MICHAEL GOVE’S UNFINISHED AGENDA FOR ENGLISH SCHOOLING AND

ITS COMPATIBILITY WITH TERTIARY EDUCATION UNDER BREXIT

60 word Abstract

Revisiting Michael Gove et al’s 2005 pamphlet, DIRECT DEMOCRACY, An Agenda for a

New Model Party, this article finds in it the blueprint for power Gove made in campaigning

to leave the EU that indicates an unfinished Agenda for English primary and secondary

education under ‘hard Brexit’ complementing measures proposed for tertiary education in the

Higher Education and Research Bill.

keywords

vouchers, fees, schools, colleges, universities

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Introduction

Remarking the prominent role played by the former-Secretary of State for Education, Mi-

chael Gove, in campaigning to leave the European Union in last year’s referendum, those out-

with the small island of UKania (aka Boris Island) may wonder at the link between his educa-

tional efforts and these other activities beyond the former-Minister’s evident free-market eco-

nomic sympathies that are shared by most Brexiteers. However, the connection was made ex-

plicit in 2005, when 23 male Conservative MPs, MEPs, candidates and activists linked to the

Centre for Policy Studies, and including Gove, published a pamphlet entitled DIRECT

DEMOCRACY: An Agenda for a New Model Party. There was little academic or other com-

ment on it at the time and the author only heard of it by chance last year when a junior doctor

posted a message to Facebook that ‘Jeremy Hunt wants to privatise the NHS’, referring to the

by-then Secretary of Health’s advocacy of private health insurance in the document in which

he is listed amongst the co-authors. Its 100 pages are still freely available for download on

the web or purchasable through Amazon in paper for £7.99. Describing itself as written by

and for ‘a movement of MPs, MEPs, activists and candidates committed to making localism

the core of the Conservative Party’s platform’ (http://direct-democracy.co.uk), its ‘plan for

pioneer/ direct grant/ Swedish/ voucher/ whateveryouwanttocallthem schools empowers and

trusts teachers’ is enthusiastically endorsed by Fraser Nelson and seconded on the website by

then-MEP Daniel Hannan who puts the case for ‘self-financing local councils’.

Although the authors are listed alphabetically, the pamphlet has the marks of Michael Gove

all over it, not least in the section on education proposing school vouchers. Described by Ken

Jones as ‘to his opponents a politician of uniquely repellent qualities’ (2016, 194), Gove is

doubtless what passes in Conservative circles for an intellectual, whose occasional quoting

from Gramsci and other unlikely sources even fooled others into considering him likewise.

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Of course, those involved in education who might justifiably be said to have some expertise

in the area, came to know him better from 2010-14 when as Secretary of State for Education

he derided ‘the educational establishment’ (‘so-called experts’) as ‘The Blob’ and school

teachers as ‘the enemies of promise’. However, unlike Keith Joseph for example, whose

‘craving for certainty’ was assuaged by inflicting Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations upon his

civil servants (Denham and Garnett 2002, 79), Gove does not draw his free-market

fundamentalism from any sustained intellectual consideration. The ideology to which he and

his fellow-travellers subscribe is more a manual or tool-kit of ready-made and simple ideas

on which to hang their prejudices. A ‘small state’ with ‘low welfare’ in ‘a free market’ is the

panacea resolving all problems by contracting out public services for ‘more efficient’ private

delivery.

This reflects more than a poverty of imagination in response to the global challenges that

threaten to overwhelm humanity. As Karl Polanyi wrote in tracing the collapse of European

civilization back to the same neoliberal economic model, ‘… the idea of a self-adjusting

market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time

without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically

destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.’ (1944, 3) Instead, Gove

and his fellow Brexiteers bury their zeal in the usual Tory faith in the unique instincts of the

Great British people whose aspirations only need to be released from state interference to

once again recreate the glories of the past, like the Industrial Revolution and the British

Empire. As the pamphlet says, ‘The stout, sceptical creed that sustained Hogarth, Johnson

and Swift will do well enough for us.’ (p.98)

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In this pamphlet therefore Gove begins by registering how far the UK had fallen from this

glorious past by 2005, quoting Lord Butler’s condemnation of quangos to which power if not

responsibility has been delegated and – more ominously – an endorsement of Peter Mandel-

son’s opinion as a European Commissioner that ‘It may be that the era of pure representative

democracy is slowly coming to an end’. With a typically obscure and pretentious reference to

