[A-List] UK state: social inclusion, New Labour-style

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Save us from salvation

Paul Foot
Wednesday May 12, 2004
The Guardian

Will she be the heroine of Hackney? asked a headline in the Sunday Times of
May 2, alongside a huge glamorous photograph of Bernice McCabe. The
potential heroine, says the report, has been drafted in to save Sir Thomas
Abney primary school, Hackney. This is of special interest to me since my
10-year-old daughter goes there.

Two points seem rather relevant. First, Sir Thomas Abney doesn't need
saving. It is a comprehensive primary school in a very poor area. It has an
excellent head and dedicated staff. The buildings are falling apart and it
badly needs investment, but the children and parents, from a wide range of
different backgrounds, are very happy there. Although the local MP, Diane
Abbott, and the former head of Hackney's Learning Trust, Mike Tomlinson,
have both insulted Hackney schools by announcing that they would not send
their children to them, Sir Thomas Abney works very well, and we are all
glad and proud that our children go there.

Second, Bernice McCabe, the potential heroine, doesn't teach in Hackney. She
doesn't teach anywhere in the state sector. She is head of the North London
Collegiate School in Edgware. People are as free to send their children to
her school as they are to stay at the Ritz. The only qualification is money.
The North London Collegiate costs (at the minimum) £9,000 a year per child
and its grounds are spread over 30 acres. It is, in short, a snob school,
restricted exclusively to the children of the rich.

One of the most exhilarating aspects of the history of the Labour party is
the long struggle to create a proper alternative to snob schools. Years of
discussion and campaigning led to the formation of non-selective
comprehensive schools in which children could be educated in the company of
children from all classes. The idea was that, through public spending and a
commitment to public education, these state schools would grow to be just as
good as the snob schools, which would wither on the vine. Such was the
social democratic policy that inspired all wings of Labour, from Ellen
Wilkinson to Shirley Williams, and led, among other things, to the formation
of one of the most redistributive councils ever - the Inner London Education
Authority.

New Labour threw all that into reverse. Ilea, abolished by the Tories, was
not revived. Snob schools became centres of excellence, and the education
advisers at 10 Downing Street, led by a former Liberal Democrat and backed
by the Labour secretaries of state Blunkett, Morris and Clarke, adopted
selective policies. They developed the fantastic notion that the people
responsible for snob schools, ludicrously described as the "independent
sector", are the best people to run state schools.

I was lucky enough the other day to sit in the same room as the Hackney
heroine. Bernice McCabe came to Sir Thomas Abney to discuss plans to turn
the successful primary school (430 children, 10,000 square metres) into a
"city academy" for children from three to 18, in which at least 1,500
children are to be crammed into a space amounting to less than a tenth of
the space at the North London Collegiate School, enlarged only by a concrete
platform over a reservoir.

I asked the heroine how she had become involved in the first place. "Downing
Street," she replied. Someone there had phoned to ask her to be an "academic
sponsor" for the new academy. The necessary "financial sponsor", some new
Labour millionaire, hadn't been found yet, but, she reassured me, there are
plenty of them around. I sat there grimly mourning the replacement of a fine
social democratic tradition by a neo-Victorian obsession with the patronage
of the rich.

We don't want New Labour millionaires and snob school heroines in Hackney.
We don't want Tory "choice". We want decent comprehensive schools run by
professionals who believe in state education.

· Perhaps the most disturbing explanation for the atrocities in Iraqi
prisons is that US soldiers have been egged on to exact revenge for the
victims of the twin towers atrocity in New York.

One of the prison camps under investigation for torture is Camp Bucca in
southern Iraq, where several thousand "EPWs" (enemy prisoners of war) are
detained. Bucca sounds like an Iraqi name. But the camp was named after
Ronald Bucca, a New York firefighter who got to the 78th floor of one of the
blazing towers before falling to his death.

Were the beatings at Camp Bucca inspired by primitive feelings of revenge
for the New York bombings? And if so, who put that fantastic and utterly
unjustifiable notion into the soldiers' heads?