The Margaret Beckett prize for making a problem worse

Here is my first 2008 nomination for the Margaret Beckett award, for spotting a problem and proposing action guaranteed to make it worse. It goes to those Labour MPs who propose to deal with the issue of parents allegedly "discovering" a religious faith in order to get their children into faith schools, by blocking the expansion of such schools.

Margaret Beckett was the Secretary of State responsible for introducing the Single Farm Payment regime for handing out EU farm and rural support money. Her department identified "Deprived areas" and "Exceptionally Deprived Areas" and set out to make them even more deprived by making disproportionately large cuts in farm support in those areas. (The apparent objective was to drive people out of farming.) Mrs Beckett has returned to the backbenches, but her Single Farm Payments legacy is still causing great hardship to farmers in Copeland and elsewhere and stands as the classic example of identifying a problem and exacerbating it.

However, it appears that Labour MPs have not lost the talent for making problems worse. It is reported in The Times today that large numbers of parents have started churchgoing at the stage in their children's education where this will increase their chances of getting into faith-based schools.

Anyone with even the most borderline capability for rational thought ought to be able to work out that, if parents really are manufacturing a religious commitment, this would only make sense if the parents concerned think that faith schools will offer their children a better eduction and expect those schools to be oversubscribed.

So what do Labour MPs propose? According to The Times, they are trying to stop any expansion of the very schools which parents want to get their children into. A move guaranteed to exacerbate the problem, ensure that they remain oversubscribed, and give parents even more incentive to play the system than might otherwise be the case.

As Jeremy Clarkson might have said, you couldn't make it up!

Any other nominations for the Margaret Beckett award ?

Comments

Newmania said…
I wonder about one detail of your super post .The Damascene conversion simultaneous with ones children reaching school age is much smirked at but there is also the strange fact that 70% of us will not quite relinquish a connection with the church often attending seasonal Services and protesting a Fuzzy Fidelity.
I can only speak for my own family but we began to drift back to church you might cynically say , well in advance .It was actually part of a long process of increasing dis-satisfaction with atheism or nothing -ism and some thought about how to reconcile honest doubts about aspects of Christianity with Church attendance.
So I`m not sure you can entirely accuse those whose Church going may be convenient with manufactured faith. Perhaps they previously had a manufactured ‘lack-of-faith’.
On your real subject ,wittily put and quite right of course. There is a deeply explicable phenomenon of people making Conservative choices for their children even if the positions they publicly hold are quite the reverse. How many Liberals send their own kidz to school failing to cope with eight languages? Precious few and the innumerable examples of Labour hypocrisy will be joined by Clog`s brood in due. There are few subjects more rendered as gaseous with cant than education

We are trapped somewhat in the problem of faith school by the incursion of aggressive Islam. We cannot say we will allow Catholic and C of E schools but not those founded on beliefs inimical to our society like Islam. Why not devil worship schools or Star Trek schools , registered religions I believe, and hardly loopier than Scientology.
Is this is partly because we do not have respectable scaffolding for the Communitarian beliefs of the majority ? In such philosophical systems rights are derived from membership of a community variously defined paying into it and being responsible for its maintenance. This to some extent opposes the Liberal idea of deriving rights merely from membership of the human race ....although the community will embrace many of the same values in our case. Well anyway that Baggini book explains it better...( much).

Cheerio
2:07 pm
Chris Whiteside said…
Paul, that's a really good point which has been almost entirely missed in the debate on this issue.

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm with David Cameron that we should not be trying to put up roadblocks against people who are trying to get into church schools.

This is not because I think it is OK to lie about your religious convictions to try to improve your children's education. It's because I don't think we have any reliable methods of judging whether people actually are doing so.

One of the wisest rulers this country ever had (Elizabeth the First) once said that she had no wish to make "windows into men's souls".

And that is precisely what those MPs and commentators who are trying to restrict access of children to faith schools on the basis of their estimate of the sincerity of the parents of those children are trying to do.
10:59 pm
Newmania said…
David Cameron is spot on and Robinson looked more of a fraud than usual on Question Time pontificating about that people will do to avoid the pre prison round the corner.
12:26 am
Chris Whiteside said…
Indeed. I thought Robinson's contribution to Question Time was doubly ironic in that

1) Robinson accused Oliver Letwin of sounding sanctimonious about Hain's resignation, and then sounded far more sanctimonious himself when he accused David Cameron of encouraging people to lie to get their children into a good school, and

2) Robinson piled on the moral outrage about how awful it was that David Cameron was supposedly encouraging people to lie, when that claim itself was, to put it mildly, rather disengenuously overstating DC's position.
12:39 am
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