The Right's New Toe-hold in Education

It’s a testament to the communications skills of Cameron’s Tories that they have managed to present yesterday’s policy on grammar schools as some kind of radical break with the past. To recap; Cameron promises not to interfere with those grammars that remain, but not to build any more. As political revelations go, this is nearly up there with Tony Benn promising not to privatise the NHS, or Sir Peter Tapsell vowing not to drag the Royal Family down into a cellar and execute them.

No Tory government was going to build more grammar schools. Thatcher did not build any more grammars. Major did not build any more grammars. In 1997 he did promise to build more grammars, because that’s the kind of thing you do when you need to galvanise your few remaining troops for a last-ditch defence. But Cameron was not going to reintroduce the 1944 Education Act any more than he would have reintroduced rationing.

It’s called electoral reality. A promise to siphon off the top one-third of pupils will appeal to those parents who are absolutely confident that their child will go to these fabulous schools. That might be ten percent - the ones who know both that their child is a genius, and that they’re not deluding themselves about it. The other ninety percent either know that their child will go to a bog-standard comprehensive, though one stripped of the brightest and most ambitious, or will be unsure whether their little darling will make the grade and go to this elite school, or be dumped with the skimmed rabble in the other one.

Most of the aspirational parents Cameron wants will be terrified to gamble like this - ‘is little Octavia going to be a rocket scientist or a crack dealer?’ will be the inevitable thought process. Until normal schools are disciplined, safe and civilised, there is no chance of widespread selection.

The only choice for Cameron was whether to make a big deal out of not building any more grammar schools, or to not build any more grammar schools and do it quietly. Being keen to engineer a series of mini-Clause Four moments, the man decided to do the former.

And for once, the old Right took the bait. Grammar schools are something so fundamental to the Hefferite vision of Britain that they bit without thinking. David Willetts’ statement of the bleeding obvious contained nothing that changed policy, just the appearance of what the party wanted. The only choice in British politics is between a New Labour government and a centrist Tory government. If either party swerves off into the ideological wilderness they’ll stay stuck there.

Interestingly, Cameron’s apparent U-turn has almost exactly the same logic as the real Clause Four moment. No one, except the dafter members of the old Left, really thought that an incoming Labour government would nationalise everything down to the corner shop, but Blair managed to connive a small revolution out of his statement of the obvious. As both he and Cameron know, the great trick of democratic politics is to say what people already believe, and make it sound new, interesting and bold. You thus appeal both to people’s aspirations and their vanity.

They know that the real control over politics does not come from politicians, but from the voters' perceptions of politics. Power belongs to those who influence these perceptions, rather than the politicians who obey.

Education policy has long been seen as a left-wing monopoly, partly because the teachers are unionised, and largely lefties themselves. I was once taught about the 1980s famines in Ethiopia, in a class that blamed environmental degradation, cash crops and Western policy in general, but carefully avoided mentioning the fact that the country was a Marxist dictatorship at the time.

But it is also because for a long time, much of the commentariat has managed to ensure that ‘education’ is seen as synonymous with ‘state-run, comprehensive education’, and edged the Right’s views on the matter into a grammar-obsessed corner. And the Right has long been happy to oblige. Most people believe that there’s no alternative to comprehensives, because outside the bastions of the intellectual Right, none are seriously discussed. Politicians cluster around what the masses believe, and the masses believe what a certain class of people tell them is acceptable.

Friedrich Hayek wrote a pamphlet on the subject in the late 1940s, arguing that it was the public intellectuals, the ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’, who were responsible for socialism, not politicians. It was these opinion-formers, the academics, writers, broadcasters, artists, teachers and activists, who control the flow of ideas down to the masses, and decide which are acceptable and which abhorrent. Socialism was originally a movement of the intellectuals, and it took decades to convince the working class to sign up. This is equally true today. Those who control the flow of ideas control the chief moulder of politics.

In a society where all original debate in conducted through the media, those who control how ideas are seen have an immense power. It was difficult to debate the merits of multiculturalism when the mere suggestion would cause TV interviewers to suck in a horrified intake of breath. It was hard to talk about the problems of Islamist politics when the BBC prefaced any mention of the MAB - the UK offshoot of the often-banned Muslim Brotherhood, and first cousin to Hamas - as “the moderate” Muslim Association of Britain.

Once the chief intellectuals change their minds, the terms of debate change for the rest of us. It is much easier to debate controversial subjects like Islam and multiculturalism once the intellectual class decides that it needs to be discussed. It took the intervention of the rather admirable Trevor Phillips to end the farcical official silence on these matters, and allow Question Time audiences to feel that they could applaud Melanie Phillips without actually being a fascist.

Exactly the same process applies to education, and every other political and social issue. Only when those who control the terms of debate have stopped clinging to the failed model of nationalised schools, unionised teachers and illiterate pupils, will we get the chance to create a decent system of schooling. It took 7/7 to start a sensible debate on multiculturalism. The Right now needs to shame the public intellectuals into acknowledging that state education is an embarrassing, ineffective and hopelessly corrupt mess, for there to be any real debate about how we can move forward. But for the Tories, breaking with its obsession with grammers is an essential start.