Last week I was in Little Rock, Arkansas to learn about something called the LEARNS Act. The brainchild of Arkansas 47th governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, this bold new approach to education across the river is drawing a lot of national attention.
Under Arkansas’ LEARNS Act, every child is allowed an Education Freedom Account. The state will then pay into that account 90 percent of the prior year’s average per pupil spending. To give you an idea, that could be about $10,000 per year.
Mom and Dad in Arkansas will then be able to allocate that money to pay for their child’s tuition, school fees, school supplies and even school transportation costs. Moreover, the parents can chose to spend that money in a public school, or a private school, or even through home-schooling.
Listening to some of the key architects of Arkansas’ LEARNS Act, I discovered that there is a lot more to it than school choice. The new law puts great emphasis on improving standards in literacy and math.
Indeed, one lawmaker I was talking with explained how Arkansas has intentionally copied Mississippi, with an insistence on teaching kids to read using phonics. Clearly Mississippi’s focus on phonics has not gone unnoticed in Little Rock. The LEARNS Act also has an ambitious plan to improve math performance, too.
Looking at some of the detail of the LEARNS Act, Arkansas seems to have followed Mississippi’s lead in combating Critical Race theory, too. Under the LEARNS Act, teachers will not be required to attend training on this divisive ideology. The Department of Education’s material will be reviewed to ensure it does not conflict with the idea of equal protection under the law.
As Mississippi did recently, Arkansas’ LEARNS Act gives teachers a substantial pay raise. From 2025, the minimum teacher salary will be $50,000 a year. Interestingly Arkansas has also implemented a merit-based teacher pay scheme. Teachers across the river can now earn up to $10,000 a year bonuses.
Under the LEARNS Act, school district superintendents in Arkansas are now required to have performance targets tied to student achievement. The days of ignoring poor performance in remote school board districts are over.
While Arkansas has clearly learned somethings off Mississippi, there are things that Mississippi could learn from our friends in Little Rock.
Arkansas and Mississippi share more than just a river. Both states are of similar size and population. Each state has a Delta, and neither state has a particularly large urban area. If education freedom works in Arkansas, it will become much harder to keep resisting it over here.
The most inspiring thing about my visit to the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock was not perhaps getting to see the bust of President Clinton (curiously someone had placed it behind the railings, making it look like Bill was behind bars). What was most inspiring was having the chance to see Governor Sanders.
She is so full of energy and enthusiasm. When she talks about the need for change, she makes an overwhelming moral case. Indeed, I was reminded of another strong, principled conservative leader I once knew called Margaret Thatcher. Both of them have a steely determination, coupled with principled beliefs. The 47th Governor of Arkansas is going to go far.
My visit to Little Rock, happened to coincide with Governor Sanders announcement of plans to dramatically reduce the state income tax. When it comes to income tax reduction, Arkansas is doing what Mississippi has done already, which is wonderful to see. It is great to see good ideas moving both ways between our two states.
Twenty two years ago America was hit by a horrific terrorist attack. Like many readers, I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard that a plane had struck the Twin Towers.
An entire generation of young Americans has, of course, been born since that terrible day, with no recollection of an event many of us can never forget.
That makes it vital that we take a moment this year to think about September 11th 2001. We should remember the victims who headed out to work that day expecting to see their loved ones again. We should remember the heroes, too, especially those on flight 93, whose selfless actions saved many lives.
Let us not forget, either, why it was that a group of savages in a distant land should want to commit such an atrocity.
Over the past two decades a myth has emerged that the attack on the Twin Towers was somehow pay back against American interference in Iraq or Afghanistan. This idea, surprisingly widespread in Europe, puts the cart before the horse.
America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in response to the attack on the Twin Towers. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan could not possibly have been a cause of it.
Islamist terrorists first attempted to blow up the Twin Towers way back in 1993. At that time, America’s direct involvement in the Middle East had been largely limited to the liberation of Kuwait – at the invitation of Arab leaders. Indeed, America had had precious little direct military involvement in the region since Ronald Reagan pulled US peacekeepers out of Lebanon in 1983.
