8/17/2023 0 Comments Definition conjure![]() The idea of a snob tends to conjure the image of someone atop a hierarchy, sneering down. ![]() When your enemy is a vaguely defined collection of views held by undisclosed people, you can go on fighting for years When your enemy is a vaguely defined collection of viewpoints held by an undisclosed number of people, you can go on fighting for years. Best of all, however long your war against it, you won’t be expected to make any progress. Everyone dislikes a snob, so your cause is guaranteed to be popular. Unlike most policy problems, tackling it doesn’t cost anything. Rwanda is a “beautiful, welcoming country”. “I encourage all of my critics to actually visit Rwanda before they throw around incredibly prejudiced and snobbish opinions,” Suella Braverman has said. Not only are they looking down on “ordinary people” who agree with the idea, they are disrespecting Rwanda itself. Critics of a scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda are also snobs. Opponents of Brexit are snobs, looking down on the less well-educated who wanted to leave the European Union. The definition expands to include them – they become part of the snob blob. Could this be the real source of the problem? Critics of government policy, strangely enough, tend to be snobs too. But, back in material reality, schools are struggling to recruit enough maths teachers. ![]() There was a “cultural sense” that it was OK to be bad at maths (perhaps the result, others went on to speculate, of a country snobbishly obsessed with the classics). “We’ve got to change this anti-maths mindset,” he said. It is snobbery, Rishi Sunak said in April, that has created the UK’s maths problem. Critics, meanwhile, have located it elsewhere: in the underfunded services themselves – but these are difficult to patch up. This locates the problem somewhere in the minds of doctors, managers or the public – a bias to shift. For a decade, Conservative health ministers have campaigned for mental health to be granted “parity of esteem” with physical health. Snobbery, ministers find, is also deeply enmeshed with another of the country’s major issues: mental health. But of course these sorts of problems are expensive to tackle. Britain’s best-paid jobs – in common with those of other countries – go to university graduates. ![]() And haphazard regulation is not the only issue. Loopholes allow unscrupulous employers to hire them for dogsbody jobs, such as making tea, or go months without training them. A recent review of the UK’s apprenticeship scene finds almost half of those who sign up to these courses abandon them, disillusioned. ![]()
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