The maintenance of decent critical standards doesn't necessarily imply 'competition' in any meaningful sense — or are you trying, Leveller [& is this why you adopted that name?] to bring us back to that dreary plateau where nothing is allowed to be considered 'superior' to anything else; so that the pulp-beat·em·up-thrillers of Hank Janson [let's say] are 'as good as' the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of George Eliot or Jane Austen or Trollope or Dickens or Balzac? That's one of the most stupidly irritating manifestations of a kind of relativist egalitarian PC fatuity, unworthy of a person of [what I take to be] your intelligence. Honestly, now, do you really think it unacceptable to say that some writers write better, or some composers compose better, or for that matter some cricketers bat better, than others? So that schools have to have nothing but mixed-ability sets [tho I can't recall hearing of one with a mixed-ability football team]. Because that's where idiotic statements like your last post are leading, mate.