Of Learning, Labour, and Liberalism

It has become news to me that Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, has proposed removing important loopholes from recent Education Acts to place local schools under even greater threat of academisation. The planned removal of a particularly important section for challenging academies, regulation 46 of the School Governance England 2012, and other regulations could mean that schools could end up being forced into academy status without any local consultation or any recourse at all. Academies not only take local schools out of democratically accountable control, but also generally do not even improve the standards of the school in question (some academies have had worse results); free schools are worse still because of the lack of a legal requirement for free schools to employ only properly qualified teachers. My Green colleague in Milton Keynes, Samantha Pancheri, has rightly said that business interests have no place in our schools-for that matter, only the interests of parents, teachers, children, and the community should be valued and respected in schools of any kind. In just a few years we have seen the damage academisation has done to our education as a whole-we must do as much as possible to stop schools being converted into academies or free schools.

With the Labour leadership election heating up, notable left-winger Jeremy Corbyn has entered the ring, but so far has only gained three endorsements compared to the 52 received by Andy Burnham and the 32 received by Yvette Cooper, wife of ex-MP Ed Balls; the current make-up of Labour MPs makes gaining 35 nominations an unlikely possibility for Jeremy. My position is that with the Labour right once again dominating these elections, with no realistic chance of being defeated, the remaining committed left-wing Labour MPs who often voted with Caroline Lucas in the last Parliament when it mattered, not just Jeremy Corbyn but also John McDonnell, Dennis Skinner et al. would in my opinion be better off defecting to the Green Party (since many of their views are now more in step with the Green Party than with the current Labour Party) rather than staying in the Labour Party and likely watch it drift further to the right (even though a drift to the right would just cause more damage to Labour rather than allow it to win over Conservative and UKIP voters).

Going to the Liberal Democrats, their leadership contest's nominations have just closed, and as expected, it is Tim Farron vs. Norman Lamb. In light of the sad and recent death of former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy at the age of just 55, who in 2005 led the Liberal Democrats to their highest strength since the 1930s before his alcohol problems ended his leadership of them, Tim Farron just might yet again prove that rumours of the Liberal Democrats' slow but sure demise are once again exaggerated if he wins, even though unlike in previous nadirs of the Liberals/Liberal Democrats (1950s, early 1970s, 1988-90), the Green Party is not only reasonably strong, but here to stay and staying on the left track.

Alan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more