I’m interested in the law on this. If West Exe Technology College is performing above the standards which would allow the government to require conversion to academy status, can Gove legally force it to do so?

The primary school at which I work as a teaching assistant is being forced to convert to an academy. Our last OFSTED rated us as ‘good with outstanding features’ in an area of social and economic depravation. OFSTED has now moved the bar ansheree we to be inspected under new guidelines we would be categorised as a failing school. With that in mind we have been instructed that if we do not voluntarily convert to an academy we will be compelled anyway and staff will have no control over curriculum etc. The change in OFSTED rules are another device by which Gove is pushing his academy agenda.

There is a very easy answer to this current exam controversy. Why don’t we simply publish – anonymously – all exam scripts for those who failed to achieve a Grade C.

What might it reveal?

“Yeah but, no but, yeah but, no but. It’s coz I is gonna be a legend, innit, bruv?”

PS. No-one should take lessons from an MP who cheats his expespnses.

……….and the best opposition New Labour can offer is a guest contribution to Liberal Conspiracy – pathetic.
Where exactly is Stephen Twigg? Although judging by the number of votes he received when contesting the 2010 election to the Shadow cabinet there may only be 55 New Labour MPs who care So maybe it’s hardly surprising the rest of us don’t..

Well Adonis said that if my area wanted a new school it had to be an Academy (still trundling along just outside the relegation zone).

Political pressures apart, just what is the objection to secondary schools opting to become academies?

Didn’t the Blair government create the status of academies in 2000 and didn’t Blunkett as education minister initiate the practice of paying increases in central government funding for education direct to schools in order to bypas local council control over the extra funds?

Man who disagrees with you, disagrees with you. Shocking!

“Just what is the objection to secondary schools opting to become academies?”

That there is no evidence that this improves education or that Local Education Authorities are incapable of running secondary schools. And that the academies’ policy involves removing local control of education and handing control to a government department and to private interests. And that in many cases schools are not “opting” to become academies, they are being forced to become academies.

Even though both the last government and this government have the same policy, the policy is highly questionable.

@8

Don’t forget that the assets are handed over to private companies, allowing their sale for profit.

That is a problem with both Labour and the Tories, they are basically side by side in so much, you wonder sometimes if they have a coalition in 2015 will it be a Tory labour or Labour Tory.

Lucky in Wales we are not going down this route of academies.

@3 LondonJ

“There is a very easy answer to this current exam controversy. Why don’t we simply publish – anonymously – all exam scripts for those who failed to achieve a Grade C.

What might it reveal?

“Yeah but, no but, yeah but, no but. It’s coz I is gonna be a legend, innit, bruv?”

PS. No-one should take lessons from an MP who cheats his expespnses.”

1) This isn’t about the exam issue.
2) It’s spelled “expenses”.

If you’re going to make out that young people are idiots (having apparently researched the issue by watching Little Britain), perhaps you should learn to read and write yourself first.

8

“That there is no evidence that this improves education or that Local Education Authorities are incapable of running secondary schools.”

With the encouragement of my local LibDem-controlled borough council, all or almost all the secondary schools in the London borough where I live have opted to become academies.

The schools include a cluster of outstanding selective schools rated in independent surveys as among the best 100 maintained schools in the country. Two within walking distance of where I sit regularly achieve better average A-level results than Eton. Based on GSCE results, the borough regularly rates at the top or near the top of the local educational authority (LEA) league table for England. The borough is not especially affluent, compared with other London boroughs, and the council has only been a modest spender on schools. It’s unsurprising that the schools would want to seek the better funding for academies.

There are substantive reasons for concern about the performance of Britain’s secondary schools. Britain is slipping back down international league table and:

Just one in six pupils in England has achieved the new English Baccalaureate introduced by the government, England’s league tables show.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12163929

Just as the borough where I live regularly comes at or near the top of LEA league tables, there are other districts which feature at or near the bottom with equal regularity, year after year.

If all is well with council control of schools, why did the Blair government create the status of academies in 2000 and why did Blunkett, as education minister, elect to pay increases in funding for eduction direct to schools bypassing local council control over the additional funds? On the face of it, the New Labour government didn’t trust local government control over schools.

