Balls's real priorities in education
James Forsyth 2:18pm
The more that comes out about the Brown-Blair tensions, the more you realise quite how damaging they were to good government. Just take this example from the forthcoming BBC documentary on the Blair years that the Daily Mail reports today, “Left-wing Labour MP Ian Gibson reveals how Mr Balls - now Schools Secretary - told him to step up the fight against the fees.
He says: "I met Ed and he said, 'Gosh, you've been on the TV and radio a lot recently on the issue, keep going, excellent'." So a Prime Minister whose passion is education was prepared to have his henchman jeopardise the passage of a hugely important piece of education legislation for purely factional advantage. It really does make you realise that all the ink spilled on the TB-GBees far from being tittle-tattle, was detailing the most important divide in British politics.
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Simon Denis
November 13th, 2007 2:28pm Report this commentLabour's priorities in education are as primitive as ever: to use schools as the blunt instrument of social levelling. To that end, they are waging a long war of attrition against the remaining grammars and have begun to undermine the independent sector. Universities are being pressured into rejecting good candidates from public schools, whilst charitable status is under threat. Most pernicious of all is the desire to rub out all distinction between the academic and the vocational paths. To disguise the disastrous effect on standards, grade inflation will continue. Balls is right behind this package of retrograde and counter productive policies. So much for the "knowledge economy". Handing out empty degrees to anyone will be even more damaging to society than simply printing money was to the economy.
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