No, the real reason Islamist terrorists attacked America 22 years ago is because America exists.
Why does the existence of America offend the Islamists? It’s not about Israel or George Bush. America is resented by Islamists because the United States represents not only a better way of life, but the best way of life yet lived by any portion of humankind.
Cultural relativism, an often well-meaning belief that every way of life is equally valid, is so pervasive among America’s elite, I fear it blinds them to the truth; there is no better place to live your life than in the United States of America.
The United States is founded on a revolutionary set of principles that emerged out of the European Enlightenment – that each of us is created equal and in possession of natural rights. The US is governed not by theocrats, but by a Constitution written by men.
Even more galling for the Islamist fundamentalist, this American system works.
Think of the southern US border today. Thousands of people from every part of the planet are clamouring to get into the United States. They are not trying to make their way into Yemen or Syria.
If, like the Islamists, you believe that the path of a perfect society is to order it in accordance with fundamentalist Islamist principles, the evidence from Iran, Sudan or Libya is not entirely encouraging for your cause.
One of the first acts of America’s first President, George Washington, was to state explicitly that it was not enough to merely tolerate religious differences. Henceforth in this country, he wrote to the Jewish congregation in Newport in 1790, people of every faith should “enjoy the exercise of their inherent natural rights”.
That idea of religious freedom must be hard to take if you believe that you alone have an understanding of the divine.
These are the principles on which America was founded, and they are a better way of organizing a society than every other way ever attempted.
Perhaps most important, we should remember the brave Americans who stepped forward after the attack on the Twin Towers to protect the American way of life. Thanks to many thousands of brave acts – some big, some small, some documented, others untold – they have helped keep this country, and the West, largely safe ever since. Thank you.
The shame of it! Mississippi has found itself in the humiliating position of being compared disobligingly to the United Kingdom. Just last week, the Financial Times ran a column asking, “Is Britain really as poor as Mississippi?”
Most Mississippians do not spend much time worrying about comparisons to Britain. The same cannot be said about those on the other side of the Atlantic. For Brits—and I am one, though now based in Jackson, Mississippi—the issue of whether they are more or less prosperous than Mississippi has become a thing. Indeed, the Financial Times now calls it “the Mississippi Question.”
It was nine years ago that Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, first suggested that the U.K. was poorer than any U.S. state but Mississippi. This came as an uncomfortable shock for many in Britain for whom the word Mississippi conjures up clichés about the Deep South, as a byword for backwardness. Every time anyone has made the comparison since, there has been an indignant outburst from Britons keen to denounce the data.
In practice, when it comes to trying to provide a definitive answer to the Mississippi Question, no uniform, up-to-date set of data exists. But if you take the most recent U.S. figures for GDP per state, divide it by the population of Mississippi, you get a pretty accurate figure for GDP per capita in current dollar values. Make the same calculation for the U.K., with total GDP data divided by the population, and you end up with two comparable numbers.
Last year, by my math, the U.K.’s output per person was $45,485; Mississippi’s was higher, at $47,190. If Britain were invited to join the U.S. as the 51st state, its citizens would be at the bottom of the table for per capita GDP. Some might say that for Mississippi, that is still disconcertingly close.
“That’s not fair!” the critics would counter. “When you compare the wealth of nations, you need to look at how far the money goes. Things cost more in the U.K. than in Mississippi.” To adjust the raw numbers, the argument goes, you need to use an economist’s tool called Purchasing Power Parity. Sure enough, when you consider differences in the price of things in Britain and America, the U.K. does appear richer than Mississippi. Thus, after such PPP adjustments, the Financial Times analyst suggested that for 2021 Mississippi’s per capita GDP was a mere $46,841 to the U.K.’s $54,590 (though conceding that, without the London effect, much of Britain was relatively poorer than the Magnolia State).
