A year ago, most people were looking at George Osborne as the successor to David Cameron, should he unfortunately get run over by a bus. But since the ‘omnishambles‘ of the budget back in March and the fact he can’t make up his mind to be Chancellor or political strategist, his form has taken a downward trajectory. And quite frankly, I never saw Osborne as the next leader of the Conservative Party anyway as he is as vacuous as Cameron and once bitten, the membership would be very shy indeed.
The only true Tories in the Cabinet are Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove. IDS has worked tirelessly to fight the civil service tooth and nail to get his welfare reforms through parliament but he is yet to see any of his changes implemented – millions of people are still creaming billions off the state whilst sitting at home all day playing on their Xboxes, which you and I are paying for. For the Universal Benefit to become reality, a computer system probably more complicated than the failed NHS computer will be needed. And IT and Governments go together like oil and water.
But Michael Gove is in a different league. He is a Tory who is actually changing the education system in this country daily. Free schools, Academies and now serious policies to scrap GCSEs and replace them with O-Levels. He hasn’t gone around, unlike Yellow Peril universities secretary Vince Cable, saying it is the nasty, evil universities which are failing young people by not letting them in even if they can’t read and write. No, Michael Gove has laid the blame firmly at the doors of the primary and secondary schools and a culture of “competitive dumbing down” which was created by New Labour during their thirteen years of disastrous rules. Labour introduced “prizes for all”, “nobody can fail”. They introduced league tables which instead of improving schools forced them to dumb down and teach to the test. Schools were ably assisted in their league table ranking by corrupt exam boards who marketed their exam papers as easier than their competitors. They shout “choose us, we’ll ensure our questions are easier.” One question in science GCSE in fact asks: “What do you use to view stars? A telescope or a microscope.” I kid you not. When you see those screaming sixteen year old girls in the newpaper each August showing off their ten A*s and then universities and employers find they can’t string a sentence together or add up you now know why!
Blair and Brown deliberately allowed exams to get easier so they could say their education policies were succeeding. This not only fails employers, it fails the students themselves. If you have passed all your exams and then can’t even mentally calculate the right change for a customer this will hit the young person’s self-esteem very hard.
Blair set the target that 50% of all school-leavers must go to university. This was wrong and I refuse to mince my words like New Labour politicians did for thirteen years which led to a bankrupt nation, economically and intellectually: 50% of all school-leavers are not academically capable of going to university! Frankly, they aren’t clever enough as a result of their genetics – no level of social-engineering will fix that and why should we want to. I do not want to live in a country full of academic lefties. I want a broad spectrum of jobs and vocations for the next generation to go into. We need non-academic people probably MORE than academic people. That doesn’t mean they are inferior to more-academically gifted children. It means they have talents elsewhere – for instance in a trade like electrician or plumber, where they can expect to earn much more than a graduate does now with a devalued degree caused by the ludicrous imposition of the 50% target.
The above point was raised on BBC Question Time last night. Labour’s frontbencher Andy Burham almost agreed the 50% target was wrong. They probably knew it at the time but Labour are so obsessed in their false belief that the Conservative Party deliberately prevented people from certain socio-economic groups from going to university they thought it was right to dumb down the schools and exams systems to shoe-horn non-academic students into university, where the only thing they achieve is £10,000 worth of debt. That’s Labour economic policy all over: debt upon debt upon debt.
Back to Michael Gove. Along with IDS he is speaking the truth. And it grates against the beliefs of the socialist Nick Clegg and his party. Nick Clegg is your classic socialist, who once he had been privately educated, he couldn’t wait to pull the ladder up behind him. Socialists love to keep the masses under control with a sheep dipping, one size fits all education system. Lump everyone together and then no one gets above their station, eh? Well, that is morally wrong. Not every child is the same. We are all unique – that’s something that makes socialists sick. How can they command and control from on high if the plebs start to think for themselves and are encouraged to do so. No, they want to move children through an education system that fits the script and the targets not tailor-learning to the individual through different qualification streams which Michael Gove is proposing we go back to with ‘O’-Levels and CSEs.
This country’s education system is frankly a disgrace. Ever since New Labour got hold of it, we have slipped further down the global league tables of education attainment. These are the league tables which really matter as multi-national corporations look at them when deciding where to set up shop. Hmm, should a global engineering firm go to the UK where sixteen year olds leave school unable to fully read, write and add up or shall we go to Singapore where using calculators for basic arithmetic is unheard of?
Michael Gove gets it. The Conservative activists love it. If David Cameron doesn’t get behind him, it’s not only Clegg’s position he will need to worry about.
Gavin Maclure's Musings 
June 25, 2012 at 9:52 am
I thought it was the Thatcher government that abolished O-levels and CSEs, replacing them with the one-size-fits-all GCSEs that you deplore?A pity you weren't around then to warn them that this decision would have such disastrous effect.Michael Gove of course was rejected for a Tory party job around that time for being 'insufficiently Conservative', so perhaps he feels his own hands are clean in this respect.