‘Philotheus’ letter to Tsar Basil III’ – to give a flavour of what is undoubtedly Gove’s style –

the pamphlet confronts the fact of successive Tory electoral failures since 1997. The ‘rude

truth’, reflected in ‘the sheer immensity of the anti-Tory vote’ (p.10), is that ‘People do not

like the Conservatives’ (p.17), echoing Theresa May’s description of them as ‘The Nasty

Party’ three years earlier. This misapprehension from the pamphleteers’ point of view is sus-

tained by ‘the BBC, judiciary and academics’ (p.5). What is needed to reverse it and over-

come ‘the errors of the Attlee settlement… which we still inhabit’ is a new model Party pre-

pared ‘to push powers outwards and downwards’ so as to be ‘direct, democratic and locally

accountable’. ‘Individuals’ will not then be ‘coerced by state power’ and local councils will

be able to ‘raise their own budgets and manage their own affairs’ (pp.3-4).

‘Unbundling the state’

This ‘Unbundling the state’, as Chapter Four is headed, seeks to disband ‘the command state’

in the way Thatcherism opened ‘the command economy’ (p.35) to ‘pluralism of provision’

(p.42). So, ‘Instead of pledging to deliver better services… offer local communities the

opportunities to improve their own affairs.’ (p.97) Much of this discourse became familiar

with Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ but for education – or schools at least, such ‘radical

localisation’ translates into ‘independent, free-standing institutions’ and ‘new providers’

backed by financiers with shareholders. Gove wanted to promise such private investment in

the Tories’ 2015 Manifesto but he had gone from Education by then and his successor, Nicky

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Morgan, cautiously ruled it out – although she later supported Gove’s short-lived bid for the

Conservative Party leadership. Perhaps her successor, Justine Greening, who at DFID had

assiduously promoted the private sector as an integral part of the government’s aid/

development program, may complete Gove’s Agenda, although her reluctant endorsement of

May’s advocacy of bringing back secondary moderns by encouraging new grammars

muddied the waters (see further below). Indeed, in December 2016 the NUT denounced

Greening’s proposals for a national schools’ funding formula as a move towards

voucherisation, with its usual talk of a ‘fair funding formula’ that characterised the quasi-

marketisation of FE under the Further Education Funding Council (Ainley & Bailey 1997).

Although little remarked at the time, Gove’s tenure at Education from 2010-14 can now be

seen in retrospect to have set the stage for a fully-fledged free market with vouchers as the

end goal. Such a Great Reversal, as Allen called it in 2013, would not only complete the

move from a public to a privatised schools service but would have to do so while continuing

to keep a lid on aspiration at the same time as officially encouraging it in the name of ‘social

mobility’ (see also below). Preparing for this transformation was the culmination of a

prolonged structural readjustment that it could be argued began with last Old Labour Prime

Minister James Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech in 1976 in which he announced the end of

his Party’s comprehensive schools experiment. So Carswell et al’s pamphlet confidently

declares, ‘the simple key which will unlock the rusty, closed door leading to excellent

education for the millions of parents who cannot afford to buy it in the private sector… is the

voucher’ (Agenda p.73). The authors make clear this will not be a national entitlement but a

local voucher. Thus, parents will not be able to offset the price of private schooling with their

voucher because the state would then have to subsidise the private sector at exorbitant cost.

(This was the reason, after a paper-trial in Kent, that Keith Joseph abandoned the notion of

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vouchers to which he was also sympathetic – see Denham and Garnett o.c., 432.) Similarly,

the return of secondary moderns/ grammar schools would hamper the smooth running of a

voucherised system since academic selection vitiates free-market choice for those able to pay

for it; as in the private sector which can always find a place somewhere for parents who can

afford to pay, irrespective of academic ability or ‘intelligence’ as it used to be measured by

the old 11-plus. In any case, the National Curriculum already crams all those covered by it

with a gobbetised grammar schooling in ‘state-funded independent schools’. It does mean

though, ‘killing the [then-New Labour] government’s “inclusion policy” stone dead.’ (p.73)

This was perhaps why Gove initially opposed Greening’s endorsement of May’s enthusiasm

for selective secondaries and why his immediate successor, Nicky Morgan, had followed him

in office along the same road, with her support for, not only more free schools, but her declar-

ation (subsequently partially rescinded) that all state schools should immediately become

academies. Only in advocating also more university technical colleges (UTCs)/ STEM (sci-

ence, technology, engineering and maths) schools and also studio schools closely related to

specific employers, did Morgan diverge from the Gove template to find favour with Kenneth

