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Okay, so it's that time of year and the arguments are going on about whether A levels have got easier or harder since I/we/whoever did them.

However, in the discussion about whether to change the system, it doesn't matter whether they are easier or harder, they are simply not, it would appear, "fit for purpose" to use a favourite government phrase. Not "fit for purpose" in the sense that it is getting extremely difficult to differentiate between those with high grades and those with really high grades.

It shouldn't matter whether those high grades are being achieved because people are working harder, being better educated, meriting higher scores, or because the assessment is less rigourous allowing more people to pass them more easily. The fact that there is a tighter bunching of grades (and also partly because there are a whole load more higher education establishments now vying for the same pool of students), means that there needs to be a new way of defining the achievements, the rounded academic ability and potential that different institutions, employers and others will need and how to assess them.

Better I say to make a break in such a case; don't pretend that whatever develops is the same qualification as I did twenty odd years ago. It's no value judgement to say it needs replacing though.

Even back then, I was royally screwed by demands that I choose just three complimentary subjects. I started off wanting to study Physics (see my other comments on sciences today) but wanted to combine it with languages, so I chose English, German, Physics and Maths (pure maths was outside the "options" so you could take it as a fourth in those days when even the best generally only did three A levels). There was an outcry and I was soon - well it took half a school year or one quarter of my A level education - talked round to English, Latin and History because they were more consistent - even though I hadn't even done History amongst my twelve O levels (but had A grades in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and a B in Further Maths AO Level) because I didn't particularly enjoy it though I am rediscovering its enticements now thanks to folk like David Starkey, Niall Ferguson and Adam Hart-Davies. A Baccalaureate type mix and match qualification would no doubt have suited this polymath much better.

Technorati Tags: education

...that "government is the problem", or because anti-regulator Alan Greenspan named Ayn Rand as his biggest political influence, it's time you did some reading.

Each year the Libertarian Alliance awards the Chris R Tame Memorial Prize (named for the late founder of the Libertarian Alliance) for the best essay on a title chosen by its Director, Dr Sean Gabb, and this year's winner was announced this weekend at the Libertarian Alliance annual conference at the National Liberal Club - more on which in upcoming posts.

The Libertarian Alliance is the biggest grouping of the broad church known as Libertarianism in the UK, and this year's essay title was set just ahead of the main round of recent financial market troubles but focussing on the common idea that Libertarians would demolish the state, leaving what we currently know as big corporate capitalism to run amok. The full brief for contestants ran as follows:

Essay Title: "Can a Libertarian Society be Described as 'Tesco minus the State'?"

Explanatory Note

Many socialists and conservatives regard libertarians as cheerleaders for big business. Our belief in free enterprise is understood as support for the bigger, and therefore the more successful, corporations - General Motors, Microsoft, HSBC, Tesco, and so forth - and for an international financial system centred on the City of London.

Some libertarians are happy to be so regarded. They dislike the way in which big government provides opportunities for big business to acquire privileges that shelter it from competition. Even so, they believe that a world without government, or a world with much less government, would be broadly similar in its patterns of enterprise to the world that we now have. It would be much improved, but not fundamentally dissimilar.

Other libertarians disagree. They regard big business as fundamentally a creation of big government. Incorporation laws free entrepreneurs from personal risk and personal responsibility, and allow the growth of large business organisations that are bureaucratically managed. These organisations then cartellise their markets and externalise many of their costs. The result is systematic distortion of market behaviour from the forms it would take without government intervention. These libertarians often go further in their analysis by denying the legitimacy of intellectual property rights and ownership rights in land beyond what any individual can directly use.

Where do you stand in this debate? Are you broadly comfortable with a global capitalism that is raising billions of people from starvation towards affluence. Or are you a radical with a vision of a society that has never yet been tried and is as alien and even frightening to most people as anything promised by the Marxists.

You tell us.

No go and read the winning essay. Congratulations go to Keith Preston, for his entry entitled "Free enterprise: the antidote to corporate plutocracy"

But if you are too lazy to read the whole lot (c 3000 words - so no more than one of my usual posts!), it concludes...

"An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries,peoples’ banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times. If the expansion of the market economy, specialization, the division of labor, industrialization and technological advancements can bring about the achievements of modern societies in eradicating disease, starvation, infant mortality and early death, one can only wonder what a genuine free enterprise system might achieve, and would have already achieved were it not for the scourge of statism and the corresponding plutocracy. "

Now, you may still not be convinced that "government is the problem", but do us the decency of not conflating "deregulation" with "evil right wing global corporatism" and blaming "libertarianism" for the great big pile of dog-doo the state and economy is in right now. Especially those of you who claim to be Liberals, fellow travelers of Libertarianism for the past 150 years.

Well, I was getting a bit worried. Royal Mail never seem to deliver to my door, and despite a great big notice to the contrary continue to deliver my mail to the adjoining student flat to which I have no access. So only last night, when the students next door decided presumably to have a bit of a clear out, did I get my leadership ballot paper, together with a final demand to have my flu jab on 15th November, two months of Prospect magazine, my Co-op dividend vouchers (too late I think now to have my divvie turned over to the Community Fund), and the calling notice for the Headington and Marston Lib Dem branch AGM on 28th November (so my apologies are too late, but rest assured as candidate for Headington Hill and Northway next year I'm not completely disinterested in the local branch!). Grrr!

