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post(s) 1-9 of 9
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Shadowing a police officer in mid Wales
24/05/2007
When I saw Jan Berry, Chairman of the Police Federation, in
Blackpool last week, she said she was interested in my teaching experience in
Hull.
I said I would like to spend the same time
shadowing a police officer so a week later, after rushing out of London after
Prime Minister’s questions, here I am.
Jan suggested coming to rural mid
Wales because it is here in many
ways that the thin blue line is at its thinnest.
Arriving here, with picturesque places like Welshpool and
Newtown, it’s hard to
believe this is a hotbed of crime, but Sergeant Paul Herdman, my companion for the
next couple of days, tells me they are “fighting towns” – and we’re likely to
see some action.
There’s plenty of time in the afternoon to talk with officers,
community support officers and Paul’s family.
We even watch his daughter rehearse at a Welsh speaking school for
Eisteddfod as he’ll be working when the festival is on.
Attending the afternoon briefing, I get a reminder that
every day these officers take big risks on our behalf – some of the people that
they are looking for on the night patrol have been extremely violent in the
past.
We hit the road - and things hot up.
Three young men arrested for drugs in
Newtown (possession of cannabis, speed and
ecstasy) are swiftly cautioned and sent on their way.
We set out to find a local drug dealer, but are soon
diverted to Welshpool to deal with yobs on a train.
Then we spot a well known local hard man heading in the
opposite direction and turn and give chase, successfully.
His car is untaxed and he is breaking the
speed limit.
While he looks fairly
harmless, on a previous occasion it’s alleged that he punished a grass by using
a red hot poker to brand the letter T on their forehead.
By the time we clock off the cells (all 3 of them) are
pretty much full, officers are wrestling with an aggressive drunk and the
custody sergeant has been rushed off his feet.
There is an incredible contrast between the power of the
latest technology on the one hand and the crumbling infrastructure on the
other.
The unmarked car with automatic number plate recognition,
which we spend some time in, is incredibly impressive.
And so often it is untaxed, unlicensed cars
that are used for other crimes and this machine identifies them within seconds.
But the strongest impressions are these.
First, it really
is a thin blue line.
You can call for back up, but it might not
arrive for hours.
There are cells in
Newtown, but no longer in
Welshpool.
If the only three cells in this
vast area are nearly full by 10pm on a Wednesday night, what happens on a Friday
night after the pubs have closed?
The
fact is that officers drive for often more than an hour each way, to Brecon or
Aberystwyth, just to process an arrest.
Second, the paperwork, targets and auditing are every bit as
bad as they say.
Some of it is so appalling
it’s almost comic.
Every so often to
audit performance, officers are made to use a large clunking Psion for a
fortnight at a time to record what they actually do.
When these tests take place they have to make
entries in to the Psion every 15 minutes that they are on duty.
One officer told me of his frustration of
spending hour after hour doing paperwork, but breaking off every 15 minutes to
plug in the word “paperwork” to the wretched Psion.
Third, the expression “the death of discretion” is not an
overstatement.
For example, taking all responsibility for charging away
from the Police and giving it to the CPS, means that Police officers often wait
around for hours to decide what to do with a relatively minor offence.
If they ring the new service “CPS Direct”
they can get advice, but it can mean waiting on the phone for three hours.
Whether it is hearing about the fact that the local
management team have virtually no control over their £13m budget, or listening
to officers complain that detection targets mean that they arrest people they
would normally just tick off and send on their way (including one teenager who
stole an apple – yes that’s right, one apple), you are left with a clear
impression.
We train these people, ask them to do some pretty tough
things – and then utterly fail to trust them.
That’s not a reason to back pedal on Police reform, which I have argued
is deeply necessary.
There is a problem
with a few officers who, as one said to me today can “swing the lead and work
the system”, but the Government’s approach of endless top down instruction is
not right.
It is more local management
and accountability that’s badly needed.
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My visit to Blackpool & Gordon Brown's non-election campaign
18/05/2007
It’s been pretty hectic since my last post from Hull – after finishing there I had to get to Blackpool for the next morning to speak to the Police Federation’s annual conference. It’s a tough crowd – John Reid got booed the day before – and I spent a lot of time on my speech.
