by Blair, Tony
In this time, I was trying to wear what was effectively a kind of psychological armour which the arrows simply bounced off, and to achieve a kind of weightlessness that allowed me, somehow, to float above the demonic rabble tearing at my limbs.
There was courage in it and I look back at it now with pride. I was cornered, so it was either go down or fight. I remember years ago a friend of mine in the constituency, who was used to rough neighbourhoods, told me: if you ever get in a street fight, stay upright, never go down. People always think if you’re on the ground they will let you be; they won’t, they will kick you in the head and most likely kill you. So stay on your feet, he warned. They’ll rearrange your face, but you’ll live.
While my face was certainly rearranged, I stayed on my feet and got a lot done.
I had more or less set in my mind a date of mid-2007 – the halfway point of the Parliament – as the right time to leave, but I was open to going sooner if Gordon cooperated, and later if he didn’t. As it happened, he didn’t really, or not in any way that gave me confidence he would continue the programme properly; but I was pushed out regardless after the September 2006 uprising, of which more later.
Despite all the difficulties, I felt enormously confident of what I was doing. Of course, it would have been better to have stayed an extra year or eighteen months and embedded the reform programme still further, better for the party and for the country. Nonetheless, what was done was significant and will last.
The reason for the confidence was that I was now completely on top of the policy agenda. I had ministers in key positions who understood what I was trying to do and why. Although the programme was subject to continual frustration from next door, I could tell Gordon was worried about pushing it too far for fear of Murdoch people and others concluding – as opposed to merely suspecting – that he was against reform.
Each step was a battle; but by then I was inured to it all, ready to get up each day and gird my loins, to go out and fight whatever might be barring the path, not unafraid exactly, but near to being reckless about my own political safety.
It wasn’t that I didn’t do all the normal political body swerves to find a way through, I made the odd tactical compromise, here and there. But by and large, for the first time since I became prime minister, I was guided simply by what I genuinely thought was right on domestic as well as foreign policies. I was prepared at any point to be defeated and walk away, but I was not going to budge on the essential strategic objectives.
In February 2006, I wrote a paper for the meetings that Philip, Alastair and I were having with Gordon, Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Sue Nye. I was consciously involving them, putting ideas before them, trying actually to persuade them. Several times I offered on sensible terms to go, if there was a proper relationship in the meantime. But by then I was adamant: there would be no voluntary departure unless it was clear the reform programme was going to be continued.
In the February paper I set out a basic template for how we could work and then went through a potential future agenda on each individual item. In addition, I had launched an internal exercise, after much Treasury dissent, called the Fundamental Savings Review. The purpose of the FSR was to get to the point where we could move beyond the catch-up in investment in public services, and instead focus on a smaller, more strategic government. This was, in my mind, right in itself but also critical to dealing with the ‘big state’ and ‘tax and spend’ arguments that I was sure, in time, would pull apart our coalition in the country, and therefore our ability to win. It went back to the argument, already described, during the 2005 election.
Unfortunately, the FSR was fought every inch of the way and was the one element I was unable to put in place prior to departure, it being the one that really did depend on Gordon’s cooperation.
However, the rest of the programme proceeded apace. In the domain of schools reform, in particular with Andrew Adonis now a minister and Conor Ryan my special adviser, we were able to forge ahead with what was a very ambitious programme that finally got me to where I needed to be.
The months before Christmas 2005 had been especially busy. On 25 October, we published a new schools White Paper in which we advocated the idea of independent non-fee-paying state schools. We did not revive the principle of selection, which had so riven the country between grammar schools and comprehensives; but in every other respect we broke with the traditional comprehensive state school. We made it clear that, in time, all schools could and should become self-governing trusts, either foundation schools or academies, with far greater flexibility in staffing and pay, with partners from whatever sector they wished, and as extended schools be part of the community in which they were situated, able to be used by the adult and youth population for learning, sport, leisure and community services.
In a speech in the summer of 2005 to the National Policy Forum, a body which was the product of an earlier reform of the party to make policymaking more rational and less confrontational, I had set out the rationale for reform.
Although by now I was writing most of the crucial speeches myself, Phil Collins, who had joined the team, was by far the best speech-writer I ever had and was helping greatly. Under pressure of time, the speeches would often be written in the early morning in the Downing Street flat. I would get up at about five, slipping quietly downstairs so as not to wake the children, make myself a mug of tea and take it into the sitting room. There, perched on a chair by a round leather-topped table, I would write in longhand, occasionally looking out of the window at the back of the house, watching as people went jogging in St James’s Park or scurried to work in the early-morning light, sometimes stealing a glance at Britain’s most famous home. I wondered about them, what lives they led, what mood they were in that day, what thoughts occupied them, each life a web of friendships, anxieties, ambitions and fears.
