Taxation, not avoidance, is morally repugnant

George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announcing the Budget yesterday, said: ‘I regard tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance as morally repugnant’. (Daily Mail, 22 March 2012)

What this means is that society must be free to use subjective criteria to decide what people’s intentions were when they acted within their legal degrees of freedom.

Some decades ago there was a principle that laws should be clear, and easily understood by any ordinary middle-class or working-class person, so that a person could make his own decisions, and so that the individual could know whether or not he was acting within his legal rights. This principle has gone by the board in the downfall of civilisation. Now, in many areas, the individual must wait for the tax authorities to tell him whether his motivation was ‘aggressive’ or not, and hence whether he is liable to be taxed (and possibly fined).

The idea that it is immoral to avoid tax, so as to preserve the maximum freedom possible to implement one’s own intentions, implies that the purposes for which the government sees fit to expend money are automatically superior to those which an individual might choose to pursue for himself, and that each individual must regard them as being so.

There are those of us to whom this seems an absurd idea, and we would argue that taxation is in itself automatically immoral, in depriving the individual of the right to decide his own priorities in the existential situation in which he finds himself (the assertion of this right being the basic moral principle).

Mansion tax, pensions and ruined educations

text of a letter to an academic

I have had to attempt to claw my way back to a tolerable life after the ruin of my career and family life caused by the so-called ‘education’. And I have had to do this in a society ever more dominated by the ideology that was responsible for causing the ruin in the first place.

Ever more damaging legislation is continually proposed, and the relevant departments of my suppressed and censored independent university are virtually silenced, while the unexamined assumptions continue to flood the television and the newspapers.

Now they propose a ‘mansion tax’ which, once instituted, will no doubt soon become a garden shed tax.

While trying to build up my capital assets to a level that could support even the skimpiest residential college and research department, with live-in domestic and caretaking staff, my only asset was the fact that principal private residences were free of tax (though not of maintenance costs.)

I still have not reached a level at which even the smallest scale of research could be done – not, at any rate, research that would have any hope of enhancing my claim on a salaried university appointment, although I suppose there are a few people who are willing to regard as research the collecting of anecdotes and the writing down of their dreams in the morning, and it has been convenient to suppose that I was one of them. But progress towards an adequate scale of operation would have been severely hampered by any form of ‘wealth’ tax, including tax on property. And progress has been, even without that, agonisingly slow.

Commentators always talk as if, after the age regarded as pensionable, a person could not ‘need’ more than one room to live in. But there may be people other than those here whose careers were ruined by the hostility which their ability provoked, and who, like us, need to build up their resources to the point where they can finance their own careers.

There is no reason to suppose that any society could provide each individual with opportunities exactly tailored to his needs. It is far more important that there should be the possibility for individuals to work towards providing themselves with the circumstances they need for the sort of career they need to have.

In the Britain of Frederic Myers a fair proportion of those with the highest IQs had the circumstances they needed for a productive intellectual life, provided mainly by inheritance. This proportion has been steadily reduced.

As I have mentioned before, you could alleviate our position significantly by buying a nearby house in which, among other things, new provisional associates could live; it being impossible for them to find rented accommodation, even at inordinate expense, and it being impossible for us, at the present time, to sink a high proportion of our available capital in buying additional houses.

No relief for 'those with the broadest shoulders'

A recent article from the Daily Mail on the Government's plans for pensions tax relief:

Higher earners should lose higher rate tax relief on pension savings, Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander believes. The Lib Dem Cabinet Minister says the Government cannot afford to keep paying such a generous allowance on retirement investments. The changes, which could be included in next month’s Budget, would affect those who pay the 40p higher rate of tax, which kicks in at around £43,000. Currently, of every £1 they save in a pension, the Government contributes 40p in tax relief. That would fall to 20p in line with the basic rate of income tax.

The raid could cost middle-class pensioners up to £7billion a year, and discourage many from saving towards their retirement. If the cut was restricted to those earning over £100,000 a year, it would still save the Treasury £3.6billion. Mr Alexander told the Daily Telegraph: ‘If you look at the amount of money that we spend on pensions tax relief, which is very significant, the majority of that money goes to paying tax relief at the higher rate.