(now Lord) Baker, successor to Keith Joseph as Thatcher’s Education Secretary and creator

of the National Curriculum. He and his Edge Foundation promote an academic : vocational/

grammar : secondary-modern divide at 14+ (Baker 2013), and so – despite the numerous fail-

ures of UTCs documented by Robertson (2016) – have ploughed on with UTCs as successors

to Baker’s original 15 City Technology Colleges. UTCs are free schools sponsored by univer-

sities or companies with vocational specialisms linked to their courses or businesses, al-

though students continue with GCSEs in mandatory subjects. This aimed to divide secondary

education into two main ‘pathways’, as Baker’s collaborator Lord Dearing called them in

1996. Under Greening’s revival of the ‘technical route’, these ‘non-academic’ schools, fol-

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lowing the T-levels based on the April 2016 Sainsbury Review and the government’s re-

sponse in the July Post-16 Plan, may dovetail with the Conservative’s 2010 general election

promise of three million ‘apprenticeships’ by 2015 as an alternative to HE.

However, a wide-ranging opposition quickly gathered against Greening’s proposal for the re-

turn of secondary moderns, defending Gove’s legacy of independently competing ‘grammar

schools for all’ as better providing opportunities for (upward) social mobility and thus con-

tributing to ‘social justice’. Yet, in this century’s conditions of general downward social mo-

bility that have replaced the limited upward social mobility that obtained briefly in the last

century (Roberts 2010), restoring any number of grammar schools will not restart even lim-

ited upward social mobility. It is a similar magical solution to that presented by the cross-

party policy consensus on ‘rebuilding a vocational route’ – and ‘apprenticeships’ in particular

– which aims to somehow conjure German-style productive industry out of the UK’s deregu-

lated economy. Such recidivism does not comprehend that the need for separate selective

schools is obviated by Gove’s promise of ‘a grammar school education for all’ (as Harold

Wilson had previously described his government’s comprehensive schools). Rather, than de-

vious, like Wilson, Gove seemed genuinely deluded that this was possible, despite the fact

that, by definition, grammar schooling is premised on the selection of a minority. Hence pre-

viously Major’s offer of a grammar school in every town had fallen flat in 1997 because the

electorate understood that this also meant a secondary modern in every town to which a lar-

ger proportion of children would be relegated. Rather, following Thatcher, Gove reversed

Old Labour’s comprehensive slogan of equal opportunities into opportunities to be unequal.

If starting points were equalised by the same schooling for everyone – although the exemp-

tion from the National Curriculum for private and free schools is inconsistent with this – ‘fair

outcomes’ could be achieved in the state system. So Gove as Secretary of State promoted his

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policies as restoring standards and the credibility of public examinations. He accused the pre-

vious Labour government of making exams ‘too easy’ and giving what he considered to be

inferior vocational qualifications the equivalent status to traditional academic qualifications

in school league tables.

His ‘free schools’, set up by groups of parents, charities and others, encouraged by the DfE,

were widely criticised for haphazard duplication of existing provision but this criticism

missed the point: the surplus places free schools provide offer parental choice in a local mar-

ket, never mind that there are shortages elsewhere. Modelled on, and in some cases sponsored

by, Swedish private friskolor, free schools are allowed partial selection of pupils by

‘aptitude’. This results in less children on free school meals, with special needs, and with

English as a second language compared with local authority schools (Andrews 2016). Despite

this, and various scandals and irregularities resulting in the closure of several of them, free

schools continue to expand. It is not for nothing that so many educational consultancies, edu-

businesses, hedge fund managers and Tory grandees have supported these nominally charit-

able independent but state-funded free schools and academies. Even if not run for the profits

promised by Gove, related business interests can be expanded in linked activities, such as

supplying and then selling on IT systems. Others, like the Cognita Group founded by the late

former HM Inspector, Chris Woodhead, together with the Dubai-based GEM Group with an-

other former HM Inspector – Mike Tomlinson – on its board, have been waiting in the wings

for some time to start up cut-price crammers. (And see Ball 2015, on Pearson’s ‘the world’s

largest edubusiness’.)

