Some Musings on the Reshuffle, Career Women, Whips and Blobs

Since before it began I have been trying to work out if this week’s re-ordering of the government matters, and if so why. Few of these people are visibly distinguished. The British government nowadays takes few major decisions, being mainly a machine for doing what it is told by supranational bodies.

 

As it is a coalition, there is little scope for individual initiative. The civil service apparently ensures that any ideas or proposals must be agreed by the coalition parties at the top before they can be seriously considered for legislation.

 

Few modern politicians have any interesting ideas or experiences (or if they do, we have not been told about them).  To the extent that any of them are interesting, they tend to be the ones who have been got rid of or reduced in rank.

 

I  cannot quite see the logic of increasing the number of women in government. Who is supposed to be pleased, reassured, comforted or encouraged by this? If they were equal to the jobs they now do before this, then why were they not given these jobs sooner? If they were not, why are they being given them now?

 

Since many of the women involved are young enough to be the mothers of small children, and in some cases may *be* the mothers of young children, one can assume from their lives that they have probably chosen to prefer careers outside the home to full-time parenthood (I understand that some, of course, may not have the choice. But I'm not making an individual point here) .

 

Even if they haven’t, their chosen path in life will make them, I suspect, more sympathetic to women who have made this choice than to the dwindling, beleaguered number of women who choose to stay at home and raise their own children. As for the much larger number of women who have been forced by financial pressure to go out to work and leave their children in the care of paid strangers, whether they like it or not, does the voluntary career woman even begin to understand their position?

 

Successful top-rank career women represent other career women very well (which is why they get such a warm reception from the media, which also has plenty of top-flight career women) . But I should have thought that other sorts of women would probably be better represented by some (but not all) men, those men who might be able to see that a career outside the home was not necessarily the only desirable way of life for a woman.

 

Whereas it strikes me that the successful, career woman might tend to look down on those who have  not done as she did, and even be hostile towards them when it came to policy and legislation. This is not because of her sex, but because of her own active choice.

 

As the opinion polls and the focus groups tend not to ask the questions about this in a form which would make these important distinctions, it is hard to tell how this sort of thing actually affects people’s votes.

 

I do hope it doesn’t impress any voters, being – apart from anything else -  so absurdly insincere and so unsubtly slick, with thighs being flashed on Downing Street and the pathetic PR men who now masquerade as political reporters in much of the media falling for every crude trick in the book.

 

Maybe it will work. The relentless smearing of Ed Miliband is plainly working, and I find quite educated and conscious people, some of them on the left,  now parroting the ‘nerd’ and ‘useless’ attacks cooked up in some Downing Street pantry by the Prime Minister’s propaganda butler.  

 

But in that case it just adds to my fear that our free civilization is coming to an end, because we are no longer independent-minded and sceptical enough to sustain it.

 

Then there’s the question of Michael Gove. Readers here will have noticed that I have been very hard on Mr Gove since , having praised academy schools, and in particular lauded one such school a short walk from his home, he did not – when the chance arose - send his child to this school, or indeed to any other such school.

 

Instead he sent her to a single-sex former grammar school miles from his home, with entrance requirements so intricate that some might mistake them for actual selection, though on quite what grounds is unclear (selection by ability being against the law, save in a tiny few heritage grammar schools).

 

I also felt obliged to hammer this home because of the supine behaviour of most of my trade who failed to note or stress the central facts about the story, and were successfully spun into flattering and even sycophantic coverage of the event.

 

But this is,  in a way,  a diversion from my general distaste for his  much-trumpeted reform programme a mass of gimmicks and propaganda, lacking any solid principle save exhortation and slogans, and reliant (as all school reforms have been for decades) on the magical powers of exceptional, charismatic heads. As such persons are in short supply, you can see the disadvantages of this quite easily.

 

Mr Gove, in my view, offered no real challenge to ‘The Blob’ ( a term he, ahem, borrowed from Ronald Reagan’s Education Secretary William Bennett, who so described the ‘Bloated Educational Bureaucracy’ which frustrated any attempts to reintroduce traditional teaching amidst the mass of child-centred  discovery learning which American and British comprehensive education have become).

 

But his propaganda, that he was challenging the British Blob, was so successful that both he and the Blob, especially the teachers and other public service workers,  seem to have come to believe it, and thus Mr Gove has become (as some politicians do) a liability among focus groups.

 

And so, despite all the supposed promises of determined,  sustained reform, and serving a full term, he has abruptly gone, to be replaced by an unknown. The Prime Minister was at a loss to explain this action when challenged by Ed Miliband at PM’s question time today. None of his answers made sense. He had no need to get rid of Sir George Young as Chief Whip (a much-diminished job anyway, now that the Downing Street spin machine has (since Alastair Campbell’s days)  taken over true power in the Parliamentary Party). And his praise for Mr Gove simply raised the question of why, in that case, the Education Secretary couldn’t stay in his job for another ten months.  

 

What a way to go, sacked to satisfy the focus groups and the NUT. I do hope that, despite his brave face,  Mr Gove has now learned at least some of what I tried to explain to him about the Cameron Tory Party, long ago. It can hardly be described as principled, after this.