‘It's very important that in these difficult times we are asking those with the broadest shoulders to bear the greatest share of the burden.’ Mr Alexander also repeated his aspiration to raise the threshold at which people start paying income tax...

Lib Dem demands are expected to be raised at a meeting on the Budget next week between David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osbourne and Mr Alexander. The raid on pension tax relief may meet resistance from Mr Osbourne, who has stressed the need to avoid raids on the wealthy because they could deter successful businessmen from living in the UK. (Daily Mail, 11 February 2012)

The plight of pensioners is a constant focus of attention, although it is difficult to believe that the increases in life expectancy and cost of living can be a major factor in the constant rise in public spending. It is, surely, the increases in expenditure in favoured areas which make it impossible to ‘afford’ state pensions at a level commensurate with the cost of living. In fact, pensions were hit by the retrospective introduction of means-testing, and also by years of ‘withering on the vine’ with rises per annum which were inadequate to match the real rises in the cost of living, let alone in the cost of things which pensioners were more likely than others to need on a socially recognised basis, such as live-in housekeepers and attendants.

We may be sure that there is no real sympathy with this population, with an above-average IQ and a limited voting life ahead of it. Attention to its problems and claims that ‘something must be done’ are actually designed to justify new forms of taxation, the need for which is predominantly created by expenditure on increasing populations with IQs below the general average.

The objective is to justify additional taxation of this above-average population. In the extract quoted above there is one explicit proposal for how this might be done, although the additional taxation is presented as withdrawal of a tax relief, and it is pointed out that the ‘tax relief’ saved will be mainly at the expense of the population of those with the highest incomes, which is also (very likely) a population with a higher average IQ than other pensioners.

Those with ‘the broadest shoulders’ (the highest average IQs) should bear the greatest share of the burden which results from an ever-increasing transfer of resources to populations with below-average IQs.

The following is a re-blogging of part of an earlier post. In light of the article above, I have felt it necessary to reiterate the key underlying issues.

Further misdirection of attention is in asserting that it is not ‘fair’ that those who go into ‘care homes’ should have to sell their houses (if they have them) to pay for the ‘care’ they receive. This, of course, will lead to families being deprived of their inheritance.

Families are said to be ‘betrayed’ by care home funding, which leads to many pensioners being forced to sell their homes. This is described as a ‘scandal’, and it is hoped that a ‘fairer’ system can be devised. This rhetoric in itself should make one aware that a misdirection of attention is involved.

The population of those who reach pensionable age, and have homes to sell, are a population with an above-average IQ; so will their offspring be. So surely the modern mind can see nothing ‘unfair’ in a relatively high-IQ population being deprived of the inheritance it might have had from its parents, also with (statistically) above-average IQs. It is the obtaining of advantages from a previous generation of above-average people which is regarded as unfair, surely? How can ‘fairness’ be increased by transferring assets from one relatively high-IQ population to another?

And so we infer that these expressions of concern that homes will be lost to some of those who might have inherited them must have an ulterior motive. What is presumably aimed at is justification for an additional tax of some kind, resulting in the usual transfer of resources to a relatively low-IQ population.

It is suggested that what a pensioner pays towards his care home fees should be ‘capped’ with ‘the state stepping in’ to pay the rest. That means taxpayers stepping in to pay the rest, including pensioners who do not go into care homes. ‘In a further blow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley refused to rule out a pensioner tax to pay for old age care.’ Aha! This idea - an extra tax on those above retirement age, mooted in the Dilnot Report - approaches more closely the principle of transferring assets from the relatively high to relatively low IQs.

The population of pensioners who do not go into care homes at all may be expected to have higher average IQs than those who do go into them and have homes they might be required to sell, because the former are likely to have better genetic constitutions, have lived more prudently and/or successfully, or because they have devoted relatives, which are all factors likely to be correlated with high IQs.

So it may be seen as ‘fair’ that those pensioners who do not go into care homes should be taxed in order to transfer assets to those who do go into them.

This is no doubt the real reason for blaming the rise in life expectancy of pensioners for the increasing costs of the NHS, so that as usual a population of people with above-average IQs can be penalised for the benefit of a population with below-average IQs.

