John Rentoul: Pay attention, rebels!

The Labour Party is being convulsed by the argument over comprehensives

Greetings from "Sweden". It is a pleasant country in which I have been spending some time recently. Wish you were here. It is not, of course, the real Sweden, a rich, industrialised nation on the Baltic that has its problems like anywhere else. I am writing from "Sweden", a mythical country of the liberal-left imagination, in which happy, smiling children are polite to each other as they grow up to be pacifist social democrats eager to pay more taxes.

Actually, in Sweden last week the big news was of Lennart Persson, who confessed to killing his two foster sisters, drinking their blood and eating parts of them. Precisely the sort of thing that does not happen in "Sweden".

But that is a digression. The reason for visiting this imaginary country is to try to understand the education debate in the British Labour Party. It is a debate that can be baffling. Tony Blair's critics, now led by Neil Kinnock, say that the schools White Paper is confused and unclear. Then they say that they are dead against it. They complain that Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Education, has not explained what the White Paper means.

Then they say that they know exactly what it means and it is the most dangerous threat to the nation's children since the paedophiles that turned out to be not quite so much of a threat as they might have been.

The real reason that the critics do not like the White Paper is that they hold it up against "Sweden", a vision in their heads of social-democratic paradise, and find it wanting. It is a classic example of "I wouldn't start from here" politics.

Many of the people who crowded into committee room 14 in the House of Commons last week have not reconciled themselves to the idea of parental choice in education. In "Sweden" parents do not care about choice because they happily send their children to their excellent local school. In the real Sweden, meanwhile, any suitably vetted body can set up a state school provided it has a non-selective admissions policy - precisely the policy that Tony Blair wants to introduce here.

In real Britain choice has been a slow-burning force since the introduction of universal education. Parents have always been able to send their children to any state school that will have them. If parents do not like the choices on offer, and they can afford it, they can move house or go private. The effects of choice have grown over decades. In most big cities the effects have tended towards polarisation between classes, ethnic groups and educational aspiration. But parental choice cannot be uninvented. Nor should it be. What if your local school is one that Estelle Morris, the former education secretary, would not "touch with a bargepole"?

The question is how to raise standards while counteracting this polarising effect. For the Labour rebels - although it may be misleading to use that word of a majority of MPs who are not in the Government - the answer is to toughen the law against academic selection. This is so far beside the point that it is somewhere in the North Sea. It was the point of abolishing grammar schools and the 11-plus in the 1970s. That was an improvement on what went before, but it did not solve all the problems. And trying more rigorously to enforce the comprehensive ideal will not, on its own, dilute the concentration of disadvantage in poor areas.

For the authors of the pamphlet that Lord Kinnock launched last week, the problem with the comprehensive ideal is that it "hasn't actually been tried yet in this country". This is a bizarre echo of the old argument of the Trotskyists for Communism, despite its real-world failure in Russia - that it had "never been tried". Yet it is an ideal that has an extraordinary hold on the Labour Party. It convulsed the party in 1994, when Blair sent his son to a Roman Catholic state school across London. And in 1996, when Harriet Harman sent her son to a selective state school, St Olave's. And it is convulsing the party now.

It is, by some margin, the issue on which the leader is most out of sympathy with his party. And yet, paradoxically, he will have no difficulty in getting his Bill through the House of Commons, because the Conservatives will not vote against him. It is surprising how many old Westminster hands are still adding up votes and wondering about the possibility of getting the number of Labour rebels down to 35, which would be the biggest revolt tolerable against a united Opposition. But David Cameron made it clear even before he was elected that, under his leadership, the Tories would support the Government. Nick Gibb, a junior education spokesman and Cameronian moderniser, repeated it on Newsnight the other night. "If the Bill pushes school autonomy one iota towards freedom we will support it," he said. An iota is about all it will be, but it will be enough. Ah, but it is all a clever trick, say the cynics. The Tories will lure Blair into pressing recklessly on and then pull the rug out from under him, as Paxman put it. A moment's thought confirms that Cameron has nothing to gain by contriving an excuse to vote against. He would look opportunist and open the way for Gordon Brown as prime minister to pass a schools Bill that commanded the united support of Labour MPs - which by definition would be further away from what the Tories want.

So Blair's school reforms will go through - the important bit, anyway, allowing new providers to set up state schools that might be smaller, more innovative and flexible than the 1,400-pupil monoliths that too often fix deprivation in poor areas. The basic pattern of Labour revolts past will be repeated. Most Labour MPs will return from their day trip to "Sweden" after the Prime Minister cajoles and compromises. But a parliamentary rebellion, even of Iraq-war proportions, can be borne because of Cameron's positioning. And that is the real story in the real world - that Blair has moved the centre ground of British politics to the left. The Tories accept that a return to nationwide selection would be a bad idea. When Labour MPs return from "Sweden" they should find they have much to celebrate.