Cambridge University goes on the 'avoid' list

Should university fees be paid to institutions which support censorship? The case of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian academic whose invitation to a visiting fellowship Cambridge was withdrawn via a tweet, highlights again the erosion of free speech in our supposed centres of academia. The vast majority of universities have restrictions speech or publications. At the acceptable end, I'd happily back anyone who didn't want sales of the Sun on their premises (until recently I'd have said the same about the Mail, it has moderated a bit under a new editor). At the unacceptable end is the 'no platforming' of speakers whose views are too difficult for tender liberal ears to listen to.

Universities are places of learning. Part of learning is working out how to defend your own ideas, and to critique those of other people. We have anti-terror laws to police the worst excesses of hate speech and incitement to violence. But hearing a view which makes you feel uncomfortable is not the same. As a Christian, I heard lots of things said at my university, many by lecturers, which I found offensive, insensitive or just difficult to hear. I even went to a debating society which featured Jacob Rees-Mogg and lost a robust debate on whether capital punishment should be brought back (you can guess which side he was on). But I'm glad we could debate it. It helped me think through my own position, and the arguments I used to back it up.

In a few years time I may become a 'customer' of one of these universities, what with being a parent of children at secondary school. I'm already composing a mental list of the ones I don't want to finance, if this is what they are going to do with the money. Cambridge has become a house of fools if it thinks the best way to advance learning is to no platform one of the leading public thinkers around. It's on the list.

School tests create surge in new medical conditions

In recent weeks teachers have noticed a number of new illnesses among their students. Little is known about many of these diseases, but there is a strong suspicion they are linked to government testing. Here is the latest list of new disorders:

Adverbal diarrhoea

Burst apostrophe

Checking pox - spontanous outburst of pimples occurring when a student notices with 1 minute to go that they've misread the question

Compound fracture - inability to hold 2 parts of a word together. Most common in teenagers.

Conjunctiontivitis

Consonantipation - usually due to a blockage in the vowels

Tense future - usually afflicts children the week before SATS tests

Homophonia - fear of words which sound the same. There is a related strain occurring in foreign languages, which is an irrational fear of two nouns of the same gender occurring too close to each other in a sentence.

Severe inflection: this could take the form of Phonemonia, or Pluralisy, which usually affects several parts of the body at once

Passive tense - the student is so stressed they are unable to get out of bed

Past tense - Ofsted was last week

Possessive Compulsive Disorder - someone who finds it difficult to share a pencil during an exam.

Prolapsed pronoun

Punctuated ulcer - in extreme cases, the patient ends up in a comma.

Many of these seem to be mutations of previously harmless bits of grammar. Kept in isolation, or small groups, grammar is benign, but large swarms of grammatical terms seem to exhibit different behaviour, and have a toxic effect on those using them. The misplaced apostrophe has always been capable, on it's own, of exciting high levels of stress and rage, but this is the first time we have seen such dramatic effects in other sections of the English language.

It's our problem-free/ Academy/ Hakuna MATata

Under new freedoms given under the governments Academies programme, Hakuna MATata* (motto 'no worries for the rest of your grades'), has just been launched. The curriculum is based entirely on songs from well-known musicals, arranged into multi-disciplinary houses. For example

House of Bjorn and Benny: Languages and Life Skills
Does Your Mother Know?  - Internet Safety and Stranger Danger
Money, Money, Money - Counting and commerce
Take a Chance on Me/Winner Takes it All - The Dangers of Gambling
SOS - Using the emergency services
I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do - Marriage and relationships
Voulez-Vous - French
Mamma Mia - Italian
Chiquitita - Mexican perhaps? anyone know?
Honey, Honey - Diet and Nutrition
I Believe in Angles - Trigonometry, Spelling

House of Javert - Teamwork, Health and Wellbeing, Spatial awareness
I Dreamed a Dream/Who Am I - Philosophy, Personal Vision Statement
Master of the House - Discipline, Leadership
Do You Hear the People Sing - Hearing Test (done annually)
At the End of the Day - Telling the time
Bring Him Home - Orienteering
Red and Black - Colours
Castle on a Cloud - Construction Skills
Empty Chairs at Empty Tables - Leaving the Classroom the way you found it

House of Simba - Science and Nature
Circle of Life - Biology
Shadowland - Light, Physics
Hakuna Matata - Managing Stress
I Just Can't Wait To Be King - optional for people who choose the 'being famous' subject stream

Sadly, plans for a House of Cats are on hold due to the tutors annoying habit of wandering off at all hours of day or night to teach at other schools. Old Deuteronomy will now be an introductory module to Jesus Christ Superstar, the RE stream.