As for changing demographics, figures for life expectancy are usually quoted in relation to specific ages. E.g. people who are 50 now have a life expectancy of so much. But by the ages one sees quoted, the majority of those with a low life expectancy at birth are likely to have died off, although not before being a considerable drain on the NHS, state education (with ‘special needs’ tutors?), etc. Clearly these are an important part of the real demography, usually left out of the discussion. Those who are still alive at pensionable age (a population with a relatively high average IQ) are certainly not responsible for the rise in the costs of the NHS caused by the genetically dysfunctional (a population with a low average IQ).

Appealing for help is not illogical

How can it be that I complain of the lack of support for my work? Well, of course, lack of support for ‘my work’ is lack of support for me in the most basic sense, and there has been a plentiful lack of support, to the point of active opposition and obstruction.

When I was at school (at a school which I was forced to attend against my will, having told my parents at the end of the first day that it was a place to leave instantly) a hostile headmistress said to me that it would be good for me not to be treated as an exception. In the sense of being given no help in learning more languages than other people. I thought even then, with very limited information about what was going on behind my back, that while I might not be being treated as an exception in the sense of being provided with opportunity, I surely was in the sense of being the object of the storms of slanders which raged around me.

People tend to dislike my use of the word ‘slander’ in this context, and soften it to ‘gossip’. But in retrospect it is clear that its effects on my life, and on the lives of my parents, were extremely damaging.

Thrown out at the end of the ruined ‘education’ with no usable qualification with which to apply for a grant or salaried appointment in any subject, I was extremely fortunate to be led to the Society for Psychical Research, where I took a temporary job to help finance my return to Oxford at the start of the next academic year in the autumn. There, without research grant, salary, or income support from social security, I intended to pursue my researches in theoretical physics, to the extent that was possible in such painfully impoverished circumstances.

As my work would not be officially recognised as such, I would not have a supervisor (which is necessary for the eventual grant of a D.Phil), but I imagined vaguely that I would send some of my work from time to time to the Physics Department, to let them know that I existed.

At the SPR, however, I found that I would be regarded as eligible for, and would be supported in applying for, the Perrott Research Studentship – a postgraduate grant from Trinity College, Cambridge, a college with which the SPR had strong historical connections.

This was a way in which I could return to Oxford to do postgraduate work with the support of a grant instead of without any financial support at all, so I resolved to stay on at the SPR throughout the next academic year to see whether I could get the Studentship. If I did not, I would return to Oxford anyway and carry out my original plan of doing freelance research on theoretical physics, on my own and in poverty. The money saved during the extra year away from Oxford would at least provide an absolute minimum of financial support; by that time it might pay for a year’s rent on a cheap room.

In fact I was successful in my application for the Perrott Studentship, and had to consider what were the areas of potential research that could be considered as meeting their terms of reference, and would be most likely to lead to results that would gain academic recognition and re-entry to a salaried academic career.

In whatever subject I was making my salaried career, which implied aiming at becoming a Professor and head of a department in that subject as soon as possible, the salary would provide me with sufficiently liveable conditions (I thought and hoped) to be able to get something out of doing research on my own in theoretical physics, and also out of writing some of the books which I felt an internal pressure to produce. There would, at best, be far too much pressure on my time for life to be comfortable. I would have to aim at the fastest possible career advancement, and by the time I was a Professor perhaps there would be enough space for productivity in my life to allow for some sense of well-being.

I use the expression ‘career’ and ‘career advancement’ to convey to people what would be involved in practice, but I had never really thought of an academic career below Professorial level as a career in its own right at all, but only as an unfortunate preliminary to my real life as a Professor, the necessity for this preliminary having been forced upon me by the ruined ‘education’. If my ‘education’ had not been ruined, and Oxford University had not been hostile, I would have expected to become a Professor immediately on leaving Somerville.

I should perhaps also make the point that I did not regard the sort of ‘research’ under supervision that was necessary to gain higher degrees as ‘research’ at all. This was another preliminary which society set in one’s way to delay the start of a real life. I had been shocked to discover what went into getting a D.Phil qualification, which one would apparently have to do before entering upon real life, ‘real life’ meaning being free to reconstruct theoretical physics, while living in a hotel environment.

