With friends like that...
It is - or so the cliché goes - Ruth Kelly's "make or break day". I don't mean to be harsh but so what? Ministers come and go. Tony Blair lost Mandelson, Byers, Hughes and all the rest and lived to fight many other days. No, the reason Ruth Kelly's fate matters politically is because it is so intertwined with the fate of Tony Blair. She is in charge of the reforms that are "make or break" for him - schools reforms designed to unleash "parent power" and to restrain the powers of local councils to frustrate it. Even if she were not making a delicate statement today on the issue of sex offenders teaching in schools, she would be headline news.
It's not every day that the man who laid the foundations for New Labour - former leader, Neil Kinnock - comes to the Commons to speak to a meeting of MPs opposed to the prime minister's most important domestic reform. It's not every day that 90 Labour backbenchers publicly declare that they cannot back the policy as it is now. It is not every day that David Blunkett urges - in The Sun, no less - his party to "pull back from the brink".
Clearly today's statement matters hugely in its own right. It must start to restore parental confidence that their children are not at risk from school staff, whilst not terrifying teachers with the prospect that their careers can be terminated by groundless accusations. At Westminster, though, minds will turn quickly to whether Ruth Kelly and Tony Blair can restore the confidence of their own party in reforms which many fear will unleash a free-for-all in schools where the richest, the pushiest and the brightest succeed at the expense of the rest.
Incidentally, Ms Kelly may not regard David Blunkett's public declaration of "sympathy" as entirely welcome. He writes that "for a mother of four it must be difficult in the extreme to balance the demands of home with the tyranny of the 'red boxes' that civil servants stuff with papers every night...Understandably Ruth leaves work behind when she finally does go to the bosom of her family...It's no good giving Ruth Kelly all the flak. The answer is the same as that from Hercule Poirot as he gathered togther the suspects in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. They all did it." With friends like that ...
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By-election announced, minister on the ropes, controversial announcement on cannabis... Ming Campbell couldn't have chosen a quieter day to launch his belated bid for the Lib Dem leadership, could he? ;)
Faith in the capabilities of the Education Secretary and the complete lack of faith in the proposed reforms possibly cloud a much larger issue: ego. When the fog of rhetoric has dispersed, the contours shall be there for all to see. What a dreadful game to play with peoples' futures.
Burying bad news is no longer considered appropriate behaviour (not to say they don't do it - I wonder how much they sneaked out when Kennedy was dominating the headlines).
Apparently though, swamping news from other quarters continues as usual.
Ruth Kelly has her career in her hands right now - if she fails at the Despatch Box, it could be all over.
I haven't seen an opinion poll on this, but what does the Electorate reckon? I realise that there's a struggle within Labour, but if the voters support Tony (and reform) then it's largely academic [geddit??].
The Govt. is chucking money at Schools in order to fix things, but the spending watchdogs seem to be saying that academic performance is dropping.
Does this signal a trend (similar to the NHS), where productivity doesn't shift (despite the extra cash) because the sector as a whole needs reforming?
I’d like to find out whether the Public feels that Back-benchers are putting principle before pragmatics, or do they support the Policy as it is?
My son was aged 7 when Mr Blair swept to power with his three main priorities of education times three. My son is now fifteen and is about to face his GCSEs. All I can say is that he received the education I thought he would get, second rate much like mine. New policies followed by new inititaives followed by new drivers and so on, but the delivery is mediocre. My example, aged nine spelling test results at his new school were 2,3,4 out of twenty. I asked the teacher, as my son had just started the school, why his spelling was so poor. She told me that the tests were quite hard and his spelling was weak. I told her that he never brings them home to learn. She told me that she had infomed him to do this on his first day. Had she checked he remembered this? answer no. His marks improved, but ahe was also trained as a special needs teacher to spot and resolve problems. When I asked to see her action plan to improve his spelling she looked indignant.
"I wonder how much [bqd news the Government] sneaked out when Kennedy was dominating the headlines", writes Chris Power.
The answer, I expect, is on the Govt's central news management site . But if bad news is newsworthy, surely it's up to the journo monitoring emerging news and filing, and the editor, to make the call about what to cover and what to report?
Some papers have taken to whining that the Government releases information which they had requested under the FOI Act a) to the general public and b) in a way which doesn't suit their own publication deadlines. Puh-leeze. Don't be so precious.