“Hold on!” we on Team Mississippi retort. “Why adjust the numbers for our state using U.S. national data?” Here, a dollar goes a lot further than it would in New England or on the West Coast. To produce PPP-adjusted numbers for Mississippi that reflect the buying power of a dollar in places like New York or San Francisco, we say, is absurd. And sure enough, tinkering with the numbers to reflect purchasing power in Mississippi itself makes it doubtful that the U.K. would still come out ahead.
Perhaps more interesting, however, than how you cut the numbers for any given year is the fact that the gap between Mississippi and Britain seems to be growing. Never mind PPP. Just run the numbers for GDP per capita in current dollars for the first part of 2023, rather than 2022, and see that Mississippi’s output is rising at a faster rate than Britain’s.
Over the past 30 years, several southern states have seen rapid economic growth. States like Texas and cities such as Nashville have become economic hubs to rival California or Chicago. North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and even Alabama have all flourished. Mississippi was missing out. Until now.
Historically, business in Mississippi was highly regulated. Licenses used to be mandatory in order to practice many of even the most routine professions. The state has now lifted a lot of these restrictions, deregulating the labor market. According to a recent report by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group representing conservative state legislators, the size of Mississippi’s public payroll has been pared back. In 2013, there were 645 public employees per 10,000 population; today, the number is down to 607. Last year, Mississippi also passed the largest tax cut in recent history, reducing the income tax rate to a flat 4 percent.
How did this come about? Policy makers here have drawn inspiration from the State Policy Network, a constellation of state-level think tanks, borrowing ideas that have worked well elsewhere. We got the idea for labor-market deregulation from Arizona and Missouri. Tennessee inspired us to move toward income-tax elimination. Florida’s success stands as an example of how we could reduce more red tape.
What was once just a trickle of inward investment has turned into a steady flow. Growth is up, visibly: The areas of prosperity along the coast and around the state’s thriving university towns are getting larger, even if pockets of deprivation in the Delta remain.
Perhaps many in Britain find it hard to accept that Mississippi has overtaken them economically because they still think of Mississippi as cotton fields and backwoods poverty, peopled by folk who subsist on God, guns, and grits. But what if Britons’ reluctance to face changing economic realities comes from an outdated perception of themselves?
Most of my fellow Brits like to think that they live in a prosperous free-market society. They have not fully grasped the way in which their country has been sleepwalking toward regulatory regimentation. Stringent new regulations on landlords have seen thousands of owners pull out of the market, resulting in a dire shortage of rental accommodation. New corporate diversity requirements have imposed additional costs across the financial-services sector, with little evidence that bank customers are getting a better deal. Restaurants are required to display a calory count for each serving on their menus.
Individually, none of these restrictions matters all that much. But together, this relentless micromanagement inhibits innovation and growth. And Brits have become so accustomed to government red tape, they no longer seem to see the crimson blizzard that blankets so many aspects of their economic, and even social, life.
To be fair to them, for many years it did not seem to matter that taxes rose and the regulatory burden grew heavier. Thanks to the use of monetary stimulus in place of supply-side reform since the late 1990s, the country’s economy seemed to defy gravity, engineering the sort of growth that high tax and tight regulation might otherwise preclude. Few in the U.K. seemed to notice as ever more aggressive doses of monetary stimulus were required to stave off a downturn. Only now that the option of further monetary stimulus has been exhausted are the cumulative consequences of 30 years of folly becoming apparent.
To recognize that one’s country has been run on a false premise for three decades is difficult. To have to acknowledge that Britain is now poorer than the poorest state in the Union could prompt a moment of self-reckoning that many Brits seem determined to postpone.
Britain’s recurrent fixation with the Mississippi Question tells us as much about the country’s state of mind as it does about GDP. Rather than confront uncomfortable truths, my countrymen dispute the data. Instead of facing up to the consequences bad public policy in Britain, many blame Brexit, or Ukraine.