I did not discuss with anyone how little time would be left over from doing what was necessary to earn my salary and work for career advancement, even when I had re-entered a university career by obtaining a salaried appointment, as this was some years in the future, even after being awarded the Perrott Studentship. Nevertheless I suppose some awareness of the constrictions of such a situation entered into Somerville’s extraordinary assertions that, without a research grant or a salaried appointment, I was ‘free to follow my interests’.

When, many years later, I had an interview with a Somerville Fellow in Philosophy, to find out whether my D.Phil in Philosophy would induce them to let me have a salaried appointment, I was amazed that she could assert that I would be ‘less free’ if I had to meet the demands of such an appointment. So I would be ‘more free’, in her eyes, if I continued to live with no source of income.

It is apparently a standard piece of modern ideology that the income which may be derived from an academic career is inconsiderable, and that no money is necessary for staying physically alive, let alone staying alive in circumstances permitting intellectual activity. Nor is money apparently necessary for what counts as actual research ‘work’. Hence people can talk about ‘supporting my work’ as a peripheral frill, the absence of which should not lead to any complaint.

I remember one conversation with a salaried academic, similar to many others, at an international convention on lucid dreams at London University. I said I was unable to get support to take further my research on lucid dreams, or any other topic. ‘Oh, well’, she said. ‘There is no support. I can’t get any either. I have just given up on trying to.’ This person was a salaried academic in America, possibly deriving many advantages and facilities, as well as salary and status, from her university position. Subsequent to the publication of my book, she had become well known for her work on lucid dreams, although probably without ever receiving direct support for that purpose.

I, on the other hand, had produced the book on lucid dreams, on which her work had been based, as an unsalaried and statusless person, implicitly applying for the necessary funding to make further progress in this new area of research. She could, it would appear, see no difference between her own need for support and mine. Like all other academics who have worked and published in the field of lucid dreams, she made no response to my appeal on my website for contributions of £1,000 a year from every salaried academic who had worked in this field.

If someone recognises, as I do, that human nature contains little in the way of genuine altruism, it does not follow that it is illogical for them to complain about their position. It could be argued that complaining is, or should be, dependent on whether one is objectively suffering, rather than on what society happens to regard as worthy of complaint. However, the fact that the present society claims to be interested in ability, and purports to have a system designed to reward those with high IQs, is liable to heighten any bitterness one may feel about one’s position.

Benevolence

Once upon a time a headmistress said of me, ‘It will be good for her not to be treated as an exception.’
I found it very difficult to understand how she could even imagine that she honestly meant something by this, let alone something benevolent, since the sentence seemed to me to have the status of ‘It will be good for this horse to be treated as a dog’.
The use of the word ‘good’ in particular eluded me, until I reflected that there was in existence an expression ‘The only good Injun is a dead Injun’, and no doubt she meant something like that.

(from the forthcoming book: The Corpse and the Kingdom)

Fat cats and starved cats

text of a letter to an academic

Everything goes from bad to worse, as it is intended to do.

Professor David Eastwood, the vice-chancellor of Birmingham University, has been getting £419,000 a year, and others in comparable positions something similar.

If my education had not been so deliberately ruined, or if recognition had been given to my ability to do things whether or not I had been allowed to get paper qualifications in them, I could easily have got into one of those positions. What a difference! Between several hundred thousand a year on the one hand; and no salary at all, not even eligibility for so-called ‘social security’, on the other.

That is the difference between someone who has risen to the top of the educational system which favours mediocrity, and someone who has failed to make their way successfully through the educational obstacle course.

I thought the powers that be were not supposed to like ‘inequality’. When I was at the Society for Psychical Research it was still supposed that the Oppressive State was aiming at ‘equality of income’. I remember Salter at the SPR, a person of independent means, asking me if I did not agree that equality of income was a grim and unpleasant idea. In those days there was still at least a minority of people who did not think that aiming at equalising incomes was automatically virtuous and desirable. Terms such as ‘fair’ and ‘fairness’ had not yet become buzzwords.

Let me know of any vice-chancellorships or similar that you see falling vacant, so that I can apply for them.

