A Matter Of Faith

The Telegraph reports on the Government’s latest attack today on independent faith schools by the creepily titled Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls.

Since the 1960s, when Labour’s Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland first decided on the importance of controlling society through culture rather than just the economy, the political Left have ideologically pursued a comprehensive state education system whose aim has been ‘equality’ rather than to give children a good and rigorous education.

It should also be said that much of the Left have not actually changed their views or indeed their end goals in any conceivable way. What they have done is simply changed the way in which they have gone about achieving those goals, through culture and social engineering rather than economic means.

What is more, unsurprisingly for a party (the Conservatives) who tend to measure their success in office by how many years they have occupied 10 Downing Street, rather than what they have actually achieved in that time, then they have been completely outmanoeuvred by this fundamental shift in attention by the Left.

In fact, in an effort to remain in office, rather than in power, the Conservatives have consistently accepted and adopted the Left’s proposals on education – especially regarding comprehensive schooling and the reintroduction of academic selection – along with many other issues, as can now be seen once again under the leadership of David Cameron.

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Royal Mail Privatisation

According to BBC News, Lord Mandelson has said that the only way to ‘save’ the Post Office from unprofitability and its huge burden of pension debt is through partial privatisation.

Similarly, Gordon Brown said in a speech in Bristol yesterday that private investment in Royal Mail was imperative in being able to guarantee its £25bn pension fund and maintain a universal postal service.

The strength of feeling on this issue in the Labour party is clearly quite strong. I was in the Lords Gallery on Wednesday when the Labour peer Lord Clarke of Hampstead, who is a former postman, shouted ‘shame on you’ as Lord Mandelson brought the Bill to the House of Lords for a first reading. In the House of Commons well over one hundred Labour MPs have signed an early day motion criticising the Government’s plans to sell a stake in Royal Mail.

Furthermore, in opposition to Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson, Billy Hayes, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, told BBC News that the privatisation plan was ‘baffling’ and just didn’t make any sense. He also said to Sky News:

I don’t want to see Mrs Thatcher’s ideas, Conservative ideas, being introduced by a Labour government. Let’s be clear: 25%, 30%, Peter Mandelson has talked about 49% owned by a foreign company.

That’s not what people in the Labour Party want, that’s not what people in the country want – they want to see a modern Royal Mail.

Yet, despite so much anger and bitter opposition from many of their key supporters, the Labour Government has ploughed on regardless with the privatisation of Royal Mail.

There has been much discussion in the media and in political circles about why Mr Brown and Lord Mandelson would risk the ire of the Unions and a backbench rebellion when the Labour party is in a weak position in the opinion polls. Unsurprisingly most of this speculation has been far wide of the mark.

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The Euromail Transition

The ever honest, truthful and impartial BBC tells us that our Government are backing a report by Richard Hooper which recommends the partial privatisation of Royal Mail and our postal service.

I suppose I could briefly highlight what may seem like an interesting contrast between the likely sale of a longstanding public service to a foreign postal company by our Government and the fact that Labour are still imagined by many to be against the privatisation of public industries – but then, what exactly would be the point?

We should know by now that Labour and the Left haven’t been interested in nationalisation and the ownership of industry for years. Labour’s supposed clause four moment in which Blair amended the Labour party’s constitution and its commitment to ‘secure … the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ was entirely irrelevant.

Decades before that moment there had been a radical revolution in thinking on the Left, since which Leftists have become steadily more interested in bringing about cultural rather than political revolution in order to successfully pursue their social and political agenda. As such the Left and the Labour party haven’t seriously been committed to nationalisation since the early sixties.

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No Action Offered

‘No action offered on migration’ says the BBC News website headline – a phrase derived from a Conservative party press release by the Shadow Immigration Minister, Dominic Grieve.

This comes after Labour’s Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas had been forced to partially backtrack on comments he’d made in an interview with the Times about reducing the number of immigrants entering Britain.

In a post-Times interview, Phil Woolas told the BBC’s One Show:

I think, frankly, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about the cap…

The European Union population can come and go just as we from Britain go and live in Spain, perhaps, or France – so, too, can others come to our country.

So it’s very difficult to see, even if we are in favour of a cap, what it should be.

And here, for once, we have the truth from a Government Minister – well, almost. Phil Woolas is indeed right that there is ‘a lot of nonsense talked about the cap’. It is nonsense because, as even the dim-witted journalists at the BBC have finally grasped:

Immigration from inside the EU cannot be controlled, and neither can a limit be placed on genuine claims for asylum.

We cannot control immigration whatsoever within the European Union as our old friend EU Commission Directive 2004/38/EC put pay to that. However, in his interview with the One Show, Phil Woolas fails to actually mention the elephant in the room (ie. the role of the European Union). To mention the EU directly in British Westminster politics is just not the done thing.

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