Do they get it yet?

The noted historian Tristram Hunt was Labour’s Shadow Education Minister until he was ousted by the Corbynite revolution. Son of a Labour life peer, educated at an independent school and Cambridge and later, after a spell at the University of Chicago, returning to Cambridge to gain his doctorate, Doctor Hunt was a shoo-in for opposition education matters; having spent so much time in academia he clearly understands the schooling needs of ordinary inner-city kids like himself. Truly a man of the people.

In a new book, previewed in an article in the Guardian which is known to be read by all grass roots, working class, horny-handed sons of toil, he manages to simultaneously explain why he thinks he understands the hearts and minds of former Labour voters and demonstrate that he simply doesn’t understand the hearts and minds of former Labour voters. It is an academic attempt to explain a wholly visceral thing, a sense of belonging, of shared struggle and ultimately betrayal by a party they simply don’t recognise any more.

In tune with the concerns of England flag flying white van men everywhere he writes: "Of course, the 2015 election had a particular English dynamic in the aftermath of the Scottish referendum. As the only credibly British party, Labour was subjected to a ruthless tag-team effort by David Cameron and Nicola Sturgeon that pitted each as the protector of the English and Scottish nation. Scottish voters were told we would sell them out to the Tories, and in England we would sell them out to the Nats. And it cut through: too many traditional Labour voters felt that the party was embarrassed to fight for England’s interests."

Really Tristram, you think the voters you abandoned thought that deeply about it? And you still thought Labor was credible? Hunt is emblematic of the difficulty Labour has in reaching its former guaranteed voters because, try as he might to analyse the situation, the principle problem is that Labour is no longer a party of the people - it hasn’t been for a good couple of decades. And no matter how much they believe they are for the people they are so far divorced from being by the people they may as well be the Champagne Socialists they are perceived to be.

Hunt, despite trying to show he cares, nevertheless handles ‘Englishness’ by his outstretched thumb and forefinger, his other hand holding his nose. He is prepared to tolerate the smell, he seems to suggest, if that is what it takes for the little people to vote for him. Corbyn holds more appeal, simply by being a Neolithic throwback to the bad old days of flying pickets and wildcat strikes, when jobs, not benefits or houses were at stake and they had the strength to force an employer’s hand. Today’s Labour’s activists seem to operate at arm’s length from the people whose votes they want but whose hand they disdain to shake.

It is widely believed that to shore up dwindling support they imported a new bloc vote and flooded the country with reliable claiming-class voters. But these votes came with the baggage that must not be named. As a consequence we now have the phenomenon of the illegal schools revealed by Ofsted. But still Labour cannot bring itself to take the blame. Current Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Lucy Powell, yesterday denounced the Tories for not spotting the so-called jihadi schools sooner. But at least the current administration actually bothered to investigate.

The happiest days of your life?

Ed Miliband was fond of saying that the Tories ‘don’t get it’. To a Labour Party struggling to find out where it went wrong and wondering why it no longer connects to its traditional voting base, the Tristram Hunt article will no doubt be read with knowing nods and much beard-stroking. But academic pontificating will get Labour nowhere until it admits to and truly understands a situation of its own making, which can be summed up in a single unpalatable word; Rotherham.

Class Act

Tristram Hunt has been on the warpath – or was that the towpath – over the government’s plan to (gasp!) not take any money from the education budget. How very dare they freeze budgets when any Labour government would automatically double them and pay for it from the fabulous wealth they would reap by holding rich people upside down by their ankles, stealing all their loose change and taxing the properties they just transferred into offshore trusts!?

This charge – that a freeze is a real terms cut when inflation is taken into account – is the only ammunition Hunt has because Labour should, just as with the economy, never be allowed to control education ever again. While Gordon Brown’s tax credits allowed employers to squeeze wages and simultaneously increase the tax burden on everybody else, and while Labour’s wilful acceptance of the EU’s open borders trampled on life chances for unskilled British workers, the children did not go unmolested. When Tony Blair said “Education, education, education!” he clearly meant something different from the rest of us.

Facilitating the furtherance of breeding and rearing by generations of hopeless under achievers should be addressed by The Equality and Human Rights Commission under the heading of child cruelty. I’m serious. A child born to stupid parents whose right to create life without the faintest clue as to how to care for that life is not human; it is bovine. Were those slow, lumbering beasts to go on and till the fields and turn the mill wheels it may be almost acceptable, but we import other, cheaper, cattle to do that for us and allow our domestic herds to wander, ignorant and pointless, procreating simply because they have nothing else to live for.