Yours, etc.

The departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

No reprieve for the middle classes

Middle-class families face a battering in next month’s Budget after the Chancellor ruled out major changes to his plans to slash child benefit payments to higher earners. The Conservatives and Lib Dems will hold crunch talks this evening on a Budget that is expected to pave the way for tax raids on the better-off that will continue until 2015.

George Osborne is set to ignore Conservative calls to axe the 50p top rate of tax, and has angered Tory traditionalists by making clear he will not introduce tax breaks for married couples in his speech. The expected assault on the middle classes has provoked claims from Tory MPs that ‘the Liberal Democrats are writing the Budget’.

The Conservatives’ coalition partners are also calling for pension tax relief to be slashed from 40p in the pound to 20p for those earning £100,000 or more – a move that could raise £3.7billion. In addition, they are expected to demand new green taxes to help speed up the increase of the minimum tax threshold to £10,000. The Chancellor already plans to strip more than £1,000 a year in child benefit payments from every family that has one earner paying the 40p higher rate of tax. (Daily Mail, 13 February 2011)

As we have observed before, the unspoken principle underlying tax and benefit policy is that resources should be transferred from populations with higher average IQs to those with lower average IQs.

The population which pays higher-rate tax because it has higher earned income (so-called ‘earned’ ‘taxable’ income is income which is not derived from benefits nor from the moonlight economy) has a higher average IQ than the population of those who do not pay tax at this level. So it is obviously considered correct procedure to cut ‘benefits’ received by the higher-IQ population. This increases the proportion of ‘benefits’ received by a population with a lower average IQ, and will encourage the proportionate growth of the low-IQ population.

Even quite a small percentage increase in the relative growth of one population vis-à-vis another population, continued over time, soon has a perceptible, and perhaps dramatic, effect on the relative proportions of the two populations.

How to stay alive longer

Elderly should be encouraged to downsize ...

[Housing Minister Grant Shapps] said that authorities should encourage elderly homeowners to move to more suitable accommodation by helping them rent their old homes to families. He pointed to the example of a pilot scheme in east London where Redbridge council has helped elderly people move without having to sell their homes in a bid to tackle the housing crisis. They also get to keep rental income from their property, so they can fund any care costs they have to face. ...

There was outrage after a report by a think tank linked to Labour suggested last year that older people should be taxed out of their homes to free up space for younger generations. The Intergenerational Foundation argued that ‘empty nesters’ in their 60s should be encouraged to downsize by a new ‘land tax’. (Daily Mail, 17 January 2012)

Pensioners to be ‘helped’ by councils to ‘downsize’ so that any spare rooms can be used by families. Population with an above-average IQ to be squeezed tighter still, for the benefit of expanding population with average IQ certainly not above average for population as a whole, and quite possibly below it.

But maybe some of the pensioners do not want to downsize. Perhaps some of them, like me, had a ruined education and are still trying to make up for it by expanding their incipient independent academic establishment to a tolerable size for even a minimum of productivity to begin. When it does begin, that will be the start of my adult academic career, so far as I am concerned, even if I am having to start at an age that is past what the oppressive society around me likes to regard as retirement age.

What any pensioner with a house of his own could do (and from some points of view should do) would be to sell his house and buy one in Cuddesdon, perhaps not with so many spare rooms as his former house but with as many as possible, do some voluntary work for my struggling and squeezed independent university, and cooperate in some of the business operations which can be set up to make the best use of the abilities of associate workers who may have restrictions on their physical mobility, and of the abilities of those who do not.

My institute is desperately in need of storage and office space and could probably pay them rent for their spare rooms to supplement their incomes. Then the rooms would be being used to reduce the disadvantages of a population with above average IQs, instead of used to provide advantages to the expanding low-IQ population.

Now the pensioner, living in the house which he owns, and which now has too many vacant rooms, may of course have no plans of his own to get started on his long-delayed business ventures or academic research; nevertheless, if he is persuaded to leave his familiar environment for an unfamiliar prison cell, and knowing that it is the end of his life and that he is now expected by everyone to go into a decline, this can easily undermine him psychologically so that he does go into a decline very soon after. I know of several cases of people who have died soon after selling their houses to go into retirement.

