The Stalinism of Tory small-staters

[Stoatwobbler]

The article's headline is a tad misleading in my view, as all 3 parties are guilty of this sort of shenanigans. However, it's still an interesting argument.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/14/ofsted-toxic-tyranny-state-central-schools

 

One overlooked aspect of the coalition's mixed-up mindset becomes clear: the party – no, parties – who habitually rail against the centralised, lever-pulling state, gleefully making it even more so. If you're being generous, Gove's cosiness with Ofsted and drive to create thousands of academies and free schools represent something paradoxical: policy dressed up in the rhetoric of decentralisation and empowerment that actually threatens the complete reverse. Viewed cynically, it's all a simple con trick: a vast power grab whose most basic elements are obvious. If a school succumbs to increasingly irresistible pressure and transfers to academy status, it effectively places its fate in the hands of Whitehall; the same applies to free schools, and a supposed grassroots "movement" overseen by 100 civil servants in London. Both crystallise a threat crisply summed up by Peter Wilby: "the creation of a fully centralised school system in which the secretary of state for education has the powers of an elected dictator."

 

Aneurin Bevan – a great man, but an exemplar of a grindingly centralist age – wanted the sound of a dropped bedpan in Treorchy to reverberate around Whitehall; Gove, it seems, wants to know whether the whiteboards are all working in Telford. It's hubristic, verging on mad – and out of kilter not just with Conservative and Liberal thinking, but also with the way we increasingly live: a vision of state power that might have just about worked in the wake of the second world war, but that will founder against modern expectations of initiative, influence and professional esteem.

 

Plenty of other headlines attest to the same problem. Today, the Royal College of Nursing is claiming that the NHS is close to breaking point, and 60,000 frontline jobs are under threat – while Andrew Lansley pursues his madcap revolution, conceived in London seminar rooms, drafted in Whitehall, and then rendered Soviet-esque in its incoherence by all that wrangling at Westminster. Back in the realm of education policy, Nick Clegg will today relaunch the government's pupil premium – and, like a good liberal, propose that if an Ofsted inspection judges a school's poorer students to be failing, "the whole school will be judged as failing". As with New Labour, the essential idea is a mixture of an unquenchable zeal for "reform", threats from the centre, endless inspections and massed box-ticking: Stalinism crossed with management consultancy, which makes last week's Clegg-Cameron relaunch in an Essex tractor factory beautifully apt.

 

The underlying story goes back decades, if not centuries, and includes one of New Labour's most overlooked manoeuvres – retaining an essentially Old Labour model of government, and using it in the cause of "modernisation" (outsourcing and "diversity of provision", incidentally, are mere canards – if G4S or Serco are nominally in charge, it doesn't alter the essentially monolithic relationship between state and citizen – indeed, the tyranny therein of target culture and "output specified contracts" actually makes it worse). The coalition, it seems, has enthusiastically copied over the self-same ideas. Think of the basic point like this: do Gove and Lansley look like liberators, come to give power away, or deluded apparatchiks, kidding themselves that diktat can be effective in an era when our lives grow ever more diverse and complicated?