“If all is well with council control of schools, why did the Blair government create the status of academies in 2000 and why did Blunkett, as education minister, elect to pay increases in funding for eduction direct to schools bypassing local council control over the additional funds?”

Sorry, I don’t know; and I say that as someone who has spent a lot of time asking proponents of Academies this type of question. No-one has been able to point me to any research about the weaknesses of LEAs. No-one has been able to explain what additional skills the “sponsors” are supposed to bring to Academies and whether they have the necessary expertise for difficult inner-city secondary schools. (Those that have an education background have usually run fee-paying schools for middle-class children.) Ten years ago I was told that the point was to experiment with different educational methods for difficult inner-city secondary schools: and that this was easier to do outside LEA control and with the possibility to ignore the national curriculum. However it has been very difficult to find out anything about experimentation in Academies and how this is monitored and evaluated. There no longer seems to be any pretence of experimentation with new methods.

My guess is that there wasn’t a problem with LEAs per se but there was a perception problem: New Labour did not want to be accused of handing more money over to loony left councils. So even if there are no loony left councils and even if LEAs work satisfactorily, New Labour felt that it had to dodge this non-problem that might gain some traction among columnists in the Daily Mail. I also get the impression that New Labour thought that it would be easier to attract middle-class parents to schools outside LEA control and that more middle-class pupils would push up standards among other pupils. I think that this has turned out to be a myth: middle-class parents who send their children to private schools do so to avoid their children mixing with working-class pupils and not because the school is run by the LEA.

Anyway, these are guesses. I don’t think that we should assume that there is an issue with LEAs because of what Blair and Blunkett did: they should be able to explain why they did what they did.

“No-one has been able to point me to any research about the weaknesses of LEAs. ”

It is surely odd that while some local education authorities remain fairly consistently at or near the top of national league tables based on GSCE results, others stay at or near the bottom when this can’t be accounted for by relative local affluence or poverty or by the extent of local spending on schooling.

In my experience, it was no secret that some councils were indifferent or averse towards improving local schooling standards on the grounds that would make local school leavers with better exam results more likely to leave to go to uni and not return.

Schooling with mediocre standards was seen as a way of keeping the best and brightest in the district and of entrenching Labour control of the local council. Blunkett elected to pay increases in central government education funding directly to schools as it was believed that some councils would otherwise divert the additional funding to other purposes.

We really do need to worry about national schooling standards and the number of failing schools. A week or so back, someone from the CBI was on the BBC Today programme talking about job market trends – the CBI is producing a report due out in the autumn. He was saying two-thirds of new jobs are “high-skill” jobs. One reason for London’s economy doing better post-crisis is because London state schools are relatively better on average than elsewhere and because it is easier for employers to recruit the skills they need in the London labour market.

“Schooling with mediocre standards was seen as a way of keeping the best and brightest in the district and of entrenching Labour control of the local council. ”

An interesting theory, for which I would like to see some evidence!

“An interesting theory, for which I would like to see some evidence!”

Personal experience and from talking with teachers who worked in schools in one of those districts which regularly comes near the bottom of the LEA league table. I know of others who take a similar view.

Ask yourself why did the Blair government create the status of Academies in 2000 and why did Blunkett elect to pay increases in central government education funding direct to schools and so bypass council control of the extra funds? Was all that on whims or were there rationales for those policies?

On the evidence, schooling standards in Britain are not consistently good and we are slipping down international league tables. Very properly, there are legion complaints about the post code lottery in NHS healthcare standards but who makes a fuss if the local school is failing or the district in which they live languishes near the bottom of the LEA league table? What lifetime prospects of a good professional job does someone have who goes to the local failing school?

@16. Bob B: “Very properly, there are legion complaints about the post code lottery in NHS healthcare standards…”

My understanding is that “the post code lottery” argument is more about geographic differences in treatment availability than “standards”. The so called post code lottery is about local managers and doctors making local decisions.

“…but who makes a fuss if the local school is failing or the district in which they live languishes near the bottom of the LEA league table?”