Therefore it would be a good idea if people were to move to Cuddesdon, or nearby, well in advance of retirement age, do some voluntary work for us and perhaps join in on some of the smaller business projects, in anticipation of more full-scale involvement at a later stage.

Professorship in Education

Below is the text of a letter of application to Oxford University recently sent with regard to a professorship in Education.

Dear ...

I am applying for the Professorship of Education being offered by the Department of Sociology in association with Green Templeton College, as advertised in the University Gazette, and attach my CV, which includes the contact details of three referees, together with notes on my CV and a testimonial from the late Professor H J Eysenck.

As my position is an anomalous one, I would be grateful if you could read the enclosed notes on my CV, as they give information about how I came to be in this position. As you will see, my CV is one that was prepared to go with an application for an appointment in philosophy, rather than education. I cannot in fact comply with all the criteria listed in the requirements for the post. However, I can comply with some of them.

I have decades of administrative and fund-raising experience as the Director of the Institute for Psychophysical Research. I also have completely original insights into what is called the educational process, due to the unique and extreme circumstances of my early life and education. The introduction to my book Advice to Clever Children provides some background on how I have been exposed to the inner machinery of the educational system, from being observed by educational experts as a case study at the ages of 4 and 11, to experiencing the contrasting approaches and outlooks of private and state schooling. The latter provided me with knowledge of the underlying motivations of those that chose to teach; having teachers for both of my parents doubtless also contributed.

I am in fact capable of carrying out research, teaching, and administration in areas in which I do not have paper qualifications, owing to my own ability to learn new topics very fast and very thoroughly in any situation in which I need to learn them.

For realistic information about my life, abilities, and situation, please see the Preface ‘How this Book came to be Written’ to my book The Lost Cause, a copy of which is available at http://celiagreen.com/thelostcause-preface.pdf. I apologise for the anomalies in my application, which arise from the extreme social misplacement which has resulted from my ruined education. There is no recognition of the predicament of the exiled academic.

I am making this application in spite of being above the normal age for a Professorship because the process of recovering from a ruined education is extremely slow, in fact there is no provision for it to be possible at all. There was a time lag of decades before the work which I had done in exile from an academic career led to my being offered testimonials from senior academics who were willing to act as my referees. After still further delay, one of the areas of pioneering work which I had initiated (lucid dreaming) came to be recognised as a suitable topic for doctorates, yet this still did not lead to my reinstatement in a normal academic career.

The enclosed notes can give little impression of what I would have achieved by now if I had had a normal life, i.e. one that was normal for a person like me. As it is, they are a statement of how efficiently the expression of my abilities has been prevented by the society in which I have been living. Academics advising me have often said, ‘Don’t say anything about your ability, only about what you have done’, and ‘Don’t mention your unofficial teaching and research.’ But society can prevent one from doing anything officially, i.e. within a normal academic position, and is what one does outside its auspices in an attempt to regain reinstatement, automatically to be regarded as disqualified from consideration?

Apart from the fact that getting me back into a normal position as a senior academic would be remedying an extreme anomaly and injustice, there are strong reasons for supposing that the field of Education would be benefitted by a Professor who is prepared to take into account factors other than those which have supposedly been considered by those who have done research in this field over the preceding decades. Clearly their insights into the situation have not created any solution to the current situation, and in practice the results of the current educational system are deteriorating rather than the reverse.

So the academic world should consider there is a need for work to be done under the auspices of someone who does not have a vested interest in the rationalisations which are currently fashionable. Those who were successful in entering normal academic careers to which, no doubt, they felt they were suited, did have such a vested interest.

The attitude to the outcast of the socially approved academic system should, in itself, be the subject of research. When one is outcast, destitute, and socially disgraced, one is described, amazingly, as being ‘free to follow one’s interests’, it being supposed that a university appointment would be a restriction on one’s freedom.

It should not be held against me that I have published fewer papers than other applicants. The exiled academic, struggling to build up an institutional environment from scratch without an income, and with no eligibility for income support when not receiving a salary, lives in circumstances which negate the possibility of carrying out research of any kind, even leaving out of account that if one did manage to produce publishable research it would have little chance of acceptance by academic journals, on account of one’s lack of an academic appointment.

