John Major, in the classic tradition of defensive PR, urges us not to
draw too many conclusions from The Ridings school fiasco in my native
Halifax. This is understandable in a Prime Minister who is seeking re-
election after his party has been in office for nearly 18 years. There
are few hiding places when you have been ordering the nation’s affairs
for nearly two decades.
But Mr Major is wrong to pass up the political PR opportunity which The
Ridings offers on a plate - just as he was wrong to take public fright
over Education Secretary Gillian Shephard’s enthusiasm for the return of
the cane, especially when the Sunday newspapers confirmed that two-
thirds of us want it back.
First, The Ridings is a clear, if extreme, example of Tory policy at
work. The aim of introducing greater parental choice in schools was to
put pressure on the unpopularly bad to improve. I do not overlook the
difficulties of melding two schools together to form The Ridings. Nor
are teachers ever going to have an easy time where parental support is
so weak that unruly girls of 13 have babies and 14 year-old boys are
allowed to keep condoms in their bedroom. But the headmistress and staff
cannot escape responsibility for The Ridings’ anarchy which caused the
school to be shut. Raiding a good opted-out school for its headmaster to
take over underlines their inadequacy.
Second, if The Ridings had opted out, it is a pound to a penny that
things would never have got to this sad state. Parents would have
prevented it. I accept that this implies that they would have had more
ambition for their children - and more gumption - than is apparent
among The Ridings’ parents. But that again demonstrates the virtues of
Tory policy: it reinforces caring families. Of course, it leaves a
problem with the inadequate. So what’s new, except perhaps its scale?
This leads to the third positive Tory PR point: the sheer incompetence
of the local Labour-controlled education authority in discharging its
responsibilities to the culturally deprived. Frankly, I often wonder
what the Labour Party has got against the working classes. But why
should we expect more of it when the chairman of Halifax education
committee is an identikit activist with studs in ears who lives off the
taxpayer?
Fourth, virtually every single educational reform brought forward by the
Government - especially opting out and the toughening up of standards -
was, until recently, fought by Labour. The fact that Mr Blair now
espouses Tory ideas - while Labour councils such as Halifax are left
stranded on the tide of their failed social engineering - is another
fifth positive Tory PR point. Conservative PR is clearly no longer red
in tooth and claw.
Sir Bernard Ingham writes for the Daily Express
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