“I’m the change candidate,” said Andy Burnham, settling down to the consolidation phase of his leadership bid. Chuka Umunna is out, so he is now the bookies’ favourite. He faces a conundrum: the brains of Labour want to tack to the centre, the money (ie, the unions) want to keep it to the left. So how can he keep both happy?
Andrew Marr this morning asked Burnham if he was happy to be the union candidate. “I’m the unifying candidate,” he said. He admitted that he has spoken to Unite’s Len McClusky – the union Godfather – but only as part of his attempt to “build support from all parts of the Labour Party.” And Charlie Falconer, Blair’s ex-flatmate, is backing him – so surely that’s enough?
Look closely and you can see what Burnham is up to. He is offering ‘change’ only on areas that the unions don’t care about. In an interview with the Observer today he gives up on the Mansion Tax, and is happy to admit that Gordon Brown shouldn’t have been running up those deficits in the boom years. He wants to adopt tougher language on immigration. Len McClusky doesn’t mind about any of that. What McClusky does care about is making sure the unions keep their power in public services – power that had been threatened by the Blair reforms in health and education, now continued under Cameron.
McClusky wants NHS reform stopped and free schools gone, and Burnham has worked out the song he needs to sing. Sitting on the Marr sofa with Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, he declared that free schools are “like an experiment with children’s education, and you can’t experiment with education.” This statement shows a complete disregard for the tens of thousands of children stuck in sink schools. If you don’t experiment with a failing system, what hope for its victims? Or doesn’t Labour care?
Burnham then went on to attack Ms Morgan. “You’re spending money in areas where there are surplus places; it does not make sense.” Sense to whom? Free schools in such areas only exist due to parental demand for them; if there was no demand, they’d go bust. Why, Burnham should ask, is there any demand for free schools in areas where there are ‘surplus’ (ie, unfilled) spaces schools? The answer is obvious: the schools in question will be sink schools, ones that stymie life chances and inflict huge damage on the neighborhoods. Bureaucrats hate new schools where there are spaces to fill in bad schools.
This is precisely where Labour went wrong: it started to side with the providers of public services, against the users. The error identified do by Alan Milburn last week (do watch it). Anyone who knows parents in these council estates will know how they dread the day when their kid has to go to secondary school. These sink schools schools are failure factories, and parents often to go any lengths to save their children from them. Those who can afford to move to a better catchment area do; choice is available for those with the cash. As a result, a rule governs English state eduction: the wealthier your parents, the better your GCSE results. It’s grotesquely, heartbreakingly unfair.
Yet Labour seems blind to it. Or if Burnham can see, he doesn’t seem to care: the new free schools represent threat to union control of state education, so he’s agin them. In saying he would not open free schools in such areas, he is making a statement: that choice in education should only be for those who can afford it.
Make no mistake: Burnham is the continuity Miliband candidate. He has no interest in the Blair-era reforming that won his party three terms in power. The Tories dread Labour selecting a leader outside of its comfort zone (a la Blair), a leader who looks willing and able to broaden its support. Luckily for the Tories, the unions bankroll Labour so the unions get to choose. And as Jim Murphy so eloquently put it, Len McClusky would pick the wrong horse in a one-horse race. He has picked Burnham, so David Cameron can breathe easy.
PS Yes, I know the video above is from his 2010 leadership pitch. But depressingly little has changed.
PPS Zoe Williams and I had (sadly unfishished) argument about the success of Swedish profit-seeking schools. She said it’s an established fact that they have been a disaster – in which case, why do so many Swedish parents choose to send their kids there? Might it be because the results are better? Some figures below:-
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