That Labour humbug in full

Spectator, The, Dec 6, 2003 by McKinstry, Leo

Other socialists go even further down the road of financial hypocrisy, using public funds for personal ends. As someone who worked in the House of Commons for six years, I have always found it an outrage that many Labour MPs, who demand that every employer adhere to equal opportunities and open recruitment procedures, should hire their own spouses and relatives to work in their Westminster offices, which are entirely funded by the taxpayer. Some practices are far more outrageous. In February 2002, the DTI minister Nigel Griffiths was exposed for claiming £30,000 in parliamentary rental allowances on an Edinburgh office that he actually owned. In one of her last acts before leaving her post, Elizabeth Filkin, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, upheld the complaints against Griffiths, though he avoided resignation by repaying the sum to the Commons Fees Office. Henry McLeish, Labour's First Minister for Scotland, was less lucky. He had to quit after also being caught fiddling rental allowances.

When the charge of hypocrisy is raised, left-wingers wail that they are being judged unfairly, that higher standards of behaviour are required of them than of other politicians. This is nonsense. All that is being asked of socialists is that they practise what they preach. Senior Tories do not end up in the same difficulties on private education, property or healthcare, because they support personal liberty and individual choice. But if Labour activists genuinely believe in higher taxation, in public transport or the state's monopoly in health and education, then it is only right that they should be expected to apply those principles in their own lives.

But the hypocrisy works on an even deeper level. For when leftists go private or offshore, they are trying to avoid the very problems they have created through their own socialist policies. They wilfully advocate measures that lower standards or destroy wealth, then run away from the consequences, while still demanding that the rest of us should have to cope. This is especially true of education, where the ideology of the Left has predominated since the early Sixties, when education secretary Tony Crosland pledged to 'close every fucking grammar school in the country'. Comprehensive schooling, child-centred teaching methods, the dilution of examinations and the abolition of discipline have all been imposed by the so-called progressives who have run the local education authorities and teacher training colleges for decades. The result is that anarchy and ignorance now prevail in the classroom.

For a socialist to complain about our shambolic education system is like an arsonist complaining that a building which he set alight has burnt down. Wealthy left-wing parents cannot tolerate the schools they have created, so they either turn to the private sector they despise, bleating about 'putting their children first', or, more subtly, they make a public show of sending them to a comprehensive while using their money to pay for private tutors. As The Spectator revealed, that is precisely what the Blairs did with their two sons Nicky and Euan, employing a tutor from Westminster School to help them prepare for their A-levels. In fact, Margaret Hodge, the embattled children's minister, was once caught telling a socialist parent with a troubled conscience, 'Look, you use the state system and then you tutor them on the side.' One insidious way that left-wing parents try to justify the use of private tutors is by claiming that their children have 'special needs', such as dyslexia, which require expert support. Indeed, because of the disastrous decline of British education over recent years, 'special needs' have become a spectacular growth industry, providing an escape route for anxious liberals.