These plans have been closely guarded by superinjunction, until the publication of the latest research on attainment in academies. As the above curriculum is likely to have no positive impact on attainment in SATS, it meets the academisation criteria for most schools.

*MAT = Multi Academy Trust. 

Broken News: Hey, Media, Leave Them Heads Alone

ITV are dangling some outrage bait this morning with another story based on a school newsletter. This follows a nearby school last week which hit first the local, then the national papers, and a story about pyjama-wearing parents at a school in the North-East. All 3 stories were based on newsletters for parents, sent home with children.

As a parent, communication with the school is key, in both directions. It would be a real problem if the school didn't feel it could talk honestly with me about our children, and the life of the school. Headteachers around the country will be looking at this latest media bandwagon and wondering if it's still possible to communicate with parents, without their words ending up quoted in the Daily Mail and fed to the social media outrage machine.

Parents with an issue over what a school has said need to take it up with the school, not leak it to the press. Using the media to settle scores undermines the parent-school relationship for everyone. School newsletters are for the school community, they are not press releases. If there is a serious problem, then there are proper channels to go through.

Local media have a responsibility here too - in the short term, you might get a bit more web traffic, but at what cost? Not every attention-grabbing headline needs to be published. It clearly suits ITV to sex the story up: head 'demands' - really? 'apparent bid to boost attendance' - nudge nudge! Conflict generates clicks, harmony doesn't. But web traffic and sales data aren't a reliable moral compass.

And for any complaint, Jesus has some good advice: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ 'School and Parent work together' won't make any headlines in your local paper (more's the pity), but then that's not the point is it?

Poverty and Life Chances: Camerons Third Way?

"....There are 4 vital, social insights that I believe must anchor our plan for extending life chances.

First, when neuroscience shows us the pivotal importance of the first few years of life in determining the adults we become, we must think much more radically about improving family life and the early years.

Second, when we know the importance not just acquiring knowledge, but also developing character and resilience there can be no let-up in our mission to create an education system that is genuinely fit for the 21st century.

Third, it’s now so clear that social connections and experiences are vitally important in helping people get on.

So when we know about the power of the informal mentors, the mixing of communities, the broadened horizons, the art and culture that adolescents are exposed to, it’s time to build a more level playing field with opportunity for everyone, regardless of their background.

And fourth, when we know that so many of those in poverty have specific, treatable problems such as alcoholism, drug addiction, poor mental health we’ve got to offer the right support, including to those in crisis.

This is what I would call a life cycle approach – one that takes people from their earliest years, through schooling, adolescence and adult life.

And I believe if we take the right action in each of these 4 areas combined, with all we are doing to bring our economy back to health, we can make a significant impact on poverty and on disadvantage in our country."

Once everyone has recovered from David Bowie's death, it might be worth paying a little more attention to another David, the Prime Minister, and his speech today. The remarks above were prefaced by a brief critique of left and right 'solutions' to poverty based on economics. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the speech & strategy was written by the Centre for Social Justice (beware, slow website). 

Some of the policy announcements include:

• extension of relationship support
• financial education in schools, expanding a pilot CofE scheme designed to help children develop a positive attitude to saving and a responsible attitude to debt. 
• expanding the 'Troubled Families' programme to another 400,000 families
• a stronger focus on parenting skills in early years, incentivising the take up of parenting classes and trying to make it a normal part of becoming a parent: "I believe if we are going to extend life chances in our country, it’s time to begin talking properly about parenting and babies and reinforcing what a huge choice having a child is in the first place, as well as what a big responsibility parents face in getting these early years right." (I remember being stunned that, on a parents ante-natal course lasting several weeks, there was not a single bit of input about parenting skills, it was all about the mechanics of late pregnancy, birth, feeding etc. Ante-natal classes and health visitors have a massive opportunity to support parents and to help us learn good habits very early on. Children are too precious and vulnerable to leave this to chance.)
• a clearer focus on character development in education, alongside the acquisition of knowledge and skills
• expand the National Citizens Service to cover 60% of 16 year olds
• targetted mentoring for those most at risk of dropping out of GCSEs
• the much trailed demolition of ugly housing estates (this is fraught with risk - it will be very easy for this not to serve the people who live there, if the estate is anywhere in or around London then developer can make more money by pricing the poor out of the replacement housing built on the site. Judging by the successive waves of housing built around Yeovil, we are getting worse at building low-crime aesthetically good environments, not better, and building regulations and pressure on housing density are driving this, alongside house prices and affordability)
• mental health: continued promotion of an open culture around talking about mental illness, support for new mothers, mental health units in A&E, waiting targets for severe illness
• funding for more research and programmes to treat addiction