There is ample evidence that when a local school is failing, parents try to avoid sending their children to it. If a large number of schools in a district are not meeting the standards that parents expect, that is a failure of the LEA which should be addressed by local politics. If LEA management of schooling doesn’t work, the solution is in local politics rather than central government management of schools which further removes parents from control or influence

“What lifetime prospects of a good professional job does someone have who goes to the local failing school?”

Young people may get bad exam results for other reasons than a “failing school”. Thus eliminating “failing schools” will not improve the prospects of all people who do not get on at school. A broader answer to it is better continuing education.

Charlieman

“My understanding is that ‘the post code lottery’ argument is more about geographic differences in treatment availability than ‘standards’. The so called post code lottery is about local managers and doctors making local decisions.”

What really alerted/alarmed me about the post code lottery in NHS treatments was reading a BBC news report a couple of years back that the number of diabetes-related amputations in the South-West region was nearly twice that in the South East region. That suggests there are much higher standards of diabetes care in the South-East so amputations are avoided. With the epidemic status of diabetes, we are talking large numbers so the differences in amputation rates can’t just be attributed to local managers and doctors making a few different decisions.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11832233

“There is ample evidence that when a local school is failing, parents try to avoid sending their children to it.”

In large conurbations, there are often opportunities for choosing between schools without much loss of convenience but not so in smaller towns – where public transport schedules can be very infrequent. It happens that the two closest maintained boys schools to where I’m sitting regularly achieve better average A-level results than Eton. There can’t be many places where that is true.

In districts languishing near the bottom of the LEA league table year after year, the choice of schooling may be pretty abysmal and will almost certainly affect the lifetime employment prospects of the school leavers. The academies or not issue seems to me to be rather unimportant compared with that. The prior question is what can be done to raise schooling standards?

“On the evidence, schooling standards in Britain are not consistently good and we are slipping down international league tables.”

I agree, but I see no reason why Academies are an adequate response to this. The justification for Academies is a vague hint that LEAs are a problem and that giving a school the status of an Academy will make it magically better. That isn’t good enough – it is a bit like a whim.

There is no incentive for the sponsor of an Academy to improve results. It would seem to be impossible to lose the contract to run a school, even if the results don’t improve. There is no requirement to be innovative and no systematic evaluation of the methods used by Academies. At the Academy my children went to, there was some vague talk in the early days of new teaching methods. There was a meeting with a power-point presentation in which the slides were crammed with small writing on a distant wall, that nobody could read. Then after the parents insisted on knowing more the whole thing was dropped and the school sticks to the national curriculum. Results are nothing special. This isn’t the answer to low standards in secondary schools.

@16 Bob B

On the evidence, schooling standards in Britain are not consistently good and we are slipping down international league tables.

No, that’s not the evidence at all.

The PISA studies are not like football league tables. Only imbeciles – usually rightwing journalists and MPs with no contact with the education sector – treat them as such.

All that has happened is more countries have been assessed since the OECD started its testing just over a decade ago.

What the PISA studies show is that – as expected – the UK has a broadly first class education system comparable in attainment and standards to those in most Western democracies.

As dull as it is for those who like to kick our schools for ideological reasons (including this most inept of education secretaries) that is the only interpretation with any validity I’m afraid.

What the PISA studies show is that – as expected – the UK has a broadly first class education system comparable in attainment and standards to those in most Western democracies.

I’m not sure that’s right. The UK is now rated by PISA as a broadly average performer – we’re pretty solidly second rank, except for science where we’re still first rate.
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/46643496.pdf

Those suggesting that the quality of schooling available in the London borough where I live is about the same as in districts which regularly languish near the bottom of the LEA league table, based on average results in the GCSE exams, are deluding themselves. Schools around where I live are regularly getting kids through GCSE exams with over 90 pc getting A*-C grades. The borough regularly comes at or near the top of the LEA league table but that can’t be explained in terms of local affluence or high spending on schools. My son went to the school down the road. It was only after he left to go to uni that I learned that Chris Woodhead, the notorious chief inspector of schools, has attended the same school.

