24.10.1996

Education ‘commitment’ sham

Over 20,000 people marched through the streets of London last week in support of the campaign organised by Fight Against Cuts in Education (Face).

The numbers were swollen after a remarkable about-face by the National Union of Teachers. Last year NUT leader Doug McAvoy described Face - an alliance of parents, teachers and school governors - as “extremist”, and disgracefully advised his members to have nothing to do with its campaign. He was concerned that effective, mass action might embarrass Tony Blair, who he believes might deign to throw a few crumbs in the direction of education. So, like good children, we were supposed to sit quietly and wait for our reward, and not do anything, such as actually organising action ourselves, to upset the applecart.

However, shamed by the resentment and incredulity of ordinary teachers, McAvoy made a complete U-turn in 1996. Not only did the NUT leadership agree to support this year’s demonstration, it poured half a million pounds into publicity for it, and all but took over its organisation. That ensured that the campaign received a distinctly pro-Labour gloss, with shadow education spokesperson David Blunkett billed as the star speaker in Hyde Park last weekend.

No doubt McAvoy had woken up to the reality that the education disaster area has outraged everyone. Run-down schools, oversized classes and stressed teachers do not only infuriate “extremists”, and New Labour realises that it had better at least put on the appearance of keeping in step with the anti-cuts campaign. After all, Tony Blair did a good job in distancing his party from the unions during this year’s conference season, and he did say that his three priorities were “education, education and education”.

However, nobody should be fooled by Labour’s promises any more than those of the Tories. Sue Lister reports in the latest issue of the Face campaign bulletin that David Blunkett was upstaged by the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson in interviews with her: “Don Foster was openly more enthusiastic and supportive of Face” (Face Broadsheet No6, autumn 1996). In fact all the mainstream parties agree on the need to curb public spending, if the capitalist machine is to avoid stalling - and that means cutting back on health, education and welfare. The only advantage that the Liberal Democrats have is that they have no chance of being elected and therefore no fear of having to implement their policies.

Like Labour, the Tories are ‘committed’ to spending more on education. In last year’s budget chancellor Kenneth Clarke announced an extra £774 million. Yet strangely up and down the country education faced cut after cut. Clarke had simply increased the proportion of government grant to local authorities which on paper was allocated to education, and reduced the proportion going to other areas. The inadequate level of the overall government grant meant that councils could not even maintain services and continued to make cutbacks in all areas - including education.

This enabled the government to claim that education cuts were the fault of inefficient local authorities who were not giving it enough priority, while opposition councillors could blame government restrictions for attacks on their workforce and on services run by the local arm of the state.

The capitalist parties will continue to blame each other for the education shambles. But the mess will continue just as long as they are allowed to get away with putting profit for the few, not the needs of the people, first.

Alan Fox