New Labour’s Skills Policy: R.I.P.
A short note to say that the news that Peter Mandelson is planning to slash spending on training for young people should come as a surprise to no one. New Labour’s educational policy—which is to say, its ‘skills’ policy, for education has long since become a bad word in New Labour circles—is premised on a species of consequentialism that is particularly susceptible to the wayward fluctuations of neoliberal politics.
Before the banking crisis, companies such as Carter & Carter successfully lobbied New Labour politicians for state ‘donations’ in the form of corporate welfare payments, and money flowed from the state into the bulging coffers of the burgeoning private FE/HE sector. But now that vast sums of state money have disappeared down the sinkholes of banks such as Lloyds and RBS, the claim will increasingly be that there is no money to be had for anything else—not even for projects that were once the darlings of New Labour’s ‘train to gain’ variety of clientelism. (Expeditionary wars such as those of Afghanistan or Iraq will continue to be excluded from the accounting because they make money for the merchants of death, and, like the Trident nuclear subs, have the cover of the sacred for British politicians who still cannot let go of a ‘glorious’ past).
EcoLogics wonders: what will happen in this brave new world of alleged scarcity to stalwart defenders of the New Lab skills faith such as Howard Newby? Will they now be busy stroking the Conservatives, in the hope of securing the continuation of the political conditions required for an on-going spirit of creation in higher and further education?
Whatever the case, the upshot is that a badly misguided, if not corrupt policy will be replaced by a return to good ‘ole Thatcherite slash—and—burnism. And like the Tory grandees who were ousted from power in 1997, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the rest of the New Labour nomenclatura will be voted out, but will also retire to corporate adviserships, the writing of ‘memoirs’, and perhaps the odd bit of TV presenting for the BBC or ITV, à la Michael Portillo.
The future is bright, isn’t it?
