Why is it good to make pupils stay on at school until they are 18? Under the Bill promised in the Queen’s Speech this week, state education will be compulsory for two more years unless the pupil is employed under an apprentice or training scheme. The political reason behind this is the government’s anxieties about young people known as NEETS (Not in Employment, Education or Training), of whom there are now about a quarter of a million aged 16 to 18. Obviously it would be good, in what people call the ‘knowledge economy’, if more of those trying to enter it had some knowledge. But it does not follow that forcing education on them will help. There are already huge problems of truancy, and of disruption of classes by those who do not want to be in them. This will get much worse if disaffected 16–18 year olds swell their number. Small firms not able to afford training will not be allowed to hire this age group. As a result, the experience of work (though not what is laughingly described as ‘work experience’) will be denied thousands of young people who would be the better for it. The reform typifies the dominant theme of current legislation — the need to show good intentions, combined with an absolute lack of interest in the actual result.
The same goes for the idea that Parliament should usurp the ‘Royal prerogative’, and decide whether or not the country goes to war. War cannot be fought according to the timetable of parliamentary business. The government has to be free, constitutionally, to order an attack without laying it before the House of Commons first. This does not undermine the Commons’ power over war and peace, because the political reality is that no government can sustain a war if it does not have the support of a majority in the Commons.
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