Take as an example the Oasis chain: a nominally Christian foundation started from small be-

ginnings by a social entrepreneur/ philanthropist, it has taken over care and social services

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provision as well as primary and secondary schools from local authorities, with links also to

its own housing association. Like others, the chain provides in-house teacher training and

staff development programmes. Little – or not so little – empires are thus accreted, with the

chief executive of the Harris Federation of schools earning more than £375,000 a year and

some ‘super heads’, who manage several schools simultaneously, over £250,000. The Church

of England remains the largest of such sponsors, continuing the provision it, Catholic and

Jewish schools were allowed under the 1944 Education Act. This was subsequently extended

to other ‘faith schools’ favoured by New Labour, which saw them as offering a ‘life-style

choice’ in the market, despite the dire precedent of sectarian schooling in Northern Ireland.

Some of these schools teach ‘creation science’ in parallel with National Curriculum biology,

while others ignore recommended approaches to sex and relationship education (see BHA

2015), not to mention the financial and other abuses that have come to light under other ‘ap-

proved sponsors’. The justification for a former carpet salesman, Lord Harris, presiding over

such a large part of public schooling as is provided by his Harris Academy chain, is that such

‘entrepreneurs’ contribute to what its advocates call ‘a self-improving system’, constantly

‘raising standards’ through competition.

In the familiar formula of the new market state (Ainley 2001), the schools are semi-privatised

but state-subsidised so they are free from ‘bureaucratic’ local authority control. Instead, in a

national system nationally and no longer locally administered, schools are contracted out

from the centre, or, as this becomes more remote and bureaucratic, delegated to the oversight

of an extra layer of appointed regional commissioners. These independent state schools are

not required to follow the National Curriculum, and, as well as additional funding, they enjoy

other ‘freedoms’, such as not having to employ trained teachers. They are also completely re-

moved from any local democratic accountability, and under the proposed Education and Ad-

9

option Bill will lose even the locally appointed school governors they may have had before

‘conversion’. Inconsistently, schools – no more than colleges and universities – were not in-

cluded in the regeneration promised to Northern ‘powerhouse’ cities in return for elected

mayors with cabinets that Latham described as ‘the optimal internal management arrange-

ment for privatised local government services’ (2011, 215).

Still, the legal obligation remains for the state to make free education and/ or training provi-

sion available from ages 5 to 18 (since 2015). The only way around this in such a market that

does not allow for the possibility of ‘exit’ would be for a voucher to guarantee basic provi-

sion whilst other schools in the local market could then charge parents who could afford it to

top up these vouchers at more or less expensive ‘independent’ but state-funded provision. (If

schools followed universities, whose undergraduate fees can be regarded as paperless vouch-

ers, these additional charges would tend to rise as signals of supposed ‘quality’.) This would

be along the lines of the US charter schools described by Diane Ravitch as playing such a

large part in what she called the death and life of the great American school system (2010). In

England, half of all state secondary schools and 4,835 out of all 21,500 state-funded schools

had ‘converted’ to academies, as well as about 300 set up from scratch as free schools (in-

cluding the UTCs referred to above), by the time of Parliament’s dissolution in 2015. The ac-

celeration of what had been a more gradual process under New Labour had picked up under

the Coalition and in the 2015 general election campaign Cameron promised to academise or

‘free’ all state schools from the supposedly ‘bureaucratic control’ of local authorities.

Unbundling colleges and universities

Meanwhile, the Gove et al pamphlet argued, ‘too many children are going to university’

(p.65). As Allen indicated in his 2013 Great Reversal, reversing this was not attempted as an

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overt policy until the Coalition when it was implemented by – on the one hand – tripling un-

dergraduate fees (Willetts at Higher Education), whilst – on the other – making it harder to

get in by ‘raising standards’ (Gove in schools). Despite their reported mutual antipathy, these

two government education ministers shared a belief that too many children were succeeding

in state education. Or rather, that too many of the wrong sort of children were going to the

wrong sort of universities. On coming to office, Michael Gove therefore commissioned Pro-

fessor Alison Wolf to review vocational provision in schools, signaling his intent to remove

vocational qualifications from league tables unless they met strict criteria. In future, voca-

tional qualifications would also only count as equivalent to one GCSE. As mentioned above,

Gove’s reforms were a response to what was considered to be the ‘credential inflation’ of the

previous decades under New Labour. Locking nearly all secondary schools into a grammar

school ‘English Baccalaureate’ also privileged academic over vocational learning. However,

secondary teachers proved so adept at cramming their pupils through the drudgery of endless

exam practice that ‘standards’ were raised, even though teachers taught more while their stu-

dents learnt less despite studying harder (Ainley 2016, 2).

