Tim Black - semi-soothscribe

Tim Black writes that "Removing the red tape is the easy part" on Spiked:

But there is more to Gove’s and Young’s proposals than nostalgia and harrumphing. They betray an awareness that our autonomy has been severely eroded, that our ability as adults to exercise authority over our own lives, and those of our children, is no longer something to be assumed as a right. This is a genuine problem. And it is a problem that New Labour exacerbated by allowing the state to fill the breach, taking responsibility for things that we as adults would once have taken spontaneous responsibility for ourselves.

The health-and-safety culture and the reams of concomitant red tape, for instance, didn’t grow to their currently grotesque proportions because New Labour was besotted with the idea of having a really big, bureaucratic state edifice complete with loads of rules and regulations.[1] Rather, the expansion of health and safety arose as a response to an increasing risk consciousness germinating in civil society.

And the collapse of discipline in schools, the wariness of teachers around pupils, was not the result of wild and wacky liberal theorems introduced by the wild and wacky New Labour apparatchiks.[2] Rather, discipline in schools became problematic because adult authority had become problematic. The basis of discipline lies in an adult’s informal exercise of their authority, which in a pedagogical situation derives from their knowledge of their subject – and all of that has been thoroughly undermined. Hence New Labour both prostrated teachers before children and persistently grafted other learning imperatives on to the curriculum.[3]

1. Chicken and egg. The New Labour "project" was to create an overwhelming statist clientele, and the rules and regulations were a means to that end. That it exploited the lowmid "there orter be a law" reflex and the willingness of people to surrender autonomy is undeniable - but the over-reach was part of a calculated attempt to make Labour the party of government.
2. The "wild and wacky" social engineering theorems of the marxhorroid teacher unions do indeed predate New Labour, but they were and are the core constituency of the Labour party.
3. For a generation before the 1997 election, teachers in England slavishly followed every pedagogical fad emerging from the USA, with identical results. New Labour tried to instill some top-down discipline in what had become a piggy-bank for literate skivers, but the demoralisation came from the grass roots.