If it's done well, this could be one of the most important things this government does. There's evidence here of more in-depth thinking about the causes of poverty than we've seen before. What's interesting is that it goes further than Labour ever dared, in terms of the state taking on more parenting functions (developing character, mentoring). 

The proof will be action, rather than words - mental health spending has fallen under the coalition, and Camerons Conservatives have a poor record on housing policy and the vulnerable. They have a life-threatening blind spot on food banks, and the planned cuts to tax credits would have been a punch in the face to anyone earning below £30,000, though thankfully these were reversed. 

Whatever the flaws, this policy at last reckons with one of the big social facts of modern Britain, that the family unit in many places no longer does the job it once did, of transmitting value, values, skills and role models from one generation to the next. We have been avoiding the uncomfortable truths for a while,  I hope there can be a new political consensus that we need a mixed economy of social and economic policy to tackle poverty, and some of this new thinking could be vital. But it will count for very little if Cameron continues to dismantle the welfare state.

update: good piece from Tim Montgomerie on what Cameron missed out

Our Education Secretary Has Forgotten What Schools are For

Bring back Michael Gove, all is forgiven.....

Speaking at the Conservative party conference, Ms Morgan said: "We're going to give more working parents something the best schools already do."

"We will be giving families in thousands of schools a 'right to request' their school provides childcare for a full working day, before and after school and during the school holidays.

"If enough parents call for childcare at their local school, we will expect the school to take reasonable steps to accommodate it, in a way that works for them.

"Because we want working parents to have the confidence their child is in a happy and safe environment."

Schools are places of education, they are not a babysitting service. Nicky Morgan has forgotten what schools are for. The schools should exercise their 'right to refuse' this silly policy. I despair that the Conservatives have picked up where Labour left off: the more time parents can spend at work, and the less time with their children, the better. As the school day expands, and free nursery places get pushed back to a younger and younger age, there'll come a point where the government simply seize our children at birth and kick us out of hospital to go and find a job.

Unholy Statistics: British Humanist Society and Schools

The British Humanist Association has published a report on faith schools, 'Unholy Mess', claiming that As many as hundreds of thousands of children have been unlawfully denied access to religiously selective state schools in England

That's a big claim, there are 4700 Church of England state schools alone, with over 1 million children attending them. According to the BHA "almost all of (them) are failing to comply" with the official Schools Admission Code. 

Ok, just imagine this. A village of 4700 people. 70 people are interviewed. Some of them don't even live in the village, but are from a similar village down the road. If 43 of them had a significant weight problem, would you deduce that 'almost all' of the people in the village are fat?

Church of England schools were only 1/3 of the schools in the 43, yet the results are extrapolated to every CofE school, primary and secondary.  There are clearly some practices which need sorting out, but it looks very much as though the evidence has been interpreted to fit the BHAs agenda. 

The BHA's solution is not to recommend that the schools get in line with standard admissions criteria, but that they be scrapped completely. As a VW owner, I'm just glad they're not in the used car market, or they'd be calling for 1.2m German motors to be melted down tomorrow.

Update: a couple of responses
 Reverend Nigel Genders, the Church of England’s chief education officer, said: “We would strongly refute any suggestion that our schools have a near universal noncompliance with the code. The OSA annual report tells a very different story to this over-exaggerated report, which equates small administrative errors or minuscule technicalities with major systemic failure. If schools were able to focus more time on getting on running their schools, rather than responding to these sorts of campaigns, children would be better served.

“The majority of Church of England schools do not prioritise their places on the basis of church attendance, and most of those that do still make places available for children in the school’s immediate community. Our secondary schools have an average of 10 per cent selection by religious criteria – this is based on church attendance only. We also have as many pupils on free school meals as the national average, some much higher."

