Excellent! Motion Coming Before Bristol South Labour Party Condemning Academies

Next week Bristol South Labour constituency Labour party is holding its monthly meeting. One of the issues to be discussed is a motion that’s already been passed by the Knowle branch condemning the academy schools and Ofsted. The introduction to this motion runs

Knowle Ward believes that the purpose of education is to enable our  children to develop an informed and independent voice, to prove to  students that their lives are valuable, and that the achievements of  each and every school, college and university leaver in the country, at  whatever level, shall have a genuine and lasting meaning. To this end  we call upon the leadership of the party to seize the initiative, and  include in its election manifesto the replacement of the privatised  Academy system with a return to a local control of education policy,  the replacement of OFSTED with a politically independent system of  inspection, a new determination that sport, music, drama and art be  seen as fundamental to a successful education, and, crucially, to insist  that each of our communities shall have its own, independent and  single place of learning, representing the needs of that community,  and celebrating its particular identity.

I fundamentally and wholeheartedly support this motion, and intend to vote for it at the meeting. The academies are a massive fraud and waste of public money. Indeed there’s a book published about them, when Tory Tony Blair was introducing the wretched things, that called them exactly that: The Great Academy Fraud. They are no more successful than ordinary state schools are, if those state schools had the millions spent on them that the academies have had. There have been issues with the educational content taught in those schools, such as Creationism and very hard-line, narrow and intolerantly religious norms in some Muslim schools. Other problems include very repressive discipline that has humiiated school children. For example, children have soiled themselves when they have been refused permission to use the toilet and girls have not been allowed to change their sanitary towels. Quite often their academic achievements have been at the expense of less intelligent children, or kids with behavioural problems. They find reasons to exclude them while keeping the more intelligent and disciplined children. It really is selective education.

As for the recognition that sport, music, drama and art also form a fundamental part of education, this should be automatically accepted as true. Since the educational reforms of the 19th century it was recognised that proper education meant a broad, humanistic education that should cultivate all areas of the minds and characters of the developing sprogs. Sport was included in the curriculum along with PE because children’s physical health is important, and organised sport is supposed to be character-building. But the humanities have been sidelined as successive governments have pushed the STEM subjects at their expense. Now there are warnings that this short-sighted policy is actually a serious danger to Britain’s cultural industries.

It’s about time the academy chains were closed down. They were a failure when Thatcher and Kenneth Baker tried introducing them in the 1980s. The Tories were actually closing them down, but Blair fished them out of the dustbin of crappy neoliberal ideas, revamped them, and set them off again. And children’s education has suffered as a result. Schools need to be brought back under local authority control.

But I have no doubt that this will be opposed by Starmer and the Blairite bureaucracy, as it’s a Tory policy so it must be right. And besides, there’s all that money to be made from corporate donations.

So expect anyone supporting this to be accused once again of being a Trotskyite or Commie.

Daily Express Article from 30 Years Ago about Controversy over Black Tory Candidate in Cheltenham

For all that David Cameron tried to clean up the Tory party’s image of anti-Black, anti-Asian racism nearly two decades ago, the Tory party has always had a nasty undercurrent of it. Mike’s reminded people on his blog that Winston Churchill thought the Tories should campaign on a ‘Keep Britain White’ ticket in the 1950s. Then there were the posters screaming ‘If you want a N****r for a neighbour, vote Labour’, the scandals about Norman Tebbit and the Monday Club, the demands by the various Tory youth organisations for the adoption of racial nationalism – the doctrine that only Whites can be British citizens – as official Tory policy, and the vicious islamophobia, anti-Black, anti-Asian racism and anti-Semitism amongst the supporters of Bozo and Jacob Rees-Mogg uncovered by ‘Jacobsmates’. But Boris, who is hardly innocent of racism himself, has seen fit to do as little possible regarding an inquiry into islamophobia, while the Tories and the rest of the British political and media establishment screamed spurious accusations of anti-Semitism at the Labour Party. With the Black Lives Matter protests have come demands for proper investigations and steps to combat structural racism in Britain. And Bozo has promised an inquiry into it, just as he did last time.

Going back through my scrapbooks, I found this article below from the Depress by Nicholas Assinder from December 4th 1990 about the controversy over the appointment of a Black candidate, John Taylor, in Cheltenham. Taylor had the backing of Major and Tory bigwigs like Norman Tebbit and Geoffrey Dickens, but was strenuously opposed simply because of his race by some local Tories. The article reads

Black Tory Row: Major Steps In

Premier turns on bigot and defends candidate

John Major will act tonight to defuse the race row over the Tories’ first Black candidate to be selected in one of their traditional strongholds.

 The Prime Minister will round on critics at Cheltenham who are calling for the removal of their would-be MP John Taylor, a British-born son of West Indian parents.

Mr Major, who will demand the selection stands, is determined to halt the potentially-damaging situation which conflicts with his vision of a classless Britain.

