IN NORMAL circumstances I would agree that few politicians are more deserving of being booed to the rafters than Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. However, the Labour activists who booed Ms Kelly during their spring party conference, in protest at the Government’s refusal to abolish the last grammar schools, are the ones who need egging off.

For many in the Labour Party, it seems, schools that still select using the 11-plus have become the new foxhunters. It is quite an achievement, but their crusade against the grammars makes even less sense than the one to ban hunting.

I am an ex-grammar school boy, yet still consider myself on the Left (not something I learnt at my 1970s Surrey boys’ grammar). If we were designing an education system from scratch, I probably would not propose including 164 English grammar schools. But who is supposed to benefit from getting rid of these few academically successful schools now? How exactly is abolishing a relative handful of good schools supposed to improve the bad ones?

Forty years ago the drive to replace academic selection with comprehensive education was motivated by a genuine, if idealistic, belief that all children might experience the quality schooling then enjoyed by a few. By contrast, the grudge campaign against the remaining grammars seems infused with a mean spirit of levelling down.

Neither the existence of these grammar schools nor their abolition will make the world more equal. We should stop investing our hopes in education as a panacea for society’s ills. But we should want to make an updated version of the non-vocational, mind-broadening education some of us received at grammar school available to all children — not as a tool for social mobility or social inclusion, but as a desirable end in itself.

Instead, despite the boos, the Government supports the anti-grammar activists in spirit. Indeed, until recently it supported them in public, dangling the prospect of abolition before the disaffected Left just as it did with the hunting ban. The only difference now, as Tony Blair makes clear, is that new Labour does not want “a war” over grammars with parents who have voted against abolition at every opportunity. However, the Government’s other reforms will continue the drift away from academic education towards using schools as instruments of social engineering and control.

Those last few grammars are talked about as symbols of educational malaise. For me, a more telling symbol is what happened to Woking County Grammar School for Boys after we left: they turned the old stone building into a shiny police fortress.

• SO WHAT can it mean to be left wing now? The question occurred to this old libertarian Marxist more than once this week: when the petty, illiberal ban on smoking in public was hailed as a victory for progressive forces (Liberté, égalité — défense de fumer?), and when Gordon Brown made his big pre-prime ministerial speech.

  Whatever else it has lost over the years, the British Left has retained its unsurpassed powers of self-delusion. The last illusion it clung to was that, once in power, Mr Brown would throw off the mask and emerge as the true face of “Real Labour”. Now the Chancellor has spelt out not only that he would govern with the penny-pinching mindset of a Presbyterian accountant, but also that when it came to ruling via the politics of fear and turning every government department into “a department of security” he would be — wait for it — worse than Mr Blair. If Labour’s 1983 manifesto, written at the Left’s peak, was “the longest suicide note in history”, Mr Brown’s address sounded like a 9,000-word living will for the terminally ill Labour Left.

  Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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