Committing Politics In Britain

HERE IN the United States our leaders are busy rushing a immigration amnesty bill to the president’s desk before the voters notice and get mobilized against it. The last thing they want is an open discussion of the issues.

But in Britain Conservative Party leader David Cameron is having an open discussion of education policy with his Tory Party rank-and-file. In an op-ed in the London Times he writes:

This is the week when the Conservative Party got serious about education reform. Our approach rests on two things. First, an instinctive Conservative belief in rigour, parental choice and competition as the best way of raising standards. Secondly, on the evidence of what works – both in Britain and around the world.

That’s a polite way of saying that his spokesman’s speech the previous week about “grammar schools” set off a firestorm of criticism. Many Tories want a return to academic, selective grammar schools and away from the current system of “bog-standard” comprehensive secondary schools.

But you have to give Cameron a tip of the hat. He didn’t hide from his critics. He came right out and confronted them.

First thing he cite in his article is the success of school choice in Sweden, the Netherlands, and “some states in the US.”

Oh? You didn’t know that they have school choice in socialist Sweden and liberal Netherlands? No doubt you get your information from the mainstream media. But here at Road to the Middle Class we are right on top of it.

Like conservatives in the United States, Cameron wants to avoid “selection” and wants students choosing schools not schools choosing students.

Notice how he gives Tony Blair a half-hearted pat on the back:

David Willetts and I are applying Conservative principles and best-practice education reform from around the world to our schools in England. This is what Tony Blair came to realise was necessary and has been moving towards in the latter stages of his premiership. His education Act last year was a step in the right direction, which is why we backed it.

That issues from his strategic decision to avoid opposition for the sake of opposition. He wants to support good ideas even if they come from the other party.

Of course, he goes on to say that Blair’s party has since given up on reform. Only Conservatives can be trusted to have their hearts in the job. And it doesn’t hurt to talk about discipline in schools.

There’s a word for Cameron’s open advocacy and willingness to debate his party’s critics in public. Politics.

What a concept.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

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Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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