In the speech I said:
If it is a system that is keeping people back, the system should change. Not to change it is to say we care more about the system than the people. That is totally unacceptable.
And, of course, the reforms must be the right ones, the changes able to achieve their purpose. But far too often people claim the change is a breach of principle whereas in reality, they’re not protecting a principle but a practice and often an outdated one at that.
The good news, however, is that there are real examples of progress, driven by our willingness to overcome resistance to change but also by the willingness, indeed enthusiasm, of many public servants to let their own creativity and innovation loose. So this is a time to push forward, faster and on all fronts: open up the system, break down its monoliths, put the parent and pupil and patient and law-abiding citizen at the centre of the system. Yes, we’ve made great progress. Let us learn the lessons of it not so as to rest on present achievements but to take them to a new and higher level in the future . . .
Eight years in, there is a body of empirical evidence to draw on. The conclusion of it is plain: money alone doesn’t do it. It is where money has been combined with modernisation of systems, working practices and incentives that the best results have come . . .
All these reforms are, in the final analysis, simply means to an end. The end is not choice. The end is quality services irrespective of wealth. The end is opportunity to make the most of your ability whatever your start in life. The end is utterly progressive in its values. But the only progressive means are those that deliver the progressive ends.
The first academies had been massively oversubscribed. It was plain this was not solely because of the new buildings. It was precisely because the academy school seemed to belong not to some remote bureaucracy, not to the rulers of government, local or national, but to itself, for itself. The school would be in charge of its own destiny. This immediately gave it pride and purpose. Because the sponsors were determined and successful individuals, they brought that determination and drive for success into the school. And most of all, freed from the extraordinarily debilitating
and often, in the worst sense, politically correct interference from state or municipality, the academies just had one thing in mind, something shaped not by political prejudice but by common sense: what will make the school excellent.
So, even in areas like Hackney, where I visited the new Mossbourne Community Academy at Hackney Downs on the site of a previously failed comprehensive, and where you might have expected the local middle class to be a bit sniffy and precious, the emphasis on rigorous discipline, a proper dress code and good manners was like a dream to parents, poor and comfortably off alike. When the Dispatches programme on Channel 4 did a covert programme on the new Doncaster Academy, with footage of some parents complaining that their kid had been threatened with expulsion if he didn’t turn up to school on time, I knew we were really getting somewhere. Of course, the programme-makers thought people would be outraged by such draconian discipline, whereas naturally the other parents were delighted.
Though the academy idea was watered down after I left, it had an unstoppable momentum and will easily recuperate and get back to full strength. In late 2006, I announced – again I’m afraid to shrieking and barking from next door – that we would double the existing programme to four hundred schools, and was satisfied then that if we attained that and combined it with foundation schools, we would be on a transformative path.
Gordon will protest that he never opposed the programme, and to be fair he never did so head-on; but it was obvious his people weren’t in favour, and getting anything out of the Treasury required a machete constantly slicing through the thick foliage of their objections day by day. I recall an event at Downing Street where we welcomed head teachers who were going to apply for foundation-school status. One of them blithely told me he had come up against the express advice of his local MP. ‘Oh,’ I said, irritated, ‘who’s that?’
‘Ed Balls,’ he replied, unaware he had confirmed my sense of where the GB team sympathies really lay.
The initial assessment of academies was often described negatively, but the whole tenor even of the negative coverage was, in a sense, a mark of their success. People compared academies to the best schools, conveniently forgetting that they had, in every case, replaced state schools that were failing chronically – i.e. we had chosen the toughest nuts to crack. The very fact people made such a comparison was a measure of the very heightened expectations around them. It was assumed they would be good, a cut above, fit to sit alongside the best. And that was precisely the measure we wanted.
Today, of course, the results are clear: academies are improving three times faster than other schools. But, back then, some were bound to struggle, some even fell by the wayside and had to be recovered; yet taken as a whole, they succeeded – not beyond my imagination, but in line with it.
The party opposition was fairly steady and consistent. To my sadness, even Estelle Morris questioned academies, going back to the old saying ‘standards not structures’ and bemoaning the fact we had ditched the mantra. But the whole point was that without the different structure, there was no possibility of achieving the higher standards. Neil Kinnock weighed in, by now pretty much routinely offside and agitating for my replacement by Gordon. His take on academies was that they were elitist, though on closer examination it was less that they were elitist in the sense of being for the wealthy – plainly they weren’t – and more that they were better than other local schools. For me, this was the point. However well motivated, it was classic levelling down. It was an argument that went to the heart of what New Labour was about and its championing of aspiration. Equity could not and should never be at the expense of excellence. My abiding insistence was never give up on excellence, wherever it might be. Attacking it – irrespective of what we felt about grammar schools, private schools, special schools, any schools – was to commit a fatal solecism. It meant that, in the ultimate analysis, we were prepared to get rid of something that was excellent on the basis that it represented the wrong ideology.
