EDUCATION Secretary Michael Gove, who has carried forward the privatisation battle against the teaching trade unions, and driven forward the Free School-Academy agenda, has been forced to apologise to the prime minister after a bitter no-holds-barred row with Home Secretary May. This threatened and still threatens to bring the government down.
Gove’s latest anti-working class campaign is one in which he advocates cutting the child benefit of parents as their punishment if their children miss school lessons!
This is a starve them back to school policy that once again emphasises just why Gove is a hero of the right wing!
His opponent May, as Home Secretary, has been attempting to preside over secret trials and a whole body of dictatorial legislation, as well as cruel deportations. She has carved out a reputation as a woman capable of keeping the state forces in order, witness her role as the hammer of the Police Federation.
She has now been forced to fire her special advisor who was conducting the media war of incitement against Gove.
Today, Gove has to make a statement to the House of Commons over the row with May which took the form that either the Home Office or the Education Department was and is encouraging ‘Islamic Extremists’.
The Home Office says that schools that previously were adjudged to be ‘excellent’ by Ofsted were in fact being used by Islamists as a Trojan Horse to smuggle in Islamic practices, and that an Ofsted inspector was, in fact, one of the Trojans involved.
Schools in the Birmingham area are now being re-evaluated by Ofsted and are expected to have their excellent rating removed and to be put into care, with the education of their pupils blighted, as well as the reputation of their teachers.
Gove’s people had been saying that the Home Office is unconcerned about Islamists until they actually take up arms.
In fact, Gove and May are part of a government that was helping Islamists to go to Syria to fight Assad with bomb and bullet and kill large numbers of people. Until recently’ they were treated as heroes.
This policy has now been turned into its opposite and Islamists who went to Syria are being arrested on sight as soon as they return, lest they bomb Britain, and special measures are already being taken against their families, with arrest being threatened if any seek to travel eastwards.
Now, even the loyalty of Ofsted inspectors is suspect, so extraordinary has this change of policy and the hysteria become.
However, this is just the form that the struggle is taking. Its essence is that both Gove and May want to succeed Cameron. They have actually begun the struggle for the leadership of the Tory Party, since they reason that Cameron might fall even before the general election.
There is the Scottish referendum in September, and there is Cameron’s threat that if his bluff is called by the EU he will bring forward the In-Out referendum on the EU.
At the same time, the Tories are losing tens of thousands of members and millions of voters to UKIP.
A further deepening of this debacle will see both Cameron and Osborne further discredited, and even blamed for the crisis.
This is why Gove and May have broken ranks and begun their campaign for the Tory leadership.
In this situation of massive crisis, all that the feeble Labourites can do is to demand that May apologises as well as Gove!
A real opposition would demand today in parliament that May and Gove immediately resign and that there be an immediate general election!
The answer of the working class to the intensifying crisis of the Tories must be to force the TUC to call an indefinite general strike NOW to bring down this coalition and bring in a workers government and socialism.
The misrule of the bankers and bosses must be replaced by their expropriation and a planned socialist economy which will produce to satisfy peoples’ needs and not to provide massive profits for a ruling class whose day is done.