The primary issue of concern is how to improve education standards when:

Just one in six pupils in England has achieved the new English Baccalaureate introduced by the government, England’s league tables show.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12163929

What incentives are there upon LEAs to improve standards in local schools when the political control of the LEAs never changes for decades? Schools with academy status will have the Education Department breathing down the necks of the head teachers. I notice that respondents are ducking the questions about why the Blair government created the status of Academy schools in 2000 and why Blunkett, as education minister, started the practice of paying increases in central government funding direct to schools instead of through LEAs? Evidently, he didn’t trust LEAs to pass on the extra funding.

BobM: it is the responsibility of Blair and Blunkett to explain why they acted as they did. I don’t think that we should assume that there must have been a good reason why they acted as they did, or that we should invent reasons, if they don’t provide their reasons. That’s not ducking the question; it’s saying that politicians ought to provide good evidence for why they make dramatic changes in policy, and not leave the voters assuming that there must be a good reason.

“Schools with academy status will have the Education Department breathing down the necks of the head teachers.”

Will they? Will this happen more than with head teachers at non-Academies? Does the Ministry have the capacity to do this? And why not breath down the necks of the “sponsors”, the private entities that have gained control of schools and are supposedly going to push up standards.

Will a sponsor have a school taken away from them if their standards are no higher than the previous LEA-controlled school or a comparable LEA-controlled school? As far as I can see this isn’t envisaged, even though they employ the staff and have strong influence on teaching methods. So what are their incentives for making an effort to imrpove schools?

23

You are simply ducking the priority issue: What is to be done to raise schooling standards when just one in six pupils in England achieve the new English Baccalaureate – five “good” passes (A* to C), including maths and English. There is a post code lottery in schooling:

“London state schools have undergone a ‘startling turnaround and are now the best in England’ according to a study by the Financial Times newspaper.
“The FT analysed 3.5 million children’s exam results for the six years to 2011.
“In 2011 London pupils did better in five GCSEs including maths and English than pupils from any other region. . .
“The FT says that by 2011 pupils in some of the poorest areas of the capital were outperforming children in more affluent areas.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19151471

With districts which continually languish near the bottom of the LEA league table and stay under the same political control for decade after decade, there is no prospect of improvement unless LEA control over local schools goes.

I’m being clear in saying that “localism” doesn’t work in this context because some councillors in LEAs are too ignorant and blinkered. That’s why the Blair government created Academies – but dare not say so – and why Blunkett was paying extra central government funding for education direct to schools to stop the funds being diverted.

With two-thirds of new jobs being “high skill” jobs – according to the CBI – where do you suppose those employers and investors will find it easier, and therefore less costly, to recruit the skilled employees they need?

It’s quite risky claiming that Blunkett had anything approaching competence in any field, or engaged in any sort of careful planning, given that he was a proper cunt for publicly claiming that any and all of his half-baked ideas could fix 101 problems.
ID cards for instance, he only just stopped short of claiming they’d cure cancer.

Cylux

As I recall, Blair created Academies in 2000. The whole cash for honours business arose out of attempts to get donations to set up academies. Not just once but on several occasions, Blunkett as education minister ordered increased central government funding for education to be paid direct to schools. At the time, there was something of a row but Blair didn’t overrule Blunkett. There was a solid rationale. Some LEAs did divert funds to other purposes.

Be all that as it may, the priority issue is how to improve schooling standards, especially in those districts remaining at the bottom of the LEA league table year after year. We very properly complain about a postcode lottery for NHS healthcare. Why do we put up with a postcode lottery for schooling standards and what do you suppose are the employment consequences for districts with poor schooling?

ID cards are a different issue.

and what do you suppose are the employment consequences for districts with poor schooling?

http://flyingrodent.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/rectaspection.html

I think Mr Rodent sums it up quite well

“Was there a point here? Oh yes, education – Kids these days, and how The System Is Failing To Provide Business With Talent. My. Heart. Bleeds.”

“Was there a point here? Oh yes, education – Kids these days, and how The System Is Failing To Provide Business With Talent. My. Heart. Bleeds.”