Now, by the way, it can be true that such a school might represent the wrong ideology. I am opposed to selection aged eleven. It’s too crude, too final, and therefore too determinative at a ridiculously young age of a child’s life chances, or, to put it less emotionally, their academic ability. I used to reflect on the experience of my brother Bill. He is a wise, sensible, level-headed and thoroughly decent man. It was and is a privilege to have him as a brother. He is also very clever, now a High Court judge, after being a top QC and author of academic works on banking law.
When Bill came to take his entrance exam for Fettes back in the 1960s at the age of thirteen, he only just passed and was put in a lower academic stream. He really had not shone at all. By the time he sat the Oxford exam five years later, however, he had developed and got to Balliol with an exhibition.
Kids change, and therefore separating them out at an early age is not right or fair. But the way comprehensives were introduced and grammar schools abandoned was pretty close to academic vandalism. And not a great reflection on the Secretaries of State – mainly Labour but also Tory – who, of course, continued to send their own children to private school. Not experiencing through their own children the reality of the change, and hugely egged on by the teaching establishment, they legislated so that grammar schools (selective but also excellent) were changed into comprehensives (non-selective and frequently non-excellent, and on occasions truly dire).
This was done because the assumption was that the only reason grammar schools were better was because they were selective. This is to make the same mistake as when people say that private schools are good just because the parents are middle class, better off and the facilities are better; i.e. they are better only through privilege and class.
The truth is that both types of school are good for other reasons too. They are independent. They have an acute sense of ethos and identity. They have strong leadership, and are allowed to lead. They are more flexible. They innovate because no one tells them they can’t. They pursue excellence. And – here is a major factor – they assume excellence is attainable. In other words, they believe failure is not inevitable, it is avoidable; and it is their fault if they don’t avoid it, not the fault of ‘the system’, ‘the background of the children’ or ‘the inadequacy of the parents’.
Now, of course, these characteristics – attitudes of thought, if you will – are easier if your parents are middle class or you select. Easier to think; easier to do. But the whole basis of my schools reform was that they weren’t impossible or unattainable in state schools that were non-selective, provided we were a) prepared to acknowledge the reasons why grammar and private schools worked, b) prepared to let state schools have the same freedoms and encourage new ways of working with new partners, and c) prepared to fund them better.
I used to have fierce internal arguments all about this, even with my closest staff. In the end, the trouble often came down to this: if you introduced a really good school in an area full of really average ones, lo and behold the parents all clamoured to get their children into the really good one. And, yes, of course that caused consternation among all the parents that failed to get their children in, and the local councillors, teachers and so on. But as I used to argue: that simply cannot be a reason not to have the really good school; that must be a reason for analysing why the others are average or worse and changing them.
I remember visiting a school in London just before the 1997 election. As the head teacher welcomed us in, there was a fight going on in the foyer. We stood talking for a time until – the noise of the scuffling being distracting – he said, ‘We’d better move elsewhere.’
‘Shouldn’t we stop that?’ I said, pointing to the scrapping students.
‘Not really,’ he said as he led us down to his study. He then explained how the families in that neighbourhood were problematic, drugs were a real issue, kids were badly brought up and not interested in studying. It was a credible – and to him absolutely persuasive – explanation of why the school was
bound to fail. He was, by the way, a nice guy and committed. He also said that since the school had ‘not a great’ reputation – i.e. everyone locally thought it was a dump – they ended up taking the excluded pupils from other schools.
The point was that we accepted failure, and not just the individual failure of certain of the pupils, but a collective failure for all of them. I knew two things were clear: I would never accept such a thing for my own children; and it would never be true that all the pupils and/or all the parents shared the same attitude or problems. What we were permitting was a disaffected and alienated minority to sour it all for the majority. Of course, we shouldn’t accept failure even for the disaffected and alienated. But to accept it for the entire school – and there were hundreds like this when we took office – was gross, an unbelievable social injustice; and what’s more, one which our mistaken ideology had helped perpetrate.
Prior to 1997, the Conservatives had partially tackled the issue with grant-maintained schools, whose status gave greater freedom and independence. The trouble was it was partial, and basically freed those schools already doing better. This was not wrong, and I fought hard to ensure that though we altered the status – the party hated grant-maintained schools – we tried to keep the basic freedoms. But the journey from 1 May 1997 to 27 June 2007 was really about first correcting the partiality of that programme – focusing on the poorest schools instead – and then, second, creating through the academy programme a whole new type of school that could fulfil the purpose both the grant-maintained and our reforms aimed for: quality state schooling. Whereas the Tories paid most attention to middle-class schools, I knew that in order to gain universal or at least widespread acceptance, the programme had to be for the worst of the system as well as the best.