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Anthony O'Hear: The Riddle of the Voucher, Part Two

By Anthony O'Hear, Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University, and editor of Philosophy journal.

Back in 1986, Arthur Seldon published an essay entitled ‘The Riddle of the Voucher’. The riddle was to explain why educational vouchers, having seen off all the intellectual and bureaucratic arguments against them the early 1980s, then disappeared from political view. Those who can think back that far will recall that the moral argument in favour of vouchers was that it put control of children’s education where it should belong, in the hands of their parents. They would then be able fulfil their proper role in relation to the up-bringing of their children, a source of both duty and happiness.

This is the situation of parents who send their children to independent schools (and who often make considerable sacrifices to do so), but it is not the case with the 93% of pupils in the state sector, many of whose parents simply could not contemplate independent education. For all the governmental rhetoric of choice, the 93% simply have to go where the state and its bureaucrats see fit, according to its crazily restrictive admissions codes, a situation actually high-lighted by the introduction of ‘free’ schools. For once these are over-subscribed, the rest are left only the option of the very schools the free schools were introduced to avoid.

An independent school which fails to satisfy its customers will close in short order. This is not the case with state schools, whose clientele are not customers so much as suppliants, who have to be grateful for what they get (which, to compound the insult, is actually paid for out of their taxes). Hardly surprising then, that being denied even minimum influence over their children’s education, many parents simply opt out of any interest or responsibility. Hardly surprising that too many state schools, not subject to minimal economic discipline, coast along in complacent mediocrity or worse, the damage compounded by the attempts of successive governments to regulate standards by otiose regulation and ideologically driven inspection.

One nation

By Anthony O'Hear, Professor of Philosophy at Buckingham University, and editor of Philosophy journal.

Following Ed Miliband’s evocation of ‘one nation’ at his party conference, various Conservative big-wigs immediately began lamenting this theft of their clothes.  But few seemed to have reflected on what might be involved in ‘one nation’, particularly in Miliband’s understanding of the phrase, which is very un-conservative indeed, the very last thing we should fighting to own.

We can leave aside the extent to which Disraeli was a conservative, perceptive as he was in identifying the intrinsic conservatism of the English working class. We should focus rather on ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer’, or its variants, that perennial siren call of tyrants and demagogues. And we should ask whether in the Miliband vision, Fuhrers aside, ein Reich will require more than ein Partei.

Certainly it involves far more than a sense of equal rights under a shared constitution. For one of Miliband’s stripe, one nationhood means one education system, one system of health and child care, one trajectory for each citizen from cradle to grave. There will be one ‘level playing field’, ironing out differences of investment between different parts of the nation, and centralised regulation of pretty well everything that moves, from railways to power utilities to the press and the media. Miliband’s nation is also one all-inclusive nation, supposedly embracing all differences in a superficially soft relativism, but enforced by ever more petty systems of thought and speech control.