Interpreting | 2008.10.24
Peter Preston: Apply the same regulatory principles to bankers, teachers and doctors alike
Here are three things you may like to forget. Every year, around 100,000 children end their school days illiterate. This year fewer than half of those taking GCSEs hit the government\'s target of five decent grades: in some dire spots - Knowsley, Hull, Sandwell - 70% didn\'t make it. And this year, too, the General Teaching Council for England said we may be haplessly paying as many as 24,000 incompetent teachers to wipe away kids\' life chances like chalk from a blackboard. Now, who really wants to rejoice about the death of Sats?
High jinks are certainly the staffroom order of the day after Ed Balls\'s climbdown. Teaching unions are very happy indeed. Labour, Liberal and Tory politicians smile approvingly. Parents hail a burden removed. Sats at 14 have few friends. But step outside to sniff the wayward winds of clashing principle.
For today gales of what we call regulation come lashing in from the north. Greedy banks and greedy bankers have failed us all most terribly. They can have no bonuses, no leeway, no mercy. The state must rise up and regulate. But please don\'t start making connections.
Just before HBOS got the shakes, David Cameron drew Tory conference cheers with his pledge to lift bureaucracy off the backs of hard-working doctors, policemen, teachers and the rest. It\'s been a winning theme against nit-picking New Labour. Who can defend coppers filling in forms when they could be out pounding pavements? Who can doubt that children would learn much more if year nine wasn\'t weighed down by dreary tests? Stop sucking your pencils, cried Dave. We\'ll set you free. Which, being interpreted, says we\'ll scrap bushels of regulation.
Surely some counterintuitive dislocation here, though? Anyone can get cross about hedge-funders and short-sellers disappearing with loads of loot. They are not, after all, people like us. They have no friends in high places when the going turns suddenly rough. They can be put in the stocks and pelted. But regulation, there apart, is a pain and a curse.
It means that children are tested regularly and publicly, so that their teachers are under constant scrutiny. It means that doctors who keep dropping their scalpels during heart surgery sink down operational league tables. It means that police who stop and search too many black people without reason or purpose may get a finger-wagging. It may be society\'s way of keeping us up to the mark: but frankly, it\'s a bit of a bore. For who can seriously believe that we professionals require such officious monitoring? Ask that question, and immediately you see why it\'s such a potent vote shifter.
They - that lot over there - deserve regulating rigorously because they are an avaricious, idle gang. We - in our small, righteous corner - don\'t require such treatment because we are doing our best, are short of resources and are misunderstood. And so the principle of regulation itself becomes a scrubby political game of pass-the-parcel.
Let\'s be clear where the music has currently stopped. Of course the City, after such a debacle, needs tough regulation. But what about the kids we thrust unready onto the scrapheap of life? Before HBOS we were poised to chuck much ordinary regulation out of the window. But now there\'s a philosophical mess in the middle. It\'s only four weeks since George Osborne was promising to freeze council tax bills by clearing the consultants out of Whitehall. Now City hit-teams are recruited for double the money. To be sure, there are differences here: such as the difference between good, intelligent regulation, and bad, mindless rule-making. But that is counting the pebbles on the beach, not seeing a tide sweep in. Get government off our backs? No: make sure that we know a brain-engaged government\'s worth.
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