Positive thinking

One freezing night of January 2019, 150 people packed into a church hall in the Hertfordshire town of Stevenage, some 30 miles north of London. Students, teachers, support staff, parents and grandparents had come to support their community’s secondary school against the Conservative government’s plan to hand control to a super-wealthy couple. A young man called Dylan Jones, the school’s “head student”, stood up to speak. “I have been part of the school since 2012,” he said. “It’s the best it’s ever been. It’s just a shame that those who have not had the same opportunity as me to see every student, every class, and those who have not seen us for the true community that we are, have decided that they can push us around because we do not have a voice.” In England today almost 9,000 schools with more than 4 million pupils operate outside of their democratically-accountable local authorities. These schools are state-funded but independent of local control. The charitable trusts that r...

Adam Behr , Newcastle University Two songs were vying for the top spot in the UK’s music charts last month. Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, also the EU’s “Anthem for Europe”, and 17 Million F**k O*** , by pro-Brexit comedian, writer and commentator Dominic Frisby. The competition between these two pieces signified a much starker divide than a merely musical one. The melodic passage of the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – originally the setting for a vocal rendition of Friedrich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy – had been adopted as the European anthem by the Council of Europe in 1972 and in 1985 by the European Community. Pro-Europeans in the UK launched a campaign to get the song into the charts, settling on a recording by André Rieu, with the Johann Strauss Orchestra . O friends, no more these sounds! Let us sing more cheerful songs, more full of joy! Joy, bright spark of divinity, Daughter of Elysium, Fire-inspired we tr...