The Spectator

'Today’s GSCE results show essentially unchanged performance compared with last year, with 21.7 per cent of pupils achieving grade 7 or above (compared with 21.6 per cent in 2023) and 67.4 per cent achieving grade 4 or above (compared with 67.8 per cent last year). This is still slightly up on 2019, but the Covid bounce in grades which occurred in 2020 and 2021, when exams were not actually sat and pupils were awarded grades based on teachers’ predictions instead, seems to be over. In 2020, 75.9 per cent of candidates achieved grade 4 and above, rising even further to 76.9 per cent in 2021. The pandemic effect lasted into 2022, when 73.7 per cent achieved grade 4 or above, but had been all but eliminated by last year. 'But that still leaves a cohort of students – many of whom are now at university – who look on paper to be particularly able and intelligent but whose inflated grades conceal a truth: they missed a vital part of their education. The inflated grades of the pandemic years are a testament to over-optimistic expectations of teachers (which is perhaps understandable – as who wouldn’t want to talk up the prospects of kids they are teaching?), but they also speak of one of the lesser-mentioned scandals of the pandemic. Children were cheated of an education by having schools closed for weeks on end, without a proper mechanism in place to ensure that teaching could continue remotely. But instead of addressing the failure, those same children were awarded flattering grades. It is rather as if the government had responded to the (equally scandalous) failure to ensure that people with cancer symptoms present themselves for examination by artificially inflating the numbers of people being given the all-clear.' ✍️ Ross Clark https://lnkd.in/eUZE8vG3

'You may have noticed that your tinned soup tastes of nothing, because there’s no salt in it, and that the chocolate bar you purchased – a Yorkie, for example, once so big and chunky that it was advertised as being ‘not for girls’ – seems to be about a quarter of the size that it used to be. Both of these changes, which have made my life ever so slightly worse in the past couple of decades, are the consequence of campaigning charities, medical lobbyists and other such do-gooders deciding that we have to eat what they think is good for us. They lobby the food industry with an obsessive, psychotic intensity – and hence you now have tomato soup which is free of that killer, salt, and your portion of sugar, your little treat to assuage life’s inchoate miseries, is much smaller than it was before. I would much rather Julie Bindel was in charge of deciding what I am allowed to eat than the General Medical Council, the Lancet, the British Medical Association and so on.' ✍️ Rod Liddle https://lnkd.in/eRhNCzrX

Keir Starmer’s parenting lessons 👇 ‘Before he became Prime Minister, Keir Starmer admitted he was concerned about what life in Downing Street might be like for his children. It was, he said, the ‘single thing’ that kept him awake at night. ‘What’s notable is that we aren’t even aware of Starmer’s children’s names. They are teenagers but that’s about all we know about them. They were not photographed when Starmer and his wife Victoria entered No. 10, nor have they been seen since. ‘We do try to protect them… we don’t use photos of them in any way,’ Starmer said. There seem to be no pictures in the public domain of Starmer with his children. ‘I’d say that is quite an achievement. As a former human rights lawyer, our new PM must be more familiar than most with privacy laws. He would presumably have little time for anyone infringing his own family’s privacy even if the Starmers now reside in one of the most famous addresses in Britain. When asked about the Princess of Wales as she recovered from surgery earlier in the year, he replied: ‘I think we should leave her alone… she deserves privacy.’ ‘Starmer is a little worthy on the matter, but I’d say he’s setting a good example. We’ve become accustomed to prime ministers cynically using their children as props to show their softer, more relatable side. It’s not just politicians who do this. Social media encourages us to do the same. The question is, is sacrificing so much of our privacy sensible?’ ✍️ Lara Prendergast https://lnkd.in/eBJbUmHn

✍️ The Cotswolds is awful, writes Adam Hay-Nicholls: 'The Cotswolds used to be a wonderfully bucolic fantasy English villages; red telephone boxes, gilded honey-stone hamlets with verdant greens where the vicar would umpire cricket matches, and pubs where poachers and gamekeepers would mix. Then it became fashionable and now it’s been Farrow & Balled to within an inch of its life. 'You could blame the King for purchasing Highgrove House in Tetbury in the 1980s. Suddenly, wannabe poshos began buying Cotswold cottages in the hope some royalty would rub off on them (real poshos would never consider doing something so outré, and prefer Norfolk anyway). Now it’s experiencing the ‘Bamford effect’ thanks to the Daylesford farm shop. It’s filled to bursting with celebrities and the Chipping Norton media elite, and following them has been a steady stream of West Londoners with City jobs making the move to ‘the country’ under the delusion that Soho Farmhouse is anything other than Waco for social climbers; its woodchip pathways promising not to muddy footwear. 'The Cotswolds is not the country. It is an extension of Notting Hill. Now every pub has a Michelin star, and the waiting list for lunch is six months because Giles Coren reviewed it in the Times. Every cottage has a pair of bay trees either side of the front door, and ugly plastic cones at the bottom of its manicured lawn so that no one dares park on the verge when they’re taking photos for their Instagram. The traffic, by the way, is unbearable.' Read more here 👉 https://lnkd.in/dvvv3DKG

The truth about Kamalamania 👇 'In a society that worships the self, identity politics is a very powerful force. We see this now in Kamalamania – the dizzying speed with which the vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee has been turned, through mass acclamation, from national embarrassment to Democratic saviour. 'The fact that Harris’s transfiguration doesn’t make much sense is sort of the point – the more improbable it seems the better. We are memetic creatures, especially in the digital age, and the meme of the moment is that Harris has magically invigorated the Democratic base and turned the 2024 US presidential election around in their party’s favour. It’s quasi-religious in that you don’t have to believe you just have to repeat the message until you accept.' ✍️ Freddy Gray Read more here 👉 https://lnkd.in/eBS_CgvD

Why Elon Musk is right to leave California 👇 ‘This month Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, really excelled himself. He signed through AB1955, which instructs school districts to lie to and keep secrets from parents about their children. ‘This is a revenge move, pushed through sneakily outside the normal legislative calendar. Parents and school governors in several of California’s less demented districts had decided on parental notification policies so as to ensure that their own children couldn’t change gender in secret. AB1955, astonishingly, makes these parental notification policies illegal. It also violates federal law that guarantees parents’ right to access their children’s school records, so the battle goes on. ‘AB1955 was the final straw for Elon Musk. ‘Because of this law and the many others that have preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California to Starbase, Texas,’ he wrote. If I was a California resident, I’d be hot on Elon’s heels.’ ✍️ Mary Wakefield To read the full article, head to our website: https://lnkd.in/e7CHu-3A

Joe Biden and the truth about old age

'Pret should start selling lighters, vapes and fags, and maybe scratchcards too. From 6 p.m., they should unsheathe the doner kebab.' ✍️ Angus Colwell https://lnkd.in/eRErEYUY

'The verdict among delegates filtering out of the arena was a mixed one: ‘boring’ was a word used by some, with even those holding placards a little unsure as to when they were supposed to wave them.' ✍️ James Heale https://lnkd.in/efa_6UzZ

Le Pen must be glad she isn't presiding over France's turmoil ✍️ Gavin Mortimer