Polls show a slight weakening in Tory support. This reflects my own anecdotal experience. Factors suggested include Conservative sternness about the state of the public finances and some Labour success in linking David Cameron on class grounds with the greed of bankers. I suspect there is a bit of truth in these explanations, but the refusal of the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty is much more important. This is not only because a great many potential Tory voters feel strongly about Europe, and may now incline to Ukip, but also because the refusal goes against one of Mr Cameron’s greatest strengths. As an individual and in policy approach, he has the ability to identify with what economists call the consumer rather than the producer interest. When he talks about the Health Service, for example, he speaks as one who has used it in many a dark hour, rather than as an administrator. The refusal of the Lisbon referendum may make sense in internal party terms — the Tories are terrified of a bust-up about Europe within weeks of taking office — but to most voters it has confirmed the ‘they’re all the same’ idea. We were promised a referendum, by Labour and Tory alike, and now we won’t get one. The why-bother-to-vote argument grows dangerously strong.
So does the let’s-try-someone-else argument. At the next election, three political parties are in with a chance of winning a parliamentary seat for the first time. Reports suggest that the Greens may win Brighton, Pavilion constituency, that Nigel Farage for Ukip, aided unintentionally by the outpourings of Mrs Speaker Bercow, might beat Mr Speaker Bercow in Buckingham, and that Nick Griffin might win Barking for the BNP. Each victory would have a disproportionate effect on the rest of politics. One reason people go on voting for the old parties is that they cannot believe that new ones could actually win. If they start to do so, the hollowness of much traditional party loyalty may be exposed.
The Serjeant-at-Arms, Jill Pay, famously allowed the police to raid the parliamentary offices of Damian Green MP. Now she has described her meeting with the police to a Commons committee. ‘It was not put to me that I could refuse my consent,’ she said. If she could not refuse her consent, why did she think her consent was being sought? How did it come about that this senior officer of the House knew nothing about rules designed over centuries to protect us from arbitrary power? The wretched former Speaker, Michael Martin, tried a similar excuse about not understanding the rules over the same incident (‘I was not told…’). How did the watchdogs of our liberties turn into lapdogs?
When the government changed the name of the Department of Education to the Department of Children, Schools and Families, it was not merely trying to sound more caring. It was enunciating a different idea about its task. Education is no longer seen as having intrinsic value, but only as one of a number of ‘skill-sets’ for the public manufacture of a particular type of society. Thus Ofsted nowadays inspects not only schools, but also child protection services provided by local authorities (as in the Baby P case). Thus education is no longer seen, as it has been for hundreds of years, as a charitable purpose in its own right: it is policed by the Charity Commission to make sure that it also provides ‘public benefit’, which only the Commission itself may define. This week — and there is something like it almost every week — the government announced that ‘web safety’ was to be made compulsory in primary schools. No doubt it is, broadly, a good idea that children learn to ‘zip it; block it; flag it’, as the slogan irritatingly puts it. But when a central authority makes something compulsory it sets up a bureaucracy of compliance, an inspection regime, more forms to fill in, more teacher-time prescribed, less freedom for each school to run itself. It also means that schools are turned into agencies for whatever the government wants to inflict upon ‘children, schools and families’. What a tremendous mistake it was of the Conservatives to impose a national curriculum in the 1980s. It opened the door for the nationalisation of schools, which, under Labour, has now turned into the nationalisation of childhood itself.
A reader writes to say that his son, now just 14, was found reading Brighton Rock by Graham Greene a couple of years ago, and was rebuked by his teacher at his Sussex comprehensive school. She said his parents were irresponsible in letting him read it. My correspondent is puzzled, because now his son has been forced to sit through PSHE sex education classes taught from a booklet which says things like ‘You can be gay, straight or bisexual to have anal sex… some people enjoy it — others don’t’, and is given ‘practical lessons’ involving fruit-flavoured condoms. When he complained, he was told that the booklet had been developed by ‘professionals’: didn’t he know that Britain had one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe? In the context, this sounded like a boast.
When you hear these attacks on the Conservatives for having too many public schoolboys in the shadow Cabinet, and then you find that half the Labour Cabinet is also privately educated, you have to wonder why this should be, and why a similar pattern is found in almost all top jobs. Could it have anything to do with the fact that so many state comprehensives fail so completely to educate their pupils? One of the strangest things about advanced Western countries is that they lose the will to teach the poorer sections of society. This is true in America as well as Britain, and even in countries like Germany, where going to university is seen as a human right rather than a means of learning something. In India and China, such attitudes are not even understood, let alone accepted, which is why those countries will soon rule the world.
Anyway, despite our contempt for the subject, there are still jobs to be had in education. If you want, you could earn up to £35,469 per year as a research officer at the Faculty of Education at Leeds University where, as the job description says, ‘you will work on the rise, tolerance and integration of sexual consumption and sexual labour in the night-time economy’. The post ‘will involve qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis’. You will investigate ‘the erotic dance industry which symbolises the commodification of the female body in late capitalism’. The ‘methodology’ which ‘consists of a survey of 300 dancers’ will employ a ‘mixed-methods approach’. You must have the ‘ability to travel to the research sites and stay overnight away from home’.
Comments