I really wanted to get two important points across. First of all, I wanted to clear up the misunderstandings about those three words I never said about hoodies. Of course people who break the law should be punished. But everybody knows, not least the police officers I was speaking to, that we won’t ever tackle crime properly unless we deal with family breakdown, drug addiction, educational failure – and do everything we can to make sure kids grow up in a stable, loving home. I was pleased to see heads nodding in the hall when I said this.
The second point I wanted to make was that our plans for police reform are all about helping the police do their job better. I offered them a deal: I’ll get rid of the targets and paperwork that get in your way, if you agree to modernise working practices.
I think the speech went well – I got a good reaction in the hall and I really enjoyed the chance to debate our plans with police officers directly. They only sticky moment came when answering one of the questions. I told the questioner I was transfixed by her red leather jacket. She said something like, don’t worry, I’m from Essex. Not sure what she meant by that.
After the speech in Blackpool, I spoke at a lunch of 300 Conservative activists at Preston North End football club. There were strong questions about grammar schools. But when I explained, as I did on the blog the other day, that this was something the previous Conservative government never did, that the next Conservative government wouldn’t do and which if it did would see it reversed anyway - and I put to them forcefully the argument that we have to work for the future not debate the policies of the past, there was strong applause. With winning council candidates at the lunch from across the north west, there was a really great mood.
Meanwhile the Gordon Brown non-election campaign keeps trundling along. As I said yesterday, it’s ludicrous that there was only one candidate for the post and that we’ll have a caretaker Prime Minister and a caretaker government for the next seven weeks. I think it’ll become increasingly clear that indulging Tony Blair’s vanity is bad for the country.
For the future, I’m looking forward to debating Gordon Brown. In the Conservative leadership election, we had a series of TV debates, and they showed that they work, they can address serious policy issues, and that they’re genuinely informative.
I said at the time that we should have these debates between the main party leaders before a general election, and I hope in the next few days Gordon Brown will make clear that once he’s actually the Labour leader and Prime Minister, he’ll take part in proper TV debates that could really help bring politics to life.
Off to the constituency today, stopping in Oxford where 2 councillors (one of them a Muslim woman who’s a local GP) have defected from the LibDems (via a stint as independents) to join the Conservative Party. Of course it’s great to have - at last! – councillors in the city of Oxford. But what delighted me was that they had really thought through their decision to join us and that what really persuaded them had been our campaigns on the environment and the health service.
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A great experience, only slightly marred by the grammar schools row
17/05/2007
Finish teaching in Hull and travel to Blackpool for the Police Federation conference. I cannot praise the school more highly. They were incredibly helpful, friendly and accommodating. When, inevitably the LEA kicked up a fuss “why weren’t we told?” (Answer – because you would have found a thousand bureaucratic reasons to say “no”, or told the press or both) the head teacher was calm and reasonable. Given the results and the atmosphere in the school (and her ability to put up with me) she is clearly doing a great job.
The teaching is a great experience (more later), only slightly marred by the row about grammar schools.
I announced over a year ago that the party would not go back to a policy of opening new grammar schools or introducing the 11 plus and so am slightly surprised that the press has got so excited about this clear pledge being given all over again by David Willets.
The Telegraph coverage and comment is near hysterical. They simply don’t understand that the idea of introducing a few extra grammars says nothing to thousands of parents worried about children languishing in failing schools. In many ways, “bring back grammars” is a meaningless slogan, as the reason the 11 plus went in so many parts of the country is because it was so unpopular with parents. It is a classic example of fighting a battle of the past rather than meeting the challenges of the future. And it is politically naïve as it just says “we’ll help a few more escape failing schools rather than turn them round for all children.” The way to win the fight for aspiration is to put those things that worked in grammars – aggressive setting to stretch bright pupils, whole class teaching, strong discipline to name but three – in all schools.
What is sad is that the commentators miss all the things we’d do that would help standards and aspiration for all – synthetic phonics at primary school, zero tolerance of bad behaviour, unchallengeable rights for heads to exclude difficult pupils, enforceable home school contracts, saving special schools, setting and streaming, and expanding academies, allowing churches, voluntary bodies and others to open new schools.
Perhaps if I put the words “Bring back” in front of some of these policies they might just get it.
Anyway, back to teaching.
