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Sunday 27 July 2014

The State knows best…of course, it doesn’t!

Where does the responsibilities of the State end and those of the individual begin?   From Plato and Aristotle through to John Rawls and Robert Nozick, this has long been one of the central questions of political philosophy.  Nozick, for instance, argued in favour of a minimal state, ‘limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on.’ When a state takes on more responsibilities than these, he argued, rights will be violated.  Others take a more positive, expansive and interventionist role for the state suggesting that it is only the state that has the coercive power to defend the rights of individuals against those who seek to limit those rights.  It is the defender of the ‘common good’—something generally undefined—and this justifies its restriction of individual rights for the benefit of society as a whole.  Individual rights are justified only where they do not do harm to others—the archetypal view of John  Stuart Mill in his On Liberty published in 1859—but also increasingly where they do not threaten the hegemony of the state.  Far from being the defender of democratic principles, though it will always argue that it is, the state is increasingly technocratic in tone—the notion that the state knows best—and anti-democratic in emphasis calling for political transparency on the one hand while denying it on the other.  It is becoming in Hobbesian terms, ‘the leviathan’.
Across the gamut of things that affect the individual—personal morality, health, education and so on—the state now takes the view that it knows best and seeks to regulate individuals’ lives effectively emasculating individual choice.  Take, for instance, the issue of students taking time off school during term time.  Recent regulations now make this not only unacceptable but, because head teachers can now imposed fines of parents who do so, can result in individuals having a criminal record if they refuse to pay the fines and are taken to court.  The justification for this is that students should be in school learning and not enjoying early holidays so parents can escape the exorbitant increases charged by travel companies during the school holidays.  This then appears, at least in the eyes of the Department for Education, to result in the poor standing of British students in the global tests such as Pisa, an argument that I find completely unconvincing.  Just how many students were taken out of school for holidays and when?  In my experience, this practice was most prevalent in the last week of the Summer term and then only affected a small number of students.  In 2004, we conducted a survey in my school and found that, of 1,300 students, only 21 were absent because of holidays in the final week of the Summer term.  Now, you may argue, that this is too many and why can’t parents use the six week break to go on holiday but if the alternative is pulling your kids out of school for the last week or no holiday at all then the question is whether a break with all the family together is more important than what is often a fairly relaxed last week of term. 
Of greater concern in tightening up the rules is that what would in the past have been seen as an acceptable absence is often no longer seen in that light.  As a result, students have been refused permission to attend family weddings, funerals, visits to terminally-ill grandparents  and even denied permission when their doctors have said they need a break.  This has placed parents in the unenviable position of either accepting the schools’ decisions or doing what they feel is in their families’ interests and paying a fine.  To be fair it also places head teachers in the often invidious position of having to decide whether to apply the letter of the rules or risk seeing their absence rates go up—a cardinal sin as far as Ofsted is concerned.  The state appears to have taken the view that it has the right to determine what is best for the family when the evidence suggests that students do no lose out by missing lessons in school.  Let me pose the question…a student misses a week of lessons to go on a school trip to Paris to study Art so no Maths, English, History and so on for that week but that’s not an unexplained absence, while if a student misses a day’s lessons to attend a family funeral it is, so does the state really know what’s best?

Tuesday 15 July 2014

The Massacre of the Men in Grey Suits: how not to reshuffle your Cabinet!

With less than a year until the next General Election, it was inevitable that the Prime Minister would reshuffle his Cabinet.  Like Harold Macmillan in 1962, David Cameron has gone for a substantial revision of his top team giving it a more euro-sceptic and media-savvy focus.  Gone are many of those moderating middle-aged men in grey suits who have dominated both Cabinet and junior government posts and in come younger ministers, including a significant number of women.  Some of those dropped from the Cabinet, such as Sir George Young and Ken Clarke, are in their seventies and it is not surprising that they have stood aside from their often arduous ministerial posts.  Others, including Owen Paterson—whose lamentable performance during the floods earlier this year makes one wonder why he was still in post anyway—David Willetts, Alan Duncan and Damian Green are two decades younger but have decided that life on the backbenches after 2015 or life beyond the hallowed halls of Westminster beckoned. 
William Hague
Several senior ministers are staying in post: George Osborne, and Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt and Iain Duncan Smith.  William Hague has decided to leave parliamentary politics in 2015 to spend more time with his writing—apparently a history of Foreign Secretaries is forthcoming--and, of course, his family and has left the Foreign Office but will act as de facto deputy Prime Minister and play a central role in the campaign for a second Conservative government.  His is an understandable, if unexpected, decision giving him the flexibility and time to do other things.  With Philip Hammond now in the Foreign Office, after his stint at Transport and Defence, political experience has replaced political experience but with a more euro-sceptic edge. The move of Michael Gove from education to become Chief Whip and his ‘enhanced role in campaigning and doing broadcast media interviews’ plays to his strengths and also removed him from his increasingly toxic position at education.  Nicky Morgan, his replacement, however, has barely two years’ experience in government.
So David Cameron has gone for youth over experience and has boosted the number of women who sit in Cabinet: I suppose it’s ‘Cameron’s cuties’, an echo of ‘Blair’s babes’.  The problem with this is that while individuals such as Ken Clarke are recognised by the electorate, people like Liz Truss, Jeremy Wright and Nicky Morgan are—whatever their abilities—generally not.  Yes, they have a year for the public to get to know them and their promotions are, at least in part, because they are good communicators. But there is a problem.  An increasing proportion of those who vote are over 55 so you have to ask how will the reshuffle go down with the ‘grey vote’?    Well, if you’re 60 and have just been moved aside to make way for younger people in the workplace, not very well at all.  It reinforces the view that experience really doesn’t count for much and that all that matters is youth and appearance—substance does not matter.  So is the reshuffle an unashamed electoral ploy to appeal to the younger voter?  Perhaps yes, but if that is the case then it’s doomed to failure.  Making your Cabinet appear more cuddly may not be the way to go.  Whether we like it or not—and this is something that David Cameron has rightly rejected—is that many people over 70 still remain suspicious of women in top jobs and in some cases have an intense antipathy to it.  It’s not something I agree with at all but it remains an electoral reality and an electoral risk, though one to my mind absolutely necessary to take.