WHAT stood out like a sore thumb when the emergency question was put to Home Secretary May in the House of Commons, on Monday afternoon, concerning her civil war with Education Secretary Gove, is that she brazenly refused to answer it.
Labour Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper stated: ‘We ask the Home Secretary to make a statement regarding her conduct regarding the government’s action in and around preventing extremism. . . She said that she did not authorise the publication of the letter on the website but then why did she not insist that the letter was removed, rather then leaving it in place on the Home Office website for three days.’
She added: ‘Section 251 of the Ministerial Code makes it clear that the privacy of opinions expressed in cabinet and ministerial correspondence should be maintained. So did she and her department break the Ministerial Code?’
May brazenly refused to answer, leaving Cooper standing with her mouth wide open in astonishment. Gove adopted the same tactic, in his dealing with Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt, leaving him in the same state of bemusement. He too refused to call for Gove to resign, and for the government to go.
Labour when faced with a government that is at war with itself, as well as with the working class, allowed it to get away with treating parliament and the working class with extreme contempt by refusing to make the demand for resignation.
Another high point of the occasion was that the Prime Minister Cameron was not even in the House of Commons to defend his party and his warring and bruised ministers – he ran away to Sweden to continue his campaign over who should be the next EU Commissioner.
Cameron is desperately seeking to avoid carrying out his pledge that if Jean Claude Juncker becomes the next EU Commissioner he will make sure that the UK is on its way out of the EU by bringing forward the In-Out EU referendum that he pledged to have in 2017. However such is the depth of the Tory crisis, the UK may not be in existence after September 2014, if Scotland votes ‘yes’, on a ballot, given the go-ahead by the Tory government for Scotland to quit the UK.
Yesterday the infighting continued with Gove and his Ofsted Chief continuing to fall out. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, said ‘minds have been changed’ over his suggestion for no-notice school inspections, which are now to go ahead. He pointed out that the proposal was shelved by Education Secretary Michael Gove two years ago.
Senior sources in the Department for Education speaking for Gove said Wilshaw was ‘mis-remembering’ events, and that Wilshaw and Gove discussed the idea two years ago but jointly agreed not to proceed with snap inspections because of opposition from some of the teaching unions. They asserted that the Ofsted chief, since then, had chosen not to, and Gove had now written to him urging him to do so.
In fact Gove is now putting the five ‘Trojan Horse’ schools into special measures. A sixth school has also been labelled inadequate for its poor educational standards. 12 schools have been told that they need to improve.
Control over education in Birmingham is being taken away from the Birmingham council and being put under the government’s academisation, that is privatisation programme, under which there are no inspections.
The trade unions must now take action, since Labour refuses to defend the state education system from the attacks of Gove and the Tory-led coalition. There must be no regime of ‘instant inspections’. Ofsted must be disbanded, the privatised academies and Free Schools must be wound up and secular state education maintained.
Schools must remain under the democratic control of city and town councils, and not be put under government dictatorship to be privatised. Plans for payment by results must be scrapped and national bargaining and national agreements made by the trade unions must be respected.
We must not allow privatisation to be carried out under the cloak of an anti-Islamic campaign by the Tories and the state apparatus.
This is the time for all teaching unions to unite to take strike action to defend free state education, halt privatisation, and oppose the anti-Islamic campaign that the Tories are using to suggest that opposition to Ofsted, free schools, academies and instant inspections of schools, is giving support to terrorism.
