Now that all of the celebrations and festivities are well and truly over, it is time to return to ‘normal’ living as it were. My son and daughter-in-law are due to call around later on in the morning and I am cooking them a very conventional meat-and-two veg meal of ham with baked potatoes and some Cavolo Nero kale. I must remind myself to call on my next-door neighbour who I have not seen for days as the wife is still recovering from a hip replacement operation, but I think she is still at the shuffling around the house stage. The only really exciting thing in prospect this week is a visit to the dentists to replace a temporary filling with a permanent one. These dental appointments are now like gold dust and I think the planning cycle for these appointments is about three months ahead and perhaps even longer.
EU leaders are now gathering for a ‘make or break’ summit over the future of Greenland. Although this phrase is often over-used, on this occasion it might be completely accurate as Trump seems determined to acquire Greenland in his own words ‘by one means or another’ The ironic feature to this whole episode is that under an agreement dating from the early 1950’s the Americans have the right to build whatever military bases they want anywhere in the island (although this is theoretical rather than real as much of Greenland is ice-covered rock) But for the Europeans, we are talking about the survival of NATO as a real and practical military alliance and the invasion of Greenland would be seen as unacceptable. But it does appear that Europeans are inclined to resist Trump by force and a certain amount of ‘playing for time’ might be the order of the day. Opposition to the Greenland plan is growing in the US Congress with calls for Trump’s impeachment and moderate Republicans are wondering where the Greenland fiasco is likely to lead them. Those of a somewhat more internationalist outlook (and there are not many Republicans of that persuasion) are disturbed about the wider geo-political implications of the Trump doctrine which seems to give the green light to big and powerful countries to invade and then annex their neighbours and all of this we thought had been ended by the second World War. In domestic politics we also to be at a turning point as well. Some are predicting that the Reform party will be emboldened and strengthened by defections from the Tory party and Reform could well replace the Labour party at any general election. But another view is that Reform will be actually weakened by being seen as the home to Tories who made a hash of things whilst last in government and many of whom lost their seats anyway. So this fracturing of the right might be a mirror image of what happened in the 1970’s when Thatcher was successful primarily because the opposition to her was divided between the Labour party and the breakaway SDP. In round terms, Thatcher only won just over 40% of the popular vote and if you take into account the 70% voting rate in general elections, then only about 3 in every 10 people actually voted for her. It is quite possible to see a similar result being played out in future years when the Labour Party (just about) secures a little over one third of the popular vote whilst the Liberals, Tories and Reform fight over the remainder. I think it seems probably that we have seen the end of one-party governments and need to et used to the idea of coalitions which has been the norm in continental Europe, particularly Germany, for decades now.
In the late morning, my son and daughter-in-law called around and evidently it was good to see them. It was my turn to cook them a Sunday lunch so what I prepared was very simple being an unsmoked ham joint cooked in the slow cooker and then we did some potatoes par-boiled and then tossed in oil) and Cavolo Nero kale to complete the dinner. My family had brought around some little pots of mousse for our sweets and then we started to relax for the afternoon. Somehow we got onto the issue of quality measurement in education and this encouraged me to go and resurrect from the filing cabinet the classic photo I had taken of some 127 boxes of evidence that we had populated during our preparations for the last Quality Assurance visit in which I was engaged more than 20 years ago. I also resurrected the report from the assessors which I have not read for twenty years but was of particular interest to my daughter-in-law as just before her retirement she achieved an ‘Excellent’ in every category in an Ofsted report on the school of which she was a headmistress and was therefore intrigued to see what had been written about our department two decades previously. At the time, we scored a 22 out of a possible 24 points which enabled us to pass over the threshold of a ‘Qaulity’ institution on the strength of which we were invited into a multi-university consortium to investigate Quality in Business Studies education. So some of this invoked trips down memory lane but my daughter-in-law was informing me about the changes in the way in which modern universities, post-Covid, had changed recently particularly as the teaching world is now dominated by the mobile phone, the internet and the prevalence of Artificial Intelligence which is transforming the ways which subject is delivered, assessed and the subsequent quality monitored. My daughter-in-law and I are both of the view that education is a world which we are both glad and relieved to have left behind us and, even if successful in today’s degree programmes, there are enormous challenges to be faced in getting one’s first professional job, acquiring a foot on the housing ladder and thus acquiring a degree of economic independence. In retrospect only, it is probably the case that the generation in which my wife (when alive) were brought up must seem like some kind of golden age because the jobs market was expanding and one’s first house could be acquired for about two times the average salary instead of about ten times, often involving a deposit of some £60k which takes a lot of acquiring. There may well be some inter-generational transfer of wealth from grandparents whose major economic commitments such as mortgagee and the costs of having their own children may have diminished. The modern ‘apprenticeship’ may be the way forward for many young people but evidence suggests that competition for certain high-quality apprenticeships, particularly degree-level roles, has become as fierce as, or even more intense than, that for top university places. While university applications are generally high, the limited supply of apprenticeship opportunities compared to high demand has created an intensely competitive market.