Iain Dale presents the evening show on LBC Radio and the For the Many podcast with Jacqui Smith.
I have no problem in saying I am concerned at the number of times law abiding black people are stopped by the Police just because they happen to be driving a nice car, or indeed, for seemingly no apparent reason than the colour of their skin. There’s no point in pretending we don’t have a problem here because we do.
However, we’re getting to the point where individual police officers now feel they can’t stop someone who is black for fear of being accused of racism.
Take the example this week, when Dawn Butler, the Labour MP, complained that she was in a car which was stopped because (she thought) the driver and she were black. She released a video she had recorded on her phone to try to prove her point. She had no complaint about how the police spoke to her, but nevertheless made it all about race.
The police patiently explained that the car was stopped because the officers had mistakenly typed the registration plate into the national computer and it came up with the fact that the car had come from North Yorkshire. Once they had realised their mistake and typed in the correct number, they apologised and Butler and her friend went on their way.
She then released the video on social media, and there then descended a vicious war between those who defended the police and those who defended her. The police have been quite robust in defending the officers concerned, and have pointed out they could not have stopped the car due to their racial profile, given the car had tinted windows. And so the debate goes on…
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I can imagine how anxious Gavin Williamson will have been this week. The last thing he will have wanted is to go through what John Swinney, the Scottish Education Secretary, has been through in Scotland over the release of exam results.
Only 24 hours before the A Level results were released, the Education Secretary announced a major change and said that if a student was unhappy with their grades they could either resit the exam in October or take the result of their mock exam. What he didn’t do is say that they could accept the predicted grades from their teacher.
This has caused outrage. Teachers have said that they are best placed to predict grades, and in some cases they may well be right, but not in all. Just at a human level, teachers will tend to give higher grades rather than lower ones. Is a teacher really going to want to fail anyone? If they did so, it would reflect on them and their own teaching abilities. But in real life, people do fail.
I sympathise wholly with anyone who hasn’t got the grades they were expecting or felt they should have been awarded. The trouble is, there is no perfect system. OfQual has released figures which demonstrate that the overall grades this year are on a par, or even slightly better, than the last two years.
However, it appears that 35 per cent of grades have been downgraded from the teachers’ predictions. That’s slightly less than in Scotland, but still a massive number, which will give the Government’s opponents a lot to chew on.
The students I feel for particularly are those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who may be at a higher risk of being underestimated because of the fact that their schools might not have had such great results in the past.
I genuinely hope universities and colleges are as flexible as they can be and will still accept those students who results might not quite have been what had been expected. It’s scant comfort to those who didn’t get the grades they thought they would get to say that this happens each year.
Understandably, those who didn’t get the grades will seek to blame Covid. My advice, for what it is worth is for them, to work bloody hard over the next two months and resit the exams in October. I hope schools will provide every support for them to do so.
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Reshuffle speculation is always rife at this time of year, and at least it gives political journalists something to write about during August.
They can rest their pens this summer, though. I am hearing that a reshuffle is being pencilled in for January and not before, on the basis that it will be quite clear by then which ministers need shifting or removing.
I doubt whether the names on the chopping board will change in the meantime, but I reckon there will be at least eight cabinet ministers who will be experiencing a few months of “squeaky bum” moments between now and then.