They Surely Won't Be Missed

A Conservative MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger, plans to risk arrest by the forces of the London Haystack and lead a march on Downing Street in protest at Michael Gove's preliminary assault on the remains of our education system. Gove has had to make an "unreserved apology" in the House of Commons for leaving some of the wrong schools off his little list, and has even "vowed to apologise to every school affected by the blunder", although it is not clear whether this means he will be travelling in person to Derby, Northamptonshire, Peterborough, Doncaster, Greenwich, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, Lancashire and Sandwell in the West Midlands to offer up his contrition at morning assembly. Even if Gove should choose the less effortful New Labour/scumbag press expedient of being "sorry if anyone should inexplicably have taken offence", Liddell-Grainger is unlikely to be mollified: "All our schools are very bad," he said. "They were built a long time ago. We were promised this because we are the only industrial town in the West Country. We need those schools so we can bring everything up to date so it all dovetails in to create the engineers we are going to need in the future." If he really believes that Conservative education policy has to do with forward planning or, perish the thought, an economy managed by something other than market forces, Liddell-Grainger must have a very strange idea of what his party has been about these thirty years. One does not need a lot of cumbersome, expensive new buildings to opportunify prole-parents in teaching their children how to spell WILL WORK FOR FOOD.