Ross McKibbin

In 1931, as the European banking system seemed to be collapsing, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter observed that people felt the ground giving way beneath them, and not merely those with bank accounts. Many in Britain and America must be experiencing similar tremors now. Yet, in Britain at least, there are huge differences between 1931 and today.

In 1964, Harold Wilson described the record of the (outgoing) Conservative government as ‘13 wasted years’. If the present Parliament lasts its full term – as seems likely – the electorate will be asked to pass judgment on 13 years of Labour rule. Voters today seem to have the same view of Labour as Wilson had of the Tories all those years ago. Many who once wished Labour well are now wondering whether they can vote Labour at all, or whether they should stop voting tactically. This is an important decision: the Labour majorities in the last three elections have been much enlarged by people choosing to vote for the candidate thought most likely to defeat the Tory – a spontaneous alternative vote. Since the country’s politicians have refused to reform the country’s medieval system of voting, the electorate has reformed it for itself. But it is a reform without any statutory basis: people can choose to practise it or not. Labour thus faces a double threat. Not merely that people will no longer vote Labour, but that they will vote as they really want to – Lib Dem, for example – whatever the consequences. And they will do so because they no longer believe keeping the Tories out is the main object of politics. Labour’s position, though not irrecoverable, is therefore serious, approaching desperate.

The modern history of English secondary education begins with the 1944 Education Act, usually known as the Butler Act. It was, for better and worse, the most important piece of education legislation of the 20th century, but was expected to reform an educational system already deeply divisive and inequitable. In some ways it promoted the hopes of wartime democracy; in others it betrayed them. It raised the school-leaving age to 15 and made secondary education universal and free. It equalised the payment of teachers in all state secondary schools and devised procedures by which nearly all the religious elementary schools were incorporated into the state system. It didn’t specify what kind of secondary education local authorities should establish, and as a result they fell back on what already existed and what conventional opinion thought appropriate: grammar schools for the academically inclined, junior technical schools for those with superior technical aptitudes and secondary moderns for those of a ‘practical’ turn of mind.

As a child in an Australian kindergarten in the 1940s one of my first memories is of wrapping up dried fruit to send to the children of Britain. Since I strongly disliked dried fruit and thought no one would eat it unless they had to, I felt deeply the level of deprivation to which British children had been reduced. These memories were refreshed by reading Austerity Britain, David...