A Department for Education spokeswoman said: "We want every child to have access to the best education possible, and where there is evidence a school does not have fair and transparent admissions arrangements, swift action will be taken.

"We will consider the findings of BHA's report carefully. All of the objections they have listed have now been resolved."

i.e. all the issues can be sorted within the current system, rather than by scrapping it.  

Libdem Manifesto: Green Monster with Medicinal Purposes

The smaller the party, the bigger the manifesto. Labour, the Conservative, Green and UKIP all clock in at around 80 pages, but Nick Cleggs little monster, channeling a 70s wallpaper designer, is 158. The pages are a bit smaller, and a couple of them are taken up with an index (bravo!). As with Labour, and the Conservatives, here are a few things which stood out.

1. There is some genuinely radical stuff in here, which the Libdems have either been a bit coy about, or the mainstream media aren't interested in because they'd rather have arguments about maths. That's a shame, because the radical stuff is potentially the most significant.

2. At the same time, spot the consensus: more free childcare, more nhs funding, 0/7% on overseas aid, control immigration, devolve power both to the countries of the UK and to local governments and cities, reduce tax on the low paid, build more houses. All 3 main Westminster parties are saying the same thing in these areas. They all use the word 'plan' on their first page as well. Snore....

3. It may be that the other parties have put their detail elsewhere, or just left it out of public gaze entirely, but there is a lot of detailed thinking and policy here. This document has the only fully-fledged strategy on climate change and the environment, nearly a fully-fledged strategy on mental health (see below), and a lot more finesse in several areas than Labour or the Conservatives. Before you think I'm getting carried away, there are several things I'm completely opposed to....

4. Greenery: there are more nods from Labour towards this than the Tories, but the Libdems tackle climate change and the environment head on. It's one of their 5 'front page' priorities, along with education, balancing the budget, fair taxes and the nhs, and there are '5 Green Laws' which cover a whole raft of stuff, from conservation areas, to zero emission cars to renewable energy. 60% of energy from renewables by 2030, zero carbon economy by 2050 with zero carbon traffic, 70% recycling rate by 2020 and (I liked this) a commission to look at what resources we're using in an unsustainable way, with power to push us to cut consumption. At the same time there's the only proposals I've seen to build houses resilient to rising temperatures, and a lot more incentives towards insulation, energy efficiency etc. And every time a child is born, a tree will be planted. Not many of these will be popular, or cheap, or give a short-term gain, but the Libdems seem to be the only party who are thinking beyond the 8th of May in these areas. Well done.

5. The other one I really like, and you'd expect me to say this, is their policies on mental health - more money, better standards of care, clear waiting time targets. There's a target of getting 25% of of those suffering mental illness into appropriate counselling treatment - that seems a very low target, but perhaps its symptomatic of how poor the support currently is. Imagine of only 25% of people with a broken leg got a plaster cast.... But, for a party which has clearly done a lot of thinking, there wasn't enough on prevention. Yes there's a plan for a '5 a day' type public health campaign on mental health, more on reducing stigma etc. But a lot of mental illness is rooted in what happens when you're young: family breakdown, poor parenting, poor relationships with main carers. As with Labour, and the Tories, this seemed to be a no-go area. Nobody has the courage, or the ideas, to tackle the epidemic of fatherlessness and family breakdown, or to use the network of health visitors and new mums support to give input on parenting and relationships, as well as caring for the new baby. The Libdems are streets ahead of the rest on mental health, but there are still some streets that are no-go areas, and until we walk them, we'll always have a massive problem on our hands. To be fair, the Libdems say more than the Conservatives about promoting and expanding the Troubled Families programme, and want mediation for all separating couples, but wouldn't it be better to build stronger relationships to start with?

6. Cunning plans: everyone is offering more free childcare, the Libdems is are a bit more tailored - 20 hours per week from age 2, but if you're a working parent then it's available from 9 months in, which is when a lot of new mums go back to work part-time after having a child. Discount bus travel for students aged 16-21 is good, to get them into the habit, out of cars, and support the bus network. Getting landlords to insulate houses to an approved standard, putting RE back into the core curriculum alongside some key life skills like finance management.  Oh yes, and giving local authorities more power to cut down on betting shops and the use of addictive betting terminals in their communities.

