On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme there was a piece about using a lottery to select pupils for schools by the Labour-controlled council in Brighton & Hove. This is bad enough in itself, but what particularly caught my attention was the statement by Ann Rossiter of the Social Market Foundation that, rather than viewing it unhelpfully as a lottery, we should "think about it in another way as a ballot, a unanimously well-regarded mechanism for allocation". You can listen again here (needs RealAudio player).
How can anyone concerned for the education of children be so pig-ignorant (or blinded by politically-acceptable jargon) as to confuse a lottery (the outcome of which is based entirely on blind chance) and a ballot (the outcome of which requires conscious will and participation by thinking humans)?
This degree of woolly thinking is just typical of many of today's well-meaning but hell-bound intellectuals. Instead of a think-tank, they should be put in a fish-tank with a few piranhas.
28/02/07 @ 19:03