Set the people free
Fraser Nelson 12:20pm
Amidst this Black Tuesday excitement, we’ve missed the real intellectual headway the Tories are making in education – as Iain Martin says in the Telegraph today. The Gove v Balls debate yesterday was brilliant: in these days of faux theatricality it’s a pleasure to see two guys who genuinely hate each other go at it. What strikes me is how Cameron and Gove are using the language of the left to sell this - in my view, the only way to get this flying. And not just by calling these “co-operative schools”. At the end of Cameron’s video on schools (here on PlayPolitical) he has this to say: “Why should the private sector have all the new schools, all the innovation, the new ideas. I want to see them in the public sector, the state sector, for free available to all our children.”
That’s how to do it. As John Reid argued about hospitals: why should choice be just for the rich? It should be for everyone. This was how to sell Blair’s pro-market reforms to Labour (Reid discovered this too late, though).
Reid’s predecessor as Health Secretary – Alan Milburn - put it thus. “Traditionally, the left turned its back on choice as the preserve of the right. In a consumer society where the consumer is king, vacating this political terrain is not a feasible strategy for progressive politics.”
Milburn was right. Brown is wrong. And this is why Cameron (a late but enthusiastic convert to this agenda) will probably win the next election. Brown says “trust me” – and the last few days have shown how the public wouldn’t trust any politician (wearing any colour of rosette). They want control for themselves and, I suspect, will elect the party who most plausibly offers it.
Previous
Comments
David Lindsay
November 22nd, 2007 3:47pmOne of the oddest things about the Political Class's hatred of the public sector is that so few of the former's members have worked much, if at all, in the private sector that they are nevertheless utterly convinced would be so much better at delivering public services, despite not only the dearth of evidence to that effect, but now the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Could it be that if they actually knew anything about the private sector, then they would know that, whatever else it might be good at, it is wholly inappropriate to these particular tasks? No member of the present Cabinet has ever worked in the private sector. Not one. Ever. Of everyone who was ever a Cabinet Minister under Tony Blair, only two had ever done so: John Prescott, as a ship's steward in the 1950s; and Alan Milburn, the obsessive privatiser of the NHS, running a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as "Haze of Dope". As for Blair himself, Peter Hitchens, in particular, was never able to trace anyone whom he had ever represented in court. Has anyone out there ever been either represented in court, or taught as a student, by Gordon Brown? All in all, our lords and masters seem to hate the public sector, not out of ignorance of it, but because they themselves were rubbish at doing what it does. So they want to make what it does rubbish all round, by handing over those functions to people and organisations whose expertise is entirely elsewhere.