11.12.2014
Playing on the fields of Eton
The shadow education secretary has been accused of fighting the class war. Not true, says Micky Coulter, but Labour does have a class-based strategy
It cannot be often that a member of Labour’s shadow cabinet is accused of fighting the class war, but that is what Tristram Hunt is alleged to be doing by the rightwing media.
The cause of their sudden, exaggerated fuming? Hunt announced on November 24, in his role as Labour’s shadow education secretary, that from now on, private schools will risk having their charitable status (tax breaks) revoked unless they can satisfy a future Labour administration that they are going to “to form genuine and accountable partnerships with state schools”.1 In other words, they must be seen to be doing more for the ‘common good’ - in addition to providing the ruling class with generation after generation of socially homogeneous and ideologically ‘on message’, highly confident functionaries for just about every position of power and influence in society, from the judge’s bench to the editorship of newspapers (and, of course, future members of parliament, such as Tristram himself). As a journalist for a local paper in Hunt’s own Stoke constituency noted, “Just seven percent of all English pupils are educated in the private sector, yet these schools provide more than 50% of our CEOs, lords, barristers, judges, QCs, doctors and journalists.”2
Make no mistake about it though: this is a radical-sounding measure, which will not in practice add up to anything - much like the policy of the previous Labour administrations (1997-2010) towards private schools. As Hunt himself noted in his own flagship article in The Guardian, “When last in government, we scrapped the assisted place scheme to fund smaller infant class sizes, nationalised a number of private schools and urged the charity commission to take a much closer look at the public benefit activities of private schools. Thanks to opposition from the Independent Schools Council (ISC), that strategy collapsed in the law courts ...” Well, what a surprise. Clearly Hunt has drawn the lesson: when even small-time, token measures fail, what you need is a little more rhetoric and a little less actual concrete proposals.
Nonetheless, in this age of capital triumphant, even the occasional flourish of radical rhetoric (and, more rarely still, policies with a little sting in their tail) coming from Labour is enough to make the right see red. Hence a Labour leader as timid, ‘responsible’ and hamstrung by his own semi-alliance with the remaining Blairites in the party as Ed Miliband can be dubbed, in a blatant misuse of socialist imagery, ‘Red Ed’. So for this hardly revolutionary stuff Hunt has been roundly denounced as an “ideologue” fighting the “class war” - his proposals were even dubbed “offensive bigotry” by the headteacher of his old school, the University College School in Hampstead.3 And indeed for Labour this really is unusually radical rhetoric, but it is not the sudden manifestation of Hunt’s latent revolutionism (as perhaps disclosed by his biography of Engels4) that is revealed here, but an example of the Labour Party’s wider 2015 election strategy.
Times have changed for Labour. No more is the party on the prawn cocktail offensive - chasing down bankers and press barons and seeking to appeal to the statistically constructed middle England swing voter archetype, the ‘Mondeo Man’ (ie, the owner of a Ford Mondeo, not a Robocop-style half-man, half-car.) A large part of this results from the ‘post-Blair’ condition of the Labour Party: pretty weak. Though its financial problems have been persistently alleviated thanks to payments from affiliated trade unions, under Blair its membership declined by around 50% and the base of working class votes that the party had taken for granted whilst shifting so sharply to the right began to fragment. Though it came back together in urban areas in the 2010 general election, this base requires shoring up and rebuilding. And, given that its strategists believe that Labour can sneak a parliamentary majority in 2015 on something like 35% of the vote, this is exactly the strategy that Labour, and Hunt, are pursuing.
Just like a price freeze on energy bills, a mansion tax and the proposal to bring back the good old days of the 50p band for income tax, the anti-private schools rhetoric is designed to resonate with people who will be motivated to vote Labour on the basis of some kind of appeal to class. An anti-private school line, however attenuated, is especially useful, as the party attempts to capitalise on the general (and often apolitical) discontent with ‘elites’. It is also an anti-elite card that the fake anti-elite party known as the UK Independence Party, cannot itself play, being ideologically committed to private schools, tax breaks galore, etc.
We communists say that there should be no tax breaks for private schools, however much they are dressed up as ‘charitable status’ and no matter how much they form “genuine and accountable partnerships” with state schools. Tristram Hunt’s proposals are no threat to capitalist elitism, but it is clear that Labour is being pushed, in however weak a fashion, to class-based egalitarianism.
Something, certainly, has changed since the fall of the last Labour government, and this is another reflection of that fact.
Notes
1. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/24/private-schools-independent-sector-state-system.
2. www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Tristram-Hunt-Class-divide-stifling-opportunity/story-24949566-detail/story.html.
3. www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/education/labour_s_tristram_hunt_hits_back_at_offensive_bigotry_jibe_from_ucs_headteacher_1_3873390.
4. T Hunt Marx’s general: the revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels London 2010.