Never mind what’s best for the kids; education policy in Britain since 1997 has been characterised by New Labour’s free market-driven determination to turn our schools into one big extended profit opportunity for the private sector.

Nothing whatsoever has been off limits. Used car salesmen with a few million to spare have enjoyed free rein to inculcate creationism in evangelical City Academies, entire Local Education Authorities have been privatised, and Private Finance Initiative school rebuilding programmes have handsomely underwritten the profits of construction majors.

Existing for-profit educational businesses – laughably known in this country as ‘public schools’, despite being unaffordable for the vast majority of the public – continue to enjoy the tax breaks that go with charitable status, unlike any other businesses of which I am aware.

Education policy in the USSR in the 1930s, on the other hand, was somewhat different. One academic study of that period speaks of

brutal campaigns of police terror against teachers, school directors, educational administrators and researchers

. Repression was such that it led to

the destruction of virtually an entire generation of Soviet Russia’s leading educators

.

True, there are plenty of National Union of Teachers activists the government would certainly like to send to the salt mines; but last time I was up there, Cheshire remained more or less a Gulag-free zone.

The mere attempt to compare midnight in the century with Britain today requires utter detachment from any sense of proportion or historical perspective. That doesn’t stop Melanie Phillips – pictured – giving it a go.

Her column in the Daily Mail yesterday launches into rampant hyperbole overdrive, apparently inspired by relatively mild remarks from children secretary Ed Balls, to the effect that some schools – many of them Church of England, Roman Catholic or Jewish – operate de facto selection policies. Ms Phillips thinks she knows why they were singled out:

For Mr Balls, they are an obvious target because he is the chief of staff of the Labour party’s unreconstructed class-warfare wing, whose aim is to attack excellence as ‘elitist’, impose a uniformity of mediocrity and beat the living daylights out of the middle classes wherever possible.

Those of us who really are on the Labour Party’s unreconstructed class warfare wing will be delighted to know that Ed has been one of us all along. The only thing is, he has kept it such a secret that few of us would ever have guessed.

Once she has finished talking Balls, Ms Phillips builds up to a splenetic climax in which she lays out her devastating indictment of where 11 years of New Labour government have done to schools:

“Such oppressive state control over education is unprecedented,” she fulminates. “It is simply Stalinist state socialism of a scale and virulence that we have never before seen in this country.”

To be fair to Ms Phillips, she is not the first person who should know better to mouth such idiocies. In 2002, Tim Brighouse – later to serve as London schools czar, to keep the analogies with Russia flowing – denounced the national curriculum as

more prescriptive than any other state’s … more so than the Stalinist regimes of the USSR.

Well, Prof Brighouse is the pedagogy expert, not me. But didn’t the Soviet curriculum included compulsory military training and up to four hours a week spent on ‘socially beneficial labour’? New Labour hasn’t come out in favour of either of these ideas. Yet.

Then again, I suppose that such proposals would certainly constitute what is known these days as ‘an eye-catching policy announcement’ and on that basis alone, cannot be excluded from the next manifesto.

One of my recent posts asked the question of why the left cannot ‘do’ populism as well as the right. Thankfully it seems we cannot manage ‘absolutely frothing at the mouth bonkers’ even half as well as the other side of the political spectrum, either.

About the author
Dave Osler is a regular contributor. He is a British journalist and author, ex-punk and ex-Trot. Also at: Dave's Part
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