The Stupid Party wins the day

By James Valentine

David Willetts and Vince Cable are in hot water. They’ve been castigated by the Daily Mail for promoting a swap scheme for overseas students by which high-paying students would be encouraged to come to Britain in return for British students being accepted abroad, in for example, India. It’s a clever idea because it’s in the spirit of limiting net immigration while at the same time being financially very attractive. Overseas students who come to the UK are prepared to pay eye-watering fees for our education; it’s a lucrative business for the universities who would otherwise risk losing out from the new limits. But Cameron has already hinted that his silly cap is more important than bringing much-needed cash into British universities. Ideology trumps rationality – to satisfy the Daily Mail, you cut off your nose to spite your face.

J.S. Mill is supposed to have said, “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” Michael Gove is not a stupid man but his pet “free schools” policy, is, I believe, attracting a number of reasonably stupid people who delude themselves into thinking that starting and subsequently running a school under their own steam is an easy matter. The free school policy is a disaster waiting to happen – one or two failures are inevitable and because expectations have been raised this will take place under a glare of publicity.

Andrew Lansley is not as far as I know particularly stupid but his scheme to hand the vast health commissioning budget to GPs puts Gove’s schools policies in the shade. The idea that the GP who taps your chest and looks down your throat can simultaneously, and at no extra cost, control large health budgets is so daft that it defies imagination. My GP friends tell me that each new consortium will simply bring in administrative, IT and finance staff from the former PCTs to carry out this task. In most areas the consortia are not even formed, and when they are, there’ll be more of them than the previous PCTs, hence more of the dreaded “bureaucrats”.

In order for the new consortia to get going, there will be a vast changeover costs – exactly the sort of unnecessary reorganisation that Labour were criticised for and which is hardly appropriate when we’re supposed to be saving money, not spending it.

Even if we accept, therefore, (which I don’t) that there’s an overriding need to bring down “the deficit” the government’s policies don’t always stand up in their own terms. The traditional Stupid Party is winning. Intelligent Tories like Willetts become marginalised. I suspect that Damian Green, given the impossible job of setting the immigration cap, will be given the chop, because the Cameroons don’t like him anyway. At some point, Vince Cable will creep away.

And the Intelligent Party still struggles to be heard. The former head teacher and Lib Dem councillor Peter Downes will put down a motion at the Lib Dem conference opposing the “new” academies and free schools but it will almost certainly be defeated. Being in power is apparently still too exciting for the Lib Dems and rationality is for now, as they say, “parked”. There are plenty of Intelligent Party members among Labour’s leadership candidates but some of them could still learn from Ed Balls who consistently carries out the politician of the Left’s classic mission, to expose and to explain.