I give the referees I do, as best I can, because it should be regarded as amazing, and highly creditable, that I am able to give any at all. However I expect that my referees will observe the usual conventions that (a) one’s case is not to be considered highly anomalous and in need of redress, that (b) only work done by the holders of official academic positions counts as academic, and that (c) there is supposed to be no such thing as ability which is transferable from one field of intellectual activity to another. Therefore they can do no more than damn me with faint praise for the few pieces of work which I have been able to do within the restrictive parameters of what is regarded as ‘relevant’.

Finally, I should like to make a statement. It may be that you reject this application out of hand, on the basis that it does not meet the ‘essential requirements’, or that I otherwise fail to fit the University’s idea of what an education professor ought to be like. However, it is my belief that if the University really wanted to contribute to the advancement of education, rather than merely occupy a prestigious role in what has developed under the label of ‘academic educational theory’, it would take this application very seriously indeed.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Celia Green

No escape from state education

The basic moral principle is that one should avoid imposing on other people one’s own interpretation of the existential situation, and overriding their reaction to it. This principle is weakly, and occasionally, recognised in human societies, and best protected, more or less unintentionally, in capitalist societies in which you can only get other people to do anything for you if you are willing to pay for it. This does not mean that they will necessarily provide you with what you really want, but at least it avoids the socialist situation in which, in many important areas, such as health and education, you can only get what other people want to provide you with; in fact you may be forced to surrender your liberty entirely and submit to what they want to impose upon you.

At present it is possible, although very difficult, to opt out of the state educational system and let your child work at home, although you must still in many ways comply with state prescriptions about what will count as acceptable.

This, however, is coming to be regarded as unnecessarily permissive. Within recent years I have seen the view expressed that this loophole is no longer necessary, as the present state educational system is tolerant of all religious beliefs (this, apparently, is the only grounds on which objection to the state system could be considered acceptably valid). From this point of view, people can now have no justifiable reason for preferring any variant to the system provided by the state, and so it should be a legal obligation to ensure that one’s children are forced to attend the child-prisons, as required.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, debating this issue, argued that home schooling ‘could be a cover for child abuse.’ (Daily Mail, 20 January 2009)

This dubious logic may be generalised to any area in which the individual is free to do anything other than comply with the requirements prescribed by the state. He might take the opportunity to commit any crime or depravity that occurs to him. ‘Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do’, as the 18th century hymn-writer said.

If people are not fully occupied with the necessities of staying alive, they may (it is feared) use their freedom to do something unacceptable, including finding out important things in science, especially if they are rich enough to be able to afford to do this independently of having a university appointment. So, better that there should be no freedom at all.

Of course, one may mention that state-provided incarceration may also be a cover for child abuse, which obviously includes any sort of programme of psychological warfare and undermining devised by teachers.

While ‘home schooling’ is considered an option that provides unnecessary freedom for the individual, it should be noted that it scarcely exists at present in the UK. While it is possible to claim that your child reading books at home constitutes ‘education’, as soon as you consider him ready to take an exam, you must invoke the approval of the education ‘authority’.

Personally I did not think of taking an exam as separate from the process of preparing for it, so someone like me would have tripped over the landmine straight away (even if my parents had home-schooled me).

It is very dangerous to have anything to do with an education ‘authority’. In fact, if you are forced into the clutches of one as soon as you want to take an exam, you cannot really be said to be opting out of the education system at all. Being allowed to spend less time in a school doing purposeless things which are not directly aimed at exam-taking does you little good if the time saved from demoralising purposelessness at school must be spent in demoralising purposelessness at home. As soon as you want to do anything for real, you have to fight it out with the local authority. But that is precisely what you may wish primarily to avoid in ‘opting out’ of the state educational system.

I conclude that although at present there is a nominal possibility of ‘opting out’ of state education, this is only a euphemism, and there is no real possibility of keeping clear of the dangers of contact with education authorities.

There should be a real possibility, but that would involve quite different arrangements to be made. Far from considering how the deadly clutch of the education authorities on the lives of their victims could be loosened, there is a drive to eliminate even the ambiguous possibility which exists at present.