Introduction.

 

Summary: This  post is the introduction to an upcoming series, summarising the Labour Party’s general election manifesto pledges on education, starting in 1970 and ending in 2019. This introductory blog explains why I think this exercise is useful. It also outlines the format of each entry, and explains how the whole series will be organised.

The first Journal entry can be found on our website tab ‘journal’  https://www.fabianeducation.com/journal

 

 

We shall not cease from exploration,

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we start

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

 

TS Eliot from Little Gidding (1942).

 

 

The idea behind this series of posts.

 

I don’t know what the decidedly ‘small c’ (and probably ‘large C’) conservative Mr Eliot would have made of his lines being the epigraph to a post about left-wing politics and education. Nonetheless, I hope he’d approved of me ‘stealing’ from him. His lines strike me as being an apt metaphor for anyone interested in education policy at the present moment: We’re looking for ideas that are fresh and new, but our sense of where to go will be all the more sure if we have a clearer sense of where we’ve already been.

 

This is the introduction to an extended series of journal entries on the Fabian Education website, which together will look at every Labour Party general election manifesto since 1970. The specific  focus will be on the manifesto pledges that were made about education, which largely means schools, tertiary education/FE, and universities. Occasionally, pledges on wider related public services will be taken into account. For example, In the 70s education and employment skills were often talked of together. This continued into the 80s, and by the 90s the focus had widened to education, skills and early years services.

 

Let’s tackle the big question first: Why bother with this task at all? It seems like a futile exercise, given that there have been fourteen general elections since 1970, and Labour has only won five of them. Surely, the task of sifting through the manifestos of lost elections is of interest just to  academic historians and social scientists?

 

I still think it’s useful for anyone interested in politics and education to have a general sense of events from the recent past. In politics, context matters. Ideas matter. In Great Britain, education- like health- is a policy area where one party’s policy ideas are often in some way reaction to what has gone before. In discussing what happened in the 80s, for example, we need a sense of what had gone before, in the 60s and 70s.

 

The ideas of a party that wins an election matter a lot, because those ideas usually become law. Manifesto pledges from an election-winning party often enable us to judge a party’s record in government, and to gauge the differences between what was promised on the campaign trail and what was achieved in power. I will certainly be doing this when looking at Labour’s promises and performance in the 70s and between 1997 and 2010.

 

The problem is that this is the Labour Party we’re talking about. Since 1970, the Party has spent more years in opposition. In all of these 51 years, only 18 of them have seen a Labour government, equivalent to about a third of the entire timespan. Large chunks of this time period (79-97 and 2010 to the present) have seen uninterrupted Tory government. During the coalition years of 2010-2015, Tory thinking unquestionably dominated education policy.

 

Therefore to get anything like an overview of Labour’s own thinking on education during the lean times, we need to go deeper. Unearthing old manifesto pledges is the easiest way of doing this, and we stand to learn as much about Labour’s thinking through manifestos associated with wider electoral failure.

 

An old manifesto is like a time capsule, capturing a point in time and summarising a party’s thinking at a particular moment. It can’t tell us everything, because a manifesto is mainly a summary of the wider and more detailed policy agenda. If you’ll allow me to mix my metaphors, during an electoral campaign the manifesto becomes like a ‘shop window’, full of all the things the party thought best represented it to the electorate. Unless a party is guilty of last-minute preparation, that ‘shop window arrangement’ is actually the culmination of lots of planning: Months, maybe years, of internal discussion, debate, and policy development.

 

In my view, looking at previous policies should form a natural part of the process whereby we develop new policies. It may be that a specific policy was well devised and, with relevant tweaking, could be reconfigured for the current era. Or it may that the general philosophy and spirit behind an idea is something we can learn from. Conversely, it may also be that a past policy idea strikes us as being so awful that it stands as an example of what not to do.

 

To seriously mix our metaphors once again, a good manifesto from the past goes from being a simple time capsule and becomes a potential treasure chest. A poor manifesto on the other hand becomes the political equivalent of that box in the loft that you’d rather forget, the one full of broken bits and bobs and other accumulated tat.

 

So which were the good ideas that resonated with voters in their time? Which were the bad ideas that are best left in the past? And what are the transcendent policies, based on values still resonating today, that might inspire us? Now is a good time to take stock, and to assess where we should go, by having a look at where we’ve already been. It’s time to sift through the treasure and the tat.

 

 

How these journal entires will be arranged.

 

This series of journal entries will be arranged in the following six parts:

 

1. 1970-1979: (Mostly) In power.
2. 1979-1992: In opposition.
3. 1992-1997: Preparing for power.
4. 1997-2010: Back in power.
5. 2010- 2019: Back in opposition.
6. Looking forward: What have we learned? Can we take anything from the past to help inform policy for the future?

 

In order to provide context, each journal will provide a basic timeline at the end which identifies some key events in politics, in education, and the wider world.

 

Part 6, currently projected to be the final post, is where most of my attempts at analysis will be found, as I look back on what I’ve learned, and try to draw out the key themes from six decades of Labour’s past thinking about education. Is it possible that I can identify recurring ideas and patterns that together add up to something like a distinctive Labour ‘vision’ for education?

 

I think that looking back on the past this way is a worthwhile task after all. It allows us to step back from the everyday, and to focus on the broader sweep of history and ideas. It’s time to go through Eliot’s “unknown, remembered gate”, into the past, into the future.

 

Mark Williams is secretary of the Fabian Education Policy Group. Mark is interested in political history, but is neither an historian nor an academic researcher, so the reader will have to give him the benefit of the doubt.