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ANDYou couldn’t invent it. Less than three weeks ago, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson threatened to take legal action against schools in London’s Islington and Greenwich if they closed a few days earlier for Christmas in light of alarming increases in infection rates by Covid. On Wednesday night, primary schools in these districts were told that they would have to reopen as usual on Monday, unlike those in most other London boroughs, despite their high infection rates and that a hospital in Greenwich declared a major incident just a couple of days earlier. that. Then, on Friday night, Williamson led the government in its first U-turn of the year to announce that these schools would be closing starting Monday after all, giving parents and teachers no chance to make arrangements. .
It’s just the latest example of Williamson’s astonishing incompetence. In every step of this pandemic, he has taken missteps that will affect children for the rest of their lives. A half-decent education secretary would have worked with teachers’ unions to launch a phased reopening of schools last May when infection rates were falling, as demanded by senior pediatricians at the time. They would have started a program of structured outdoor activities during the summer holidays for the children who had missed months of school. They would have invested adequately in equipping schools and homes for distance learning in the case of the second wave that everyone expected. They would have introduced a school-wide testing, tracking and tracing scheme led by public health experts, rather than expecting principals to organize and oversee massive volunteer-led testing with virtually no notice. They would have hoped for a tuition refund for college students and asked universities to move to distance education rather than encouraging students to spread the virus across the country, causing many young people to drop out of an experience. college that has involved long periods. self-isolation in storage rooms. None of this is rocket science. It just takes a little imagination, a modicum of competition, and a little passion for wellness.
But this is a secretary of education who seems to have no interest in his brief little care for the nation’s children. This former whip boss, who boasts of keeping tarantulas as pets in his office and poses for photos with a whip on his desk, is the ultimate caricature as a cabinet minister. We desperately needed the government to work with schools to protect children’s education as much as possible in this pandemic. But last May, Williamson preferred to fight the education unions through the tabloid press rather than work behind the scenes to get schools to reopen as quickly as possible. Pubs and bars reopened while schools remained closed. Last week, Williamson’s allies crazily reported the “huge battle” he was facing with cabinet “closures” to ensure schools remained open. The hodgepodge of an ad last week was the result of this false postulation of this decision as a struggle between education and health. Outside of cabinet, he has succeeded in prompting the supremely pragmatic principals union to initiate legal action against the government for demanding that most elementary schools open this week.
This is a crazy approach. The idea that critical decisions about opening schools should be determined by cabinet compromise between “hawks” and “doves” is ridiculous. Schools should be the last to close. We are probably at that point now, but with the vaccine launch already underway, this perhaps could have been avoided if the government had not chosen to ease social restrictions in December or implemented a circuit breaker lockout before November. Government communications have been a total disaster – the message in the run-up to Christmas should have been to stay home not only to protect the NHS but also to keep schools open.
This is much more than the story of one man’s incompetence. It is part of a larger story of a populist takeover of a ruling party just before the biggest crisis this country has faced since World War II. The consequences of Brexit go far beyond our relationship with the European Union. The crisis that it unleashed in the Conservative Party has purged it of nuances and governing competition, leaving a cabinet full of insipid loyalists and has marked the beginning of a style of politics that privileges culture wars over what is in the national interest. Williamson is not the exception, but the norm: aspiring prime minister sees the route to number 10 as a House of cardsstyle role play. Politics is a game, it is not about doing things.
What makes it worse is that we have a male-dominated cabinet so isolated from the real world by wealth and privilege that they perceive the stakes as very small. Do you have any idea what impact closing schools in the blink of an eye has on working parents, mostly mothers? Perhaps they wouldn’t be so determined to cut universal credit by more than £ 1,000 a year from April if they bothered to find out what life is really like as a parent working a low-paying job.
The reality is that Covid has made the stakes higher than ever. Yet Williamson is living proof that normal political rules have been turned upside down. He’s a new breed of cabinet minister – too rubbish to fail. Despite having lost the trust of teachers and parents alike, they keep him in office as the scapegoat who will take responsibility for all of the government’s terrible educational decisions when this is all over. It is a whole generation of children who will pay the price.
