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Bethan Marshall: The militants are on the march again

Thursday 11 April 2002 00:00 BST
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We're back in the Eighties – or should that read the Seventies? The teachers are squaring up for a battle with the Government. They are mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more. Old forgotten phrases – working to rule, pay and conditions, industrial action – are back on the agenda, not just with the teachers but with public-sector workers across the land. Reverend Blair's halo has slipped and he has trouble aplenty in the traditional Labour parish. What is going on?

Perhaps the first question to ask is whether or not we're seeing the same thing as two decades and more ago. I think the answer is – possibly not. As a young teacher in the mid-Eighties I went on strike with impunity. I believed in the principle of a union and marched with thousands of teachers through the streets of London protesting for a fairer deal than Maggie seemed to want to offer.

I nearly froze to death in the stands at Highbury listening to appeals for solidarity, and refused to cross the picket line when the dinner ladies took industrial action. I even went in for lightning strikes – all to no avail. We won nothing and the Conservatives marched on to tighten their grip on the teaching profession. What made matters worse was that to a large extent we had contributed to the perception that we needed controlling.

If I think back to the conferences I attended over those Easter weekends, there was a sense in which we were part of the problem. The unions themselves were not as democratic as they might have been. It was never a simple fight between left and right, as was frequently characterised, but more a contest between those who had a vanguard mentality and those who had an ear to the ground. Often those on the moderate wing were less liberal than those on the left and vice versa, depending on the vested interest in question.

That was Mrs Thatcher's genius. She spotted the inherent weakness in the unions' position and played it for all it was worth. The teachers, she argued, are not interested in your children, they are simply concerned about themselves. The irony of her attack was that her whole philosophy was based on the notion of vested interest. Greed was good, there was no such thing as society and everyone became a consumer. Schools entered the marketplace, and parents accordingly shopped around.

So appealing was this philosophy that Tony Blair has never questioned it. Choice and the needs of the individual are still the buzzwords in any policy document. We all want the best for our children. The difficulty with getting the market to deliver is that markets require the weak to go to the wall. In other words, the people who produce the worst products fail. As children are the only product in the education system, that means that the least successful schools and the least successful pupils will fail.

After 20 years of a consumerist philosophy, a public-sector mentality is beginning to kick back. And it is different; it has to be. For a public service to survive we have to accept that, for example, rural buses will always be uncompetitive, and that poor children need money thrown at them. We may never send a letter to Penzance or Plockton in our lives, but people live there and their service needs to be as good, or as bad, as mine in London, irrespective of cost.

This, then, was the lesson teachers were trying to give Estelle Morris at Easter. If you want a decent education system, you have to pay for it. But the subtext of that message was even more important, and significantly different from my conference days in the Eighties. In a strange way the unions may just have learned their lesson from Thatcher. In arguing their case they were in effect saying: "We are all in this together; parents, children, teachers alike." There is no "us and them" any more, or perhaps more accurately, "you and me". There is only what "we" want, what we really, really want, as a society.

Whether the withdrawal of labour will achieve this is a moot point. But in a democracy we have to have some mechanism for challenging the powers that be. The essence of democracy is not whether or not we can vote, but whether we can get rid of a government once it is there, or dissent from the prevailing view. The question remains; as Thatcher has now gone silent, can a truly collective voice be heard again?

The writer is a lecturer in education at King's College London

education@independent.co.uk

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