Über-Tony

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 18 · 17 September 1998

From David Tipping

Ben Pimlott omits to mention one of Anthony Crosland’s major contributions to the thinking of his day. At a time when the Labour Party believed in public ownership on moral and economic grounds, he argued that the aims of socialism could be achieved by controlling industry without having to own it. It has taken a long time for (most of) Labour to accept this argument. Today, some of our industries are among the most highly regulated in the world, don’t have full control of their own prices and have constantly to justify themselves to consumer watchdogs. I refer of course to the public util ities, privatised by a Conservative Government. The point is that we had to wait for Thatcher to vindicate Crosland. How very English.

David Tipping
Sherborne, Dorset

From Roy Roebuck

Ben Pimlott (LRB, 3 September) refers to Lord Hattersley as Anthony Crosland’s ‘own disciple’. In fact, Hattersley deserted Crosland in the 1976 leadership election and was told by him, with 1st Airborne Division vigour, to fuck off when he went to explain himself. With disciples like that … It was not, as Pimlott asserts, ‘a mutual unease’ between Crosland and Wilson which kept Crosland from the plum jobs enjoyed by Jenkins. The latter had a gullible fan club in the Parliamentary Labour Party which Wilson (wrongly) felt it was prudent to appease.

Roy Roebuck
London N1

Vol. 20 No. 19 · 1 October 1998

From Christopher Price

Ben Pimlott’s conclusion (LRB, 3 September) about Tony Crosland’s ministerial career – great guy, good thinker, hopeless minister – is, I suspect, a by-product of the consistent denigration of Crosland by the Jenkins pro-Europe camp which never forgave his mild Euroscepticism. The description of his record at Education could not be more inaccurate. Legislative enforcement of comprehensive education would have caused endless bickering with local councils; encouraging them to eliminate eleven-plus selection through a range of different mechanisms on a voluntary basis achieved a rapid cross-party consensus with such astonishing momentum that Mrs Thatcher, when she became Education Minister in 1970, could do nothing to stem the tide. Pimlott is also wrong to say that Crosland was ‘culpable’ in the failure to abolish public schools. Some public schools had wanted a measure of integration in the aftermath of the Second World War, which had hit their finances very hard; but by 1965, with new laboratories built for them gratis by British industry, they were in an immensely powerful economic position once more. The attempt of the Public Schools Commission to integrate them by threatening their charitable status was a nice try but never a runner. Neither local councils nor the public schools themselves wanted any truck with integration. All the postwar ‘one nation’ idealism had dissipated and Britain’s educational apartheid was already re-set in concrete. It is true Crosland disliked the Open University, partly because Jennie Lee, with her exclusive access to Wilson, was using it to eat into his own education budget. But the polytechnics, which he did invent, have just as big a claim (many would say a far bigger one) in terms of access and curriculum development to be ‘the greatest innovation in tertiary education of the age’. No Labour minister since the war has a better record of opening up opportunities to those who would otherwise have been denied them and acting as an advocate for an inclusive education system – not just with mumbled phrases about social exclusion but with a personal integrity which is both refreshing and instructive to look back on today.

Christopher Price
Settle, North Yorkshire

Vol. 20 No. 20 · 15 October 1998

From Ben Pimlott

My review of David Reisman’s books on Tony Crosland was intended to save a political hero from the myth-makers. Christopher Price (Letters, 1 October) misinterprets the piece and adds to the obfuscating myth. It also caricatures what I wrote. In particular, I did not conclude that the auth or of The Future of Socialism was a ‘hopeless minister’, as Price suggests. On the con trary, I presented him as a good and successful one, who missed some catches.

Price takes me up on Crosland’s role in the development of post-school learning, implying that I did not give him enough credit for widening access to degree courses. In fact, I stressed that, as education minister, Crosland ‘presided over a heroic expansion of higher education, establishing a proudly innovative tier of "new polytechnics"’.

Price also takes me up on schools, and my criticism of the half-cock way in which Labour launched the comprehensives. This is a matter of opinion. He writes with direct knowledge of the obstacles in the way of a more fundamental reform. Nevertheless, I do not believe that a policy of pushing state grammar schools into the comprehensive scheme without doing any thing about the private sector was the best or only available way of going about it.

The issue was not ‘abolishing the public schools’, but finding a method of bringing good independent schools into the national mainstream – something Labour had long promised, and many teachers and parents wished for. Then it was a widely discussed option: now it would be much harder, if not impossible. Price’s excuse for government paralysis (’Neither local councils nor the public schools themselves wanted any truck with integration’ – i.e. vested interests might have got cross) scarcely disposes of my argument that an opportunity was missed.

But what surprises me most is that Price should think Crosland’s memory needs earnest defending. As I indicated, Crosland was one of the postwar giants, whose writings reflect a deep understanding of politics and society, based on practical participation as much as theory. It detracts from his achievement to paint him as a lost messiah who never made a mistake.

Ben Pimlott
Goldsmiths’ College, London