The future of English state education as planned by Dem Tories?

Is this is what Dem Tories will do for non-privatised schools?

This photograph was taken by Jim Wileman, and appeared in The Guardian.  According to the paper, it shows how a school in Somerset has had to make do by using a shipping container as a classroom. The photograph is shocking evidence of the kind of gross educational inequalities that past British governments have been willing to tolerate. For all its authoritarianism and barely concealed elitism, New Labour had earmarked money to invest in this and other crumbling British schools. Alas, after the publication of the details of Michael Gove’s savage budget cuts, we now know that Dem Tories—this blog’s name for the allegedly ‘Liberal’ Conservative coalition—would be content to allow this Third World state–of–affairs to continue in many schools across England and Wales. Did you vote for the Liberal Democrats in the last election? And if so, will you ever vote for them again?

David Willetts’ Tax on Higher Education

If she still follows politics, Margaret Thatcher must be breaking out the champagne: with the help of New Labour, the Tories have finally got academics and university students where they have always wanted them. It may have taken 30 years, but the prize was certainly worth the wait: those critical academics who refused to put up and shut up—the men and women who Thatcher famously accused of spreading poison—are finally about to be silenced, perhaps for once and for all.

The final ‘opening up’ of higher education to market forces via unmitigated tuition fees—with inevitable knock-on effects for a ballooning student debt which Willetts has the cheek to describe as a ‘tax’ on higher education—means that students will emerge from their degrees not with ten, fifteen or even twenty thousand pounds of debt, but with the equivalent of a mortgage to pay off.

Knowing that they will have to spend the rest of their lives paying for their higher education—and knowing that there will not be a state-run student loans company, so all loans will eventually be charged at market rates—many if not most students are bound to become even more reactionary than the vice-chancellors who are cheering this back-door privatisation on: teach us ‘economically valuable skills’, or we won’t take your courses.

Will the so-called ‘opposition party’ oppose the move? No, of course not (or if it does, it will be for purely tactical reasons); New Labour set this very process in motion. Indeed, the privatisation and vocationalisation of higher education sheds much light on the difference between New Labour and Dem Tories. New Labour pretended to care about the widening gap between the haves and the have nots—a gap that will now surely become a chasm, what with working class and even middle-class students barred from all but the cheapest of higher educations. By contrast, Dem Tories will simply get on with the business of widening the gap at an even greater speed than New Labour managed. Class differences? What class differences? All we need is a Big Society!

The Willetts Tax also sheds much light on the ‘Dem’ side of Dem Tories: the Liberals supposedly drew a red line when it came to tuition fees, but today you are unlikely to hear even a squeak of protest from their leaders. The most powerful ones are so happily ensconced in government—the embarrassing Laws hiccup to one side—that they will be unwilling to rock the cozy coalition boat for working class students’, let alone English academics’ sake. Here too, we will hear the silence of the once great Vincent Cable, the very man who is the head of BIS, and so nominally in charge of higher education policy.

To be fair, both academics and recent former students will have had some responsibility in allowing this process to evolve in the way that it has: we’ve not seen, and I dare say we won’t see, lecturers and students taking to the streets in the way that a previous generation did. No, most lecturers will be so fearful for their jobs that they will almost welcome the Willetts Tax; many will argue, apparently a-politically, that if politicians are determined to put an end to state funding for higher education, then an alternative funding scheme must be put in place.

For their part, the NUS leaders will be so busy facebooking and jockeying for the role of ‘the next William Hague’ that we are unlikely to hear more than the standard expressions of dismay and disappointment.

If, as Henry Jenkins noted years and years ago, the Tories ‘nationalised’ higher education, the muzzling process has been so effective that it will now be paradoxically possible to remove those self-same constraints and make of higher education what it always should have been (in the Great Tory Mind): a market where corporations will not only make a pretty penny at lecturers’ and students’ expense, but will weed out any critics before they can even begin to say things like I have just written. This is, and will remain, the reason why I have opposed the skillificationist discourse of Richard Lambert, Sandy Leitch, and Howard Newby.