I found being a teaching assistant much easier in history than English. I helped a really bright set with a slavery project. Every single child in the class wanted to learn and succeed (see, setting works). However, as a result, my assistance – bit of spelling advice, an idea here or there – was probably of limited value. Helping the bottom set with “post 1945 reconstruction” on the other hand I was rushed off my feet. Personalised attention, assisting with plans for their presentations, advice about sources and information – I felt that I was really helping. That said it took me longer than it should to see that one boy was playing pacman rather than reading about the Yalta conference.
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English classes, playground duty, and helping supervise lunch
15/05/2007
After two days living with a Muslim family in Birmingham – two days as a teaching assistant in a Hull secondary school. Two English classes, some playground duty, and helping supervise lunch are the main elements of my day. Remembering how to analyse and write about poems, without getting my metaphors confused with personification, oxymorons or enjoinment is one of the main challenges.
Two English classes, some playground duty, and helping supervise lunch are the main elements of my day. Remembering how to analyse and write about poems, without getting my metaphors confused with personification, oxymorons or enjoinment is one of the main challenges. Tomorrow I'll be helping the history department, which I hope will be more familiar territory.
I'm at a recovering school serving a pretty tough housing estate on the outskirts of the city. A few years ago this school had one of the lowest GCSE pass rates in the country – now it's above the national average with 62 per cent getting 5 A-Cs at GCSE. But when you look at the percentage getting these grades in core subjects like English and maths, the percentage falls to 7%.
The day starts badly, for me at least. Helping register a class of 13 year olds, no-one – and I mean literally no one – has even heard of the Conservative Party. Using “hangman” on the smart new interactive whiteboard we get to “Conser_ati_e party” before any one gets it. As the point of me being here is to observe and to learn – and not get the usual “here's a visiting politician” treatment - maybe this is a good thing.
I'm not the only one with a bad start to the day. I meet a 16 year old boy loitering outside the hall where he's supposed to be sitting an important GCSE and he tells me he feels rotten - “got pissed last night” - and isn't looking forward to the exam. A timely reminder that improving schools is as much a matter for parents as it is for teachers.
Impressions?
The skill that some teachers have in maintaining order, using their natural authority, while making the subject interesting is a wonder to behold. Given that they are doing this at a time – during GCSEs - of maximum “teaching for the test” it's even more impressive.
But the overwhelming impression I get is of the importance of good behaviour and discipline. It's what the teachers talk about most – and it was the thing that most exercised a small group of kids I had lunch with. And in every class you can see the potential, and often the reality, of poor behaviour by a few wrecking the chances of the rest. And this is in a school that has made huge strides; as the deputy head said to me, before recent changes they were “just glorified baby sitters” looking after children who often behaved appallingly. Truancy – or “twagging” in the Hull slang - is still a problem but here it's getting a little better.
Two teachers I have coffee with in a small staff room would favour a zero tolerance of poor language and behaviour – and I think they're right. In the run up to GCSEs you feel so clearly that these kids only get one chance – and for too many it's simply missed.
Of course there's more to say about teaching methods, the madness of closing special schools (including those for children with behavioural problems), the paramount importance of the basics and the dangers of new teaching fads (I am still to be convinced by the mania for “personalised learning”), and I will say more about these things tomorrow. But order, discipline and behaviour absolutely have to come first.
The current system makes it harder to enforce discipline. Like all schools, the one I'm at is fined for every pupil they exclude, so it's not surprising that they try and avoid excluding disruptive pupils even when they want to do just that. The result is that language and behaviour that simply would not have been tolerated in the past is put up with. What's more, the kids know it.
Change in our society – big, long term, substantial cultural change - is needed. And we should start by making every school head the absolute captain of their ship, able to maintain discipline and exclude poorly behaving pupils without being second-guessed or penalised for doing it.
Of course we need to think hard about how to turn excluded kids around – the current system based around Pupil Referral Units is a bit of a disaster. In the last few months I've visited a couple of fantastic social enterprises that do a brilliant job with excluded kids, and we're working on plans to enable them and similar organisations to be able to offer their expertise to more and more kids who need it.
But I've seen today how much teachers and pupils suffer from and resent the bad behaviour of a minority ruining the chances of the majority and we've been far too soft on this. Teachers want to teach and most kids want to learn – it's pathetic that our education system makes it harder, not easier for them to do that.
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Why does a practising Muslim send his kids to a Jewish school?
11/05/2007
Spent the night staying with Abdullah and his family in Birmingham. His children are a lot better behaved than mine (and older) so my sleep was blissfully uninterrupted.
