Ongoing debate
- 29 May 07, 08:52 AM
The problem with political ideas is that once you unleash them you cannot control them.
The Tories' Great Grammar School Row was started by a thoughtful speech by the party's education spokesman David Willetts in which he dared to challenge the success of grammar schools in transforming the life chances of poor bright kids. Up until then, David Cameron had always made an essentially political argument. First, he told his party to focus on the education of the many and not the few. Then he pointed out, as he did again , that "Conservative governments in the past - and Conservative councils in the present - have both failed to carry out [the policy of opening new grammar schools] because, ultimately, it is not what parents want."
It is Willetts' idea and not Cameron's politics which backers of grammar schools regard as so dangerous. They fear that the Tories have given anti-grammar school campaigners a new script and may give the Labour Party new courage to campaign against them.
Thus the Tory MP Graham Brady - releasing data which, he claimed, prove that grammars improve the life chances even of those who don't go to them. Brady is the MP for the town in which he went to school. He has long been seen as the MP for Altrincham Grammar.
Now the Tory leadership is threatening to discipline him and even drop him from the front bench. His crime was to re-open a debate which the Tory leader has declared to be over. You can't, though, discipline an idea.
The problem with David Willetts' speech was not the policy it spelt out. Most Tories had grudgingly accepted that. It was the idea contained within it which begged a question which won't go away - if grammar schools are failing, why should Tories oppose their closure and if they're not failing, why not allow more of them to be built? A debate which will go on.
Incidentally, David Cameron's article suggests that someone close to him has been reading the exchanges on this blog about the role class plays in the Tories Great Grammar School Row. He declares in it that "I may be a white, forty-something old Etonian, but that doesn't constrain what I do."
PS. This may be the last blog for a day or two. Not content with the bank holiday washout I am taking a few days to wallow in the rain whilst my colleague John Pienaar follows the PM to Africa. Poor judgement, you might think.