Dem Tories

On the day that the government has presented its ‘show cuts‘, a short post to suggest a change in nomenclature: I’d suggested that ‘Torylibs’ was a good way of referring to the ‘Liberal Conservatives’, but I’ve thought of a more apt expression:

Dem Tories

Update: I also like the Mirror’s ‘ConDems’, and the LibCons.

These Liberals are starting to look like Neoliberals

Less than a day after a judge effectively tried to remove our right to go on strike, Nick Clegg declared that he would push through the most radical changes to British democracy in 200 years. Alas, Clegg, like the rest of the Liberal Democrats, said nothing about the implications for democracy of Judge Mr Justice McCombe’s extraordinary judgment, which removed at a stroke the BA cabin crews’ right to strike: the union allegedly failed to convey to its members that 11 ballots had been spoiled. Thanks to two of the three members of the panel that considered the appeal, the outrageous judgment has been revoked, and the BA cabin crew will be allowed to strike.

I’ve scanned the news for a reaction on the part of the ‘radical’ Clegg, and can find no statement that celebrates the outcome of the Unite union appeal. It might be argued that no politician would do that (what with thousands of passengers, including my brother, potentially left stranded). Then again, Clegg seemed quite happy to defend the courts’ decision not to deport the alleged Al-Qaida activist.

In my opinion, Mr Justice McCombe’s decision was the equivalent of taking the spoiled ballots and shoving them up the nether regions of Britain’s working classes. I find it almost as extraordinary—and just as worrisome—that one of the three judges of the appeal panel was willing to argue that the decision was a just one. It speaks volumes of the direction that Britain is headed that two out of the four judges that considered the issue were willing to back ‘Brutish’ Airways over what the airline itself described as a technicality. In my view, it is difficult not to conclude that in this country, as in Spain—witness what has happened to Judge Baltasar Garzón, who is being pursued by fascists with the help of a right-wing supreme court judge—at least some of the judges are now playing an explicitly ideological, and right-wing role. Perhaps what many regard as the union-busting Willy Walsh will have been gloating over his lawyers’ initial success; with a legal system like ours, who needs Lib-Tories (or as I will call them henceforth, the ToryLibs)?

As if this were not enough, it has now been revealed that the ostensibly critical Vince Cable—the David who promised to take on the banking Goliaths—is intent on privatising the Royal Mail. What the Prince of Darkness could not achieve, Cable and the Tories will: the already tattered service will be split into yet more parts, and in an extraordinarily cynical gesture, the ToryLibs will offer to give the Royal Mail’s beleaguered workers a share of whatever is left. Note that this proposal was actually in the Liberal Democrats manifesto; it is not a caving in to Tory policy.

The upshot is that, contrary to what some of us would have believed as little as two weeks ago, a parallel can now be drawn between the careers of Vince Cable and Gordon Brown. Both politicians wrote essays in the famous The Red Paper on Scotland, which was published in 1975. (Cable’s essay was titled ‘Glasgow: Area of Need’, and in one passage, he stated that ‘It is a reasonable working hypothesis that most of Glasgow’s social problems can be related back to unemployment, job instability and an unbalanced occupational structure’. Does he believe that privatising Royal Mail will lead to employment, job stability, and a balanced occupational structure?) Now both politicians have now demonstrated that they are quite ready to betray the principles of progressive politics which they not only held back in the 1970s, but which both still claim to represent.

Before the elections, I was convinced that the worst possible outcome would be an outright Tory victory. I am starting to think that the coalition is worse, indeed, possibly far worse. The Tories will now be able to hide behind the apparent liberalism of the Lib Dems, even as the Lib Dems aid and abet what will be yet another velvet claw-like stage in the advance of neoliberalism. The mild John Major introduced legislation that was far more brutal than anything that Thatcher ever managed, and New Labour did the same again. How much further will the ToryLibs take us in the same direction?

Ken Loach rightly noted in this week’s Guardian that he thinks that ‘…we’ve got the real British ruling class back in power. Very rich white men with old money. This is the real face of the ruling class –very nuanced, very urbane, very smooth, and we shall see how very ruthless they are’.