The last conceivable reason to vote Tory has just been eliminated
BBC NEWS | Politics | Cameron warning to grammar rebels
Back in the 1970s, my parents considered voting Tory, at least briefly. I’m not sure whether they did or not, of course, because, as good democrats, they didn’t say how they voted. But I remember vividly my mother saying “perhaps I’ll have to vote Conservative — to save our schools”. Many years later, as a very new parliamentary candidate, I attended an NUT meeting to put forward the Liberal-Democrat view (abolition of tuition fees, that sort of thing). By this time NUT power had faded greatly, and most union-joining teachers were members of the NASUWT. But I didn’t know this. I was treated to a spectacle of hard-left politics, which had seemingly arrived out of a time-warp. An aging teacher — though still dressed for mid to late twenties — explained how British education was briefly on the right track during the early 1970s when teachers went on strike and occupied a school somewhere, but for the rest was a complete failure. People who were around at the time — I must have been five or six — doubtless remember this, but I wasn’t able to find any record through an admittedly cursory search of Google and Wikipedia.
In any case, the one policy which can be said to be consistent with the Conservatives right the way through from the 1970s was on education, and the preservation of grammar schools. Conservatives have been pro-Europe and anti-Europe, pro and anti monetarist, pro-war in Iraq and anti (although only after it became unpopular), etc etc. That is, until last week, when in a scene of great bathos, David Cameron unceremoniously turned his back on grammar schools and decided to back New Labour’s Academies. (more…)