7. A few contentious ones: minimum unit pricing on alcohol (which has been suggested for a while but nobody has done it), legalising cannabis for medicinal use, and a looser drugs law put under the Health department rather than the Home Office. Decriminalising having drugs for personal use would raise a storm of protest at other times, but there hasn't been a peep about it (yet). Perhaps the Daily Mail is too busy looking for celebrities in badly-fitting bikinis.

8. Being liberals, there's quite a bit on civil liberties, control over what data people can hold about you, freedom to be rude about people and to swim where you like, more support and promotion of equality for people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and gay, bisexual and transgender people. The cuts to legal aid are going to be reviewed,  and different forms of punishment trialled (badoom-tish) for crime. 'A large prison population is a sign of failure to rehabilitate, not a sign of success'. So they want more tagging, curfews, weekend prison etc., and if you go to prison there's a skills and education assesment in your first week. After the confiscation of books by the Tories, this is a welcome change of direction.

9. Fair play to Clegg, he hasn't given up on proportional representation, there it is again, alongside an elected Lords, more devolution, caps on donations to parties, and a formal process for working out who is in the leaders debates (tick).

10. One which elevated my eyebrows: 'liberalise rules about the location, timing and content of wedding ceremonies'. I guess it depends how liberal, but the gay marriage reforms raised question marks over whether the government even knew how to define marriage, and this takes it a step further. At what point does marriage stop being marriage, and start being something else? There's a difference between pledging 'all that I have I share with you...till death us do part' and singing each other something by Robbie Williams.

11. Housing - again, plenty of detail and evidence of a lot of thinking. Right to Buy is there, but left up to local authorities not enforced by central government. But again, it's frustrating that a party which has done so much work misses some obvious issues. One is housing density - new estates are crammed, with every home overlooked, miniature gardens, and short on facilities. Many new homes have more space for the plasma telly than for a meal table. Joined up thinking on mental health and wellbeing would ask for a maximum housing density and a minimum standard on social space within a home. The Libdems mention loneliness as a problem - well at least give people the space to invite friends round then!

12. There's some thinking on faith, discrimination etc., mostly around supporting interfaith work, protecting Jews and Muslims from hate crime, but also putting RE back in a more central role at schools and giving freedom for 'religious doctrines' to be explained.

13. British Sign Language will be recognised as an official language of the UK. Excellent. Now offer it at GCSE. Outside London and premiership football, most of us are more likely to come across a deaf person than a Frenchman.

And great news for anyone from the SW who likes the Brecon Beacons - once the debts on the Severn Bridge are paid off, the tolls will be scrapped.

Overall, I was quite impressed. Much more than either of the other two parties, the policies seem to be designed with people in mind, and the stress on the environment and mental health is the kind of long-term thinking we need from our politicians, but rarely get. There are some sensible policy reviews (e.g. the constitutional convention on devolution, rather than Camerons divisive populism, legal aid),  and more of a sense that this is rooted in vision and values, rather than managerialism and presentation. It's the nearest thing to what the bishops were asking for a few weeks ago, and is mercifully free of the snide political bashing you find throughout the other manifestoes. I wonder if somewhere in a backroom there are Labour and Conservative strategists going 'why didn't we think of that?'

Because of course, that's the context. Clegg is pitching to 2 sets of people. One is us, the voter. The other is the two other main parties. The Libdems main shot at power is to be a more attractive coalition partner than either the SNP or UKIP. To do that he needs as many votes and MPs as possible, and as many policies as possible which the other parties think they can work with. Given all that's in the manifestoes, a coalition with Labour looks much the better fit: the Conservatives will spend 2 years taken up with an EU referendum and take their eye off the ball, and Labour is offering much less in terms of policy anyway, so there are plenty of gaps for the Libdems to fill. Libdems and Labour are both ok with borrowing to invest, and the Conservatives are riddled with people who simply don't get climate change and green energy, from Owen Paterson to Eric Pickles.

However, I still think that doing all this is a massive challenge if 300,000 new people are arriving in the UK every year; all the money and effort that goes into the nhs, housing and education will only enable us to stand still. Meanwhile there aren't any big ideas, from anyone, on how we integrate communities at a local level. Nobody is producing an evidence-based immigration policy (why do people come here, how many will stop coming if we do x or y) based on a sustainable level of immigration, and leaving the EU is a blunt instrument with too much collateral damage. So we still need UKIP to keep this debate on the table, but probably not UKIPs solution.

