Britain

The Tories Should Steal Jeremy Corbyn’s Plan For A National Education Service

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Jeremy Corbyn - National Education Service - Education Policy

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A version of this article was first published on the Conservatives for Liberty blog.

A top-down reorganisation of Britain’s education system, giving the state full control over education at all levels and for all ages would be a terrible, frightening idea. But could conservatives pick up Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal for a National Education Service and give it a libertarian twist to inspire a genuine consumer-focused revolution in life-long learning?

Whether you hail Jeremy Corbyn as the left wing saviour of British politics or intend to hide behind the sofa on 12 September lest his election as Labour Leader ushers in a dark new era of Soviet communism, no one can deny that Corbyn’s candidacy has brought a certain level of partisan excitement back to drab, consensual British politics.

But as always happens when an outsider threatens to show up the bipartisan political elite and their soul-sapping sameness, the media has focused on whipping up hysteria about some of Corbyn’s off-the-cuff pronouncements, like his remark that we might potentially learn something from Karl Marx (as though we can only learn from historical figures who we 100% agree with) or twisting Corbyn’s words to suggest that he supports re-instating Clause Four and the historic Labour commitment to public ownership of industry.

You don’t have to be a fully paid-up Tory to realise that this headline-bating and click-chasing detracts from the serious discussion of any policy specifics which Corbyn has announced, and which might lead to the start of a real debate if only the media did their job properly. Take Jeremy Corbyn’s recent proposal for a National Education Service to rival the National Health Service.

While failing to provide many concrete details of what this “cradle to grave” education system might look like, Corbyn did offer this glimpse:

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Will The Anti-Corbyn Backlash Change Labour’s Attitude To Capitalism?

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

Capitalism Isn't Working Banner - Jonathan Jones - Socialism - Jeremy Corbyn

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If Jeremy Corbyn is not the answer to the Labour Party’s creeping irrelevance, the party must make peace with capitalism and free markets once and for all – and then decide what it stands for.

Is Guardian columnist Jonathan Jones the great new hope of the British Left?

No, of course not. This is still the same odious man who poured scorn on the Tower of London poppy display and who thinks that the Union flag – our national flag – is ‘provocative’ and offensive. But between the usual self aggrandisement and marvelling at his own peerless ethical virtue, a small but noteworthy sliver of realisation crept into Jones’ latest column.

Jonathan Jones is a committed Labour centrist, you see, and it is driving him absolutely crazy to watch Jeremy Corbyn’s acolytes seize the mantle of principled socialism for themselves, leaving him looking like just another rootless, ideologically compromised member of the establishment.

All of which led to this mini tantrum in the Guardian:

I can’t listen any more to rhetoric that contrasts the idealism of Corbyn’s supporters with the supposed cynicism, hollowed-out power worship and futile pragmatism of the centre-left. I am a Labour centrist supporter not out of cynicism but out of principle, because I believe the only ethical politics of the left today has to be moderate, reasoning, and sceptical. I am Labour, but I am not a socialist any more.

But it’s what Jones writes next which is really interesting:

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The Great Left Wing Race Card Scam

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

George Osborne with despatch box

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The cynical, virtue-signalling Left think nothing of abusing the term ‘racism’, using it as a blunt cudgel to bash right wing policies when reasoned debate is too much effort. In this hysterical universe, even the Chancellor’s Budget can be deemed ‘racist’

Just so we are all on the same page, here is the dictionary definition of racism:

  • the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.
  • prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.

There’s not too much ambiguity here, it should be fairly simple to understand. But not for Varinder Singh, Left Foot Forward pundit and secretary to an unnamed Member of Parliament.

Singh is possessed of a racism detector whose needle jerks from “Just about OK” to “Ku Klux Klan” if affirmative action isn’t baked into absolutely every government policy working its way through parliament. And the latest target of his ire is George Osborne’s 2015 summer Budget, which he casually labels “racist” for failing to sufficiently patronise and condescend to Britain’s ethnic minorities.

In order to arrive at this surprising conclusion, Singh relies on a report by The Runnymede Trust, which deduced that ethnic minorities will be disproportionately worse off as a result of George Osborne’s fiscal tinkering. And then he changes the definition of the word “racism” to mean “policies that fail to actively promote my own personal agenda”.

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The Guardian’s Endorsement Of Yvette Cooper Is A Failure Of Political Courage

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Yvette Cooper - Labour Leadership - The Guardian Endorsement - Jeremy Corbyn

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The Guardian has spent the past five years excoriating the Tories for their supposed persecution of the poor and the sick. And yet when it comes to the Labour leadership, they have endorsed a nonentity of a candidate on the basis that she is best placed to win back votes from a party it considers to be evil.

It is telling that most of the Guardian’s decidedly lukewarm endorsement of Yvette Cooper was devoted to discussing Jeremy Corbyn.

The fact that Corbyn looms so large in the campaigns of the other candidates says a lot about the state of the Labour leadership race, but it says even more about the Guardian-reading Left, and the gulf between their Tory-hating rhetoric and their desperate lack of imagination in coming up with an alternative policy agenda.

Here’s where the Guardian’s endorsement of Cooper really falls apart:

Labour is not a debating society; it was founded to represent the interests of working people at the pinnacle of power. This engagement in politics, this new excitement, must be channelled towards government. The brute lesson of May is that Labour cannot get there without first winning back significant numbers of Tory voters. Mr Corbyn will not do that. Those searching for an election winner must look elsewhere.

Yes, Labour will need to win over a number of Tory voters if they ever want to taste power again. But there are two ways to win the vote of someone who currently supports another political party.

First, you can move your political party so close to theirs in ideological and policy terms that it becomes possible to coax voters across by promising to be just a little bit more competent, or a touch more compassionate. This is what most of the Labour leadership candidates, including Yvette Cooper, are currently doing – largely accepting the centrist Tory narrative on a range of issues, but promising to implement the same agenda with a caring smile.

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Labour Has Lost The Ability To Persuade Its Own Members, Let Alone The Voters

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Tony Blair - Labour Leadership - Jeremy Corbyn - Annihilation

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Tony Blair attacked Jeremy Corbyn not thinking it would help, but in order to claim valuable “I told you so” points after a failed Corbyn leadership (which he would doubtless help to engineer). Why can’t the other candidates or their supporters make a positive, coherent case for their own campaigns?

Why has the Labour leadership contest descended into such a farce, with the bulk of party activists seemingly intent on going in one direction (Corbynland), and the angry rump of the Parliamentary Labour Party intent on thwarting their will by any means necessary?

Why has this become a contest characterised chiefly by the inability of nearly everyone – save Jeremy Corbyn – to connect with and persuade others that their candidate’s vision for the future of the Labour Party is the right one?

In truth, we should not be surprised. Because the Labour Party are conducting their leadership contest in exactly the same way that they fought – and lost – the general election in May. First, activists picked their team. And then they embarked on a deafening blitz of grandiose moralising and cheap virtue-signalling on behalf of their favoured candidate, barely pausing for breath and never stopping to hear to what the other teams are saying – other than to search for damaging soundbites, of course.

Apparently the Labour Party has forgotten how to campaign, in the age of social media. Where once there might have been an attempt to reach out to the supporters of rival candidates, to convince and persuade them that they should switch their support, instead there is a lot of shouting, a lot of sharing of internet memes, and not much else.

Unfortunately, the Labour Party’s big beasts are setting a terrible example to the broader membership by behaving in exactly the same way. Witness Tony Blair’s latest full-frontal attack on Jeremy Corbyn in the pages of the Guardian:

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