So, along with a stern letter to the local Royal Mail delivery office my completed ballot paper will go out in today's post. I noticed incidentally, I'm sure it must have been discussed to death at the time, but while I was looking for an address for my delivery office, I noticed that there's new speed limits being introduced courtesy of Brussels on 1st January such that all vehicles over 3.5 tonnes are restricted to 56 mhp. What's that all about then? Can anyone imagine how frustrating it's going to be trying to drive up a motorway when Norbert Dentressangle going 56mph is trying to pass Eddie Stobart going at 55mph? This measure will, I predict, cause more deaths than it might be aimed at preventing.

Still, no doubt this means that my ballot paper will be flown from Oxford to ERS in a private Post Office jet or something. Or just arrive three weeks on Saturday after going by road as the truck driver will have to take several days off at High Wycombe for exceeding his legal hours at the wheel.

And yes, I have voted for Chris. I'm a bit confused at this stage of the contest though - at the beginning many people were talking up Nick because of his presentation skills and energy, and yet each time there's another hustings or radio or TV debate it seems that more of the same people feel that Chris has done better on both counts. So I'm no longer clear who is voting for whom and why, frankly. But I continue to say that for me, "it's the economy", and Chris's background on that is key to me. Neither appear liberal enough for me, but that doesn't matter too much - I've got plans for changing that!

Personally, I think we'll rue the day we put presentation before the economy, if that's how it turns out next weekend.

For some reason I have Oliver Kamm's blog in my daily reading list. I have no idea why - I don't like his style, his politics or his opinions most of the time, but today he has a go at Chris Huhne about that nuclear issue. He says, at the end, that he's "doubtful that the Lib Dem contenders have thought much about this issue beyond their internal party positioning, and I wouldn't trust them anywhere near this country's security policies."

I think that's just wrong. Kamm picks on one word in Huhne's article on Trident..."independent". He says that the Trident system is independent to us - that we bought it once and for all from the Yanks (and saved a whole load of money because we did buy existing technology from elsewhere) and could use it independently. I disagree - I think we are dependent on the Yanks for maintaining the missile system - only the launch platforms, our nuclear submarine fleet, are ours.

Now all of this is a slight side-show. At the moment I cannot conceive of a situation in which the UK might be tempted to initiate an independent, unilateral launch of ICBMs. But if we did, and it was over a cause the Yanks did not agree with us on, would we find that "our" missile system was truly independent? I don't know, but for me all this misses the basic point, and one that Kamm simply sweeps under the carpet. Chris wants, if we can't negotiate multilateral complete disarmament, a different system because the threats today are different. Kamm seems to suggest that buying a system for the next forty years makes such a question irrelevant - the old threats may have returned in that time so we'd be back to needing a system like Trident.

I assume here the question is whether we want submarine launched long-range Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile nukes. And this is where we diverge. The threat is different. We have the existing system for a particular type of threat - that of massed ranks of opposing missiles targeting our cities and mainland installations where it is a good thing that we have our missiles offshore and moving around, albeit slowly, so that in a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario we can still launch when all our land based facilities are reduced to radioactive rubble. The US can have land based Minuteman missiles because they're on the other side of the planet from what was the main threat - the Soviet Union - and can be sure to be able to fire a few off before the USSR's nukes reach them.

Neither are appropriate for the type of threats we now have. Far more useful to us would be the sort of thing the Greenham peace camp was meant to prevent - nuclear armed cruise type missiles that are far more flexible as to launch platform and scenario, so called tactical nukes. Personally I can't see again a reason why we would use such creatures either. Emerging nuclear states have to have two technological breakthroughs to produce weapons that might threaten us or ours - the nuclear warhead and the long range launch platform. We've seen how claims of Saddam's ability to reach Cyprus were found completely untrue, we know that even North Korea's missiles were far from stable. We're more likely to see terrorist launched nukes come in the shape of a suitcase - ground detonated by timer - which no nukes of our own are going to be able to counter.

I am a unilateralist - no doubt someone whom Mr Kamm thinks a lilly livered coward out of touch with the world and its threats. But even if we cannot persuade the rest of the world to get rid of nukes once and for all at the next round of talks, I think the better deterrence nowadays would be a truly independent, multi-platform, tactical device rather than ICBMs designed for a particular cold war scenario of roughly matched opponents and "push button warfare".

Well done to Iain Dale on News 24 reviewing the Dead Tree Press tonight. He picked up on the ridiculous story of Andrew Phillips, the Lib Dem peer who wants to start taking things easy at 67 but has run foul of the house rules that say you can never really retire. You can take leave of absence but nobody's quite sure it seems whether that would reduce your party's presence or not and allow an extra place to be allocated next time there were a raft of party appointments.

These are of course the same rules that prevent people like Emma Nicholson from making an open decision about whether to stick with Europe or the Lords under the ban on holding a dual mandate - sitting in a national as well as a European legislatures.

Blair indeed promised to have this particular problem addressed for that very reason - so peers could resign to run for the European Parliament if they wanted to.

Whilst I completely agree with Iain on the necessity to elect the House of Lords, and as soon as possible, it's a bit ironic that the story that prompted it was Andrew Phillips, who takes a contrary line to party policy and would rather see the house remain pretty much wholly appointed as I understand it.

Technorati Tags: electoral reform, house of lords, politics