Michael Gove Gets Hackneyed

It is Michael Gove's time of the month again. As every four weeks, he has announced the replacement of the GCSEs with which Thatcher, the destroyer of the grammar schools, replaced O-levels. Believe in it when you see it. Hardly anyone leaves school at 16 these days, and soon no one will be allowed to do so. Why do we still have external examinations at that age?

Abbott held these views when Margaret Thatcher did not. Which is to say, at any point throughout the long career of the latter. Where on earth do people get the idea that "the Left" was somehow in power when all the educational changes of which they rightly disapprove were enacted and implemented? What, in 1988?

Abbott's ordinary, rather than her Leadership Campaign, website made and makes clear her sympathy for the 11-plus, for single-sex schools, for Oxbridge as academically elitist, for universities' flexible approach to entry grades if they see potential in the applicant, for the prevention of social rather than academic elitism by improving the schools attended by the poor, for raising poor pupils' aspirations so that they actually apply to the top universities, and for reinstating full grants so that they can afford to go.

Admittedly, that sounds a lot more like Old Labour in the North East than Old Labour in London. But it certainly sounds like Old Labour. And not remotely like the Tories, for anyone who bothers to check their record.

Before anyone tries to stock anti-Abbott line (and I do not deny that she has her faults), it is no more or less "hypocritical" for a politician of any party to send his or her child to a commercial school than it is for a politician of any other party to do so. At least Labour politicians ever use the schools for which they legislate, unlike most Lib Dems or practically all Conservatives.

As Harold Wilson made manifest while both Prime Minister and a parent, there has never been any Labour Party policy to abolish these strange institutions, which sell themselves as especially adept at putting pupils through an examination system which is largely rubbish anyway, and which frequently embody the views that adolescence ought to be lived out in single-sex residential environments while the relationship between parents and children ought to be strictly financial and nothing more.

Meaning that Diane Abbott was no more or less a hypocrite than any Conservative or Liberal Democrat, including Nick Clegg. She certainly acquitted herself better than Tony Blair or Harriet Harman, who did in fact send their children to schools that it was then, although mysteriously not for very much longer, the Labour Party policy to abolish.