Nick Cohen bigging up Alan Johnson!
In this week's Evening Standard, which presumably no-one read as there were papers better and free of charge available:AS THE Standard's poll on the cataclysmic drop in Labour support suggests, the Government could pay a heavy price for not realising that London is as much a Labour heartland as the Welsh valleys or South Yorkshire. It needs its champion in the movement, and one is lurking in the Cabinet in the beguiling form of Alan Johnson.
He's sharp, witty, devious and has the brass neck to sell the Tower to a tourist. Outsiders may find these qualities reprehensible, but we like them here, and Labour would do well to put him in charge of its battle to regain votes in London.
So it rules out 'Nick Cohen's mate' as a replacement for 'Not the Minister' if 'Not the Minister' was to become a Minister.
Incidentally the piece also gives us another example of just how right-wing he has become. In another boiler-plate piece on grammar schools he argues:
But nothing will really change until politicians are prepared to allow the state system to compete with the private schools by breaking the taboo on selection by ability and giving the brightest children from all backgrounds the elite education they deserve.
Elite? He's not pulling his punches, is he? Of course the best research available shows what anyone who thinks about it for a second realises - Cohen would have been more accurate to have said:
by breaking the taboo on selection by ability and giving the vast majority of children from poorer backgrounds a worse education in secondary moderns.
It's also important to note that this idea that comprehensive schools mean 'selection by house price' and a secondary modern system doesn't is complete nonsense. For a start the thesis has not really been proven, if you think about it it requires a huge degree of housing mobility and segregation that doesn't fit in with the reality. But also of course it would be worse under the secondary moderns. For in this system 80% attend secondary moderns, which would have catchment areas identical to the schools they replaced, and so there would be no difference. But the 20% who attend the grammar school we know are drawn overwhelmingly from the middle-classes, who presumably have expensive houses.
None of these arguments, note, mean grammar schools are a bad idea - the research found that total education achievement was slightly higher, although the distributions were much more skewed (towards the wealthy). And you could argue for instance that middle-class families pay more income tax and thus deserve the best education possible, and their children should not get fewer As to help others. But it means Cohen's argument is rot, and I suspect he knows it - that this issue is being used as a marker in his slow conversion to Phillipism.
posted by Matthew @ 9/08/2006 09:54:00 PM
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