Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 19:14 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian Friday 6 September 2019
2
diffi cult, culturally denigrated, politically
marginalised end – is a constant struggle
against visible and invisible forces.
People’s ambitions for themselves, their families
and their neighbourhoods are vulnerable to attack
from a combination of wilful inaction and deliberate
destructiveness from government.
It was undoubtedly resentment at such malign
neglect over past decades that drove much of the Brexit
vote in 2016, among traditionally Labour working-class
communities in the north of England and the Midlands.
But the result has been a series of tired popular
narratives about the role of place in forming our
identity, the most common being the idea that certain
places have been “ left behind ” – a term that conjures up
a vision of areas fi lled with people who are bewildered
and marooned in a changing world. Those places
haven’t been left behind, but deliberately held back. The
people in them are desperate to vote for a party that is
fundamentally optimistic about our ability to cope with
change and knows what it has to do to make it possible.
Labour’s 2017 election manifesto did this. It boosted the
turnout and won the party over 40 % of the vote. That
will not stop the Conservative s attempting to mount a
land-grab of supposedly “left-behind ” Brexit voters. (It
was no accident that Boris Johnson chose Wakefi eld as
the backdrop for his rambling speech yesterday.)
A recent report by the right-leaning thinktank
Onward entreated Tories to place more emphasis on
“the politics of belonging ”, suggesting that “voters do
not want more autonomy, choice and mobility. They
want a government that ... protects them, their families
and British businesses from the modern world. ”
Do they mean the same modern world in which the
British use smartphones, social media and cashless
payments more than anyone else? The problem is not
modernity, or nostalgia for an idealised close-knit
“community ”. People desperately want the feeling of
autonomy, but are intelligent enough to recognise that
autonomy isn’t possible without an underpinning of
material security. And they are not going to get that
under the Tories, whatever guise the party takes under
the shape-shifting Johnson, and whatever pre-election
bungs are tossed their way by Sajid Javid.T
he Labour party too – and for a longer
period of time – has been misreading
the politics of community. I once
got into a barney with two MPs who
insisted that Ed Miliband’s emphasis on
universal benefi ts would lose Labour
“the white working class ” for ever
if they felt that migrants and recent
arrivals were given equal treatment to longstanding
residents. Their approach was to paint Labour’s
problem as cultural – an inability to understand “how
the working class thinks ” – rather than one of policy.
Labour spent decades accepting the policies that left
de industrialised England battered, bruised and angry.
When working -class voters began to desert the party,
they went for the “culture ” explanation.
Successful community life is not about who chats
to whom on the doorstep or about mystical working -
class values. It is about whether the essential needs
of everyone are met to the extent that they can look
beyond that day’s survival and outwards towards
others. So when the Tories send their representatives
to court the working-class vote, they should be asked a
few questions. Have they ever tried to apply for benefi ts
to which they are entitled, or sought help from Citizens
Advice? Ha ve their local branch library and children’s
centre been closed? Have they ever tried to get a bus
on a Sunday , or after 8pm, outside London? Have they
noticed that children no longer play out on the street?
Have they ever peeled “Free Tommy Robinson ” stickers
off the bus shelter and the playground gates?
The very idea of a culture war , invoking supposed
working-class values , is empty. What we are really
talking about is quality of life. The problem of our
times and our communities is that a full, rich life, free
of avoidable stresses , in which the right to stay and the
right to move are equally taken for granted , now feels so
hard to achieve for so many people.Perhaps the strangest unintended consequence of Boris
Johnson’s decision to seek a snap election is that Jeremy
Corbyn could be received at this month’s Labour party
conference as the country’s prime minister. This would
be quite a role reversal for the pair of duelling politicians.
Mr Johnson’s misplaced optimism in his powers of
persuasion would have meant that he risks being, at
some 48 days, the shortest-lived occupant of No 10. A
left wing fi rebrand would have replaced him. No one
would be more surprised than Mr Corbyn, who did not
believe he could even be leader of the Labour party when
he ran for the job in 2015.
This outcome is unlikely but not impossible. The
reason it has become so is Mr Johnson’s rash and unwise
pledge in front of the TV cameras not to request in
any circumstances an extension to European Union
membership beyond the current date of departure
on 31 October. Britain would leave the EU by then,
“do or die”. With a cabinet in thrall to a ruinous hard-
Brexit agenda and negotiations for a new withdrawal
agreement with Brussels going nowhere , Mr Johnson
is prepared to risk the country’s economic stab ility by
crashing out of the EU. This has been too much for a
large chunk of moderate Tories who have either been
hounded out of the Conservative party or decided, like
Mr Johnson’s younger brother , that they did not want to
be footsoldiers in a no-deal revolution.
