The Brexit Referendum

This letter was sent to the Times but was neither published nor acknowledged

Conduit Tail, 38 Conduit Head Road, Cambridge, CB3 0EY

Professor Sir Peter Lachmann FRS FMedSci

15 September 2017

The Editor
The Times


Dear Sir

In writing in this morning's Times about "MPs ignoring the voters clear instruction to leave the EU" Philip Collins  greatly over interprets the result of the referendum.
At the same time as the Cameron Government put through the European Referendum bill that treated this major constitutional change as if it were a constituency election for an MP, they also passed the Trade Union Act of 2016 that stipulates that for a strike in important public services there needs to 40% of support of all those eligible to vote. This should surely have also been taken as the minimal requirement for a clear instruction on an issue as important as leaving the EU.
It was not achieved. Giving the results in percentages of the electorate of 46.5 million, the leavers received 37.44% ; the remainers 34.71%;  and 27.85% did not vote or had their ballots rejected. This left the leavers 2.56% of the electorate - some 1.19 million voters - short of what would have been necessary to call a strike in health, education, transport, border security or fire sectors.
With a mandate as marginal as this, there is every reason to support the efforts of those who would require any final Brexit deal to be approved by Parliament or by a further referendum that requires the votes of, at least, 40% of the electorate.

Yours Sincerely

Peter Lachmann

The Olympics and selective schooling

 

With justification, the whole country is enthusiastic about Team GB’s success in the Olympics and the Paralympics.  This success has been achieved through a policy of selecting the most talented young athletes and allowing them full-time training in the company of their peers and with the best available coaches.  No-one seems to worry that this process may be unfair to the somewhat less talented athletes who are not recruited into this process and who may be made to feel rejected as a result. 

This contrasts starkly with the arguments rejecting selective schooling, one important aim of which should be selecting the most academically gifted children and educating them as a group with the best possible teachers as a way of creating an intellectual elite capable of a comparable performance in the “Intellectual Olympics” if there were such a thing. 

There is really only one conclusion that can be drawn from this contrast - that the country does not esteem intellectual success at the highest level in anything like the way it regards success in the Olympics or indeed in football.  This is a pity since the cultural and even economic success of the country really depends on producing a cadre of those who by endowment, education and training, are able to produce success comparable to that of Team GB at the Olympic Games.

This argument should not be taken to imply an uncritical attitude to all forms of academic selection.  In particular, it is clearly unwise to do this selection at one single point in time, at the age of 11.  There should always be the opportunity for those who develop later to join the elite training programs; and those who fail to do well at the highest levels may be more comfortable in returning to a less challenging training environment.

Nor does the argument favour “between-school” selection over “within-school” selection. But it does imply that schooling is primarily about promoting educational excellence and only secondarily about other, also highly desirable, ends such as promoting social equality; and that it should aim to achieve both.