AND IT DOESN'T MENTION HARD WORKING FAMILIES ONCE! YIPPEEE! If you're as intermittently lazy as I am, at last, a party you can vote for.....

Conservative Manifesto: The Longest Coalition Document in History?

Hot on the heels of Labour, David Cameron published the Conservative manifesto yesterday. What was most immediately striking, apart from proposals to create social housing ghettoes (see below), was how much overlap the headline policies had with someone else:

 - no tax on people earning the minimum wage (UKIP)
 - raise bottom tax threshold to £12.5k (libdems)
 - extra £8bn on the nhs (Libdems, except it isn't, Clegg is promising £8bn per year, the Conservatives promise 'a minimum of £8bn over the next 5 years', which isn't the same thing)
 - freeze rail fares (Labour)
 - 30 hours free childcare for 3 and 4 year olds (Labour, though they only offer 25)
 - build more houses (everyone)
 - Right to Buy (Mrs Thatcher)

With the exception of the SNP, there are bones thrown in all directions, which either highlights political consensus, or flags up the scope for coalition discussions, depending on how you look at it.

Compared to Labour, it was a much easier document to work through, with some pretty detailed policy sections, and what looked like a comprehensive programme in a lot of areas. Here's what stood out for me:

1. Of the £30bn needed to reduce the deficit - it's 'fiscal consolidation', not cuts folks - £25bn is coming from public services, roughly half from welfare and half from other departments. There's no detail of where most of the welfare cuts will come from, apart from a reduced cap on total welfare income and scrapping Job seekers allowance for under-21s. There'll be a temporary Youth Allowance instead which stops if you don't take one of the 3m apprenticeships or a job.

2. There's a lot of specific regional and infrastructure spending, which makes me wonder why we couldn't have done some of it in the last 5 years. This is a bit of a dividing line with Labour, who despite talking about using borrowing to invest more, don't have the same commitments on infrastructure investment. Curious. However, it does allow them to name drop pretty much every region in the UK, which is politically clever.

3. A lot of devolution - more powers for all the bits of the UK, and for anywhere that chooses to have an elected mayor (and not if you don't!).

4. Tony Blairs Labour had a reputation as the champions of reannouncement, repeating declarations of new spending on several different occasions as though it wasn't the same cash over and over again. The Conservatives go one better, repeating the same announcement within the same paragraph. The pledge not to tax the minimum wage is basically the same as the pledge to raise the income tax threshold to £12,500 per year. At the moment, if you work on the minimum wage for 30 hours a week you earn £10, 452. And the threshold is 10.6k. How convenient! The Tories pledge to get the minimum wage up to £8 an hour, which will earn you £20 per year shy of the £12.5k threshold. So effectively it's the same policy, but announced in two different ways.

5. The married couples allowance stays, and rises marginally, and this is what qualifies as supporting relationships. There's passing mention of the 'troubled families' programme, but no indication of whether it will be renewed, expanded or scaled back. No mention of epidemic rates of relationship breakdown, fatherless families, and the effect all this has on the mental and emotional health of the adults and children involved. There is almost a conspiracy of silence around the family and how to support and invest in it.

6. On education, it looks like things will get a bit quieter - more of the same, rather than revolution. Worryingly for students, there is no mention of the level of the tuition fee cap, so it's left open for this to be increased. Watch this space. There'll also be loans for postgraduate degrees. The education budget is 'protected' - which means that if the number of pupils rises, so will the amount of money. It's not protected against inflation. So there will be a real terms cut in money going into schools under the Conservatives if inflation ever rises above 0%. So the word 'protected' actually means 'cut'. Again and again I was frustrated at the slippery way things were presented in this document, which then made it harder to give credit where it was due. Interesting that they keep the two flagship Libdem policies, free school meals for infants and the pupil premium.

7. The NHS - I really struggled to get my head round how politicians think about this. There's no point recruiting extra doctors and nurses if they're leaving as quickly as they arrive. 5000 nurses are leaving the NHS each year, mid-career. But responding to that entails accepting there's a problem, and like every other section, the bit on the NHS starts with a section on how poorly Labour did and how well the Conservatives have done. Sorry, but there needs to be more reality here. The section on mental health, apart from supporting mums during and after pregnancy (good) had very little. No specific targets, money, or policies. Not good enough.