Putin’s war on Ukraine might have caused higher energy prices, but it alone does little to explain Britain’s poor economic performance. As for Brexit, though opinion formers who originally opposed it love to blame the country’s woes on it now, they never seem to ask why, if leaving the European Union was the cause of Britain’s lack of growth, Britain has still managed to outperform much of Europe.
Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, the U.K. economy has grown by 5.9 percent. German GDP has only increased by 5 percent. Unlike Germany, the U.K. has so far also managed to avoid recession. Far from a reduction in trade, Britain has seen a boom in exports, especially in the service sector, since withdrawing from the EU trade block. Service exports grew by nearly 18 percent in real terms from 2016 to 2022—the strongest growth in this sector among the G7 countries, according to OECD data, and far more than in neighbors such as Italy, Germany, and France.
In any case, Nelson posed the Mississippi Question nearly two years before Britain voted to leave the EU. The country’s lackluster output, productivity, and growth were apparent long before Brexit. Leaving the EU should have been a perfect opportunity to correct course, but little has been done to address the problem. In fact, after leaving the EU, Britain has been hit by a succession of disastrous policy choices.
Having rushed to impose a lockdown in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, British ministers insisted on ever more draconian measures long after it was apparent that such steps were disproportionate, as well as ruinously expensive. Then, in the name of achieving Net Zero targets on “decarbonizing” the U.K. economy by 2050, successive governments have made rash commitments to move to renewables. Higher energy costs have helped price British industry out of world markets.
Instead of changing course, ministers have stuck stubbornly to their dogma—even though the latest moves to outlaw the internal combustion engine and new emissions regulations are making car ownership unaffordable for millions.
Mississippi has managed to borrow good ideas proven to work elsewhere. Britain, by contrast, has preferred to pioneer its own bad ideas. The former approach helps explains why Mississippi is emerging as part of a wider southern success story. The latter approach accounts for why a once successful country is really struggling.
“Woke” radicals love to undermine America at every opportunity. They try to rewrite history in order to demoralize and disorientate the United States.
Cultural Marxism is able to thrive in that vacuum where there was once good civics education. If we want to defeat the radicals, both on and off campus, there are six things we should ensure every American child understands.
1. America is built on liberty.
Liberty is what makes America special. This country was started in 1776 because people living in 13 former British colonies had had enough of being bossed about by a British king.
America today might have its fair share of busybody politicians and bureaucrats, but the default setting in this country is to distrust anyone claiming authority over others, from George III to Dr. Fauci.
Americans also dislike being told what to think, and particularly having their children told what to think: an extraordinary 3.7 million American schoolchildren are now homeschooled.
2. The US Constitution created the best system of government in the world.
America might only be 240-something years old, but the US Constitution is now the oldest written Constitution in the world (with the exception of tiny San Marino). For context, France, which had its revolution at about the same time as America, is now on its fifth constitution. (Incidentally, how's that working out?)
It might be fashionable for CNN pundits to proclaim that American democracy is in crisis, but it is nonsense. If and when Americans adhere to what the Founders actually wrote, the system works.
The document they drafted, which fuses English ideas about natural rights with recently rediscovered insights from republican Rome, has withstood the test of time – and the challenge from would-be tyrants.
3. America is a force for good.
No country is perfect, and America has had its fair share of blunders. But overall, America has been a force for good in the world.
All previous great powers used their might to establish empires. Far from subjugating people, the United States used her strength to set people free, insisting the European powers dismantle their empires.
On three occasions – World War I, World War II and the Cold War - the United States has intervened to save the free world. Can you imagine what the world today would be like if on any of those occasions, the other side had won?
4. Americans are amazingly inventive.
From the first flight of the Kitty Hawk to the advent of the iPhone, there is one country that has proved extraordinarily inventive; the United States.
Take a look at the everyday household objects around you as you read this. The light bulb. The microwave oven. The refrigerator. Toothpaste. All are American inventions.
Innovation depends on being able to try out new things. It means freedom to fail. America is inventive because she is free.
