Through The Institutions

In his execrable Spectator cover piece this week, Toby Young revives the claim that Michael Gove has been influenced by Antonio Gramsci.

The thing about Gramsci is that we have never really needed him in Britain. The insistence on the unity of theory and practice, the rejection of economic determinism and of metaphysical materialism, the celebration of the "national-popular", an organic working-class culture and self-organisation including worker-intellectuals: we already had them all.

At least, we did have them. Until Gove's and Young's political heroine, whom no one ever accused of being either a worker or an intellectual, came along and destroyed their economic base. As Education Secretary, she closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left for her record ever to be equalled. As Prime Minister, she replaced O-levels with GCSEs.

But there remained heirs to the organic worker-intellectual tradition, often very left-wing people indeed, who tried as best they could to maintain in their own classrooms, until they themselves retired, whatever they could of the best that had been known and thought, in the midst of her enforcement upon everyone else of her own utter philistinism and of her own total lack of even the slightest intellectual curiosity.

Truly, her natural successor was Tony Blair. And truly, contrary to what has often been asserted in the absence of the slightest evidence, his natural successors are David Cameron and George Osborne.

But Gove may yet revive the worker-intellectual tradition in spite of himself. Under him, universities are to become confined merely to those whose parents happened to have nine thousand pounds per annum lying around with no other call on it, and therefore had no need to send their offspring out to work at the earliest opportunity. Academic ability or accomplishment will have nothing to do with it. Indeed, they will be relatively rare among the entrants, one would expect.

Leaving plenty of room for the successors of the pitmen poets and of the pitmen painters, of the Workers' Educational Association (which still exists) and of the Miners' Lodge Libraries, of the brass and silver bands, of the people's papers rather than the red top rags, to re-emerge in, though and as an organic working-class culture and self-organisation.

That, in turn, requires an economic base such as only the State can guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver. That, not exclusively but in no small part, is what the State is for. That, not exclusively but in no small part, is why we have it. That, not exclusively but in no small part, is its mission from God.

Young concludes with talk of "Labour politicians defending the idea that the children of the poor should study the words of Simon Cowell rather than Shakespeare," which he calls "one of the great mysteries of the age." The great mystery of the age is that he can get away with writing that in a supposedly serious magazine.

Or with passing himself off as an "education expert" all over the media on no basis apart from the fact that he says that he is one. Presumably, he receives a fee each time that he does this? When is a teachers' union going to bring a prosecution for fraud?

Exhibit A might be his, and Gove's, oft-repeated belief that schools are run by local authorities. That has not been the case in a generation. It was ended by the Conservative Party. Young's and Gove's preoccupation with the teaching of History needs to be set in the context of their total ignorance of even the recent history of their own party.