8. The Big Society is back! All quiet for 3 years, whilst most of us got on with staffing food banks, there's now the new initiative to encourage volunteering (you'll need those extra 3 days a year if you're a governor of an academy, it's a couple of leagues up from being governor of a normal school, and that was demanding enough). I wonder what the Italian paymaster of Westlands, whose workers here in Yeovil will all be entitled to 3 days a year off, will think of that! It's an odd policy, but I think I like it. What I didn't like was the manifesto taking credit for £8bn a year going into heritage art and sport. It claimed this was 'public and lottery funding', but since the lottery puts in £1.6bn a year, that doesn't leave much for the government! In fact, it gets a tax from the lottery, so it makes a profit. Better controls on online pornography are welcome, but I'd have liked to see something on gambling and payday loans.

9. Not many people have picked up on the plan to cut the number of MPs to 600 and revise parliamentary boundaries. That could be quite significant in the long run.

10. Sorry but the Right To Buy plans are like the AV referendum (remember that?) a potentially ok plan scuppered by dreadful delivery. The AV option put to the vote was probably the worst form of proportional representation, and there are a lot of things wrong with the RtB format. Forcing the most expensive properties to be sold off? Well lets have a think. They'll either be the biggest ones (which Housing Associations have previously pulled down to build more, smaller units), or those in the nicest neighbourhoods. Smaller dwellings, and poorer neighbourhoods, will remain social housing. The long term effect is obvious: nicer areas will become almost 100% owner-occupied, and social housing will become more concentrated in areas of lower value. Around here, house prices in Sherborne were recently shown to be £100k higher on average than those in Yeovil. So if you applied the policy locally, all the social housing tenants would end up in Yeovil.

There's also an inevitable time-lag. It takes 10-20 years round here to find and buy land, get planning permission, and build new houses. Without being able to take out big loans, the housing associations won't have the money to buy land and build houses until the RtB units are sold, you can't replace them like tins on a shelf. So RtB will build in an extra shortage on top of the 1.4m that currently exists, around the time it takes to build the replacement properties.

11. Goodbye wind turbines. Subsidies for onshore wind will be scrapped, and they will 'change the law so that local people have the final say on windfarm applications'. Giving local people 'the final say' is a nimbys charter, nobody is campaigning for wind farms to be built on their skyline. What will Eric Pickles do with his time now that he hasn't got all those wind farms to veto? Words about 'cost effective' green technology suggest that economics, rather than carbon emissions, will be the deciding factor for any Tory greenery.

12. I'm worried about propsals to ban 'extremists' from working with children. We all know they mean ISIS sympathisers and the like,  but the way the cultural wind is blowing, anyone like me who takes the 'traditional' line on marriage is seen as a phobe and an extremist. Will there be unintended consequences?

13. The manifesto alludes to 'space for resentment to fester' over Scottish MPs voting on English laws. As I recall, this wasn't that much of an issue until Cameron stoked it up after the referendum last year. Standard marketing practice, create a demand ex nihilo then produce a product that meets the manufactured need. Shabby.

14. I was glad to see the case being made for keeping overseas aid at 0.7% of GDP, with some stats on lives saved, children immunised, access to clean water etc. This needs to keep being said. Well done.

There is a lot more to get your teeth into here than the Labour manifesto, but aside from the economy and infrastructure, where there seems to be a fair bit of thinking, other areas of policy get a token nod. There's nowhere near enough on climate change, family support, and mental health. The loud silences in some areas (food banks, details of welfare cuts) the slippery presentation in others (tax on minimum wage, EVEL, school and NHS funding) and the awful ideas around Right to Buy, don't inspire me with confidence. There's a programme of action, but true to Cameron there isn't much of an underlying philosophy.

Despite the levels of detail in some areas, it just doesn't leave me with a sense of a party which has really got to grips with all the issues we face. It's not just about the economy. The Bishops call for an 'attractive vision' of a society has fallen on deaf ears. The most eye-catching policies are of the 'retail politics' variety - vote for us and we'll give you this. There isn't much here, aside from the aid target and the volunteering scheme, that calls on us to put others first, to think of 'us' rather than 'I'.