns to its advantage. Perfect. 10 out of 10. Go to the top of the class.

I also really like the very simple video promo for the current issue that’s on the home page at the moment. One take, no edits, shot in the office, hosted on YouTube—brilliant. (declaration: I write the odd bit for Word, including this piece about memory and the Internet and an earlier one about Wikipedia and I’ve got a piece about why futurology’s rubbish in the current issue—so I’m probably a bit partial).