5. Judeo-Christian ideals have shaped America.
Religion has been remarkably important in shaping America. Yes, I know that the Founders kept religion and government separate. That was not because they thought religion unimportant but in fact the opposite.
The Founders wanted to avoid the oppression of smaller religious groups, as had happened in Europe.
When George Washington became President, he wrote an extraordinary letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. In it, he made it clear that they had a right to follow their faith. No one needed anyone else’s approval to worship as they pleased.
America’s emphasis on individualism is, I suspect, a reflection of Judeo-Christian thinking.
6. Americans have so much to be thankful for.
“Woke” ideology encourages grievance and resentment, rather than gratitude. This is why the “woke” seldom seem happy.
Gratitude is an essential ingredient for happiness – and if you want to “pursue happiness” won’t get very far without appreciating the good things that you have.
It is not a coincidence that one of the most important days in the American calendar is called “Thanksgiving”.
Initially, a day to show gratitude for getting the harvest in, today Thanksgiving is a day to celebrate being American. Simply being an American means you have so much to be thankful for.
Life on this side of the pond is far from perfect. Politics is deeply divisive. Gun crime is off the charts: more people get shot in the course of a year in one small city here in Mississippi than in the whole of London.
It baffles me that no one in America seems capable of making a decent cup of tea. I’m puzzled that a country so technologically proficient as the United States does not seem to be able to do roundabouts.
But there are, without question, some things that America does rather well.
Low taxes
A middle class family earning $50,000 a year in this part of America would expect to pay about 15 per cent in federal and state taxes. In the UK, they would be taxed almost a quarter of what they earned.
It is difficult to make an exact comparison, since the amount of tax people pay varies state by state, but overall, the tax burden here is far lower.
Higher living standards
Americans tend to live well. GDP per person in the UK is about $45,000: in America, it’s around $70,000. American workers are vastly more productive than those in Europe, Britain or almost anyplace else.
I constantly marvel at how blue collar America is better off than much of white collar Britain. Materially, everything is more bountiful, from the cars and the boats to the houses and the hair-dos.
Customer service
It is striking how enthusiastic ordinary Americans are about the jobs they do, and nowhere more so than when it comes to customer service. Perhaps it has something to do with the prevalence of tipping, which incentivises that can-do service culture. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that so many Americans will take on some kind of customer service job to get through college.
Whatever the reason, there is seldom the sort of surly attitude often encountered in other parts of the world.
Liberty
America does liberty better than anyone. It might be the instinct of politicians in every country to boss us about, but in America the default is to distrust any would-be autocrat. This country founded in rebellion against a King has a long tradition of scepticism towards anyone claiming authority over the people, from George III to Dr Fauci.
That is not to say that America does not have its fair share of busybody mayors and governors, especially along the east and west coasts. But across much of the vast American heartland, however, ordinary folk often simply refuse to be told what to do. Americans also dislike being told what to think, and particularly having their children told what to think: an extraordinary 3.7 million American school children have now been kept out of the government run school system by their families and are educated by home schooling networks.
Health care
In Britain, where the National Health Service has become a kind of national religion, it is deemed sacrilegious to imply that any other country might have better health care. To suggest that Americans might have better health outcomes puts you beyond the pale.
But the facts speak for themselves. If you are going to fall seriously ill, you would be better off being ill on the US side of the Atlantic. According to the World Population Review, you would be nearly twice as likely to survive lung cancer in America (18.7 per cent survival rate) as in the UK (9.6 per cent survival). If you get breast cancer, you have an almost nine in ten chance of surviving in America. In Britain, it’s only 81 per cent. Some 97 per cent of prostate cancer patients survive in the US: in the UK, it’s only 83 percent.
There’s more to it than survival rates: a friend of mine was recently admitted to hospital for a minor operation. When I asked about the ward he was on, no one understood what I was talking about since every patient had their own room.
Manners
Americans tend to have remarkably good manners. It’s not just the polite way in which they greet strangers: Americans, especially in the South, have an old fashioned etiquette that we Brits once had but seem to have lost along the way.
