Last Sunday, the Observer published a hostile article about the free school being set up in Wandsworth by Katharine Birbalsingh, whom it described as the ‘Tories’ favourite teacher’. As readers may recall, Katharine lost her job as deputy head of the St Michael and All Angels Academy in Camberwell after criticising Labour’s record on education at the 2010 Tory party conference. She’s now embroiled in a bitter fight with the SWP, NUT and Anti-Academies Alliance, all of whom are campaigning against her new free school.
In fairness to the author of the piece — Observer policy editor Daniel Boffey — he probably wasn’t aware that he was trafficking in lies put about by the hard left. Organisations such as the Anti-Academies Alliance are skilled at getting well-meaning journalists to regurgitate their propaganda, usually by dressing it up as purely factual information. One of the key ‘facts’ in the Observer piece was that the proposed site of Katharine’s new school is currently home to 400 local businesses and that if the school opens many jobs could be lost.
That struck a chord with me because exactly the same smear was used to try and discredit the West London Free School last year. Indeed, our opponents chose the same newspaper group to disseminate this piece of misinformation. In January of 2011, the Guardian ran a story under the headline: ‘Toby Young’s free school will expel groups working with refugees’. Like Katharine, I stood accused of acting like an aggressive property developer, seeking to evict various worthies to further my free school ambitions. On that occasion, instead of ‘400 business’, the victims were ‘more than 20 voluntary groups working with refugees, the homeless, former young offenders and a range of ethnic minorities including Kurds, Iranians and Iraqis’.
It was nonsense, of course. The building in question — Palingswick House — had been listed for disposal by the council long before the West London Free School came on the scene and the tenants would have had to find new homes willy nilly. Similarly, the charity that owns the proposed site of Katharine’s new school has signaled its intention to sell the building whatever happens, so the businesses will have to find new homes regardless. Incidentally, there aren’t 400 of them. The real number is closer to 40 and, like the tenants of Palingswick House, they won’t be flung out on to the street. They’ll be offered alternative accommodation.
My heart goes out to Katharine. It’s not pleasant to be targeted by the hard left. Opponents of free schools and academies aren’t constrained by old-fashioned notions of truth and decency. For them, the end justifies the means. Provided they can convince themselves that their aims are noble — and it doesn’t take much, believe me — their consciences won’t be troubled by the dirty tricks they have to engage in to achieve them. Having failed to derail my school, they’ve now moved on to Katharine’s.
One of the most energetic campaigners against the West London Free School was a charming gentleman called Nick Grant. In addition to being the local NUT shop steward, he’s on the national executive of the SWP and is an organiser of the Anti-Academies Alliance. At one point, he and I were both summoned to appear before the education scrutiny panel of Ealing Council to answer questions about my proposed new school. Just before I was due to get up and speak, I discovered he’d circulated an NUT ‘briefing note’ to all the officers and members present accusing me of, among other things, sleeping with prostitutes. As I say, there are no depths to which the hard left defenders of the status quo in state education aren’t prepared to stoop.
For any journalist covering the education beat and trying to get to grips with the politics of people like Nick Grant, I would recommend Interesting Times, the memoir of Eric Hobsbawm, Marxist historian and defender of the Soviet Union. Hobsbawm wrote of his fellow radicals in the 1930s: ‘Hardness, indeed ruthlessness, doing what had to be done, before, during and after the revolution, was the essence of the Bolshevik.’ This ‘hardness’ was shared by Hobsbawm himself. In a 1994 television interview with Michael Ignatieff recounted by Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Hobsbawm was asked: ‘What [your view] comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the old communist.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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