Breakfast with the family, before taking the children to school. Here’s the interesting part – his three Muslim children go to a local faith school - a Jewish faith school. King David Primary school, which is massively oversubscribed, has a mixed roll with some 60 per cent of pupils from Muslim families, around a third from Birmingham’s Jewish community and the rest a mixture of Christians and Sikhs. The day starts with some prayers in Hebrew, led by the head of Jewish religious studies.
My obvious question to Abdullah – why do you, a practising Muslim, send your kids to a Jewish school? – does not get just the obvious answer: good discipline and good results. On top of that, the very fact that the school has a faith and a strong ethos is seen, at least by Abdullah and his family, as a positive advantage.
To those who think that faith schools are part of the problem and prevent us from building a more cohesive society this tale has a powerful message – far from being part of the problem, schools like King David’s are actually part of the solution. They can promote integration and cohesion, instil discipline, teach the basics, inspire young minds and raise their aspirations – all at the same time.
Later in the day I visit a private Muslim school, the Al-Hira school. Again, some Muslim schools, particularly private ones, have been criticised for encouraging separateness, rather than shared values. I quiz the head about this issue. She accepts that this is a problem in some schools, but in her current job her answer is straightforward and encouraging – her whole philosophy is about opening up the school to the whole community, to dispel any suspicions there may be about “what goes on there.” The school teaches the National Curriculum, and as I walked round, meeting pupils and teachers, it was obvious – from the wall charts about Shakespeare and Richard III to the confident and outward-going manner of the kids – that this is a school that’s helping to strengthen community cohesion, not undermine it.
In fact, the head teacher is totally committed to getting this school into the state sector where it can expand, take more non-Muslim pupils and have access to more resources The current fees are much lower than usual for a private school, £1,500 a year, and that’s many thousands less than the cost of a state school place.
Today Al-Hira’s pass rate at GCSE is 25 per cent. While that’s better than the worst state schools it is still quite poor. The head is confident that she can get it up to 50 and then 75 per cent. If she is right then a new Muslim faith school in the state sector in this part of Birmingham could, along with King David, play a valuable role in tacking the acute shortage of good school places.
As for the rest of the day it’s made up of a number of visits, a few meetings, filming a clip for webcameron about Tony Blair’s announcement (finally!) of his departure timetable - and quite a bit of work.
The work includes cleaning up a city council owned car park with members of the Balshall Heath Forum and volunteers, and helping take the moss and grass off what ought to be a red dirt, all weather football pitch. I also spend some more time behind the cash till in a neighbourhood shop.
Cleaning the car park I come across a discarded syringe and needle. While helping clear the football pitch I chat with an ex-con who’s now living above a crack house which he says the police still haven’t closed. But the story of how the Forum and its neighbourhood patrols cleared a lot of the drug dealers and prostitutes off the streets is an inspiring one. They literally refused to put up with them, picketing the streets, posting the names of kerb crawlers to their wives and offices and forcing the council to evict the drug dealers.
The ex-con (who is white) is still unconvinced, telling me the Forum is just “Asians looking after their own.” I point out that the team clearing the football pitch includes white people, British Asians and Afro-Caribbeans working together, but he simply won’t listen to anything that challenges his bone-headed racial stereotype. Depressing.
The nature of the community work raises an interesting question.
Where you have great community groups like the Forum doing things in and for their local community, why is it so hard for them to get more responsibility and more money?
Real devolution should mean giving them the right to say to the council: “we’re carrying out useful work on behalf of the community that we are doing in your place, and we’d like the resources that should go with it.”
Put more simply, the last Conservative government gave council tenants the right to own their council house; shouldn’t the next one give local people, through such local forums, the right to own and run their parks, community centres and public spaces?
It’s been a fascinating couple of days.
Saying goodbye to Abdullah at Birmingham New Street I’m embarrassed with his gifts of T-shirts, shoes and a traditional robe which he says will be perfect for any visit I make to Pakistan.
It’s yet another reminder that, as I blogged yesterday, integration is a two way street and if we want to remind ourselves of British values – hospitality, tolerance and generosity to name just three - there are plenty of British Muslims ready to show us what those things really mean.
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Balsall Heath photos
11/05/2007
Here are some photos from my stay in Balsall Heath in Birmingham, where I was living
in the house of a British Asian family.
