Labour is after the Tories’ localism crown

Stephen Twigg is, as he probably expected, coming in for a bit of flak on his U-turn on free schools this morning. Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary has launched his own plan for ‘parent academies’, which Toby Young and James Kirkup have had some fun with here. But he is basically doing what Lord Adonis has long hoped the party would do, accepting that free schools are a variant of the last Labour government’s academies programme anyway. He just needed to find a new brand that wouldn’t send the teaching unions into orbit.

But what’s interesting is that Twigg also devoted large sections of his speech to trying to steal the localism crown from the Conservatives. He said:

‘Although he has tried to cast himself as a warrior for freedom in our schools, Michael Gove is in fact the classic centraliser, an armchair general, taking back freedoms, undermining head teachers and centralising power around his desk in Sanctuary Buildings.