If skills don’t matter then no wonder businesses outsource to other countries, especially countries where skills can be employed at lower cost – in my experience, the technical helplines from Indian call centres are good. And why would mobile foreign direct investment be attracted to Britain? There are solid business reasons for London’s relative prosperity compared with the rest of Britain when the schools are better than elsewhere.

@28 Pretty sure neither me nor Flying Rodent even mentioned skills or lack thereof, so I don’t know what you’re actually replying to. It sure ain’t my post.
You might want to click the link through to the full blog post, it’s enlightening. Especially the bit where it points out that it’s those from say, your generation, that’s currently responsible for the genius idea that is youth unemployment outstripping demand for employing youths, not to mention postponing retirement age off as far as possible because all the money for pensions has been spunked up the wall on various vanity projects, or placed into financial constructs that make putting the company payroll on black look like a prudent and cautious idea.
Still, kids these days eh, don’t know their arse from their elbow.

29: “Petty sure neither me nor Flying Rodent even mentioned skills or lack thereof, so I don’t know what you’re actually replying to.”

Apprenticeships these days generally require applicants to have 5 A*-C grades at GCSE including English and maths with good reason. Adults who find literacy and numeracy challenging are unlikely to meet high-skill job requirements because of problems reading operations manuals, programming CNC machines and managing computers. There’s little employment growth with unskilled manual jobs.

Those without a basic grasp of reading, writing and maths skills on leaving primary schools are likely to be left behind in secondary schools, let alone make it into tertiary education and beyond:

“The National Curriculum test results also revealed that in spite of an improvement in English and maths, more than a third of pupils still left primary school without a proper grasp of the basics in reading, writing and maths.” [August 2010]
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ba881948-9f3f-11df-8732-00144feabdc0.html

The truth is that some LEAs have been disgracefully complacent. All the secondary schools in the London borough where I live have opted for academy status with the encouragement of the LEA. There have been no visible signs of any protests.

@30 Is that reply aimed at me? Doesn’t seem to link back to anything I wrote at all.

Cylux: “Is that reply aimed at me? Doesn’t seem to link back to anything I wrote at all.”

Never mind. Maybe it’s all too difficult for you to follow the analysis of why basic education skills are crucial for businesses to thrive and why some LEAs are disgracefully complacent about the attainment in the local schools they control.

@32 Anyone who thinks that the value of education is in providing businesses with employees is a pusillanimous moron with shit for brains.
Besides you already argued yourself out of options by claiming that any skills that can be obtained via education are already aviliable for cheaper elsewhere in the world – so even if ‘lack of skills’ was the problem and then solved, the youth of today would STILL be fucked because they’d be priced out of the global labour market.

“Anyone who thinks that the value of education is in providing businesses with employees is a pusillanimous moron with shit for brains.”

Thanks for the personal abuse – it shows that you really haven’t managed to grasp the issues at stake when you need to resort to such an ignorant response. Of course, education is about developing character and conveying an appreciation of what are called the “eternal values” but any who think employers are rushing to develop businesses in districts where few school leavers are able to reach the benchmark of 5 good GCSEs, including maths and English, and where the district languishes near the bottom of the LEA league table, is hopelessly naive.

“Besides you already argued yourself out of options by claiming that any skills that can be obtained via education are already aviliable for cheaper elsewhere in the world – so even if ‘lack of skills’ was the problem and then solved, the youth of today would STILL be fucked because they’d be priced out of the global labour market.”

Domestic territory has advantages for businesses which gain advantage from being close to the home market but there wouldn’t be the outcry against outsourcing if it was easy for businesses to hire the skills they need on the home labour market at affordable costs. Successive business surveys report persisting skill shortages. Before the 1997 election, Gordon Brown was pushing for a University for Industry on the internet to raise employee skills but Blunkett was too diverted to do that.

In the middle of a recession when we can expected a low demand for imports, the ONS has just reported a record trade deficit for Britain, migrants have been taking a rising share of low-skill jobs in recent years, and international comparisons show Britain rates as having low labour productivity per hour worked comparerd with other G7 countries:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_232305.pdf

The quality of schooling matters and some LEAs are disgracefully complacent about their responsibilities.