On Monday the law of the land will be that the prime
minister must obtain at next month’s European council
meeting a delay that would defer the country’s departure
from the EU to 31 January 2020. The prime minister says
he would rather be “dead in a ditch” than do so, though it
would be unwise for this country’s leader not to upholdAccountability in education is important. Politicians,
acting on the public’s behalf, are right to seek evidence
that schools are delivering a good service. So there is
nothing wrong, in principle, with gathering information
in order to track progress. The problem with the
government’s new baseline assessment of four-year-olds- being trialled over the next six weeks in around half
of English primary schools, and intended to replace
the tests previously taken by seven-year-olds – is the
idea’s execution.
Ministers already have one failure behind them , after
the data produced by the various providers of a previous
round of tests could not be accurately compared.
Not surprisingly, given this background as well as the
current political instability overshadowing everything,
the number of schools participating this time is smaller.
But the problems do not end there, with a recent survey
of headteachers fi nding that 86% view the government’s
latest plans negatively. The real issue is that what sounds
fairly straightforward – assess children when they start
school and again when they leave, in order to measure
both their progress and that of their school – turns out
not to be straightforward at all.
First, as campaigners have pointed out, the fi rst few
weeks of school are not the right time. Some children
will only just have had their fourth birthday, hardly any
have turned fi ve, and those without older siblings are
the rule of law. The only way out for Mr Johnson is
an election where he will aim to outfl ank on the right
Nigel Farage’s Brexit party and campaign to repeal the
law that delays a no-deal Brexit.
The prime minister would like to go to the country
on 15 October. But an early election is not in Mr
Johnson’s gift. Under the Fixed-term Parliaments
Act, it would require the support of two-thirds of
all MPs. The Commons has already rejected this
approach because parliamentarians do not believe
Mr Johnson can be trusted with the timing of a poll
date. It is also an elephant trap. If that vote was won
on Monday, it would trigger a 14-day period in which a
new government could emerge, and if one didn’t then
parliament would be dissolved. The 25-day period that
would follow means an election on 29 October – not
enough time to stop the default no-deal Brexit. Mr
Johnson’s government could roll the dice on Monday
and, in topsy-turvy times, call a vote of no confi dence
in itself. This could be won by a simple majority vote.
An election would follow if opposition parties could not
form an alternative government after 14 days. However,
if they can then on 23 September their leader would be
prime minister. Mr Corbyn could fi t that role.
Mr Johnson could achieve the same by resigning
and telling the Queen to send for the leader of the
opposition to replace him. The prime minister
appears to favour this option because it would give
him a poll before 31 October. It is a paradox that
resignation is Mr Johnson’s ace card. If he were not
to play it, then he risks the opposition parties leaving
him in Downing Street until 19 October , the date he is
legally mandated to ask the EU for a Brexit delay. If he
didn’t do that, Mr Johnson would then be forced out
of offi ce in the most ignominious of circumstances,
and a new prime minister could hold an election,
but with Brexit deferred until January. The alliance
of opposition parties needs quickly to answer the
question that has so far eluded them: who can they
unite under? If they do not, Mr Johnson will get his
early election and the issue will be Brexit. For the
country, the stakes have never been so high and the
chances of getting it right so low.in a new setting for the fi rst time. Teachers can give
more rounded and informative pictures of children
when they know them better, which is why many
would prefer to stick to existing arrangements,
whereby a less formal assessment is carried out
towards the end of the reception year (and moderated
by the local authority ).
Second, the assessment of literacy and maths
skills is overly narrow and pulls in the opposite
direction to the new and improved Ofsted inspection
framework, which emphasises breadth and
discourages specialisation. Taken with the year 6
tests (Sats), which again focus on English and maths,
the undeniable eff ect is to devalue other areas such
as sport, creativity and the arts, food, religion,
relationships and, crucially in primary schools, play.
Third, even if such limitations are disregarded, the
new data will be compromised in areas with high
mobility (where it is not unusual for up to 25% of
the children in a reception class to move school
by year 6), or where infant and junior schools are
separate (since there will in future be no “baseline”
for a school that recruits its pupils at age seven).
Beyond such practical objections, the overriding
impression is of a lack of imagination. Yes, literacy
and numeracy are essential, but there must be more
to 21st-century education than reading and counting,
and more to assessment than yet more time-limited
tests. When the crisis in teacher recruitment and
retention and the damaging impact of budget cuts are
both recognised at the highest level of government,
and the achievement gap between advantaged and
disadvantaged pupils remains stubbornly wide , it
seems cack-handed at best for ministers to begin
a new school year by setting yet more data-entry
homework for staff. They, and the nation’s four-year-
olds, deserve better. Continued from frontProgress matters, but
testing four-year-olds is a
clunky way to measure it
Schools
Brexit
The PM thinks he can win
by resigning. To defeat him,
critics must fi nd a leader
Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust No 53 ,819
‘Comment is free... but facts are sacred’ CP Scott
Working-class voters will want
no part in a fake ‘culture war’
Lynsey Hanley
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