Thanks to Michael Otsuka (Philosophy, UCL) for calling to my attention more disconcerting evidence of Tony Blair's blurring of the line between church and state:
Tracy Morton and Kay Wilkinson, from Conisbrough, a sometime mining community not far from Doncaster, have been engaged in a passionate fight against the government, Doncaster's elected Labour mayor and Sir Peter Vardy, a man recently described by the Times Education Supplement as a "Christian fundamentalist car dealer". Their battleground: a schools policy to which the government now pledges heartfelt allegiance, namely the replacement of "bog-standard comprehensives" with the gleaming new creations known as "academies"....
Kay and Tracy...both had high-achieving daughters at Northcliffe, a comprehensive school that serves Conisbrough and nearby Denaby....Both had benefited from Northcliffe's so-called Gifted And Talented programme....
In 2001, Northcliffe was inspected by Ofsted and credited with being "a good and improving school". Both that year and the next, the DfES gave Northcliffe a School Achievement Award. In 2003, the school's pupils produced the best SATs and GCSE results in its history. Three months later, however, Northcliffe was placed in Special Measures by the Schools Inspectorate - the category denotes a school that is "failing or likely to fail to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education"....
Five months after that, Doncaster's local education authority (LEA) unveiled plans to replace Northcliffe with an academy run by a charitable organisation called the Vardy Foundation....
Academies, initially known as City Academies, were publicly rolled out in 2000 by David Blunkett, who aimed to use them to replace schools that were either in Special Measures or deemed to be "underachieving". Four years later, the government planted the idea at the core of its education platform for the general election, announcing plans to open up to 200. The idea is roughly this: for a fee of £2m - payable in random instalments - private benefactors are handed effective control of brand new state schools, although the taxpayer meets the lion's share of both building and running costs (which tend to involve an initial sum of at least £20m, and annual payments of around £5m). The relatively small size of their contribution has little bearing on the sponsors' clout: they can appoint the majority of the school's governors and thereby have the crucial say in the appointment of senior management, and shape the school's practices without having to worry about the national curriculum. Stranger still, academies are not bound by national agreements on teachers' pay and conditions.
Among those who had got in early was Sir Peter Vardy, a millionaire car dealer and evangelist from Durham. Under the auspices of the Thatcher government's not entirely dissimilar City Technology Colleges Programme, his Vardy Foundation, run by his brother David, had already seen to the opening of a school called Emmanuel College in Gateshead. Thanks to the City Academies initiative, September 2003 marked the arrival of a second school, the King's Academy in Middlesbrough. The following March, it was ceremonially opened by none other than Tony Blair, who was presented with a Middlesbrough FC shirt bearing his surname. Two weeks later, he enthused about his visit during prime minister's question time. "There is nothing more inspiring," he said, "particularly when one knew the old school that the King's Academy replaced, than to see the brand new buildings, the total commitment of the teachers and staff, and the pupils there eager to learn"....
Vardy's Christian beliefs are shared by John Burn, sometime head of Emmanuel College and now education adviser to the Vardy Foundation, and Nigel McQuoid, principal at the King's Academy. Papers they have co-authored give a flavour of their stance: "If relativist philosophy is acceptable, then sadomasochism, bestiality and self-abuse are to be considered as wholesome activities," runs one. "It is very important that young people begin to realise that activities which are 'private and personal' often degrade oneself and are not necessarily good and acceptable." By way of clarifying the latter position, McQuoid recently told the Observer that "the Bible says clearly that homosexual activity is against God's design. I would indicate that to young folk."
Most notoriously, Vardy schools accord equal importance to both creationism and theories of evolution. According to McQuoid, though state schools are required to teach evolutionary theory, "also, schools should teach the creation theory as literally depicted in Genesis". The 300-year reign of the enlightenment apparently counts for very little: in his view, creation and evolution are both "faith positions". Blair, it should be noted, has claimed to have no problem with such a stance. In 2002, when asked by the Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge if he was happy about creationism being taught alongside evolution in state schools, he replied, "I am very happy. I know that the honourable lady is referring to a school in the north-east [ie, Emmanuel College], and I think that certain reports about what it has been teaching are somewhat exaggerated. It would be very unfortunate if concerns about that issue were seen to remove the very strong incentive to ensure that we get as diverse a school system as we properly can."
This does raise a question for my friends in Britain: namely, why hasn't Tony Blair been voted out? Is it simply that the Tories are too ridiculous? First, Blair joins cause with Bush & his bestiary of madmen in the criminal and immoral invasion of Iraq. Now the Prime Minister, in a nation of atheists and agnostics no less, throws the government behind schools which teach lies and misinformation, and sponsor religious indoctrination. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury knows the Book of Genesis is engaging fiction, a "creation myth" not empirical science. Has not the Prime Minister heard?
UPDATE: Professor Otsuka sends along a possible answer as to how Blair has survived:
The answer to your question provides a cautionary tale for US Democrats of what can happen when a party sacrifices principles for the sake of electability: The Tories win four successive general elections -- three under Thatcher plus John Major's unexpected victory in 1992. Demoralized by Major's victory and desperate to return to power, Labour elect a Tory in all but name to lead their party in 1994. This strategy works too well, as they go on to win a landslide general election in 1997, thus conferring saviour status on their leader Tony Blair and giving him a huge Parliamentary majority which empowers him to legislate at will. The global and therefore Britain's economy fare better under Blair than under Major, for which Blair and his Chancellor get credit, a modest amount of which is deserved. The Tories haven't helped themselves by squeezing themselves to the right in response to the rightward march of Labour. But what choice did they have? They needed to present an alternative to Labour and couldn't credibly have refashioned themselves to the left of Labour, nor would they have be allowed to by their reactionary Home Counties grassroots members. The Liberal Democrats are now to the left of Labour. But they're a third party without many seats in Parliament or a large base of loyal, habitual voters on which to draw. They've also got an amiable but ineffective leader whom people find difficult to imagine as Prime Minister, and there's no credible alternative to him on the horizon. Therefore, the most likely scenario in which Tony Blair is removed from power is one in which he is deposed as party leader by his Parliamentary colleagues. Like the Pope, however, Blair has managed to promote loyalists up through the ranks during the past several years. Moreover, he will be especially keen to cling to power these next few years. Being an admirer of Thatcher and a shallow and unprincipled man, Blair's main goal in life now is probably to ensure a positive line in the history books by supplanting Mrs T as the 'longest serving Prime Minister in 150 years', for which he will need to win and serve an entire third term. All of his other bids for a flattering place in the history books have failed: Iraq was a complete disaster, he hasn't managed to get Britain into the Euro, he hasn't managed to broker a stable peace in Northern Ireland, etc.
Recent Comments