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’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in