Sir Keir Starmer is sometimes described as having ruthlessly disposed of the Labour left after securing the leadership. Yet whilst his party is clearly much improved compared to the era of Jeremy Corbyn, it seems increasingly that this claim has been overstated.
As we noted last week, the King’s Speech was very much not that of a Labour Party which had totally conquered its worst instincts. Instead, a useful but fitful pro-growth agenda – see today’s announcement that the Government is going to have its own tilt at reforming the nutrient neutrality rules delaying housebuilding – sits alongside plenty of legislation that will work entirely against it.
Where Rachel Reeves focuses her attention we get new vehicles for borrowing private finance for infrastructure investment, such as Great British Energy; wherever the Sauronic eye of the Chancellor is absent we see such vehicles scrapped, such as railways and, unfortunately, schools.
Beyond the spiteful VAT raid on private schools, education policy didn’t play a big role in the general election. Whatever the demerits of that policy – which won’t raise much money and risks forcing more parents back into the state sector, at a cost of thousands of pounds per child per year – one might have hoped the raid was a sop to the left, rather than a direction of travel.
After all, Starmer did seem to have curbed Bridget Phillipson’s worst instincts on some issues. Early suggestions that Labour would make childcare a graduate profession – adding years of recruitment delays and extra hiring costs to a sector that already has steep shortages – have gone nowhere.
But no. We are instead going to see a sharp rolling back of isolation booths and other policies designed to curb extremely bad behaviour; an everything-bagel broadening of the National Curriculum to reverse the previous Government’s emphasis on core academic subjects; and the reimposition of that new curriculum on academies and free schools, a big step back towards the centralised, homogenous school system favoured by the worst elements of the education and teaching establishment.
The Conservatives must take some share of the blame here: 14 years ought to have been more than long enough to bed in a total transformation of the school system, but the energy to drive forward the free school revolution seemed to peter out once Michael Gove left office.
But it is still remarkable to see Labour lapsing so quickly into policies that will make a rod for its own back. These policies will lower standards, and make schools more unpleasant to teach and learn in by stripping them of the power to remove seriously disruptive pupils. At least the Conservatives will have something they can wholeheartedly oppose without seeming unconstructive.