The purpose of morality is to teach you,
not to suffer and die, but
to enjoy yourself and live.

N.B. The author is Tim Hewish – my Parliamentary Researcher – who is somewhat riled by opposition to the Government’s education reforms — Steve Baker.

The largest powder keg in the Hundred Years’ War known as class warfare is surely Education.  Toby Young, writer and now somehow alienator of the people of Acton, has thrown his own grenade into the debate by embarking on the creation a flagship Academy school in west London. The documentary charting the realisation of his free school was aired on BBC a few days ago and can still be watched on iplayer.

What I was most concerned about was the reactionary vitriol spewing from the Left and the National Union of Teachers. The NUT opposition to Academies was laid bare as an attempt not to help the children who are failing in comprehensive education, but a clear act of saving one’s own skin. Failures propping up failure. It made for desperate viewing.

Mr. Young said that the State had let children and parents down and we are not willing to stand by and put up with what we’ve got. He wanted to show that we, the local people, were going to do it better than the State. He spoke of tearing down the wall between the public and the private sector. I echo such sentiments.

However, opponents of Academies accuse them of being middle class havens for parents who want to avoid sending their children to poor performing schools, but can’t afford to go private. They have declared this as middle class warfare. But is it?

For Left wing doctrinaires to tell children, who don’t have a social understanding of class at the age of 10, that they must stay in a failed education system because any other school system is unpleasant to Marxist theory is an outrage. This smacks of cheap ideology set over the social fact that a large number of state schools are failing pupils under the current inflexible system.

For example, if a comprehensive school has children from every walk of life, but it is anchored to a rigid system that won’t teach a subject because to them it’s bourgeois, that makes the class warriors deniers of basic social demand from parents and pupils.

Whereas a free school would allow children and parents of all backgrounds the chance to learn and be taught what they desired. It’s the age old dualism of freedom not State control. Individual choice, not Statist uniformity. It took the Tories, the historical party of freedom, to grant parents what they wanted and to liberate them from the educational false class consciousness.

It is the anti-Academy foot soldiers who are creating a divide and turning man against their fellow man. Their opposition even resorted to threats and personal harassment. For example, here is one comment from a BBC apparatchik:

I don’t think there’s been one person yet on Toby Young’s BBC2 documentary about starting a school that I wouldn’t happily punch to death.

That is what the Left does. They alienate the bonds of human interaction and retard community freedom. In fact, so called middle class people want to help their fellow working class brother. If they set up better schools for everyone, then it is a win-win.

The alternative is that children from any background will not be liberated to grow into responsible adults if they are given an education system that puts failing schools on pseudo-GCSEs such as the Certificate in Personal Effectiveness, which  teaches children to clean their teeth, give their friends a make-over or entertain a group of people with tea or coffee. Basic life skills should be taught at home and shouldn’t be subject to the certification-obsession New Labour has created. Why should the State reward someone for brushing their teeth or learning how to put on a condom?

As for the creation of free schools, to me it seems that to be denied the opportunity to even try is actually very sad. Affectively, it is telling children that they should be deprived of access to top-quality teaching because some myopic nomenklatura God-worships the edifice of the State. It is they who are drugged up on the opiate of masses. Academies provide a welcome tonic to this malady.

Via Tory: Coalition partners Lib Dems could ‘disappear’ (From Bucks Free Press):

SUGGESTIONS the Lib Dems could ‘disappear’ because of the ‘shift in politics’ have been dismissed by the party’s Wycombe leader – following a neighbouring councillor’s defection.

There is an excellent explanation of the structure of political ideas in the author’s preface to Living with Leviathan (David B Smith, IEA, 2006). Smith posits as a replacement for the conventional and flawed left/right spectrum what he calls Hayek’s Triangle:

From Living with Leviathan, Smith 2006

On this scheme:

• The Labour party is an alliance of various denominations of socialist (democratic socialist, social democrat etc, etc) plus an occasional classical liberal in the wrong party.
• The Conservative party is a mixture of conservative interventionists and classical liberals.
• The Liberal Democrats comprise classical liberals and socialists.

These days, Conservatism is not the avoidance of change – perhaps it never was – but its embrace: big society not big government, social responsibility not state control.  This is the new politics. Either you embrace a more dynamic future based on productive relationships between individuals or you are stuck in a past which relied on big government, on imposed state solutions which never seemed quite to work.

Could the LibDems disappear? Possibly, perhaps probably. More important are the practical questions which impact on people’s lives: Where can I give birth? Is a good school place available? Is my income secure? Where will my next job come from?

The fact is, as I said during the campaign, all parties are coalitions. The important political question is this: can we best answer those practical questions through freedom and responsibility or through state control?

I am an Associate Member of the Centre for Policy Studies and I always enjoy reading their pamphlets: they remind me I am not alone. I caught up with the following four yesterday on the train. The theme? Putting humanity back into our society.

Click the images to download the pamphlets as PDFs.

The Reality Gap – an analysis of the failure of big government demonstrates that more government means worse. Jill Kirby writes of voter disenchantment and indicates that, in the EU elections, “Only one voter in 11 voted for the runaway winners, the Conservative Party”.

Jill provides and explores:

five techniques which have been deployed by the Government to create the appearance of success, while presiding over failure:

• Moving the goalposts
• Declaratory legislation
• Government as public relations
• Data collection
• Complex structures, procedures and language.

In particular, from the chapter Declaratory Legislation:

A 2008 survey by Sweet and Maxwell found that Margaret Thatcher’s Government introduced an average of 1,724 new laws every year. That rose to 2,663 under Tony Blair and in the first year of Gordon Brown’s regime the annual total reached 3,071.

This frenzied legislative activism can only be ignored by ordinary people. It puts me in mind of Jamie Whyte’s article Am I a Criminal? I haven’t a clue:

This Government has relentlessly undermined the rule of law by its vague legislation and constant meddling

Jill concludes that “The only answer is a significant reduction in state control” — I could not agree more.
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Corporate tax for small firms could apparently be reduced by 4% if “failed” RDAs were abolished.

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