The war against the remaining 164 grammar schools in England and Wales will receive what could prove a mortal blow today when anti-selection campaigners in Kent give up their fight. The war against the remaining 164 grammar schools in England and Wales will receive what could prove a mortal blow today when anti-selection campaigners in Kent give up their fight.
As David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, prepares to address the Labour Party conference tomorrow, the campaigners will accuse him of hypocrisy. They will argue that government rules for ballots on the future of grammar schools have made their task impossible.Their decision is a setback for anti-selection campaigners across the country: Kent has more selective schools than any other area. Parents in Ripon decided earlier this year to keep their grammar school and campaigners elsewhere have struggled to collect enough signatures to trigger a ballot. Buckinghamshire parents, however, have just begun a campaign to end the 11-plus.Becky Matthews, a Kent parent, will tell a conference fringe meeting organised by the Campaign for State Education, a parents’ pressure group: “I want Mr Blunkett to tell us tomorrow why he has deliberately engineered a situation where a quarter of a million children in Kent continue to have their education blighted by the 11-plus.”It would have been more honest for him to tell the world he had changed his mind, that he now supported the 11-plus. Instead, he gave us the appearance of a say in the way our children are educated, but made sure it was only the appearance.”Kent campaigners have to collect the signatures of about 46,000 parents to secure a ballot on the future of the county’s 33 grammar schools. They tried and failed last year but announced only three weeks ago that they would try again.Mr Blunkett reviewed the rules governing ballots in June and minor changes were announced earlier this month.At the fringe meeting, the Labour peer Lord Hattersley will accuse the Prime Minister of continually denigrating comprehensive schools “often in language which suggests that he has no idea how non-selective schools are run”.He will remind delegates of Mr Blunkett’s promise to a previous Labour conference that there would be “no selection by examination or interview” and will argue that “there is more selection now than there was on the day he became Secretary of State for Education.”The selection promise has caused controversy ever since it won a standing ovation.

Mr Blunkett’s advisers say that he meant “no more selection”.Two days after the Ripon ballot, Mr Blunkett described it as “a joke” but a few weeks later he described grammar schools as an anachronism that would eventually disappear.. The son of the manse was at his most forceful yesterday. Gordon Brown treated us to plenty of heavy-jawed preaching about the Labour Party “heeding the call of duty to the people of Britain”, and, tellingly, the need for determination in the face of hard times

The son of the manse was at his most forceful yesterday. Gordon Brown treated us to plenty of heavy-jawed preaching about the Labour Party “heeding the call of duty to the people of Britain”, and, tellingly, the need for determination in the face of hard times.
When Mr Brown sternly reprimanded politicians who are prone to “sudden lurches” in policy, he was, of course, ostensibly attacking the Tories. But he was also implicitly chiding his less resolute cabinet colleagues for their wobbliness in the face of fuel-tax protesters, and patiently explaining to his fellow ministers as much as Labour Party activists about “what it is possible to do and what it is difficult to do”.It must have irked Mr Brown sorely to have his tail tweaked by Peter Mandelson, of all people, when he remarked, about the fuel protests: “We were a bit unsympathetic and a little high-handed, and I think we got that wrong.”Mr Mandelson had a point.

The Government’s initial statements on the fuel crisis were couched in excessively bureaucratic terms. We should not forget that it was Tony Blair, no less than Mr Brown, who sounded like an automaton as he droned on about the ritual of annual budget procedures, not something of huge concern to the citizen at the petrol pumps. A great opportunity to take on and win the substance of the case against the protesters was thereby lost.Yesterday, Mr Brown showed that it is possible to make those arguments of principle, although he failed to make much of the powerful environmental reasons for high duties on fuel. Even so, Mr Brown deserved to get some of his loudest applause when he bravely said that the Government must not give in to “those who shout the loudest and push the hardest”.Conversely, the Chancellor was right to address the concerns of pensioners, a group who have their allies in the Labour movement, but who, short of blockading the post offices on pension day, lack the brute clout of the fuel protesters.

He rightly avoided committing himself to restoring the link with earnings, but made a convincing case for helping poorer, as well as the very poorest, pensioners, with the new pensioners’ credit and by raising the minimum income guarantee from £78 to £90.Mr Brown may have been unduly ambitious when he claimed that “in this time and this generation” Labour could see full employment and abolish child and pensioner poverty, but those are indisputably noble aims. What is tragic about the Government is that it may not be able to continue working for those things because the personal ambitions of some of its members – including Mr Brown – now threaten to jeopardise its progressive project and lumber the country with a Conservative Party that is less fit for office than at any time in its history.Every time members of the Government and their proxies play out their rivalries in public, and each time they make coded or unattributable criticisms of one another, they make the re-election of the Government that much less likely. Discipline was once the watchword of New Labour: a key lesson of the 1980s was that a divided party doesn’t get elected. Now that the Tories have an eight-point lead, it is time for Mr Blair, Mr Brown and Mr Mandelson to heed the call of duty and replay some of their old lectures about discipline, before it’s too late.. “You won the election, but I won the count.” Thus, in the late 1970s, the former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza to his critics.

And thus, equally brazen, seems certain to be the response of Slobodan Milosevic as he attempts to preserve a rule that has brought a decade of blood and misery to his country and the Balkan region. Two things may be said amid the confusion: Mr Milosevic appears to have been soundly, perhaps overwhelmingly, defeated in Sunday’s presidential election in Yugoslavia. But it is equally clear that the regime intends to concoct a “victory” by whatever means are required. If the worst comes to the worst, those means will be violent.