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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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The Times carried this report the other day ...
 
Adam and Luke Bolton are identical twins who do everything together, but this week they were told that not only have they been allocated places in different secondary schools, but also that the schools are 18 miles apart. The news has come as a bombshell. The ten-year-old boys read the same books, play the same computer games and, although they have separate bedrooms, have sleepovers in each other's rooms every weekend.
 
They have different hobbies — Luke plays piano and is a footballer, Adam prefers reading — but most of the time they stick together. To date their biggest anxiety has been being asked to sit at different tables in their class at Tewin Cowper Primary School, in Hertfordshire.
 
Their mother, Ann Connolly, said: “When we applied to secondary school we tried to prepare them for the fact that they might be put in different classes. That would be a huge step for them. So for them to find themselves in different schools is very distressing. Twins are not like other children. They have a total reliance on each other to be their primary friend and they look to each other in stressful situations.”
 
Adam and Luke are a living example of a problem highlighted this week by Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary. Hertfordshire is one of 25 local authorities that use a lottery system to allocate places in oversubscribed schools. The aim of the lottery is to make school admissions fairer and prevent middle-class parents from playing the system by buying or renting homes close to the best schools.
 
Ms Connolly believes that the thinking behind the system is muddled. "It makes it impossible to make a rational choice of school because you can have no idea in advance what will be your chances of getting in,” she said.
 
“I asked the local authority if they could allocate places to two children together via the lottery process but they said that would bias its random nature and so couldn't be allowed. It is ludicrous.”
 
Mr Balls agrees and has asked the Schools Adjudicator to look at the issue of twins being split in lottery-based systems. “I am asking the Schools Adjudicator to look at how we can make crystal clear in guidance and in the [School Admissions] Code that splitting up twins when parents don't want them to be split is the wrong thing to do,” Mr Balls said.
 
Luke was allocated a place at the twins' first choice, Richard Hale school in Hertford, which is a six-mile (9km) bus ride from the Bolton home, while Adam was given a place at their second choice, Verulam School in St Albans, which is 12 miles from the house in the opposite direction and an hour away by train and bus.
 
Ms Connolly, who works in the pharmaceutical industry, said: “All I can do is put Adam on the waiting list for Robert Hale and hope that a place becomes available, but it could be months before we hear and in the mean time we just have to sit and wait.”
 
What is particularly frustrating to her is that now that one twin has been allocated a place at the Robert Hale, the family can take advantage of the school's sibling rule to get the other one in. This effectively means that Adam will be higher up on the waiting list than he otherwise would be. Ms Connolly said that it was bizarre that the boys counted as siblings only after the first round of applications but not when they first applied.

 
It is, of course, quite outrageous that in a relatively densely populated area like Hertfordshire any child should have to travel twelve miles to school.
 
Note that "The aim of the lottery is to make school admissions fairer and prevent middle-class parents from playing the system by buying or renting homes close to the best schools". What an extraordinary thing for a reputable newspaper to have to print - that we live in such a nonsensical society that local politicians can seriously describe buying a house as "playing the system". What next? Our choice of clothes is discriminatory because we choose not to walk round Asda in a fluorescent shell-suit? Our haircut is racist because we don't wear dreads? Will the speech police prowl in the High Street and issue spot fines to anyone who doesn't end every sentence with "innit"?
 
Despite Ed Balls' current misgivings, this "one size fits all" approach starts at government level - pretty rich for a government whose members are adept and shameless in feathering their own nests and scratching the backs of bankers and quangocrats. It has caused local authorities to try and make school admissions “fairer”: what they mean is that in middle-class areas, all the middle-class children go to the local high school and fill it up. That school is therefore successful, and working-class children from the council estate on the other side of town can't go to it. This is unfair, and they are trying to force the middle-class children to go to out-of-catchment schools to ensure a mix.
 
It would be a great deal fairer, of course, to run all schools effectively (or, rather, to leave head teachers to do it without interference, as the vast majority of them are perfectly capable of deciding what's good for their schools and what isn't) and to fund them properly so that all children get a good education wherever they live. But that would cost money, of course.
 
The real unfairness is something the government haven't yet addressed – though one wouldn't put it past them to try. The real unfairness is that middle-class parents can afford to buy nice houses in nice areas and all live together in a cosy huddle. Working-class parents can't.
 
So one awaits with interest the next round of government legislation, when a law will be introduced to (a) put all middle-class people on a government database (which will then be left on a train or sold to double-glazing firms), (b) force them to buy houses they don't want in areas they don't like, and drive elderly cars which they'll have to park in the street, and (c) give working-class people large grants so they can live in nice houses with a garage and a front drive, and buy a nice car.
 
Now THAT would be fairer, don't you think?
 
Here's another idea: in the current economic climate, wouldn't it be fairer if everyone who still has a job was forced to pay a large proportion of their salary to the government, so that the government could hand it out in benefits and grants to all the people who don't have a job?
 
Oh no, wait a minute. Silly me, that already happens. So that's all right then. Very fair.
 

 
The GOS says: Of course, these two boys could have the best of both worlds - or the best of both schools, anyway. They can take it in turns to go to both schools - I mean, they're twins, aren't they? What's the point of being twins if you can't, erm, what's the word? ... "play the system"?
 

 
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