Year by year the evil grows

I felt sure that I'd used this as a title before. But google assures me that no-one has used the phrase, which I fund rather hard to believe. Maybe I can copyright it. Its a useful phrase. I'm sure I remember it in the context of a Ray Bradbury story. Aha!. It has been used in books, 4 times says google. Well its all bad news, linked to widow-burning. I'm not complaining about anything as bad as that.

No, I mean the trivial evils of our times, one part of which is the relentless march of policy pap in our schools. Our governors had a training evening on "Equality and community cohesion" (I missed it, sadly). All very worthy stuff I'm sure. I thought the hand-outs from that were bad enough, but the original document from which they are mostly cribbed is worse. Because the hand-outs, though 95% wurble, do at least provide the one piece of vital context that allows you to understand (and ignore) the entire thing: The duty has its origins in disturbances in 2001 in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford and the subsequent Cantle report concluded that people from different groups were not mixing and were living 'parallel lives'.

So there you have it: its a 7-year-late response to a problem we don't have here. Jolly good. The only cohesion issue we have around here is between rich and poor; naturally enough the report (tailored to Cambridgeshire, remember) doesn't mention that issue, because they were just slavishly following government guidelines rather than thinking about actual problems.