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'Philistinism and Cultural Renewal':
Essays on Education
by Tony McManus

New Labour and the Poverty of Ideas (2001)

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[The footnotes in this essay have been added.]

You may know the joke-- how many Labour politicians does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer - Labour doesn't change anything.

It doesn't stop them pretending though. Take the commitment to 'end poverty'. I know New Labour is, to the gravespinning embarrassment of its founders, an anti-intellectual party, but surely there must be enough of a whisper from the ghosts of the ideas of their past blowing faintly in the cellars of New Labour minds to tell them that to abolish poverty is to abolish capitalism? Or do they think that the captains of industry, the gnomes of Zurich and the merchants of Venice, actually like the idea of most of the world having not so that they may have? Do they seriously think that these pilots of the great economic ship only need to be told to open this hatch or lower that craft and everyone can get on board instead of floundering about in the water, in the cold, among the sharks, trying to keep up? If it's as easy as that, how come they never worked it out before?

The headmen of capitalism, some of whom are women (why didn't capitalism collapse when all those caring sharing female qualities got into the poop, onto the lawn and up the lagoon?), have always known that, in the words of Pelagius, 'the one cause of the many poor is the few rich'. They know that if you want your summer fruit and veg cheap and in winter, if you want your car streamlined and your PC online, if you want your wardrobe trendy, full and cheap ... in short, if you want your reality virtual, then half the world's children must work all hours of the day for wages that wouldn't buy you a night in at the screen, the sweat shops of the world's 'developing' countries must hum, the rocks of the earth must be turned over for 'raw materials' by miners whose disfigurements, disabilities and deaths will not feature in the price you have to pay. In short, the poor get their reality real. But all at a safe distance, of course. We will not be suffered to hear their cries, smell their sweat or see their broken bodies. And if they get a little close to home, if they start appearing on the streets, wrapped in blankets and begging, well, what are the police for?

I don't suppose they like it, those drivers of the 'global economy', but they assume that this is the way things are and they believe that 'there is no alternative', a belief given grounds by the failure of Marxism whether in the hands of serious people as in the old Soviet Union or pretendy people as in the British Labour Party. Why can't New Labour just get real and say, 'Look, this is, you know, the nasty global economy, actually and I myself personally can't, sort of, do anything about, you know, it, but, actually, we can, sort of, help a little here and there, you know, maybe'? It's the dishonesty and hypocrisy that sticks in the craw. Unfortunately, it seems to go with the job. And as the convert is always the zealot, let's focus on that ex-missionary for the socialist alternative, the man once the apostle for the redistribution of wealth, now the almoner for the redistribution of taxes - away from the rich; the man now known as Prudence Iron Broon[1] but whose real name, as I shall demonstrate, is Santa Claus.

A politician's job is to raise taxes and any politician who claims to 'cut taxes' is a liar. A Chancellor's job is to decide whence the taxes are to be raised and how they are to be spent. Cuts in income tax have only one purpose - to fill the pockets of the already well-off who are the only ones with enough money to benefit from a penny off here and there. But it keeps them happy and on-side and that is just as well because when the rich are unhappy, they shout. Of course, one person's tax-cut is everybody else's public service cut - after all, New Labour may have the remarkable ability to coin clichés, but it cannot coin currency - so the pokes of the patricians jangle because the coffers of the community echo in emptiness. But when the poor are made unhappy they become even quieter, they slink into the silence which surrounds their blanket presence on the streets. So who cares?

Ah, there's the weasely word, though - 'cares'. 'Caring and sharing' is what sentimental New Labour wants to be all about. They have to run a capitalist economy but they need to pretend to abolish the poor. No wonder they all smile all the time. It's not just because they've all been on one of those SCOTVEC [2] Management courses on the use of body language, eye contact and shoulder pads (although they have), it's because they've worked out a way to run a capitalist economy and feel good about themselves while doing it.

So, having left the rich free to become richer at everyone else's expense, and having saved a billion here and a million there at the expense of the community, Prudence Iron Broon arrives every so often down the aerial cable on your chimney and onto the hearth of your television screen with a sackful of loot. He tells the homeless they are going to benefit from his largesse to the tune of x-billion pound, for the children (how they love that word) in our schools it's y-billion, for the hospitals which care for our sick and elderly (doesn't it just roll lugubriously of the tongues of the tribunes) it's z-billion. And every time a penny of the loot is spent over the period between these bouts of largesse, we are reminded of the x, y or z billion so that we think how good these people are, forever spending on us and our needs while running the horrible global economy so efficiently at the same time.

This is Santa Claus economics and it is practised by Micky Mouse politicians. It is anti-democratic because it banishes the community from the debate and the decision-making and pretends that it is all down to the cherubic Chancellor and the beatific Blair. But the really, truly awful aspect of all this is that they clearly think we are too stupid to realise that every pound they spend on the community comes from the hundred they took from it in the first place, that the community is kept out of the House so that it can be robbed.

But Labour needs its people stupid which is why it is not kidding about education. It wants to see an end to it. Some of us knew, when Tony Blair said his first three priorities were 'education, education, education', that we were not hearing a promise, but a threat. New Labour hates real education. Knowledge? Ideas? The mind? Critical thought? Imaginative thinking? Try suggesting the importance of those at a New Labour meeting and the fingers would go up in crosses before the frightened faces. You'd go home to find your phone had started making clicking noises and your buckets had been given a going over.

But these are the values and aims of genuine educational processes and they are being driven from our schools to be replaced by the insidious vocabulary of structures and testing - the language of training. Our schools are oppressed under the tyranny of the ticky box grid - interminable tests which pupils run through, skip round, jump over and collect 'target-hitting' but meaningless certificates for - virtual reality education. Training camps for call centres.

For you cannot run a Santa Claus economy based on the production of tacky goods designed to fail after a year or two, an economy dependent upon the proliferation of ever more moronic 'infotainment' in the electronic media, and at the same time offer a genuine education to youngsters in your schools - you do not want them to end up being able to think critically and independently, to cultivate their imaginations, to know about world cultures and ideas.

And there lies the pathetic short-sightedness of all this dishonesty and hypocrisy. For when the 'global economy', the Orwellian 'knowledge' economy, based upon such flimsy practices and products, collapses into the pit of its own shallowness, who'll be around with the sort of inventive and imaginative minds to revitalise things? No-one at all.

Unless we look to the poor. Nobody cares what they think so maybe that is exactly what they are doing - thinking. Hypocrites, look out.

 

Footnotes

[1, return to reference in text] i.e. Gordon Brown, MP for Kirkcaldy, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK government after 1997.

[2] The Scottish Vocational Education Council, merged in 1998 with the Scottish Examination Board to form the Scottish Qualifications Authority.


(Published Online: 28 June 2006)

Other essays available

Introduction by Lindsay Paterson

Paths of Perception (1997): an essay on the Celtic and European basis of Scottish thought.

Philistinism and Cultural Renewal (2000): a general cultural critique, with particular attention to the state of education.

[This essay] New Labour and the Poverty of Ideas (2001): a political polemic, arguing that the UK Labour government and its predecessors have come close to destroying the intellectual basis for social renewal.

Higher Still and Lower Yet (1997): critique of the reform to the examination system in the senior years of Scottish secondary schools that was put in place between 1994 and 1999.

Inaugural Lecture to the Scottish Association of Teachers of Language and Literature (1999): political activism set in the intellectual context explained in the other essays.

Background paper by Lindsay Paterson

 

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