LibDems around the country who want to be taken seriously as a force in British politics - even one that is a third party - must hold their heads in their hands and weep everytime something like this happens.From the party that wanted rights for fairground goldfish comes the notion of abolishing competition in school sports, just as the rest of the nation finally agrees it is a good thing.
LibDem MP Sandra Gidley made the point in a recent House of Commons debate and I hope that the leadership of her party make her suffer for this. Why, I hear you think?
I am about the only person in my school who doesn't think that sport is the absolute cure-all for every problem in the system - including under-achievement and poor behaviour. I think PE is a nice run around a few hours a week, helps towards health and fitness and gives the kids a much needed laugh. I was the fat kid who was always last to be picked - but I didn't care because generally I enjoyed the sport despite being absolutely awful at it. But that aside I think the one thing it does teach the pupils is that you can't win all the time ... unlike academic subjects where "deferred success" has replaced "failure" in our lexicon, PE remains a bastion of reality. You win some, you lose some. Fact of life, etc etc.
Only the LibDems, who are becoming increasingly illiberal on such issues, want the blandness of "everyone wins a prize" to be injected into school sports.
I wonder what former Olympic runner Sir Ming Campbell would have to say about this...
4 comments:
Silly and childish. If people trawled thorugh comments made by an individual conservative and asserted it was party policy then going by comments made by Tories in Norfolk North you'd al be homophobes.
Hardly Robert. This isn't some 94 year old armchair activist - it is a frontbench spokesman and MP.
The point antony was making is that the libdems need to be taken seriously and these comments, no matter who makes them, creates an image of a party out of touch with british people. remember that the mp in question is a fairly senior libdem too.
It would be a good story if it was true, Tony.
Of course the truth is that Gidley didn't suggest abolishing competitive sports. She said she would like to see more emphasis on non-competitive exercise like gymnastics (well, it's non-competitive at school level). I happen not to agree, but your headline, "Lib Dems want to abolish competition in school sports" is an out and out lie. You should apologise to your readers.
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