Monthly Archives: August 2010

Spoil sport

I suspect Queen Polly is right on this one. History may well judge David Miliband to have lost the leadership election at exactly this point, with Mandelson foolishly attacking Ed Miliband and Blair almost certain to come out in support of David, although I suspect Blair will be rather more subtle in his approach in this, his book launch week.

In fact, it seems to me so obvious that the endorsement of Mandelson and Blair is unhelpful to David Miliband, one might well ask oneself, why do it? Are they trying to ruin it for everyone? That’s one rather novelistic take on it. Far more worldly Labour friends of mine take a different view; they think the intervention of the Old Guard might well swing it for David. Either way, silence about one’s successors is usually a wise course. Very rarely does a figure like Neil Kinnock come along, with the largeness of spirit to support a more successful later leader but the political courage to criticise his policies.

Interesting how our final judgement of political personalities so often comes down to values, and not how much money or glamour or fame or even how many votes they won.

But therein lies the paradox, for a successful political leader must, of course, win power.

That’s one reason why I am supporting Ed Miliband. He has decent personal and political values, is a warm man, genuinely interested in listening to others, a hugely underrated quality in politics, and has, I believe, the courage and self awareness to withstand the terrible pressures of power and leadership, political triumph and possible disaster: ‘to treat those two impostors just the same.’ Just as importantly, over the past few months he has set out a credible if modest stall for social and economic change.

In other words, I think he, too, can win power. And do something significant with it.…

The Miller’s Tale

The opening sentence of Jane Miller’s new book is stark. “I am old and I feel and look old.” In person, however, she seems anything but. As we saunter along Kings Road in London, she in her light grey Converse trainers and short black coat, I am struck by how raffishly youthful she appears. A deft emailer with a razor-sharp mind and an unusual openness to life’s more uncomfortable truths, Miller, now 77, swims every morning in her local pool and is currently reading War and Peace for the third time, this time in Russian, taking “three pages slowly and carefully each morning”. If this is what 77 looks and feels like, I think, in a selfish burst of late-afternoon cheer, there’s a lot to look forward to…….

For the rest of Melissa Benn’s interview with Jane Miller in Saturday’s Guardian, please read on here.

Free Schools: not for turning.

Below, an amended version of Melissa Benn’s latest blog on the Public Finance website

So it looks like only a handful of Free Schools will be opening in 2011, and some high profile projects like Toby Young’s West London Free School might be delayed for a year or two. Following on from the PR disasters of the BSF funding announcements and the widespread criticism of the way that the Academies Bill was pushed through the Commons in late July, it looks as if the Coalition’s flagship education policy is in trouble.

Not a bit of it. Gove got off to an unsteady start and the summer break will surely lead him to reflect on his department’s manner of policy presentation, if not its substance. This autumn, I suspect we will see a rather more sober Gove, emphasising caution and caring at every turn.

Clever politician that he is, he might even argue that the slow start to the Free Schools project is actually a good thing, indicating that government is playing it by the book and that the new schools are subject to the same financial and planning strictures as the maintained sector.

And yesterday’s Institute for Fiscal Studies report showing that the government’s austerity drive is going to hit the poor the hardest will only confirm to Gove and co the need to keep arguing that their education policy is there to help the disadvantaged.

The pupil premium will be introduced in the coming months; who knows, perhaps around the time of the potentially restive Lib Dem conference? But whatever the timing, expect much to be made of it, even though many hard-pressed headteachers I’ve spoken to say that even in their schools, with high numbers of students on free school meals, its introduction is unlikely to make up even a fraction of the shortfall left by other cuts.

But for all this, there will be no change of heart or direction from government on the schools front. The so called Free Schools and the new ‘outstanding’ academies are at the heart of the Coalition’s determination to break up state provision and introduce private initiative and finance at all levels of the welfare state.

Of course, a few schools will flourish; backed by corporate capital, powered forward by influential figures, drawing on the most talented pool of pupils, how can they fail? And of course, they will include in their ranks some of the country’s poorest but most talented pupils whom you can be sure, come results day, like yesterday, will be pushed to the front of all publicity photographs.…

Indeed they do….

‘Stop knocking comprehensives. They work’.

Bloody hell.

That was my first thought on discovering the author of this spirited post on comprehensives on the Guardian website. I don’t agree with everything in it but it’s such a rare genre, the pro comprehensive piece, that I have to reproduce it, even if it does come from a strange stable, politically speaking.…

Meet the Wife

Read Melissa Benn’s latest review, of Laura Bush’s autobiography Spoken from the Heart, published in yesterday’s Guardian Review.…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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