EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION?
That was the pledge that Tony Blair made in 1997, but midway into his second term and despite large injections of cash into the education system, schools are warning that they may have to sack teachers to balance their budgets. An angry Education Secretary Charles Clarke blamed Local Authorities for salting away additional funds, while they in turn blamed the government - and by implication the teachers - for increasing wage costs through higher national insurance. The sum that has gone astray is said to be five hundred million pounds.
The mystery is not as great as it appears. The fragmentation of the school system, the different regimes of community and foundation schools, local management of schools, as well as the fragmentation of wage bargaining in performance related pay all lead to waste and budget drift. Though the Labour government stopped the previous policy of schools opting out of local authority control, the tendency for the balkanisation of schooling has continued in other ways. Though decentralisation is much lauded as a means of getting institutions closer to users, it is also fantastically wasteful, involving reproduction of effort at all levels when it would make much more sense to organise pay and funding at local rather than school level. Local authorities like Islington that tried decentralisation in the 1980s have boarded up many of their neighbourhood offices, learning the hard way that larger just is sometimes more efficient.
The real waste is that government has micro-managed performance in classrooms - to the detriment of teachers' motivation, but devolved responsibility for service provision from local authorities to amateurish governing bodies.
NO WAR FOR OIL
Was the war against Iraq undertaken for oil profits, as anti-war demonstrators alleged?
The allegation appeals to a vulgar Marxism where all actions can be traced to pecuniary motivations, as well as a vulgar journalistic maxim 'follow the money'. It is a modern piety that virtuous action has no dirty self-interest, but actions that you disapprove of can be traced back to a grubby desire for gain.
… except that this war was not fought for oil. Already the US government is struggling with a budget deficit that has been enlarged by the 80 billion US dollars dedicated to the war effort. Now the US faces a 2.5 billion dollar aid bill to reconstruct Iraq, and analysts put the likely cost at around ten billion a year for the next three years ('Fuzzy maths on Iraq', New York Times, 27 April 2003). Those who hoped that Iraq's oil reserves would pay for the reconstruction failed to take into account the cost of drilling them. Yahya Sadowski of the American University in Beirut estimates that getting Iraq's oil production back to 3.5 million barrels a day as it was before 1991 would take three years, and investments of nearly thirty billion dollars to wells, pipelines and infrastructure ('No war for whose oil?', Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2003).
Sadowski concludes that 'oil appears in Washington's calculations about Iraq as a strategic rather than an economic resource: the war against Saddam is about guaranteeing American hegemony rather than about increasing the profits of Exxon.'
'NO WAR' FOR OIL?
Characteristic of these pious times, Washington's pugilistic champions turned the charge of oil-profiteering against those that made them. France and Russia's doubts about the war were put down to economic interests in Iraq, which was a convenient way to avoid the scepticism US actions provoked in Europe.
In the UK the allegation that the peace movement was motivated by Iraqi oil money reached its apogee. The Telegraph newspaper alleged that Iraqi government documents proved MP George Galloway had been paid for his anti-war stance. Since Galloway has decided to sue for libel, the truth of the allegations will now be decided by the courts - an unwelcome development.
The desire to shrug off anti-war protestors for their dubious motives is a kind of fantasy politics: that in the rubble of the Iraqi government ministries 'the truth' that Galloway was 'No war' for oil. The search for corruption scandals was always a way of avoiding the real issues of political debate, only this time it is the left, not the right that is the target.
NEW ROLE FOR THE CHARITIES COMMISSION
For the second time in as many months the Charities Commission is being called upon to police the acceptable limits of dissent. As reported in the WEEK it was the Charities Commission that stripped radical Islamic cleric Abu Hamza of his position in the Finsbury Park mosque - while the police occupied the mosque to evict him physically. Now the Charities Commission, a government department, is investigating George Galloway's Mariam Appeal, a fund used initially to pay for the leukaemia for an Iraqi girl, and then later for general campaigning against sanctions on Iraq. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that the Mariam appeal was never registered with the Charities Commission, no doubt because it would have been refused on the grounds of being 'political'.
Interestingly it is the increasingly political role of the charities and non-governmental organisations - bodies that are encroaching on the territory of declining political parties and campaigns - that makes the Commission's role more important. Since the 1992 Charities Act, registered charities are subject not just to financial control, but also general scrutiny as to their methods and purposes. In an age that prefers the 'selfless' actions of the NGO to the interested pursuits of more explicitly political or representative organisations, it becomes more important for the government to decide who is and is not acceptable in this more exclusive club.
-- James Heartfield