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But great was their fury when a friend of mine, Don Guttenplan, published an article in the Guardian in which he explained why, despite being a convinced socialist, he is going to remove his daughter from one of the local state primary schools and send her to a private school. My opinion was that Guttenplan was wrong to be opposed in principle to private education, so had no need to suffer agonies of conscience when he decided to make use of it. But this was not the reaction of the terrifyingly energetic women who wanted to tear Guttenplan limb from limb. To these old-style socialists he was a traitor to the cause of state education, in which they believe with a passion, while also worrying desperately whether it is good enough for their own dear children.
Guttenplan is an American, and though he is a very good writer, there was a certain innocent tactlessness in the way he exposed the dilemma that faces socialists like him who believe in equality but also in high culture. English socialists talk endlessly about this dilemma, but few of them care to write about it. They are divided people, their egalitarianism at war with their desire to get the best possible education for their children. They send their children to the best possible state schools, and hope that this will amount to the same thing, which sometimes it does. Certainly the state school which Guttenplan’s daughter attended is excellent; I got to know him because my elder daughter goes there too.
But leaving on one side the relative merits of various schools in north London, what struck me was the ferocious small-c conservatism of my socialist friends. The strength of their determination to go on doing things in the same old state-socialist way, only better, cannot be overstated. They are certainly not prepared to entertain the idea, which to me seems obvious, that the state has no business running schools or hospitals in the first place. Research published at the start of this week by the think-tank Reform confirms this middle-class resistance to change: it shows that voters on lower incomes are more willing than those from the so-called ‘decision-making’ classes to support such ideas as education vouchers and private health insurance.
As the Labour MP Frank Field points out, the middle classes know that in the last resort they can opt out of state education and state health. They are much more successful than the working class at getting what they want from the state, but they also know they can go private if they need to. They therefore have no pressing interest in reform, and are natural allies of those who oppose change in the public sector.
It did not take Mr Blair long to discover the ferocity of that resistance to change: as he remarked on 6 July 1999, ‘You try getting change in the public sector and public services — I bear the scars on my back after two years in government.’ Mr Blair is blamed by petulant commentators for failing after six years in power to give us the excellent public services which we demand. But what is really astonishing, given the Stalinist manner in which they are run, is that our public services work as well as they do.
If you want to see the Labour party being true to itself, look at the way it is trying to ensure equality for the fox. Its policy of banning foxhunting, which combines vicious class prejudice with wilful and sentimental ignorance about country life, will have the effect of making life much worse for foxes, but what a warm glow of satisfaction it will give to hundreds of middle-class Labour MPs. These are the kind of people Mr Blair has to deal with, and for the most part he has done it brilliantly. He has joined George Bush’s hunt for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein — an extraordinary thing for a leader of the British Labour party, and one who until 1997 lived and moved among north London socialists, to have managed to do. When Mr Blair goes, we shall look back on him as a man whose words carried far more weight in Washington than those of his successors will. As I said, we shall miss him.
Peter Oborne is away.
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