Willetts was even less successful, as numbers of undergraduate applicants rose to new re-

cords as they continue to do since higher education institutions have been made dependent for

their survival on increasing competition to attract demographically diminishing numbers of

fee-bearing students. Applicants are thus more or less guaranteed a place somewhere/ any-

where. Also, because the repayment threshold remained at £21,000, since policy makers un-

derestimated or were unaware of the fall in graduate salaries and decline in graduate jobs, and

also because undergraduate fees were capped by a compromise with the Lib-Dems at the

£9,000 level to which nearly all institutions rose, they failed to differentiate institutions by

variable pricing. So even tripled fees did not check the numbers who are so desperate for the

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degree essential for even a chance of secure employment that avoids the precarity beneath,

they are (still) prepared to take on lifelong debt, though many are unlikely ever to repay it.

(The promises of lavish advertising for ‘apprenticeships’ as an alternative to this academic

route, fail to make an impression on young people and their parents since they know that

most so-called ‘apprenticeships’ offer no comparable possibility employment to the 2.1 or 1st

class degree now obtained by 70% of graduates who complete. See Allen 2014.) It would

have been cheaper just to abolish undergraduate fees and write off the unpaid loans. Instead,

the new Teaching Excellence Framework aims to raise fees for ‘quality’ courses, while the

level at which repayment is due come down (changing the terms of the loans). New providers

will offer lower fees for cut-price, short programs, contributing to ‘market exit’ by universit-

ies that will close, hastened by falls in numbers of EU and other students. Management buy-

outs and corporate buy-ins can also be expected. Student numbers in Higher Education

‘proper’ will then be reduced as places become more expensive, while being separated from

what Palfreyman and Tapper (2014, v) call TE (Tertiary Education) or mass higher education

that has, as Alison Wolf put it, ‘colonised areas of vocational education and training which

were traditionally the preserve of… vocational schools and colleges’ (2015, 74) with the con-

sequence that ‘more academically low achieving students are being recruited’ (ibid, 67). This

tendency is heightened through the dissolution of Further Education by closures and mergers

resulting from the process of area reviews.

The Higher Education and Research Bill that received its second reading on 19th July 2016

(see Holmwood et al 2016 for an alternative) thus augments the moves towards a market in

TE that complements the market Gove intended for schools. Moreover, a fundamental change

has been effected by the transfer of responsibility for colleges and universities to Greening’s

Department of Education, leaving research under the Department for Business Innovation and

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Skills (as was), amalgamated with the now also defunct Department for Energy and Climate

Change, to form the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy. The merger of

the seven research councils, plus HEFCE’s recurrent research funding (now known as

Research England) along with Innovate UK to form UK Research and Innovation (UKRI),

thus institutionally separates research from teaching. This was not envisaged by critics of the

previous unclear division of schools from skills, college and university funding – criticisms

that were not pressed too far lest they ended in advocating Michael Gove running FHE and

training as well as schools! Where previously research as knowledge production tended to be

privileged in universities over teaching misconceived as knowledge reproduction (Bergendal

1984), priorities are now likely to be reversed towards teaching, especially to meet the

retention and widening participation targets of the REF upon which permission to raise fees

will depend. This will aggravate the loss of European research funding despite concentrating

domestic research funding in a new unitary body. Student recruitment will also be hit by

Brexit just as student achievement, retention and widening participation becomes vital for

institutions’ survival in competition with the new providers that the Bill aims to introduce.

The intended differentiation by fee prices as a result of competition between institutions is

complementary with the differentiation in schools that can be anticipated, whether or not

Michael Gove’s Agenda completes the privatisation of state schooling in England.

In their 2005 pamphlet Gove et al did not consider what school, college and university gradu-

ates would actually do in what has become a predominantly deregulated service economy –

and likely to become more so in the anticipated race to the bottom with countries outside the

EU. In conditions of general downward social mobility more graduates have not generated

more graduate-level professional jobs as was hoped by successive New Labour governments.