At least if we stashed the edu-tech and reverted to rigour and discipline in primary education we might have a chance of reversing the rot in a couple of generations but then why would any government be interested in policies that would only come to fruition after they were all wealthily retired or even dead? The grammar schools and the multi-tiered education system of my youth recognised and even celebrated the differences in aptitude and ability. Today, while ‘university’ graduates jostle for barista jobs or belatedly self-fund themselves into manual trade training, or settle for delivering pizzas, surely it is time for politicians to admit the unsavoury truth; we are NOT all equal.

But while we can’t all be rocket surgeons[sic] we can all graduate from the University of Life if only we are well enough prepared for the entrance exam. If you can’t read it is extremely difficult to learn. If you are innumerate the world will rob you blind, but if you acquire both those skills early they will be with you for ever… so why don’t we do that? Let's forget such nebulous idiocy as ‘citizenship’ and inculcating destructive notions of disproportionate sensitivity to differentness and offence and instead aim to get everybody over the first hurdle and equipped for the rest of the race.

Too kool for shkool?

Political correctness? Voter engagement? People power? Intersectional awareness? Who bloody cares? If there wasn’t something wrong with politics we wouldn’t bother to vote at all. If there wasn’t something desperately wrong with our current education system we certainly wouldn’t be voting for more socialism.

Those who can…

 The row over qualified teacher status continues with yesterday’s  motion for an Opposition Day debate,‘That this House endorses the view that in state-funded schools, teachers should be qualified or working towards Qualified Teacher Status while they are teaching.’ challenging, or at least giving the appearance of challenging, the coalition’s Free School programme. Labour’s Tristram Hunt has hinted that he may send his own children to private schools as so many hypocritical champions of state education do, thus avoiding any need to confront the outcomes of his proposal.

The debate was entirely predictable, of course, with both sides banging the drum, both sides claiming the moral high ground and both sides ignoring the grim reality that in the view of many, education in Britain is clearly a disaster and furthermore a disaster fifty years in the making. Watching from the inside, as a pupil, I saw my combined Grammar and Secondary Modern school deteriorate over a single school year as it became a Comprehensive just one year behind mine. Add to that incarceration, against their will, of thuggish fifteen year-olds now compelled to attend another year and it was as if the school just lost the will to live.

Teaching is a hot topic worldwide right now, so much so that a World's Top Teacher competition is to be launched next year: But on what basis will the winner be judged? Will their efficacy be assessed over, say, twenty years to show how the kids actually benefited? Or will it, more likely, be based on the number of theoretical pedagogic concepts that can be demonstrated in a twenty minute lesson? In which case it becomes just another example of the pointless exercises in self-justification so beloved of politically motivated organisations. It would be far better to run a competition to investigate and demonstrate just what has gone so horribly wrong in the last half a century to reduce our own state education system to the shambles it quite clearly is.

Or is it actually not a shambles at all but the intended culmination of a series of shadowy conspiracy theories? Is it a Leftie triumph, preparing the mediocre to live out their lives as a client underclass on benefits, creating a justification for immigration and helping to rub The Right’s noses in diversity? Or is it, as some may claim, a Rightie triumph whereby the children of ‘the poor’ are given only sufficient education so as to be useful workers for the children of the rich, as this parody in the Evening Harold illustrates? It’s the same, the whole world over, it’s the poor wot takes the shame, eh?

One thing is for sure and that is the years of steadily declining outcomes – employers and universities have been bemoaning the unpreparedness of their young intake for several decades now – can’t be just entirely accidental. It may be negative feedback originating in the nineteen-sixties obsessions with introducing radical new ideas, each diminished generation passing on their mediocrity to the next, but I somehow doubt it. No, I think there is something worse at the heart of all this – the expert. In a world where even the amount of sugar allowed in jam has to be regulated by government the obsession with pedagogy is almost inevitable. And in such a nebulous area as child development everybody is some kind of expert; which is to say, quoting William Goldman out of context, “nobody knows anything”.

During yesterday’s Commons debate MP Pat Glass said “Qualification is the very basis of a state-run education system.” (Qualification, not Competence.) And there we have it; as ever the argument is for closed shop, state-run institutions because as everybody knows, the state does everything better, doesn’t it? Power generation, health, transport, steel, telecommunications… what could possibly go wrong in a market whose providers and consumers are entirely controlled by such safe hands as the Department for Education?

But what use is education if, afterwards, we end up with adults not only unemployable, but unable to properly read and analyse the issues of the day and then engage in sensible debate? What’s the point if they are unable to discern economic fact from political fiction or earnest pledge from hyperbole? Why bother if we just end up with the same old tribes whose beliefs and votes are based on purely historical precedents; and inaccurate, corrupted history at that? Then again some people probably shouldn't be burdened with the vote no matter how well educated they are.

We don't need no education

One thing is for certain though: much as I rail against a lot of their ideology and unproven, fashionable education theory, teachers must have increasingly broad shoulders, for upon them they carry the hopes of the nation. Qualified or not, only those who CAN, should teach.