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The decision by 94% of delegates at the National Association of Headteachers’ annual conference in Brighton to boycott next year’s Sats tests is as alarming as it is typical of the bloated public sector.

It’s also a damning indictment of teacher’s language skills…

boycott
• verb refuse to have commercial or social dealings with (a person, organization, or country) as a punishment or protest.
• noun an act of boycotting.
— ORIGIN from Captain Charles C. Boycott, an Irish land agent so treated in 1880 in an attempt to get rents reduced.
Source: OED Online

Customers boycott, not staff! And if they still refuse commercial or social dealings, what about their salaries?

The action means headteachers will refuse to prepare for and invigilate next year’s key stage tests, leaving more than a million children without the SATs results vital to accurate ability setting at secondary school and parents ability to access school performance. All preparation for Sats will stop from this September after the agreed on Saturday to ballot members on boycotting the tests for seven to 11-year-olds.

This isn’t a boycott, it’s a dereliction of duty.

And it’s inspired more by teachers shirking being assessed than anything.

I’ve never needed a reason not to visit Laos or Thailand: I can get sun and beaches without having to get paranoid about having drugs planted on me and facing the death sentence or life without trial or being arrested for insulting their King, thank you very much.

But unfortunately people do visit these illiberal, unjust and poorly governed TPC’s, and one poor such youngster - Miss Samantha Orobator, 20 - now faces the death penalty in the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Laos if convicted of drug smuggling.

Sir Humphrey: East Yemen, isn’t that a democracy?
Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office: Its full name is the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of East Yemen.
Sir Humphrey: Ah I see, so it’s a communist dictatorship.

Ms Orobator, from south London, was arrested at Wattay Airport in August last year accused of smuggling heroin into the country, the Foreign Office said. Orobator, who fell mysteriously pregnant in December while in prison, faces a hastily-arranged trial next week and if found guilty, a death sentence. The Laos court has made it impossible for any lawyer to prepare an adequate defence.

It’s utterly disgusting, and our government’s responce is weak. The exact figures aren’t available but we surely give £millions to Laos in aid. There are currently 47 on-going EC-funded projects in Laos with a value of more than 35 million Euros. Surely he who pays the piper should pick the tune?

Catching up on the past few weeks, the news that Norsheen Bhatti - previously the Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate for Chelsea and Fulham - defected to the Conservatives during their Spring Forum has raised mixed opinions.

The Party leadership are naturally delighted, with the defection fitting neatly with the “love-bombing” tactic; whilst the Party membership are more concerned naturally with what may have been offered to Norsheen and fears of her defecting purely for personal ambition.

I divide defectors (and politicians in general) into two groups - principled and personal, or as I prefer Churchillian and Blairite.

The Churchills defect and decide their badge on principle: Churchill switched from Conservative to Liberal in 1904 over a range of issues including support for free trade and social reforms such as the pension, then rejoined the Conservative Party in 1924 as the Liberals drifted ever leftwards, commenting wryly that “anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.”

The Blairs defect and decide their badge for personal ambition: Blair joined Labour when it supported mass nationalisation, unilateral disarmourment and opposed the Falklands War, Common Market and privatisation because it was down and out, in need of electable talent, and a vehicle for his power.

Now there’s always a degree of the latter in the former, along with a dose of realpolitik as no one joins a party with no hope of it ever achieving anything, but as generalisations they work. Now the question is which camp is Norsheen in? Her brief article at ConservativeHome leaned both ways.

Firmly in the Blair camp are ill advised statements such as “My principles are the same, it’s just my party is now different” and “Since Charles Kennedy stopped being leader of the Lib Dems, the party has had no real focus and has just been drifting along in the wilderness. I don’t have the time or what to be a drifter - I entered politics because I want to make a real difference in society and in peoples’ lives, therefore really making a change. A party that drifts along cannot do this, nor would it, in its present state, be a party that would be fit to form a government”. What if Kennedy returned and the party changed back, and how exactly has it changed? Did it ever have direction?

Yet leaning the principled way is this: “In areas including ID cards, anti-Heathrow expansion, the environment, civil liberties, savings and investment, and education, the Conservatives have policies in which I have always believed” and “at the Mayoral elections I voted for Boris and I’m glad that I did and that he got in!”

I guess the jury is still out. We have to accept defections and welcome them, it’s a public example of what we’re asking millions of voters to do and people do make mistakes. Whilst I’m concerned that Norsheen may not hold true conservative principles, she joined the Lib Dems at 18 - at university in 1991 - and may well have done so through peer pressure of the prevailing zeitgeist, youthful inexperience or simply mistook their true illiberal beliefs, or may have changed her beliefs unwittingly and unconsciously over these 18 years.

Perhaps it goes back to a Churchill quote. “If at 20, you’re not a liberal, you have no heart. If at 40, you’re not a conservative, you have no brain.” Ms Bhatti is 32.