I am constantly impressed with the good manners of young Americans in particular. At a football game I went to recently, there was lots of shouting, plenty of passionate yelling. The crowd made it brutally clear when they disagreed with the referees’ decision. Yet I did not hear a single F word the entire afternoon.
Local democracy
Everyone seems to have an opinion about American politics, perhaps especially people that don’t live here. All that attention, however, is mostly focused on what is happening at the federal level: the local nature of American democracy is often overlooked.
The United States should be thought of not as a backdrop to the political drama taking place in Washington DC, but a mosaic of self-governing communities, detached from what happens in the national capital.
Most of the key public policy decisions in America are decided at the state level. Key fiscal decisions are made at county level. A myriad of different officials, from sheriff to tax collector, are elected by local people in the communities they serve. This system of local democracy in America largely works in a way that local government in Britain since the days of Ted Heath has not.
This article was originally featured in The Telegraph.
What comes to mind when you think of Mississippi? Steamboats on the river? Mississippi mud pie, maybe? Does America’s Deep South conjure up images of cotton fields and backwoods poverty, full of folk who subsist on God, guns and grits? You might be surprised to learn that Mississippi, the poorest state in the US, is now wealthier than Britain.
Mississippi’s GDP per capita last year was $47,190, slightly above the UK’s approximately $45,000, though still well below the overall American average of $70,000. While the UK’s per capita GDP has stagnated for the past 15 years, Mississippi’s has been rising rapidly to the point that it has just overtaken us.
For decades Mississippi was in the doldrums and median household income was low. It was the poster child for US deprivation, home to catfish, cotton, a spot of forestry and little else in the way of economic activity.
Three years ago I moved to Jackson to run a free-market think tank, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. I made the move after 12 years as the MP for Clacton-on-Sea in Essex, first as a Conservative and then as Ukip’s first elected MP, after I left the Tory party and won a by-election. Brexit was why I went into politics, and in 2020, we left the EU.
Why did I then come to Mississippi? I came because I saw a great opportunity to achieve change.
Over the past 40 years, those southern US states that have embraced free-market reforms, such as Texas, Tennessee and Florida, have done remarkably well. Helping Mississippi adopt similar reforms would almost guarantee something similar. Frustrated by the inability of those who run Britain to change much for the better, I was attracted to America.
In the US there is an appetite for improvement, and those you vote for — especially at the state level — have the power to deliver it. That is why Mississippi is now overtaking Britain. In recent years the state has used its freedom to make bold free-market reforms. Last year it introduced the largest tax cut in its history, slashing income tax to a flat 4 per cent from 2026. Only a dozen or so US states have a lower personal tax burden. An average middle-class family with a household salary of $50,000 might pay total federal and state income taxes in the region of 15 per cent, or $7,676. In the UK, the equivalent rate would be 23 per cent.
For years the nepotistic “good ol’ boy” system handed out public sector jobs that were often comfortable sinecures. Now, in Mississippi, politicians compete to reduce the size of the public payroll. Ten years ago there were 649 public employees for every 10,000 people in the state. Today it’s down to 606 per 10,000. Thanks to these and other reforms, Mississippi is starting to prosper, with per capita income up 25 per cent over the past five years. In Britain, real wages and living standards have not grown since 2007.
Life is far from perfect, of course, and there is still plenty of inequality: 31 per cent of black residents live in poverty. Unemployment levels in the state are similar to those in the UK — about 3.5 per cent — but black unemployment is higher at 5.7 per cent. Nonetheless, attitudes have changed beyond recognition — for the better.
What my time in Mississippi has made abundantly clear to me is that the kind of change that has brought about such sharp improvements here in recent years simply isn’t possible in Britain today. Brexit, for heaven’s sake, was nearly nullified by Britain’s administrative state — and that had a direct democratic mandate from millions. What chance is there of any lesser reforms being let through without a revolutionary change in the way Britain is governed?
