John Connell: The Blog

A let­ter in today’s Observer about George Osborne’s finan­cial com­pe­tence caught my eye — the let­ter was in response to an arti­cle by Will Hut­ton in which he had assumed that Osborne really is seek­ing to rem­edy finan­cial inequal­ity in the coun­try but he just doesn’t have the eco­nomic com­pe­tence to make it hap­pen. The sen­ti­ment in the let­ter res­onated with my own thoughts, not just about Osborne, but about the whole Tory endeav­our in Gov­ern­ment at the moment, and espe­cially about Michael Gove’s assault on school­ing in Eng­land. Of Osborne, Gra­ham Aspinall, of Sheffield, wrote:

To credit Osborne merely with eco­nomic illit­er­acy, as Hut­ton and Blanch­flower et al do, is too char­i­ta­ble. He is a shrewd ide­o­logue and strate­gist. It’s not that he doesn’t under­stand the ruin he is inflict­ing on fam­i­lies. He knows what he’s doing; he just doesn’t care. Osborne is not an eco­nomic illit­er­ate; he’s worse – a moral illiterate.

Polly Toyn­bee has called the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion:

…the most rightwing of all post­war governments…

I agree. And deep at the heart of this rightwing gov­ern­ment is a clever, seemingly-complex (but really not), unfail­ingly polite, well-read and media-savvy ide­o­logue who just hap­pens to be in charge of edu­ca­tion, appar­ently by his own choice. At least in Scot­land we have only to con­tend with an ego­tis­ti­cal incom­pe­tent as edu­ca­tion sec­re­tary; Eng­lish state school­ing, on the other hand, is now being sys­tem­at­i­cally under­mined and dis­man­tled by a man who thinks that his own life tale, that of some­one from hum­ble begin­nings made good by a rig­or­ous school­ing of a trad­tional kind, is the model that must serve everyone.

But that is only part of what Gove is about. Gove, like many of his rightwing friends in this Gov­ern­ment and beyond, accept whole­heart­edly the con­cept of an edu­ca­tion sys­tem as a race to the line, as the means by which the country’s elite is selected and trained, and as a sys­tem designed to weed out those who are not capa­ble (defined by cri­te­ria designed to serve the rightwing credo) of ben­e­fit­ing from any kind of aca­d­e­mic school­ing. Many will throw, and have thrown, the epi­thet of elit­ist at this crew, and will intend it as cen­sure. To Gove and his col­leagues, such name-callers are merely stat­ing the obvi­ous. They would call them­selves exactly the same, being merely descrip­tive of their phi­los­o­phy and inten­tions and values.

Michael Gove is a man with a mis­sion, and he is in a hurry to com­plete it. State school­ing in Eng­land has been, for many years now, a for­eign land when viewed over the fence from Scot­tish edu­ca­tion; soon, it will be more like view­ing the sur­face of Sat­urn, an exotic place beyond our easy ken and under­stand­ing, a sit­u­a­tion not lack­ing in irony given that Gove’s own school­ing hap­pened in Scotland.