Instead, as digitisation and deregulation lay waste the core middle-class constituency of tradi-

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tional HE (Susskinds 2015), today a degree is needed for previously non-graduate employ-

ment, displacing other job-seekers into more precarious – often insecure and part-time – em-

ployment. Doubtless, Gove and his co-authors rely upon the natural creativity of the Great

British yeomanry to somehow revive productive industry, ignoring the fact that the UK has

become a largely post-industrial and service-based economy in which even increased pro-

ductivity is driven by further automation only adding to unemployment.

Two opposed solutions for tertiary education have recently been advanced by the Baronesses

Blackstone and Wolf. In her June 26 2016 Gresham Lecture, Tessa Blackstone, former New

Labour Higher Minister, persists in seeing higher education offering chances of upward

social mobility from working-class jobs to middle-class careers in the so-called ‘knowledge

economy’. She therefore advocates a 100% adult, further and higher, tertiary education with

credit transfer allowing access upwards to degrees for all. This does not recognise the

vocational nature of tertiary education, especially of the academic vocation of teaching and

research informed by the democratic-professional collegiality necessary for its sustenance.

(Although a National Education Service worthy of the name would certainly be freely

available full- or part-time to the minority of the adult population dedicated at any one time to

developing expertise in specialised areas of application, creation, investigation or scholarship,

it would not be universal or comprehensive.)

By contrast, Baroness Wolf, writing as a cross-bench peer for a Lib Dem educational think

tank, proposes Remaking Tertiary Education by integrating post-secondary further and higher

as a way of reducing the numbers of university students. She suggests expanding sub-degree

technical qualifications in both colleges and universities by giving ‘a uniform and unified

tertiary funding entitlement for all adults, which they can use when and as they like.’ (p.43)

14

This suggestion of a funding entitlement to tertiary learning that could be taken up as and

when required might appear a relief to many 18 year-olds pressured into thinking they must

‘go to uni’ or die!’ It might also rescue FE from more mergers and rationalisations to

integrate it as part of TE (ie. FE+HE, as in Palfreyman and Tapper above), instead of once

more cutting provision for its 4 million-plus (depending how you count them), full- and part-

time, mainly adult students. But school leavers will predictably reject Wolf’s sub-degree

alternative to HE – along with apprenticeships – since they know they need ‘a proper degree’

(however tedious and expensive) to have a chance of a proper job. This leaves academic

schools competing to cram their sixth formers into universities, a route preferred by all those

advocating vocational training for other people’s children. Wolf shares this preference, not

recognising how disheartening relentless cramming is for students and teachers alike in the

grammar-school based National Curriculum.

With competitive academic cramming set to continue at all levels and the weakness of any

supposedly vocational alternative to it, such ideal solutions as ‘A good general education for

everyone’ seem a far cry. A general diploma of high school graduation at 18, linked to the

assumption of citizenship as in the USA, would provide entitlement to different forms of

learning beyond foundational schooling. Whilst recognizing high-quality technical and other

education and training undertaken at school, in college or on work placements, so that

‘learning about work’, not just ‘learning to work’, would be part of a common core, this

would be essentially prevocational provision. Although Marx was writing about self-

realization in a communist society, his ideal of ‘fully developed individuals, fit for a variety

of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions

they perform, are but so many modes of giving free scope to their own natural and acquired

powers’ (Marx 1971, 494) shows the immanence of his critique, one that could begin to be

15

fostered in comprehensive schools and developed throughout a democratic society.

Agenda for a Coup

Instead, to so radically ‘redefine the nature of politics’ (p.97), as the 23 named authors of

Gove’s pamphlet propose, will ‘capitalise on the anti-politician mood by setting the people

free’ (p.27), primarily from ‘the biggest quango of all, the European Commission’ (p.93). The

enthusiasm that will be generated will then deliver the ‘high wage, low tax, low welfare’

working people’s paradise Cameron promised his last Party conference. As manifested in the

referendum, this was an Agenda, as Alex Salmond repeatedly pointed out at the time, for a

coup d’etat that would not be possible if the UK had a written constitution – hence Gove’s

proposed ‘Humbling the judiciary’ (p.84), as well as replacing European Human Rights with

a ‘British Bill of Rights’. Deliberate misrepresentation was a Leave campaign tactic from the