Until a leader emerges prepared to take on the obstructive mandarinate the way Margaret Thatcher took on and destroyed the National Union of Mineworkers, politics will remain stylised posturing and not much more. Britain could learn a thing or two from Mississippi.
This article was originally published in The Times.
The company offers 98 flavours, all of them too obnoxious to swallow
July 4 is a big deal in America. People here don’t merely celebrate the day that thirteen former British colonies broke away from Britain back in 1776. Americans, I discovered when I moved here, spend July 4 revelling in being American. No matter when it was that you or your ancestors moved over here, July 4 is an occasion to rejoice that they did.
So, it is hard to overstate how offensive it was for Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream vendor, to mark the day with a tweet claiming that “the US exists on stolen Indigenous land”, which should be “returned”.
What possessed Ben & Jerry’s, part of the global Unilever conglomerate, to say something quite so gratuitously offensive?
Ben & Jerry’s are not only guilty of bad history (Indigenous American tribes were busy “stealing” from other indigenous Americans long before the Mayflower showed up). They are guilty of hypocrisy.
While attacking America for existing on “stolen land”, their parent company, Unilever, sells ice cream to Putin’s Russia, a country that is actually engaged in stealing bits of Ukraine.
Unilever says it is still operating in Russia because “for companies like Unilever, which have a significant physical presence in the country, exiting is not straightforward” and because “were we to abandon our business and brands in the country, they would be appropriated – and then operated – by the Russian state”.
And both the ice-cream company and its eponymous founder Ben Cohen have such a dislike of free Western society that they have been guilty of blaming Putin’s opponents for his murderous, atrocity-laden war, rather than him. “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” the company’s social-media mouthpieces tweeted as the crisis intensified early last year, no doubt causing students of Vegetius and George Washington to roll their eyes.
“We call on President Biden to de-escalate tensions and work for peace rather than prepare for war,” the virtue-signalling corporate spokespersons went on.
“Sending thousands more US troops to Europe in response to Russia’s threats against Ukraine only fans the flame of war.”
Cohen for his part has helped pay for a full-page ad in the New York Times which blamed Putin’s invasion on “deliberate provocations” by the US and Nato. He has also funded a “journalism” prize that praised its winner for exposing “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
It’s not just Ben & Jerry’s. Earlier this year, Bud Light, one of America’s top beer brands, decided it was time to distance the brand from its “frat guy” customers and embrace transgender “inclusivity”. Before that, Disney, a leading family entertainment business, made a big deal of backing a radical stance on social issues.
As Vivek Ramaswamy, a potential future Vice President of the United States, has been energetically pointing out, many of America’s leading fund managers impose explicitly “woke” agenda on the businesses they invest in. And of course, we have seen plenty of evidence of “woke” finance in the UK this week when it emerged that Coutts Bank closed the account of Nigel Farage, a leading Brexiteer and climate change sceptic, because he did not have the right “values”.
What we once called “political correctness” has long been evident on American university campuses. But until relatively recently, that’s where it stayed. Now these ideas are moving mainstream.
When a big corporation indulges in “woke” signalling, it’s easy to assume that they know what they are doing. When Bud Light decided to embrace transgenderism, I imagined it was all part of a cunning marketing plan by clever MBAs to sell more beer.
But “woke” ideas seep into boardrooms and marketing departments that are otherwise bereft of intelligent insights. Look at some of the consequences.
Bud Light’s marketing campaign offended their core customer base, and sales fell by about a third. Disney’s share price fell significantly. Far from protecting Coutts’ reputation, the bank’s decision to close Farage’s account has been a huge blow to its image.
It is time for consumers to start boycotting Unilever brands the way they have stopped buying Bud. There are plenty of less obnoxious alternatives to Ben & Jerry’s.
“Woke” people adopted that term to describe themselves because they see themselves as having “woken up” to the unjust ways of the world. They believe that they have a heightened sense of social injustice that others lack.