He will defend barrister Mr Taylor in a speech to the Conservative National Association in London. And last night other senior Tories also came to the candidate’s aid. Home Secretary Kenneth Baker made a public show of support by warmly shaking hands with 38-year old Mr Taylor as he left his adviser’s job in Mr Baker’s department.

Mr Major’s intervention follows an outburst by Cheltenham party member Bill Galbraith in which he described the candidate as a “bloody n****r” who had been foisted on the constituency.

Former Tory chairman Norman Tebbit said yesterday Mr Galbraith was an “ignorant man who holds no position or power” in the local party.

Mr Tebbit predicted Mr Taylor would be Britain’s first Black Cabinet minister. “I have the greatest respect for him and am confident he will prove to be an excellent asset to the party,” he said.

Backbencher Geoffrey Dickens denounced Mr Galbraith’s attack as being reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

Home Office minister Angela Rumbold said of Mr Taylor: “he will make an excellent MP. I am sure he will appeal to a broad cross-section of the Cheltenham community. He is an extremely nice, gentle and approachable young man.”

The row began when Cheltenham Tories chose Mr Taylor to replace their retiring MP Sir Charles Irving who had a majority of 4,896 at the last general election….

There was a continuation to the article, but that’s nearly all that I clipped out. There are now, of course, several Black and Asian Tory MPs and no doubt the Tories will be keen to stress this against anti-racism protesters. As for Cheltenham, there was a mass Black Lives Matter demonstration there a few weeks ago, attended by both Blacks and Whites. It’s become far more diverse than when I was there as a student over thirty years ago. I gather from talking to friends up there that the Tory party was nearly split on the issue of Taylor’s candidacy, and that some really did want to see racial nationalism adopted as official party policy. But I don’t believe that the town as a whole is particularly racist.

But this incident does show how racist the Tories have been, as they still are, despite their efforts to get people to believe the opposite.

From 25 Years Ago: Beeb Director-General Found in Tourist Party with Tories

This is very old news indeed, coming from Private Eye’s edition for Friday, 16 June 1995. But it shows just how long the Tories have been using their tactic of accusing the BBC of bias against them, and how false that accusation is. Because in that issue, the Eye reported how a group touring the Scottish highlands and found themselves in the company of BBC Director-General John Birt and a group of senior Tory MPs. The report ran

Proof positive of Lord Tebbit’s claim that the BBC is a leftie-run conspiracy dedicated to destroying the British way of life came last month.

A pair of hillwalkers, seeking shelter from the elements in a bothy on a remote west Highland hillside, startled a small group of conspirators huddled inside the hut.

First BBC director-general John Birt blinked owlishly out of the gloom. The “Red Ken” Baker, former home secretary, grinned foolishly. Also present in Sandinista-style camouflage gear (and green wellies) were Sir Tim “the Trot” Renton, ex-chief whip, and Sir Adam “Bolshie” Butler, former Tory MP for Bosworth and son of the late Rab. 

They were guests of Jonathan Bulmer, owner of the North Harris estate, whose wife is the daughter of Lord Glanville, cousin of the Queen.

How they are related: BBC chairman Marmaduke Hussey’s wife, Lady Susan, is lady-in-waiting to Brenda.

Clearly the tentacles of international communism have a stranglehold on our national broadcaster, just as the wise lord warned. (p.10).

Clearly this confirms that the Tories’ claim that the Beeb is biased against them is absolute rubbish. It also adds weight to the academic studies showing that the BBC is massively biased towards the Tories, and against Labour and the trade unions.

Not least because it shows how BBC senior staff mix with them and the aristocracy.

Book Review: The Great City Academy Fraud – Part 1

By Francis Beckett (London: Continuum 2007)

This is another book I managed to pick up from a cheap bookshop, in this case the £3 bookshop in Bristol’s Park Street. Although published nine years ago in 2007, it’s still very acutely relevant, with the plan of the current education minister, Thicky Nicky Morgan, to try to turn most schools into privately run academies. According to the back flap, Beckett was the education correspondent of the New Statesman from 1997 to 2005, and also wrote on education for the Guardian. The book’s strongly informed by the findings of the NUT and other teaching unions, whose booklets against academies are cited in the text. And its a grim read. It’s an important subject, so important in fact, that I’ve written a long review of this book, divided into four section.

Academies: Another Secondhand Tory Policy

Much of New Labour’s threadbare ideology was just revamped, discarded Tory ideas. This was clearly shown before Blair took power in the early 1990s, when John Major’s government dumped a report compiled by the consultants Arthur Anderson. This was immediately picked up, dusted off, and became official New Labour policy. Similarly, PFI was invented by the Tories man with a little list, Peter Lilley, who was upset ’cause private industry couldn’t get its claws into the NHS. This again was taken over by New Labour, and became the cornerstone of Blair’s and Brown’s ideas of funding the public sector. Academies, initially called ‘city academies’, were the same.