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Fed up with the way that touring the country works in politics
10/05/2007
I’m already rather fed up with the way that touring the country works in politics. You charge around having to meet deadlines imposed by the media and the Parliamentary timetable. An hour here an hour there (frequently half hour, in fact) with snatched conversations, half learning things but not getting to the bottom of a problem and often failing to gain a proper understanding of what’s going on.
There’s too much of people telling you what they think you want to hear, and too often the boldest or loudest voices dominate, rather than the most considered and thoughtful.
So I’ve decided to spend some proper time out of Westminster. For the last couple of days I have been in Balsall Heath in Birmingham, living in the house of a British Asian family.
I’m staying with Abdullah who’s 37 and married to Shahida. They have three children: two girls and a boy, and I’ve also met many of the extended family who live in the area. Abdullah’s a great guy - born in Birmingham, he’s lived here all his life. Since leaving school at in 1985 he studied Business and Finance before he helped to run the family corner grocery shop. He’s steeped in marketing, trading and knows most of the local small business people in the neighbourhood. His main interests are TV, travelling, enjoying family life and good food. He's a Villa fan and enjoyed playing when he was younger.
Yesterday was pretty busy. After going to Abdullah’s house to meet the family, we had a walk round the neighbourhood and chatted to some of the local shopkeepers and small business owners – you can see some of that in the films we'll be posting to Webcameron in the next 24 hours.
Then we went to the local mosque, where I had a really fascinating (and in some respects extremely worrying) conversation with some of the elders. After spending some more time in the local shops (including trying my hand at serving customers – not a great success) we met up with some parents at the Balsall Heath Forum, an amazing community organisation led by the brilliant social entrepreneur Dick Atkinson, then on to dinner back at Abdullah’s house, before going out on patrol with Abdullah, who’s a community warden. We ended the day with a drink in the local pub.
You can find out more about
Dick Atkinson and the Balsall Heath Forum here, and read the speech I
made a while back which talked about their work here.
Some impressions of my first day.
Yes it’s a cliché but people in this community work incredibly hard. The shopkeepers I spoke to (and worked with) yesterday tend to work 13 hour days, often 7 days a week. And far from the ever-onward march of the British Asian corner shop, they’ve been facing very tough competition. Abdullah and his family actually sold their shop, which was a key feature of life in Balsall Heath, some years ago. They showed me with great pride the newspaper cuttings about their shop, and talked about how it was much more than just a shop – more of a community centre, really. Now supermarkets are getting more savvy at stocking ethnic food, life is getting even tougher for small local shops here.
Another cliché is the strength of the extended family, but it really is so powerfully true. Abdullah and family see more of their aunts, uncles and cousins in a week than I see of mine in a year. Mum lives at home, rather than – as is the case in so many ethnically British families – elsewhere and alone.
Whether sitting in the Karachi Café, with its cross-cultural menu of southern fried chicken, kebabs and baltis, or having dinner with the family and friends at Abdullah’s home, or in the Balsall Heath Forum itself, a lot of the conversation is around the twin issues of cohesion – put simply, how do we live together - and the current threat of terrorism and how we should tackle it.
Let’s do terrorism first.
It’s hard to over-emphasise the importance of language. I know it sounds like a side issue, but it isn’t. We are just not getting this right. Every time the BBC or a politician talks about “Islamist terrorists” they are doing immense harm (and yes I am sure I have done this too, despite trying hard to get this right.) Think of Northern Ireland – “IRA terrorist” was fine because it marked them out as part of a terrorist group, Catholic terrorists would have been a disaster. Yet that is the equivalent of what we are doing now..
When they hear and see this kind of language, Muslims simply think – “they mean us.” Of course it’s impossible every single time to say “terrorists who are following a perverted strain of the true religion of Islam” but if we’re going to use shorthand we have got to do better.
Together with the issue about language, the other recurrent theme is the way the media handle these issues. The leaks about the arrests surrounding the alleged plot to capture and behead a British soldier did a lot of damage in the community here. And the perceived lack of balance in reporting the Muslim community comes up again and again. And it was boys at the supermarket check-out talking to me about these things, not activists from the MCB.
But there’s another side to this. Even accepting the point about language and the need for the media to think and act responsibly, do these conversations show that there is a problem amongst the Muslim community of accepting what has happened with 7/7 and other plots? Put simply is there an issue of denial?
