Education

This afternoon's education question felt like a pressure valve being released. For a week now, the story has been all about the heat building-up under Michael Gove. But, today, the Education Secretary looked far more comfortable, and managed to swing the blowtorch back in Ed Balls' direction. The message that the coalition had been struggling to make previously came out clear and loud: the Building Schools for the Future cuts are a result of waste and bureaucratic mismanagement by the previous government. And Gove even came armed with examples, such as the £1.3 million paid to an individual consultant from the BSF fund. His point: this would be better directed at pupils and teachers.

David Cameron has today told the News of the World that he is "terrified" about the prospect of sending his children to an inner-London state school. This is quite some statement, given how many tens of thousands of parents are in the same predicament. Isn't it the classic politician's error? To betray how his aloofness from voters by showing how he fears what ordinary parents have to put up with? That's what Tony Blair thought – so he'd pretend to be happy with state schools while sending his kids to the ultra-selective Oratory School. That is hypocrisy. What David Cameron has said represents honesty. After all, why shouldn't he be terrified? As I say in my News of the World column today, the record is appalling.

His apology earlier this week was a reminder of how Cabinet Ministers used to behave. Today’s cock-ups and crises have increased the pressure on the Education Secretary – two schools face cuts despite meeting the government’s criteria. Now Gove has penned a defensive article for the Sunday Express. He writes: ‘Reform is never easy, and certainly not when cash is tight... but school building will not stop under this government.’ Gove is, of course, right. Money is tight. But he must explain why reform is necessary in and of itself, and why his ideas should be adopted. There was an aloofness and arrogance about his performance on Newsnight on Monday, suggesting that Gove believes he has won the argument.

"Aspiration" tends to be a convenient word for politicians, in the sense that any policy that they can't implement now can be glossed over as something they want to do in future. But, if Vince Cable's interview with the Times is anything to go by, it could become a troublesome word for the coalition. Speaking about the Lib Dem's election promise to scrap university tuition fees, Cable says that: “It is an aspiration, but we’re highly constrained financially and we have got to try to work out ways of doing it. I’m not Father Christmas.” But nowhere does the coalition agreement say that scrapping tuition fees is an "aspiration".

John Redwood has written a typically thoughtful piece, questioning the government’s arch cuts rhetoric. He writes: ‘Ministers would be wise to tone down the rhetoric of massive cuts. They need to mobilise, energise and reform the public services. Labour made clear in their marathon moan in the Commons yesterday into the early hours of this morning that they are out to talk the economy down, highlight alleged huge cuts in jobs and services and campaign with the Unions against sensible change. The government needs to be smart and careful in its choice of words to bring about the improvements in quality and performance needed.’ Ministers sound terse and defensive at present.

Michael Gove's welcome freeze on Building Schools for the Future will invite tomorrow's press to claim only that this means 715 various building projects are not being carried out. In fact, what it means is that the fund will be open for the Swedish-style new schools. The budget will be transferred from bureaucratic priorities to those of communities, as expressed by those who wish there to be a new school. One of the great tragedies of the politicians' stranglehold over education is that they just love huge, shiny buildings to point at, complete with new whiteboards and all the latest gadgets. The Swedish experiment has shown the parents care not one jot about how grand the building is: their value is placed on the importance of teaching.

George Osborne has an historic opportunity to begin to turn the UK's public finances back into the black. As Reform noted in an alternative budget released last week, while this will require making the toughest spending choices for a generation, history will smile on him if he does this in the right way. What the right way is will largely reflect three key things. First, George Osborne's Budget needs to be ambitious in its timeframe for reducing the deficit. Setting out to, say, simply "eliminate the bulk of the structural deficit in the term of this Parliament" will not be enough. Delay will make fiscal consolidation harder as interest payments on debt and the costs of unreformed programmes and entitlements will continue to rise.

Thank God for Iain Martin, who has called Labour’s response to the Gove ‘Free schools’ idea what is: ‘moronic’. He writes: 'Labour warned that the resulting experiment risks creating a “two-tier” education system. Good grief. And Britain doesn’t have a two-tier schools system now? Actually it’s more like 10 tiers. In this troubling context, claiming that Britain somehow has a splendid one-tier education system that must be preserved is moronic.’ If enacted and delivered, the Gove school reforms will transform education: either they will inaugurate extraordinary improvements, or they’ll be catastrophic.

What is Vince Cable up to? He is on manoeuvres, keeps making attempted power grabs from George Osborne. Barely a week passes without him rattling the cage to which Cameron and Clegg have confined him  - that is, the unwieldy and yet fairly powerless Department for Business, Innovation & Skills. For all its bulk, the department doesn’t really do anything. It has the universities brief, which is important, but it is certainly not an economics department as Cable was pretending last week. “It is a bit like the German economics ministry and the finance ministry,” he claimed. “Two departments, working in parallel.” As if.

Polly Toynbee was on ‘mute’ on Sky News in my office, the remote wasn’t working, which is frustrating because I’d love to hear how someone mounts a passionate defence of why local government should have monopoly control of state schools. Very few things in politics are indefensible, but a system which doles out sink schools to sink estates is one of them. When Michael Gove was a journalist, he described comprehensive education as the greatest betrayal of the working class. And now, as Education Secretary, he is outlining a system that will give the poor the same choice of schools that the rich have. Who on earth could be against that?

It is quite telling that David Cameron's first newspaper article since becoming Prime Minister is for the Daily Mail, and even more telling that its central message is, "you still have a Conservative Prime Minister".  There then follows a series of reassurances about Dave's political motivations ("I believe the state is your servant, never your master. I believe in the common sense and decency of the British people") and about the policies contained in the coalition agreement. One line that jumped out at me, though, is this rather inspid description of the Tories' radical school reform agenda: "We're also giving parents, charities and other organisations the opportunity to set up their own new schools." Hardly inspiring, is it?

During coalition talks, wild rumours can fly - and some of them can be true. That's why Michael Gove would have stopped many a Tory heart this morning by telling Andrew Marr that he was by no means wedded to a Cabinet job and then heaped praise on David Laws. The Gove schools policy is ranked by The Spectator as reason in itself to vote Tory and by The Economist as the best single policy of the election campaign. Might it be sacrificed? The 10am radio headlines were suggesting so.  I bumped into Gove just afterwards and asked him: panic over. He had simply sought to make clear that he was not insisting on a Cabinet job, and nor was he drawing some kind of red line around is own position. He sought to state the obvious: that he serves at the pleasure of the party leader.

While both the Conservatives and LibDems support the idea of Swedish schools, a Lib-Con deal could kill the agenda stone dead. David Laws is proposing to allow local authorities to have the power to veto new schools – which would, in effect, mean no rollout. As we all know, this could strangle the Gove school agenda at birth. Local authorities, whether Labour or Tory, will hate the idea of competition in the provision of education. The local authorities and teachers’ unions are incredibly powerful, and defeated Thatcher, Adonis and Blair. They have also nobbled the LibDems to the extent that, I understand, David Laws believes that he could not get rid of the local authority veto. His party, and the special interests it represents, would not let him.