BEFORE SUNDOWN, shadows can lengthen into strange exaggerations of the distant stick or stump that casts them. This week, in the late afternoon of Tony Blair’s political life, the long shadow of an old sin — if sin it was — was thrown in grotesque relief across the face of an important new idea for government policy; and struck the idea down.
It started 12 years ago, just before Mr Blair was elected Labour leader. Into the amity between the prime-minister-to-be and his servant, Alastair Campbell, there intruded quite early a sour little quarrel. Its ghost lingered on. On Thursday, concealed within a different matter — an affair of state — the ghost struck back.
The 1994 story became personal to me because of a curious incident in a BBC car travelling to a studio where Campbell (then a senior political journalist), the Corporation’s Justin Webb and I were to interview Tony Blair.
Alastair persuaded me as a fellow-journalist that to tackle Mr Blair on his and Cherie’s reported hopes of sending their son Euan to a prestigious, out-of-catchment Roman Catholic school (the London Oratory School) on the other side of London would be below the belt. So I dropped the question. But there were two things I did not know when I deferred to my more experienced colleague’s judgment. First, I was unaware that Alastair was already working for Mr Blair’s election team.
Secondly, I was unaware that, in private with Mr Blair, Alastair was distressed at the Oratory plan. This distress was professional because Alastair realised what a stink the story might cause; but there is an underlying earnestness to Campbell too, usually overlooked. He really doesn’t care for religion, and there is something of the Leveller in him: he would hate selective education where privilege opens doors. I suspect that his worries about the Oratory story may have reflected an inner anxiety about what sort of a person the man to whom he was to dedicate his life might turn out to be.
Superbly loyal, however, Cambell was heading me off. He was trying to avoid precisely the trouble he warned Mr Blair he was asking for.
In due course, Euan went to the Oratory. Though this did raise quite a stink, Mr Blair was lucky to get away with limited damage. Despite the school’s protestations that it is not academically selective, nobody really thinks a place at the Oratory, or any comparable elite Church school, is a realistic hope for most British parents outside that school’s catchment area. But the story broke while he was still the darling of the public and the news media, and it would have been a brave voice that used a word like hypocrite.
I conclude that when it comes to his own family’s entanglement with the question of religious schools, the Prime Minister may possibly have a troubled conscience; and will at least, and without doubt, have a sense of lucky escape.
And this is the background to my strong suspicion that Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, did not (as he claims) change his mind this week about proposals to require by law that religious schools funded by the State should take a quota of pupils from other religions or none. I have the impression that Mr Johnson’s own beliefs are secularist, firmly held and longstanding; that they have not changed; and that he still believes that the proposed quotas should be the rule, not an aspiration or a voluntary code.
I think he was leant on. I reckon by the Prime Minister. The main pressure on the Prime Minister will have come from the Catholic Church. I suspect that Mr Johnson, who has not abandoned all thought of leading the Labour Party, has told himself (or been reminded) that he may be needing Mr Blair’s help and support in the year ahead; and that Mr Blair has told himself (or been reminded) that there is a painful tension between what he and his Catholic wife do for their own family and the plans his Education Secretary was working on for reducing the access of Catholic children to Catholic schools. Muslim, Jewish and Christian educationists have found an Achilles’ heel in the Government’s stance on religious schools, and that Achilles’ heel is the Prime Minister. They were lucky he was still in office when these proposals were floated.
They should not push their luck. The survival into the 21st century of taxpayer funding for religious schools now rests on shifting sands. We give them money because — and only because — we think they can run better schools than governments can.
Listen to ministers defending religious schools — listen even to this most religiously inclined of prime ministers. They cite school results; they cite exam statistics; they cite tight discipline; they do not cite church or mosque or synagogue attendance records. To the best of my observation no minister in this Government has ever stated that the value of a religious school is that it produces citizens who are more religious. A hundred years ago the inculcation of religion would have been cited as a key benefit of a church school. Today a majority of my fellow countrymen would view the schools run by our major religions rather as we view the work of the Church’s mission hospitals in Africa or the Salvation Army’s work among the homeless here: we tolerate the religious side because the secular benefits are worth having. If we were truly confident that secular schools could reliably bring these benefits, where would be the argument for giving the taxpayers’ money to religious schools?
But we are no longer sure that the State itself is capable of creating good schools, except patchily. Can it be long before the argument for Church, Jewish or Muslim hospitals is made? The Tories are already talking about governments hooking into the benefits of the social work of church voluntary groups. Sooner or later someone will probably suggest a Methodist-run bus company somewhere where a local authority is losing the plot.
We are in an era in which the State is suffering a near-catastrophic loss of confidence in its own ability to do things well. Margaret Thatcher began this erosion of confidence because she did not herself believe that governments do anything well, except possibly wars; and (perhaps to Alastair Campbell’s private dismay) I have no doubt Mr Blair shares her suspicion that state provision is usually incompetent, and perhaps inherently so.
We may live to see a rebirth of political enthusiasm for sound administration and high-quality, cost-effective state provision where the State really runs things rather than franchises them out. Or we may not. We may instead continue the present momentum towards an “enabling” State, which commissions, purchases and regulates, inviting every kind of platoon — churches, businesses, charities, clubs and voluntary societies — to bid for dollops of taxpayer money. If so, then on one level the future of religious schools will be secure.
But they should beware. There will then have to be more rules. In particular there will have to be rules about how they select their pupils and recruit their staff. There will have to be rules about what they make children wear, and what they teach as “truth”. I seriously doubt that in two decades’ time it will be thought acceptable for those taking very large sums of public money not to cater equally for non-believers.
If government can learn how to run good schools everywhere, religious schools will lose their funding. If government gives up the attempt, religious schools must lose their independence. The far-sighted among religious leaders should be asking not (as they did this week) how to keep the tap open, but how their schools can find a future floated free of state funding. The Archbishop of Westminster will not have his hotline to Downing Street for very much longer.
