Backwards or Forwards? How to do Good

I’m gripped by the revelation from David Blunkett that Prince Charles favours the restoration of Grammar Schools. It’s not the opinion that surprises me – Charles has many good opinions, and quite a few silly ones too. He is at least a thoughtful person who cares hugely about this country and its people, which is more than can be said for a lot of persons who have held his position in the past, or in other countries.

 

I’ve always thought, myself, that Charles should have used all his influence to get his own sons into such a school (yes, I can see the difficulties, but I suspect they could have been overcome). I believe that sending them to Eton wrongly identified the monarchy with a particular class and type, which is quite well-represented enough on the nation’s upper deck. But I had no platform for my views when the Eton decision was first taken.

 

If he’d sent them to state grammars, the republican egalitarians would have found it very hard to attack an heir to the throne sending his children to state schools, and the campaign for the restoration of selection would have been helped at a time when it was very weak. Maybe we would now actually have restored grammars, an aim I think is attainable, but which is still some years away.

 

But that’s by the way. What really gripped me was Mr Blunkett’s description of the encounter.

 

‘He (the Prince) was very keen that we should go back to a different era when youngsters had what he would have seen as the opportunity to escape from the background, whereas I wanted to change their background’.

 

Mr Blunkett is hard to dislike as a person. Anyone who has made so much out of a life blighted form the beginning by multiple Job-like tragedies (his own blindness, his father’s terrible death in an industrial accident) , has to be admired.

 

But I have never thought this should in any way influence my view of his politics, or my judgement of his performance as a politician. And I don’t think Mr Blunkett would want to be shown any mercy on those grounds, either.

 

But he is sensitive to criticism, and once wrote me a personal letter in response to some rude things I had said about his tenure at the Education Department. I was impressed by the attention to detail, but unmoved. I thought then, and think now, that Mr Blunkett did no good to the schools, and served only to give the impression of serious reform, when there was none.

 

Why should it have been otherwise? Mr Blunkett came from one of Labour’s most left-wing nurseries, the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire.  Once upon a time I knew an interesting and perhaps paradoxical story about Mr Blunkett’s involvement with the school uniform issue in Sheffield, but I no longer have access to those files.

 

He was an egalitarian zealot, who viewed comprehensive schooling as a wholly necessary part of a moral social revolution. You’d no more ask such a person to restore rigour, order and authority to English schooling than you’d ask Maximilian Robespierre to return the Church of England to its former glory, or get Ernie Marples and Richard Beeching to form a consortium to rebuild the railways. His heart wouldn’t be in it.

 

The whole point of comprehensive schooling is that it puts politics first, education second. That’s one of two reasons why its total educational failure, which is beyond all denial, has never been enough of a scandal to get the project cancelled.  Imagine an aircraft that failed as often, or any consumer product that was so consistently less successful than the brand it had replaced. They would long ago have been scrapped and replaced, and the original model restored. The other reason is the way in which the elite –above all, politicians - are able to buy or wangle their way out of the comprehensive experiment by the many methods so many times detailed here.

 

So look again at Mr Blunkett’s rather patronising summary of his conversation with the heir and successor of William the Conqueror, Edward III and Good Queen Bess:

 

‘He (the Prince) was very keen that we should go *back* to a different era when youngsters had what he would have seen as the opportunity to escape from the background, whereas I wanted to change their background’.

 

Why *back*? In what way would a such a move be backward? First, such opportunity to escape still exists in the present in a  few of the more enlightened continental countries and in Northern Ireland, where it is successful and popular.  It is a move sideways, into a perfectly attainable alternative present day.

 

But Mr Blunkett, too, wants to go *forward* as he would describe it, though how he is so sure I do not know, into a different era, one where in some strange way, an egalitarian state has succeeded where all such utopias have failed before, and changed the general conditions for the better without bothering with the minute particulars. Who cares if it hasn’t actually happened? Mr Blunkett’s personal progressive benevolence is itself so good that we should support him anyway, apparently.

 

Whereas the Prince (as he has many times proved with his personal involvement in charitable work) just wants to do measurable practicable good to identifiable individuals.

 

William Blake understood all this long ago, when he wrote ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer’.