‘battlebus’ that toured the country with a slogan claiming £350 million a week would go to

fund the NHS instead of to Brussels on to Gove’s ‘post-truth’ discrediting of ‘experts’. This

cast public debate into a miasma, so that when Remainers counteracted with rational argu-

ments and facts they were disbelieved, especially Cameron and Osborne whose government

since 2010 was widely perceived as having been blatantly misleading in declaring in relation

to austerity that ‘we’re all in it together’. The public were then left not knowing who or what

to believe and fell back on their prejudices. As Nicola Sturgeon put it to IPPR Scotland:

‘Much of the blame for what happened on 23 June lies with the UK government’s

ideological obsession with austerity, with its decision to make ordinary people pay the

price of a financial crash they didn’t cause – and with its cynical collusion in the myth

that cuts and public service pressures are the fault of migrants rather than a direct

result of deliberate economic policy.’ (Reported in The Daily Record 25/7/16)

16

Scotland will not take this putsch by two formerly-allied journalists lying down and in this

sense it is incorrected to talk about a ‘Brexit’ that may affect only England and Wales, for

which it represents a further stage in the democratic regress outlined by Streeck (2016, 113-

143). From the post-war Keynesian national welfare state to what Bobbitt (2002) called ‘the

new market-state’ of Reagan/ Thatcher as subsequently developed by Clinton/ Blair, this is

fast becoming what Streeck calls ‘the consolidation state’. Following the financial crisis of

2008 and the subsequent imposition of ‘austerity as a fundamental principle of government’

(p.133), this is a state in which the debts of the previous period are consolidated so that ‘com-

mercial market obligations take precedence over political citizenship obligations... [and]

where citizens lack access to political or ideological resources to contest this’ (p.124 it-

alicised in original). While Streeck notes ‘the disorganisation of dissent’ in this Transition

from Corporatism (Vickerstaff 1993) and the switch from production to consumption in what

is now largely a post-industrial economy with accompanying indebtedness – public and

private – for goods produced elsewhere, he does not add the part played by education at all

levels in contributing to a ‘reconstitution of social class’ (Ainley 2013). Perhaps because pre-

carity is so marked in the more deregulated UK labour market – as compared with Ger-

many’s, with so many of the employed population now working in fungibly low skill, low

paid, part-time and insecure jobs. This suggests a new form of Marx’s Reserve Army of La-

bour if not a distinct ‘precariat’ as proposed by Standing (2011). Nor, connected to this, does

Streeck note education’s role in providing the individualizing ideology of what Grubb and

Lazerson described in 2005 as ‘the new gospel’ of salvation through education.

Rule by capital in Streeck’s ‘consolidation state’ is direct, no longer through ‘quasi-markets’

providing access to contracted-out state services supposedly independently regulated in the

new market-state. Consolidation would be marked in schooling by the completion of the

17

Gove Agenda with private shareholding in only now nominally state schools for which a ba-

sic entitlement voucher would be available to be topped up by those parents who could afford

additional contributions. Similarly, a consolidated market in tertiary education would see col-

leges and universities bought out and bought up in competition with state-subsidised private

providers, accompanied by private loan schemes offering various versions of what will pre-

dictably become future miss-selling scandals of the Trump University type. With its ‘rotat-

ing’/ ‘revolving doors’ between government and financial capital (Streeck, 31 & 33), ‘hol-

lowed out’ democratic governance becomes ‘populist’ rather than – as previously – at least

nominally representative and – even more anciently – social democratic.

As Karl Polanyi wrote of the 1930s in Germany:

‘the moment would come when both the economic and the political systems were

threatened by complete paralysis. Fear would grip the people, and leadership would

be thrust upon those who offered an easy way out at whatever ultimate price.’ (o.c.,

236)

The speed with which Polanyi noted this occurred is echoed in recent events as ‘devoted

upholders of constitutional freedom… melt away’, their place taken by characteristically

‘sham rebellions arranged with the tacit approval of the authorities’, so that such populism

‘may be called a “move” in preference to a “movement”’ (ibid, 238-9). The weakness of any

opposition is added to by the failure to resolve the crisis of European social democracy, of

which in England Jeremy Corbyn is a symptom but not a solution. In such circumstances, this

paper has offered an insight into the continuities with previous education and other social

policies outlined in Gove et al’s Agenda document that can be anticipated from the ‘hard

Brexit’ still advanced by May. These policies are supported by Gove who now campaigns

through Change Britain and other organisations funded by that section of largely non-

18

productive British capital that once again sees its best interest in a special relationship with

the USA rather than with the EU.

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