The elect and the electors
POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH
Politically the Budget must be judged by its electoral significance and by the effect it is likely to have on party morale. On the whole, this is probably negligible, since the deleterious effect of Mrs Castle's forthcoming legislation against the unions this session is likely, even in its watered-down form, to outweigh any euphoria which might result from increased old age pensions or from any of those minor acts of spite against the enjoyment of life like the Chancellor's brutal increase in the duty on table wines, or the victimisation of paper handkerchiefs, potato crisps, pet foods, peanuts and plastic wall-coverings. Few traditional Labour supporters are sophisticated enough to comprehend the distress which will be caused to our higher paid workers by the ending of tax relief on bank overdrafts, so they are denied even that consolation.
The important thing is that it is not by any stretch of the imagination an election-winning Budget, which leaves the Prime Minister wide open to any cranky schemes which members of the Cabinet may produce to this end. I have heard it suggested that Mr Edward Short honestly imagines that education will be the field which eventually wins the day for Labour. Let us goad the Tories into forcing Sir Edward Boyle's resignation, the argument runs, or bet- ter still let us bribe him out of politics with some handsome academic post, then anybody succeeding him will be impelled by pressure from below to advance the root-and-branch defence of grammar schools as one of the party's constructive alternatives—and with it the maintenance of the eleven-plus. Now any- body who has ever studied an opinion poll, let alone discussed the matter with a member of the W*rk*g Cl*ss*s, knows that the eleven- plus is electorally unviable. Ergo, Labour will win the next election.
There is no need, in discussing Mr Short's thesis, to expose its principal fallacy—namely that education has never been a big vote-win- ner. What matters is the effect which Mr Short's conviction may have on government policy, and all the signs at present are that his depart- ment intends to push through its Bill reorganis- ing state education on comprehensive lines without waiting for the Maud Report. This, in itself, is of little importance, since the Maud Report. which concerns itself with local govern- ment, is merely going to recommend the re- grading of educational authorities into larger units, and will not concern itself with the merits of comprehensivisation as such. If wholesale and compulsory restructuring along compre- hensive lines is carried out simultaneously with the reorganisation of the local authorities, then the only result will be to add to the general confusion, and it therefore seems fair to deduce that one or the other will be given precedence. Local authorities are much easier to reorganise than the schools they control, and plainly it would make no sense if the task of reorganising schools were given to numerous small authorities, for the most part implacably hostile to the comprehensive idea. before the responsibility is moved to the new enlarged authorities which will eventually administer them. In any case, even the most 'botched up' comprehensive scheme takes several years to implement, by which time we will have had a general election. So the only explanation for the Government's eagerness to produce its Bill is a political one. If the Tories can be per- suaded to emerge as the champions of the eleven-plus and second-class citizenhood for three quarters of the population, then Labour might well gain some small electoral advantage by showing its compassion for the 'education- ally deprived' (i.e. academically unexceptional) majority.
Which might go some way to explaining Mr Short's extraordinarily intemperate language to the National Union of Teachers on the Isle of Man. Since the amiable, bumbling Sir Edward Boyle could never be mistaken for a dragon, Mr Short had to invent one, just as Don Quixote worked off all his healthy urges for social justice against a windmill. He chose a pamphlet, the work of several eminent hands, which had been circulated to Members of Par- liament and had caused as much sensation as a few drops of bath essence in the Mediterranean sea. Entitled Fight for Freedom and described as a 'Black Paper,' it queried a few of the more obviously questionable assumptions among those who regard education as a means of promoting social equality rather than as a means of developing the pupils' potentialities, and it certainly contained nothing which would be regarded as at all objectionable by anyone else.
'In my view, the publication of the "Black Paper" was one of the blackest days for educa- tion in the last one hundred years,' cried Mr Short, proceeding to identify its authors with racism, advocacy of capital and corporal punishment, and with a desire to abolish the welfare state. Needless to say none of the authors had suggested the slightest inclination in any of these directions.
But the whole speech reflected a degree of complacency about the comprehensive experi- ment which simply cannot be justified in terms of educational results to date. It can only be explained in political terms, and it is here, 1 am afraid. that the Black Paper's authors appear somewhat naïve. Only one of them suggests a way in which the selective ideal could be sold to the 'educationally deprived' majority—by pointing out to them that if nobody is allowed. to receive a proper education, they will be unable to batten on the productive efforts of the bourgeoisie as they have done for the past twenty-five years. In other words, their stan- dard of living will go down.
Here, I am afraid, he will find himself— most unjustly—in the position of the boy who cried 'Wolf.' Many people have been threaten- ing the working classes with a decline in their standard of living for a very long time. They never pay any attention, and their standard of living continues to rise in the most encouraging way. Even when the great crash comes, they will never attribute it to comprehensive educa- tion, let alone to defective university training. With luck—and it is here, that the battle must really be fought for the minds and hearts of these magnificent creatures—they will attribute it to excessive government spending on things like the Land Commission, MPS' salaries and the salaries of top grade chairmen in the nationalised industries. That is where the• fun starts. '
If the Labour grassroots attitude to educa- tion can be summed up as a determination to partake fully in anything which is going free— and an equal determination that nobody else should be judged worthy to receive more—then the Tory grassroots attitude might be summed up as a determination to secure a superior education for their children, equally free. Educationists may talk about developing potentialities to the full, or about the idea of a university, but it all boils down to the same thing. The brutal fact remains that children of the working class—whether by virtue of their unfortunate gene pools or through some environmental hazard—do not, on average, compare favourably with those of the middle class in any method of academic selection yet devised; and one has only to look at an eleven- plus paper to see how far ingenuity in this field has been stretched. Add to this the fact that roughly one third of the working class is thought to consist of actual or potential Con- servative voters, and one has some inkling of the Tories' dilemma.
The distinction which Sir Edward Boyle has chosen to observe, and where he proposes to plant his flag, is between the comprehensive schemes which are judiciously prepared and those which are `botched up.' If he and Mr Heath are right in believing that the eleven-plus is no longer electorally viable—as well as being educationally imperfect—then it must follow that the physical and geographical division of schooling is not electorally viable. Whereupon the fight against 'botched up' schemes becomes at best a holding operation, which does nothing to satisfy the basic and obvious demand among a definite majority of Tory activists for selectivity in education— not to mention the demands of learning, cul- ture, wisdom, justice and everything else—nor the apparent demand among a majority of the electorate for an end to the more invidious manifestations of selection.
Plainly, the only possible compromise which will go some way to meeting all these demands is for the Conservative party to distinguish rigidly not only between those schemes which are 'botched' and those which are not, but also within the comprehensive system, between those which are 'streamed' (i.e. which separate the brighter pupils from those who would in other circumstances be described as `educa- tionally deprived') and those which are `un- stream' (i.e. which lump all the pupils to- gether in the interests of social justice, com- munal harmony, etc).
The present scheme provides for stream- ing to begin at sixteen, which means that all our potential Lord Beechings and Edward Heaths will receive very little educa- tion indeed until their sixteenth birthday, which is surely not a very good idea. If only Sir Edward could grasp and exploit this vital distinction, he might not only save his own political career but also save his party from gleefully donning yet another millstone in time for the next general election. It would be rather sad, even from a non-political stand- -point, if, through Tory mismanagement, the grotesque Mr Short were allowed to carry the day.
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