POLITICS
The appalling consequences of Labour policy for the likes of Blair the elder
BORIS JOHNSON
Looking back at that happy Blair family in Scotland in the 1960s, one has to face the appalling possibility that the extra burden might have been just too much. It might have placed Fettes a few hundred pounds beyond the reach of Blair senior. And then where would we have been? Not only would Tony have never learnt his rugby and Latin at Fettes, Britain would have been deprived of the fresh-faced, attractive pub- lic schoolboy who has transformed the Labour Party and British politics.
And yet the policy I speak of is not VAT on school fees, which Mr David Blunkett, the Shadow Education Spokesman, has been forced to recant with such humiliating speed. No, we are talking of core Labour policy, accepted by both Mr Blair and Mr Brown. The 8 per cent increase in school fees is the estimate of the average effect on a public school of removing charitable status.
These days Fettes College in Edinburgh costs, according to the Independent Schools Yearbook, between £2,500 and £3,685 per term. Let us suppose, mutatis mutandis, that the bill for Tony was towards the thick end of that, what with the supple- ments of orange juice and milk he might have needed to build him up for rugby. In that case, according to my maths, the removal of charitable status would have had Blair pere stumping up, in today's money, a shocking £884 extra per year It is all very well for Blair to look reso- lute, slap down Mr Blunkett, and announce that the Labour leadership has taken con- trol of all policy that relates to raising rev- enue. (Blair fuhrerprinzip means that every- thing now has to go through his office or that of Mr Brown). But nothing can dis- guise the mess his party is in over education. To understand Blair's trap one only had to look at the Guardian letters' page in the immediate aftermath of the decision by Tony and Cherie Blair to send their son Euan to a grant-maintained school in south London.
It was a sulphurous correspondence, mainly from teachers in the Islington schools the Blairs had spurned. They raved at Tony for betraying the traditional idea that education should proceed at the pace of the slowest boat in the convoy. Among the Dave and Deirdre Sparts was a woman who warned that the London Oratory, the Blairs' preferred school, would encourage homophobia in the changing-rooms, and a man who referred to 'the Monster of Choice in the classroom'. Mr John Cock- ing, formerly Chair of Governors at Isling- ton Green School, groaned that, 'Mr Blair is fuelling the mindset of those who deploy their consumerist skills and strategies in relentless and compulsive pursuit of the "good school".'
That, one would have thought, is not a bad description of exactly the people whose votes Mr Blair is hunting: the sensible mid- dle classes who care about their children's education. And yet in order to appease the kind of people who write to the Guardian, and in order to leave Mr Blunkett with the semblance of a 'traditional' Labour policy on education, Mr Blair is forced to endorse a programme that he must know is spiteful and unjust.
Like, one imagines, Leo Blair before them, the middle-class types of today are forced to make painful economies so that little Nigel or little Charles may acquire the social and intellectual benefits of an educa- 'Miss Fuller, will you come in for a moment, I want to undress you mentally.' tion at St Custards. Perhaps these families have been forced to go without a second car or a second foreign holiday. By electing to pay the school fees of 600,000 children, rather than sponging off the state, they are saving the Exchequer between £1 billion and £1.5 billion, enough to pay for more than a handful of hospital wards.
Mr Blair's strategists must realise that if these people get wind of a Labour attack on private education they will turn away from the Labour Party, as when a herd of brumby horses thundering through the out- back veers away from an electric fence. No one, you might think, no one apart from Mr Major and Mr Hanley could possibly benefit from such a policy, founded as it is on crude class hatred and the desire to level down. Not the teachers, not the chil- dren . . . But wait.
There is, so I am told, one group which would unquestionably profit from Labour's dog-in-the-manger approach. In fact, there are a large number of families who would positively welcome it. These are the ones who have been sending their offspring to St Custards for generations, but have been embarrassed by the curious devotion to A- levels and academic standards that have developed in the last 20 years. Now they have little Charles on their hands, who is as good at rowing as his forefathers, but is, like them 'not very academic'.
Think back to Mr Leo Blair and his choice, in the 1960s, to give Tony a decent education. Suppose he had been forced, for reasons of financial embarrassment, to abandon the idea. Someone would have been found to fill Tony's place on the school list. And the same will happen today. If the energetic, bright, but only comparatively well-off middle classes sud- denly find they can no longer afford private schools, then cui bono? Why, the broad- acred numbskulls, those who used to be sure of a place at St Custards, but who have been dismayed to find that Common Entrance has got harder.
It is difficult to believe that this could be an intentional consequence of Labour poli- cy. We all knew the party was dedicated to the preservation of thickos from the conse- quences of their own stupidity. But not rich thickos, surely.
Boris Johnson is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph.
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