Basically, they’re just a revival of the City Technology Colleges set up in the mid 1980s by Thatcher’s education secretary, Kenneth Baker. Baker decided that the best way to solve the problem of failing schools was to take them out of the control of the local education authority, and hand them over to a private sponsor. These would contribute £2 million of their own money to financing the new school, and the state would do the rest. Despite lauding the scheme as innovative and successful, Baker found it impossible to recruit the high profile sponsors in big business he wanted. BP, which is very active supporting community projects, flatly told him they weren’t interested, as the project was ‘too divisive’. Another organisation, which campaigns to raise private money for public projects, also turned it down, stating that the money would best be spent coming from the government. It was an area for state funding, not private. The result was that Baker was only able to get interest for second-order ‘entrepreneurs’, who were very unwilling to put their money into it. From being a minimum, that £2 million funding recommendation became a maximum. And so the scheme was wound up three years later in 1990.

After initially denouncing such schemes, New Labour showed its complete hypocrisy by trying out a second version of them, the Education Action Zones. Which also collapsed due to lack of interest. Then, in 2000, David Blunkett announced his intention to launch the academy system, then dubbed ‘city academies’, in 2000 in a speech to the Social Market Foundation. Again, private entrepreneurs were expected to contribute £2 million of their money, for which they would gain absolute control of how the new school was to be run. The taxpayer would provide the rest. Again, there were problems finding appropriate sponsors. Big business again wouldn’t touch it, so the government turned instead to the lesser businessmen, like Peter Vardy, a car salesman and evangelical Christian. Other interested parties included the Christian churches, like the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, and evangelical educational bodies like the United Learning Trust. There were also a number of universities involved, such as the University of the West of England here in Bristol, and some sports organisations, like Bristol City Football club. Some private, fee-paying schools have also turned themselves into academies as away of competing with other private schools in their area.

Taxpayers Foot the Bill

While the sponsors are supposed to stump up £2 million, or in certain circumstances, more like £1.5 million, in practice this isn’t always the case. The legislation states that they can also pay ‘in kind’. Several have provided some money, and then provided the rest of their contribution with services such as consultation, estimated according to a very generous scale. For Beckett, this consists of the sponsors sending an aging executive to give his advice on the running of the new school. This particular individual may actually be past it, but the company can’t sack him. So they fob the new school off with him instead. Sometimes, no money changes hands. The Royal Haberdashers’ Society, one of the London livery companies, decided it was going to sponsor an academy. But it already owned a school on the existing site, and so did nothing more than give the site, generously estimate at several millions, to the new academy. Other companies get their money back in different ways, through tax rebates, deductions and the like.

But if the private sponsors are very wary about spending their money, they have absolutely no reservations about spending the taxpayer’s hard-earned moolah. An ordinary school costs something like £20 million to build. Academies cost more, often much more: £25 million, sometimes soaring to £37 million or beyond. Several of the businessmen sponsoring these academies have built massive monuments to their own vanity, using the services of Sir Norman Foster. Foster was, like Richard Rogers, one of the celebrity architects in favour with New Labour, whose ‘monstrous carbuncles’ (@ Charles Windsor) were considered the acme of cool. One of these was called ‘The Learning Curve’, and consisted of a long, curving corridor stretching across a quarter of mile, off which were the individual class rooms. Foster also built the Bexley Business Academy, a school, whose sponsor wanted to turn the pupils into little entrepreneurs. So every Friday was devoted exclusively to business studies, and the centrepiece of the entire joint was a mock stock exchange floor. The school also had an ‘innovative’ attitude to class room design: they only had three walls, in order to improve supervise and prevent bullying. In fact, the reverse happened, and the school had to spend more money putting them up.

Unsuitable Buildings

And some of the buildings designed by the academies’ pet architects are most unsuitable for the children they are supposed to serve. One academy decided it was going to get the local school for special needs children on its site. These were kids with various types of handicap. Their school was not certainly not failing, and parents and teachers most definitely did not want their school closed. But closed it was, and shifted to the academy. The old school for handicapped youngsters was all on the same level, which meant that access was easy, or easier, for those kids with mobility problems. The new school was on two floors. There was a lift, but it could only be used by pupils with a teacher. The parents told the sponsor and the new academy that they had destroyed their children’s independence. They were greeted with complete incomprehension.

HM School ‘Belmarshe’

In other academies, conditions for the sprogs are more like those in a prison. One of the schools, which preceded an academy on its site, had a problem with bullying. The new academy decided to combat that problem, by not having a playground. They also staggered lunch into two ‘brunch breaks’, which were taken at different times by different classes. These are taken in a windowless cafeteria. The result is a joyless learning environment, and the school has acquired the nickname ‘Belmarshe’, after the famous nick.