A retired headmistress writing under a false name takes thirty-eight years of marking to a party’s sums, and is made to do the other lot as well
Show Your Working: I Marked a Socialist Manifesto With a Red Pen and It Got a D
The name over this diary is not my name. I had better say so at once. I was a teacher for thirty-eight years, the last fourteen as headmistress of a girls’ school in a market town I shall not identify, and I have a pension, a reputation and a bridge four to consider. So I write under the name of a great-aunt who would have approved. My editor at The London Prat knows who I am. Nobody else needs to.
I should also declare my colours, since I despise people who do not. I am of the right. I have voted the same way since 1979 and expect to do so until I am carried out. I regard the Labour party, and the assorted socialists and Greens who orbit it, with the settled disapproval I once reserved for the back row of the lower fifth. They are not wicked. They did not pay attention. This diary is where I mark their homework.
The Exercise
This week a document came through my letterbox from one of the parties of the left. It was glossy, it had a photograph of a wind turbine and a child, and it contained a list of promises. I counted twenty-three. I took it to the kitchen table, put on my reading glasses and uncapped the red pen, which I have not thrown away and never shall.
I marked it exactly as I would have marked a piece of work from a girl of fifteen. The standards have not changed. I looked for four things. Is the question answered? Is the working shown? Do the figures add up? And has the candidate confused what she would like to be true with what is.
The Marking
Promise one: a very large sum for the health service. Good. Laudable. I wrote in the margin: where from? The document’s answer, some pages later, was that it would be paid for by closing loopholes and making those with the broadest shoulders pay a little more.
I have read that sentence, in one form or another, in every left-wing manifesto since I began teaching. I wrote: which loopholes? How much does each raise? Have you allowed for the fact that people with broad shoulders also have accountants? No figures were supplied. Two out of ten. See me.
Promise four: a hundred thousand of something, by a date. New homes, I think; it may have been nurses. There is always a hundred thousand of something. It is the number a politician reaches for when he wishes to sound large and precise at once. I asked: per year or in total? Net or gross? Starting from what? The document did not say. I taught mathematics to girls who could have told you that a number without a unit is a decoration.
Promise nine was to abolish something unpopular and replace it with something fairer, to be designed after the election. I wrote: this is not an answer, it is a promise to do the homework later. I had a pupil in 1987 who tried that. She is, I believe, now in Parliament.
Promise fourteen would be funded by efficiency savings. I underlined it three times. In thirty-eight years in the public sector I was asked for efficiency savings every single spring, by governments of both colours, and I can tell the authors what an efficiency saving is. It is a cut that has been asked to wear a hat.
The Adding Up
Then I did what the authors plainly hoped nobody would. I added the promises together. I used the party’s own figures where it gave them and the lowest plausible estimate where it did not. I added up the money it said it would raise. I subtracted the one from the other.
I shall not print my total, because I am a retired schoolmistress with a calculator and not an institute. There are proper bodies that do this. The Institute for Fiscal Studies goes through every party’s sums at each election and is rude to all of them impartially, and the Office for Budget Responsibility checks the government’s. I recommend both. I will say only that the gap on my kitchen table was not small, and that the document dealt with it by the method known in my staff room as hoping the examiner is tired.
At the bottom I wrote what I wrote on a great many reports. A lively and well-meaning piece of work, let down by a refusal to check the answer. D plus. The plus is for presentation. The turbine was very nicely photographed.
My Sister Intervenes
I was rather pleased with myself. I telephoned my sister, who is two years younger, lives in Sheffield, was a district nurse for forty years and has voted Labour at every election of her life out of what she calls gratitude and I call habit. We have not agreed about politics since the three-day week. We speak every Sunday regardless.
I read her my marking. She listened. Then she said: and have you done your own lot?
I said that was not the exercise. She said, it is exactly the exercise. She said, you were the fairest marker in the county, you told me so yourself, you used to cover the names. Cover the names. Get out last year’s leaflet from your side and mark that with the same pen, or you are not a teacher, you are just a cross old woman with a biro.
I should like to record that I put the telephone down with dignity. I did not. I said something sharp. Then I went to the drawer where I keep such things, because I keep everything, and found it.
The Second Script
It gives me no pleasure to report the result. My own party’s document had fewer promises. It had the same hundred thousand of something. It had tax cuts, of which I approve in principle, to be paid for by growth, which is a word that does the work on the right that fairness does on the left: it is the thing that will turn up later and settle the bill. It had efficiency savings. Of course it did. It had a pledge to get a grip, with no noun attached.
I marked it as hard as the other. I had to. My sister was, so to speak, looking over my shoulder. It got a C minus, and the only reason it beat the D plus is that it promised less and so had less to get wrong. That is not a compliment. It is the difference between a girl who attempts six questions badly and one who attempts three.
I telephoned Sheffield and told her. She said: there you are, then. She did not gloat. She never does. It is one of her most irritating qualities.
What I Still Maintain
I have not changed sides. Let nobody think it. I still believe that the left’s characteristic fault is to treat a wish as a plan, and that the worst sentence in politics is we will find the money. I spent a career watching well-meaning schemes arrive from above with no thought given to who would do the work on a wet Thursday. The people who devise them were, in my experience, the same people who at school were very good at the essay and never checked the sum.
But I taught for too long to pretend that my own side shows its working. It does not. It simply makes different mistakes, in a more confident voice.
For the Paper
My editor has a rule, which she repeats to me about once a fortnight, generally after I have filed something enjoyable. It is in the house essay, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not. One may be as severe as one likes, but the standard must be the same for everybody, or it is not satire, it is a leaflet. She and my sister have never met. I am beginning to suspect they correspond.
So this week’s piece is an end-of-term report, and it has no party’s name on it. Arithmetic: has yet to grasp that both columns must be added. Comprehension: answers the question she wishes had been set. Promises a hundred thousand of something. Effort: considerable. Attainment: to be confirmed after the election. Headmistress’s comment: we look forward to seeing the working.
It will appear on the British satirical news page. Any reader who believes I have been unfair to their party is invited to post me its manifesto. I have plenty of ink. More of my marking is here.