From this comes a sense of moral superiority which causes intelligent and highly educated people to make remarkably stupid decisions.
If being “woke” is bad business, why does it keep happening? We are seeing the consequences of two decades of having “woke” HR departments across corporate America.
For years, big firms have been recruiting and promoting people on the basis of diversity and inclusion – or even their commitment to combating climate change. An organization that recruits and promotes people on the basis of anything other than competence at their actual job risks becoming incompetent. A lot of fairly mediocre people have been overpromoted to the point where their mediocrity is starting to stand out.
We are starting to see a long overdue correction: and it would be a good thing if Ben & Jerry’s took the same kind of hit that Bud Light did.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
This article was originally featured in The Telegraph.
I love hearing good news about Mississippi. When I read recently that there had been an improvement in education standards in our state, I was thrilled.
But then I looked at the data. The claims being made that there has been a ‘Mississippi miracle’ are not, sadly, substantiated by the facts.
Claims of a big improvement in literacy performance are based on National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores for 4th graders. These show that between 2019 and 2022, Mississippi moved up the national rankings, from 29th to 21st.
But when you look at the actual scores, the average reading score for a 4th grader in 2019 was 219. By 2022 the average reading score for a 4th grader had fallen slightly to 217. Far from improving, the scores went down.
The reason Mississippi appeared to rise up the rankings is because reading performance for 4th graders in other states fell even faster.
If you look more at the same data set, it turns out that only one in three 4th graders in 2022 were proficient in reading. A similar number are at or below basic level reading. I would not call that a ‘miracle’.
Those 4th graders tested in 2022 had had to endure almost two years of Covid lockdown disruptions, often having to be absent from the classroom. Despite that, the average score fell just 2 points. What does that say about the added value of being in a classroom?
As for the NAEP results for math, between 2019 and 2022, average 4th-grade scores in our state fell from 241 to 234. In other words, there was both an absolute and relative fall in performance. NAEP scores for 4th graders are only one way to measure education outcomes. Another benchmark is the ACT scores, which look at how students are performing at the end of 11th grade. The facts show falling proficiency, with an average ACT composite of 18.3 in Mississippi in 2016 falling to an average ACT composite of 17.4 in 2022. Again, these are the indisputable facts.
There are only four school board districts in the entire state in which the ACT composite score had not fallen over those six years.
Mississippi also uses state student performance scores from a variety of assessments to calculate reading and math proficiency. For the first time in more than two decades, the cumulative scores in 2022 for reading and math proficiency in Mississippi school districts appeared to show improvement. A sign of progress? Not really.
The apparent uptick in district proficiency scores between 2016 and 2022 in math and reading reflects the fact that in 2022 they stopped including end-of-course testing for seniors. The year before that change was made, there was no evidence of an improvement in standards.
The ‘progress’ in these state scores and consequential decline in the number of F-rated school districts is almost entirely a reflection of eliminating the end-of-course tests for seniors which raised proficiency percentages and increased the graduation rate.
If performance has not in fact improved, why might education bureaucrats and campaign organizations want us to believe that there had been progress? You only need to ask the question to answer it.
Doctoring data to sustain a fictitious narrative about improving education standards does our state a grave disservice.
Back in the old Soviet Union, local officials use to annually report record levels of agricultural output and an extraordinary increase in the number of tractors produced. Was this proof that the system was working? Quite the opposite. No one wanted to be the one not to report record rises. It did not pay to challenge the dodgy data.
The education system in Mississippi is not working either. It is deeply disingenuous to claim improvements in performance when the data shows a decline. Those making these claims must know the truth, but they chose to gloss over it. Mississippi deserves better than that.
Education progress is possible when the vested interests that run public education are no longer able to run the system in their interests. Progress will only come about when families in our state are given control over their child’s education tax dollars – as is about to happen in Arkansas.
The sooner people realize the truth about education standards in our state, the sooner they will demand parental power to put it right. The vested interests know that which is why they aren’t being honest with you.