Recap:

“The number of low-skilled workers born outside the UK more than doubled between 2002 and 2011, according to the Office for National Statistics.

“The figures show that almost 20% of low-skilled jobs are held by workers born abroad, up from 9% in 2002.”
[BBC website 26 May 2011]

“Recent graduates are more likely to be working in lower-skilled jobs than they were 10 years ago, new figures suggest.

“More than a third of recent graduates were in non-graduate jobs at the end of 2011 – up from about a quarter in 2001. ” [BBC 7 March 2012]

Migrants and graduates are squeezing those with inferior skills out of lower-skilled jobs.

35

The position of current graduates (taking lower skilled jobs) does nothing to foster educational aspiration for most young people. You have a good point about qualifications and their relevance to employment, but I would suggest that the emphasis on the utility of qualifications is one of the main factors which puts off a big percentage of youth from persuing higher education. Cylux makes a good point, too little is made of the wider value of education, consequently, those who have undertaken HE and are in low-skilled jobs, serve as a sign that education is a futile persuit.

Steveb

“I would suggest that the emphasis on the utility of qualifications is one of the main factors which puts off a big percentage of youth from persuing higher education.”

The purists say an education is valuable for its own sake but I’m unsure that convinces many school leavers – or their parents.

Some degrees are obviously vocational – such as degrees in medicine, law, nursing, engineering, computer science or a BEd degree – but with others it’s not clear.

Andrew Marr, Sam Mendes and Imogen Stubbs have high quality degrees in English Lit. Perhaps some worry that career prospects from a vocational degrees are too narrow – although I read in the news that the CEO of GSK has an economics degree from my alma mater.

From the early 1980s, I recall reading a piece in The Economist about the jobs of philosophy PhDs in American unis where the annual output easily surpassed the number of academic posts becoming available. As reported, many were going into the, as then, rapidly expanding computer industry in America where skills in language analysis and logic were highly valued. At the time that struck me as interesting since most folk seem to regard a philiosophy degree as probably the most useless and least vocational qualification going.

@34 It’s only personal abuse if if you think the value of education is in providing business with employees. Secondly, it’s been quite a few decades since the rhetoric of “get on yer bike” became dominant – i.e. workers should move to where the work is, and don’t expect a job for life anymore – which might well be another factor why areas with next to no opportunities tend to produce poor educational results – parents trapped on the scrap heap do not often make for educational inspirations, and knowing that the place where you grew up in has nothing waiting for you when you leave school is also not going to engender a strong desire to read and comprehend Shakespeare. Those that DO do well will do what I did, leave town, and move to where the work is.

There’s far far too many factors to just lump it all on LEA’s, who may well be performing poorly, or performing quite well given the conditions and resources they have to work with – however as pointed out before, neither Blair nor Blunkett actually bothered to explain what was wrong with LEA’s, and it was hardly surprising that panacea du jour just happened to be more private ownership with centralised control.

Years back, I used to work in an area where the regular response to criticism of the LEA and local schooling standards was that Labour control of the local council didn’t change at local elections so the local electorate was clearly satisfied with the policies of the local council.

Nothing changed and that district has remained near the bottom of the LEA league table for England for decades since. One consequence is that employers, including inward investors, look elsewhere when seeking locations to invest in. After all, there are other districts where it is easier and less costly to invest and recruit employees with the required skills. Sadly, the problems of the poor literacy and numeracy standards of school leavers are fairly common to judge from this news report last year:

Almost half of all employers have paid for remedial training for school and college leavers who lack a basic grasp of English and maths, according to the CBI.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/may/09/cbi-criticises-schools-literacy-numeracy

It’s hardly the fault of employers if LEAs are too apathetic or incompetent to do anything about their being persistently ranked near the bottom of the LEA league table. We need to appreciate the important insight of recognising that urban cycles of decline and regeneration tend to be very long. I grew up in Clapham in the 1950s when it had the reputation of being a haunt for the local Teddy Boys. Nowadays, Clapham is fashionable and housing there is expensive by London standards.

