(h er to the Offensive
A. Phillips Griffiths, A. E. Tomlinson
The 'Observer' and Cuba. Louis Blom-Cooper
Gentility Kingsley A mis Company Directors
Sir Richard POWell, A. H. Jollific
Unesco David Footman The Six and Agriculture N. March Hunnings All That Glisters Leo MeKern Victims of Nazism Robert Bolt
Anti-Apartheid - S. Abdul
OVER TO THE OFFENSIVE Maude is 'deeply suspicious of the Treasury's intentions towards education.' But he 'cannot believe that Ministers will allow theniselves to lose this battle.'
What Ministers? The previous Minister of Edu- cation was capable of doing great things for the schools, and did a lot more than anyone could have expected in the middle of last year's economic freeze-up. He is no longer in the Government. He was succeeded by someone whose attitude to the universities appears unbenign. The present Home Secretary, together with the Prime Minister, must be regarded as the surviving Minister most respon- sible for rejecting the recommendations of the University Grants Committee, thus denying the universities the means (though still paying lip ser- vice to the end) of keeping pace with a growing population. Lord Hailsham, to judge from his replies to Lord Longford about the future of the universities, might well do best to confine his atten- tions to the future of the House of -Lords.
The problem is not whether the Ministers 'will allow themselves to lose this battle': but whether they are not in fact all fighting on the side of the Treasury (or whatever sinister ungovernable force to which the buck must be passed). One fears for the schools; the universities are in a worse plight. They seem to have dropped forever out of sight through a hole in the Cabinet system. There is no Minister answerable for them, and the prized in- dependence of the Grants Committee also entails that nobody has to listen to it. In Australia, where a far-sighted Prime Minister made himself person- ally responsible for the financial provision of the Government for universities, there is now a first-rate and rapidly growing university system which should be our envy. But this would be no solution in our case, for the Chancellor of the University of Oxford has shown by his acts that he cannot care about the future of university education in the way that Mr. Menzies does.
No one is going to accept the Ministry of Edu- cation in order to preside over the dissolution of the schools. But if the universities go to the dogs, who will be to blame? We can only hold the Government responsible--a government which is still pursuing the disastrous policies of last year, and which fobbed off with bromides the able pleas of Mr. Michael Roberts at the Conservative Con- ference.
As voters, we can only blame the Government. But all this, I fear, has little to do with election results. So I blame us.
A. P1-111..t IPS C;1211:FITHS
Birk beck College, London University
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