In some parts of the community, yes. In the mosque and elsewhere I got the familiar depressing questions about who was really responsible for 9/11 and even 7/7. Dig a bit deeper and it all comes out. “CIA plot…Jews told to leave the twin towers” - even when it comes to 7/7 “how do we know the suicide bomber videos are real and not fakes?”
Even if this is a view held by 5 or 10 per cent of British muslims - and I suspect it is at least that – this is a real problem which we have all got to get to grips with.
That said there is plenty of gritty realism too. There is a justifiable anger amongst British muslims of Pakistani origin that so many radicalising preachers come from abroad – Syria, Egypt and Jordan – and yet so little has been done to deal with them.
The effect of all this on cohesion is depressing. One young businessman told me that it had set back progress by at least a decade. Another said that he felt constantly under suspicion and much less a welcome and normal part of British life than before.
But after a group of us had discussed these difficult issues over dinner, it was really striking that many of them came up to me individually and pointed out that in fact they as a community don’t talk about these things enough – that usually when they get together, the conversation’s just about the normal everyday things, football and so on, and that actually it’s really important for muslims to talk about these issues more.
The two things that have struck me most? The first is the centrality of education in all this. By far the most depressing meeting I had yesterday was listening to the dedicated and hard-working school governors talk about what was going on in their local secondary school. That any school is only getting 15 per cent of 16 year olds through 5 good GCSE is deeply depressing and totally unacceptable. They blamed a culture in the school which accepted low aspirations, as if kids in poorer areas somehow couldn’t be expected to do well. That is a disgusting attitude, and we’ve got to drive it right out of our education system. If ever there was a case for zero tolerance this is it Wherever such low standards and bad attitudes persist, schools should be taken over or closed, period.
My final thought yesterday was that integration is a two way street. Yes we can ask minority ethnic communities to work at integrating with British society as a whole, but we have to recognise that it won’t happen unless there’s something attractive to integrate into. Time after time I heard people here talking about the uncivilised behaviour and values that they see all around them. As I’ve said before, we can’t just bully people into being more British, we’ve got to inspire them. And frankly, there are many aspects of our society today which are hardly inspiring – the drinking, the drug-taking, the rudeness and incivility, the lack of consideration for others, anti-social behaviour…we’ve got a serious fight on our hands to build a responsible society that is the kind of society people admire and want to be part of. I know we can do it because most people in this country, like the people I’ve met here, are decent, hard-working and committed to their communities. We’ve got to much more to make sure that those are the values that win out.
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Great weekend - and quiet, too
07/05/2007
Apart from
opening a children’s railway at the Cotswold wildlife park ad dropping in to a
West Oxfordshire thank-the-candidate drinks, I am at home
in the constituency with the family.
Putting up
the paddling pool and trying to erect sticks for sweet peas were as exhausting
and frustrating as some of my election campaigning (and probably about as
effective), but it made a good change.
I
assumed when becoming leader that the hours after local election campaign would
be taken up with endless phone calls and post mortems.
But on our side everyone is clearly too
exhausted and, bar the odd essential call, I really do get left alone.
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Bed at 3.00am and up at 6.00am
04/05/2007
The shortage of sleep is more than made up for by the great results in the local elections.
The difficult thing is to finally switch off the TV and go to bed. The BBC’s graphic for the Tories is a cut out of my house in London, which if we get 40 per cent of the vote, extends all the way up to the (currently uninstalled) windmill. Bizarre.
For years, I’ve watched Peter Snow on these sorts of occasions with his rather mindless translation of local election or by-election votes into a general election result, complete with the House of Commons, “the little red men”, “the little blue men” and “the winning post”. Just as we have a chance of crossing it, the whole thing has been ditched. Funny that.
Spend the day travelling across the North West visiting councils we’ve won, like Chester, South Ribble and Blackpool. The BBC persist for some time with “no breakthrough in the North” but after our gains hit almost 900, with more councils in the North West than Labour, they begin to relent.
There is a problem here. Everyone – me included – wants their politicians to sound reasonable when describing election results. Ming’s “mixed bag” and Blair’s “perfectly good spring board” were both pretty far fetched. My use of the word “stunning” was only in respect of South Ribble (which with 25 gains was pretty stunning). But on these occasions with the media so fixed to their lines, if you don’t point out your good results, no one else will….
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