The departure of Michael Gove and David Willetts in the
recent reshuffle was a fairly obvious attempt by David Cameron to cleanse his
government of some unwanted political toxicity ahead of the election. For the
left and the trade union movement, it’s an opportunity to enjoy a short moment
before redoubling our efforts to tackle the deeper forces at work.
Michael Gove’s exit was, of course, particularly enjoyable.
Rarely has someone united so many people against him so successfully. As Nick
Wright wrote in his recent piece for the Morning Star, Gove was singularly
successful in uniting almost the entire education profession against him. The
government might have lived with that. But the fact is that the Blob just kept
growing. By the time he went, polling evidence was showing that Gove was the
most disliked politician in Britain. Quite an achievement at a time when the
politician’s stock is arguably lower than at any point since the era of mass
democratic politics began. Gove’s real gift was tabloid journalistic bear-baiting
and he used it to try to sow division between teachers and their communities,
but as anyone who knows how community state schools actually worked could have
told Gove, it was going to take more than a clever turn of phrase and an
acquired talent for public school-style bullying to get between parents and
their daily experience of teachers. Gove’s rhetoric did not resonate with lived
reality and his dictatorial centralisation of power as he tried to drive
de-regulation ruthlessly from the DfE started to jar badly against basic
democratic common sense.
Then of course there was the unravelling of the policies
themselves. Forced academisation created broad-based coalitions based on
revulsion at rank dictatorship. The huge diversion of resources to pet Free
Schools, the back-of-a-fag-packet process for approving them and the drive to
set them up wherever and whenever someone felt moved to run a school stank of
insane dogma. And then there is the growing suspicion that academisation has
been a vast folly, academically meaningless and successful only in handing
schools into the control of people unfit for one reason or another to run them.
It was increasingly obvious that the real enemies of promise were practising in
Whitehall, not the classrooms.
Nicky Morgan’s appointment is clearly designed to take some
of the personalised heat out of education policy but there will be no radical
break. Indeed, as this
recent article in US publication People’s World showed Gove’s particularly
offensive offensive was rooted in a far longer counter-revolution that serves
powerful transatlantic finance capital interests. Even while the
academy chain heads and other assorted apostles of privatisation are publicly
mourning Gove, they will be looking to the post-election world and working
to make sure that a Tory victory will further their aims.
David Willetts’s departure had a similar motivation.
Willetts was the architect of the shock therapy approach to the marketization
and privatisation of higher education. Willetts attempted to resettle the
financing of higher education on a publicly subsidised voucher system that
would be progressively sold off to the financial sector while simultaneously
feeding the growth of new private for-profit uiniversities. His policies
produced student riots, occupations and Parliamentary splits in the Coalition
before they began unravelling, publicly, in a very embarrassing way. As Andrew
McGettigan has argued here, judged by his two stated aims, Willetts has
been a failure. He leaves the higher education system more unstable, more privatised,
more de-regulated and more chaotic than at any point in the post-war
period.
Yet for all the relief at the passing of the headbangers,
the job at hand for the left and the education labour movement has not changed.
Now is the time to take advantage of the unpopularity of the policies, as well
as the people, and start to push for an alternative, democratised vision of a future
education system. Most importantly, now is the time to build on the broad
coalitions of interest that have emerged on campuses and in local communities
all over the country. Our urgent need now is build the mass forces that can put
pressure on Labour to start to develop once more a progressive vision of
education. Our own suggestions for starting this process are in our
pamphlet, Education for People. But this is just the start.