Around 1800, at the time of William Wilberforce, Henry Thorton and the Clapham Sect, Clapham was a fashionable village on the outskirts of London from where it was feasible to commute by coach to Westminster and the City. It was the advent of the railways in the late 19th century which turned Clapham into a commuting suburb – see Wikipedia for the origins in (?) 1903 of the phrase “the man on the Clapham omnibus” to epitomise the ordinary, reasonable man on a trial jury who needed to be convinced.

39

You cannot compare the conditions of Victorian England with the here and now, that is exactly what Thatcher did to sell her neo-liberal policies, policies operate on different environments (something she failed to acknowledge with dire results).

The real debate is as already been stated, where is the evidence to suggest that academies would be better than existing LEAs?

@ 34 Bob B

“Thanks for the personal abuse – it shows that you really haven’t managed to grasp the issues at stake when you need to resort to such an ignorant response. ”

Personal abuse is indeed a bad thing. It’s good that you set such a high standard with your previous post, which says such non-offensive and relevant things like “Maybe it’s all too difficult for you to follow the analysis”… Ah.

If you’re going to insult people, you can’t get on your high horse when they insult you back.

Steveb: “You cannot compare the conditions of Victorian England with the here and now, that is exactly what Thatcher did to sell her neo-liberal policies, policies operate on different environments (something she failed to acknowledge with dire results).”

Yes, I can make the comparison. The factors making for urban decline and regeneration take decades to work through regardless of who is PM.

When I was growing up in Clapham in the 1940s and 1950s, Streatham, next door, was reckoned to be “posh” – Duncan Sandys (Eton, Oxford and Churchill’s son-in law as well as the Conservative Monday Club) was the local MP but the seat switched to Labour in the early 1970s before the advent of Thatcher.

Streatham nowadays is very different from Streatham half a century and more ago. Its ascendancy and subsequent relative decline had nothing to do with what party was in government. I saw Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Streatham Hill Theatre in 1956 when the production was on its provincial tour – cue for: Those were the days, my friend. Nowadays, the theatre is a bingo hall.

“During Margaret Thatcher’s premiership public spending grew in real terms by an average of 1.1% a year, while during John Major’s premiership it grew by an average of 2.4% a year.”
http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/05ebn2.pdf

IMO you are paranoid about Thatcher and pay too little attention to the consequences of (a) ending the inherited high inflation of the 1970s, (b) the appreciation of the Pound when it became a petro currency at a time of high oil prices in the early 1980s as a result North Sea Oil exports. World oil prices about halved over 1985/86.

42

I thought your level of debate would extend further than calling me paranoid because I quote a (well observed) problem with applying the same principles to different environments and expecting the same outcome, which Thatcher always did when she disregarded the differences between the 19th century and 20th century. Of course, that’s more to do with drawing from Adam Smith, an 18th century writer observing 18th century society.

The changes in demographics within urban areas of the 19th century owed more to the situation of railways which attracted industry and the working-class.

Public spending did rise under Thatcher, although she slashed welfare benefits, the state also grew despite her promise to roll it back. You see that is what happens when you do not take into account the environment, something of a similar disaster occurs when Newton’s law is applied and no account is paid to the prevailing conditions.

Steveb

The reason why urban cycles of decline and regeneration can take long periods to mature and reverse is because the underlying causal factors take long times to work through – regardless of who is PM.

Personalising policy issues detracts attention from the crucial task of analysing errors in policy of commission and omission. Changing the personalities in government won’t necessarily remedy policy failures. We need to know the reasons for policy failures.

Adam Smith is widely credited with having founded Political Economy – although Aristotle and Aquinas both wrote on economics issues long before him and Hammurabi’s Code of Laws of c. 1772 BC includes many economic regulations.

The subject of economics has developed much since antiquity but we owe credit to its pioneers if only to show where they went wrong. Smith’s seminal contribution was in recognising how the profit motive and markets could drive the allocation of resources between competing uses without state intervention. He also specifically recognised the possibility of the failure of markets to optimally function because of monopolising tendencies and because:

“The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain.” Wealth of Nations (1776) Book 5, Chapter 1, Part 3.