The World at One today carried a feature on a bunch of ex-army people who are going to set up a free school in Oldham, with an emphasis on ‘discipline’ and a mission to deal with the racial segregation of the area. Most of them served in Afghanistan. The teaching unions raised objections because not only are these people un-trained, but they appear to revel in their untrained status. This, after announcements of barely-diguised witch-hunts for many existing trained teachers in schools. If the Oldham experiment works, it was said, many will follow across England. In the name of ‘empiricism’, the BBC then asked some garage mechanics in Oldham what they thought about the proposal, which was, roughly, ‘just what them kids need’, although one did ask where the dividing line between ‘youth detention centre’ and school would be drawn. An American man whose name I missed appeared half way through, claiming that kids played on X-Boxes all day because they missed the greatest human quality of all – competition – which has been bleached from current state schools. He sounded like a trailer for a Chuck Norris movie. All of this was reported as though neutral, but what I heard was a planned indoctrination programme, backed by the state, coming straight out of military imperialism, with a sideline to instill a laissez-faire capitalist philosophy into semi-formed young people. It was what Richard Seymour recently described as a ‘military-industrial infestation’, but I can actually imagine many Tories chortling, privately, rather than sincerely applauding the project.
On the same programme, we heard from a researcher who called to bring back flogging as a replacement for prison, and a Tory who claimed that £43k per year is not the salary of a well-off person, and yet another who announced that Nick Clegg has ‘another thing coming’ if he thinks that he is going to tax high earners, which he described as ‘the striving classes.’ On his terms this means people who want more unearned surplus, rather than, say, the classes who are currently striving to scrape together enough to pay the council tax. Owen Jones, as a journalism undergraduate, was invited, in 2005, along with his peers, to speak to what he describes as an ‘extremely prominent Tory politician from the moderate wing of the party’:
‘So that he could speak candidly, aspiring student journalists were barred from reporting on the speech and we were sworn to preserve his anonymity. It soon became clear why. As the logs crackled in the fireplace on a rainy November evening, the Tory grandee made a stunning confession. “What you have to realise about the Conservative Party,” he said as though it was a trivial, throwaway comment, “is that it is a coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people.”‘
That, let us remember, is from a moderate. Of course we already knew about this, but it’s good to have stark reminders every now and then. Whatever language I need to learn to begin living outside all of this, I need to start learning it now.
Notes
Owen Jones (2011) Chavs. London: Verso. Pages 39-40.
