BY JOE NUTT It has to stop. Some situations are so fundamentally detrimental to healthy human families, which are after all, all that really matters when you can genuinely see the wood, they simply cannot be tolerated. Listening to a series of well-informed, often passionate debates about the current state of State education recently, has brought me to this conclusion. Our schools must be freed … Continue reading School Levers
BY JOE NUTT I’ve been a sports participant and a fan all my life. So one of very few things I can hand-on-heart thank the world of television for, besides Basil Fawlty and Noggin the Nog, is its near magical ability to gift me the joy of spectating, even when I can’t be there. I’ve been known to watch an entire stage of a cycling … Continue reading Lift Music Journalism
BY JOE NUTT It’s difficult to avoid the sensation as a commonplace citizen, that more and more equally commonplace citizens have become openly prepared to defy the law. Flags have nothing to do with this. Unless of course they’re ornamenting terrorism. Lawlessness began quietly booming some years ago. In world famous galleries, paint is thrown at great paintings, statues are defaced or toppled and at … Continue reading English and the Law
BY JOE NUTT The English language needs its English teachers more than ever Whether they realise it or not yet, English teachers in this, the first quarter of the twenty-first century, have been burdened with the most daunting, and arguably unique, cultural responsibility in the entire history of the language. It is up to them to restore a tongue not just “listless” and “supine”, as … Continue reading Language in Chains
BY JOE NUTT When Bridget Phillipson’s excruciatingly embarrassing Reign of Error comes to its inevitably ignominious end, all those seriously and professionally involved in thinking about policy relating to schools in the UK, need to grasp the opportunity her failure has dramatically exposed. She will have left a bomb site behind her. Her only achievement has been to dramatically confirm the reality that schools are … Continue reading Reforming Schooling
BY JOE NUTT Life has recently dealt me a surprising, but truly delightful blow. I’m getting used to being recognised as someone other than myself. My eldest daughter has made something of a name for herself as a professional gravel cyclist. She travels all over the world racing, sometimes for days at a time, battling across remote, astonishingly beautiful, and often mountainous landscapes. The videos … Continue reading Fifteen Minutes
BY JOE NUTT Professionals who have to know these things to do their job, know that Wales has quickly followed Scotland in becoming an international educational basket case. The worrying question now is, are England’s schools about to follow them into the trash? Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence started the rot. I was there at the birth, physically in the same offices, and watched the monster … Continue reading Stop Exploiting Schools
BY JOE NUTT Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me is such an obvious truism, it rightly finds a perfect home in the pre-school playground where grazed knees naturally provoke more tears, than bruised egos. Yet in England, in 2025, you would be forgiven for thinking almost no adult elected to the Mother of all Parliaments now believes this. … Continue reading There are Lies, Damned Lies and Keir Starmer
BY JOE NUTT We are living in the age of the charlatan. Plenty of others have drawn attention to how little credible or relevant professional experience, so many members of his Majesty’s current government possess. Whether it’s Rachel from accounts or Bridget from…well nowhere really, if you don’t count mum as your employer; many of those currently exerting considerable power over all our lives appear … Continue reading The Age of the Charlatan
BY JOE NUTT Centuries of Accumulated Soft Power is Being Trashed by a Single Spite-Fuelled Politician. In 1964 a Labour Party minister for education whose name is largely forgotten and truly deserves to be, so he’ll remain nameless here, instructed local education authorities to reorganise secondary schooling along comprehensive lines. Like dutiful sheep, they mostly did. Our current minister for education, Bridget Phillipson, is now … Continue reading Sacrificing the Best for Spite
BY JOE NUTT About a month before Keir Starmer’s now self-evidently delinquent version of the Labour Party secured the mother of all Pyrrhic victories in the general election, I published an essay in The Critic explaining how they would immediately dedicate their energy to attacking private schooling, just as Blair had done with fox hunting. I predicted that they would face a legal challenge rooted … Continue reading Labour’s Anti-Education Policy
BY JOE NUTT If you can’t speak freely you are someone else’s puppet. In that brief sentence alone, any genuinely well-educated reader should find delicious food for thought, because words aren’t the innocent little toys the ex-hippies the BBC loves to sell as language experts, insist they are. They are a constant battleground of chemical reactions that link me to other English speakers like you. … Continue reading Someone Else’s Puppet
BY JOE NUTT Someone who teaches writing to undergraduates recently made this astute observation online: “At university, your main reader is always a peer. That means your readership numbers in the tens, perhaps hundreds, not thousands.” One of the least understood concepts about writing in any context, is this stark reality. Who, really, are you writing this for? Do you even know? This numerical but … Continue reading Can’t Wait for Independence Day
BY JOE NUTT I’ve always empathised with the charming character Bill Nighy plays in the Richard Curtis film, About Time. He uses his peculiarly inherited ability to time travel, for the most admirable of purposes; he rereads Dickens. I’m perfectly aware that that statement alone risks losing readers, not just because sitting quietly on one’s own, engrossed in a fiction isn’t high up on the … Continue reading Why and What Do You Read?
BY JOE NUTT October 7th changed my life. I know this, like I know water is wet and dogs deserve better than us. I cannot live the same life I led before I witnessed anti-Semitic glee and hatred on the streets of Westminster with my own eyes. Growing up in the immediate televisual aftermath of a world war, my world view encompassed both the black … Continue reading Even Dogs Have Consciences
BY JOE NUTT I have just walked half a mile along a quiet pavement in my local market town. The gusts of wind were strong enough to mean I actually had to make a small physical effort to resist each one as it hit, while sporadic, unpredictable rain drops struck my face hard enough to sting. It was trying hard, but failing to rain. I … Continue reading Earthlings
BY JOE NUTT I wish I could have a good laugh. I really, really miss it. It feels like years since I enjoyed the kind of unbridled, spontaneous hilarity that was a familiar part of my experience growing up in what we have all recently come to appreciate is indeed a sceptred isle. I certainly used to feel I belonged to a happy breed. But … Continue reading Dying Without Laughter
BY JOE NUTT Like many people who read an essay by Honor Jones published a few weeks ago in The Atlantic magazine, entitled How I Demolished my Life, I reacted badly. For anyone who missed it, the essay began with the author detailing her dissatisfaction with her current kitchen, before rapidly moving onto a description of the unending mess created by her three children, then … Continue reading A Family is for Life
BY JOE NUTT One of the most significant advances in Western culture took place when a handful of Renaissance artists defined the rules for creating the illusion of linear perspective in their work. When painters learned how to mimic reality by following rules, they unknowingly initiated cultural and intellectual innovation on a vast scale. Perspective gave people vision. Our modern day visionaries have lost this … Continue reading Maintaining Our Sense of Perspective
