Nine reasons to like Michael Gove

So farewell then, Michael Gove, reshuffled from the Department of Education to become government Chief Whip. I hope The Spectator’s James Forsyth is wrong in arguing that ‘the move is a big blow to the education reform agenda’, and that his colleague Isabel Hardman is more accurate when she writes:

Left-wing teachers who opposed Gove’s reforming agenda might be celebrating, but it is absurd to suggest that his move to chief whip – itself a big job – is a ‘scalp’ for the unions. Gove’s reforms have already been enacted. He has got everything done that he wanted. He has succeeded, and can move on.

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a fan of Michael Gove. I get irritated at the avalanche of abuse directed at him, and at what Frank Furedi correctly identifies as ‘Govephobia’, the way that expressing hatred of Gove ‘works as a kind of password that grants one entry into the inner circle of polite society’, a ritualised way of ‘establishing one’s moral distance from the modern personification of evil’. As anyone who works in the sector will be aware, this is particularly true of educators, at whatever level:

It’s as if Govephobia now provides many teachers and educators with a kind of corporate identity. The very mention of Gove’s name in a meeting is guaranteed to raise a collective smirk and the knowing shaking of heads. Saying something awful about Gove provides a person with the shining moral status that comes with being on ‘the right side’. Not only do you have permission to despise Gove – you are expected to express your emotions publicly whenever you can.

Of course, implacable hostility towards individuals who symbolise everything you dislike in the opposing party is not unusual in the tribal world of British politics, and it helps to have a single syllable surname that fits easily on a placard and can be spat out with appropriate venom on demos. (Mind you, the Left’s dislike of Tories like Gove is as nothing compared to the hatred they reserve for one of their own who is perceived to have betrayed the true gospel: think of the malice with which they utter that other single-syllable name – ‘Blair’.) 

But it’s when people who should know better join in with the ritual Gove abuse that I get particularly annoyed. I’m talking about those who, like me, are passionate about education and about extending educational opportunity, but for some reason see Michael Gove, who is equally passionate about these things, as an enemy rather than a kindred spirit. I’m not talking here about legitimate criticisms of Gove’s policies, some of which I share, but about sweeping dismissals of his entire reform agenda and often willful and ignorant misunderstandings of his intentions. In this category I would place those who seem to think Gove’s aim is to shore up educational privilege and deny access to learning to the poorest in society – when the opposite is actually true. It’s as if some people, blinded and deafened by a tribal dislike of everything Tory, are unable to see what’s in front of their eyes or to hear what the man is actually saying.

So, rather than getting into further endless and mostly pointless arguments on Facebook and Twitter, I thought I’d share with you nine reasons why I like Michael Gove:

(1) 

He has unashamedly continued the reform agenda set in motion by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis. Now, when New Labour were in power, I was often critical of aspects of their educational policy. I thought the emphasis on choice was a chimera when what most parents, including me, really wanted was the guarantee of a good, local school. However, I’ve changed my mind and have come to believe, with Michael Gove, that real reform was not going to occur – standards and aspirations for all children were not going to be substantially raised – while local authorities maintained their monopolistic stranglehold on state education, and that freeing schools from LEA control – whether by converting them to academies, or founding new ‘free’ schools – was perhaps the best way forward.

(2) 

More generally, Michael Gove is an admirer of Tony Blair, and has said that he regards Blair’s memoir A Journey as a kind of manual for government. I know this won’t endear him to those on the Left who still regard Blair as a traitor to the good old cause (rather than the most popular Labour prime minister ever, the man who introduced the minimum wage, devolution, increased education and health spending exponentially, brought peace to Northern Ireland, freed Sierra Leone and Kosovo, etc…..), but still…

(3) 

Gove is a passionate opponent of the knowledge-lite leveling-down low-aspiration culture that has gripped the education sector for the past quarter of a century, and that has become entrenched in the teacher training colleges, teaching unions and the Department of Education. Instead, he believes in raising educational standards for all children, not just the privileged, and in extending educational opportunities, as a means of improving social mobility and overcoming inequality.

(4) 

Unlike some of the philistines and utilitarians who have filled the post of Education Secretary, Gove actually believes in the value of education for its own sake. Remember his brave defence of teaching ‘French lesbian poetry’ in response to the Gradgrindian businessman who scoffed at the uselessness of the humanities? He reads books too – proper books – including the kind of books people on the Left like to read: for example, he’s been known to quote from Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and Raphael Samuel’s The Lost World of British Communism (see the video at the end of this post). 

(5)

As the above shows, this is a man who understands the Left. I think I read that he supported Labour as an undergraduate. Indeed, some would argue that, in other times, he would have been a natural Labour politician.

(6) 

Moving away from education, Michael Gove has written, in Celsius 7/7, one of the best books you’ll come across on terrorism, the Middle East, and the West’s response. He’s also on the Council of the Henry Jackson Society, and anti-totalitarian leftists and liberals should find in him a natural and sympathetic ally. That’s why some of us think he would make an excellent foreign secretary.

(7) 

He’s genuinely funny. I know some like to mock his pratfalls, his odd facial expressions and, most recently, his love of rap, but they miss the point: he’s sending himself up. This is a politician who most definitely can laugh at himself. The first time I saw him face-to-face was in a hotel corridor, engaged in a balloon fight with one of his young children. Which brings me on to:

(8)

He’s a nice guy. OK, not a reason to like his politics, but I thought I’d include it anyway. The above mentioned encounter took place when we found ourselves two doors along from the Gove family in a Portuguese hotel a few years ago. He wasn’t so well known then, and I hadn’t really been following his career until that point, so I didn't pluck up the courage to speak to him. But I had the opportunity to observe him over a number of days, at the next table in the restaurant, reading by the pool (we were reading the same Lisbon-based thriller,) and he came across as an affable and likeable family man.

(9) 

And following on from the above – he’s also a Lusophile. As he once said, a love of Portugal is the only thing he has in common with George Galloway. Me too.

A number of Gove's qualities are on display in this very civilised discussion with David Aaronovitch, who makes an ideal interlocutor. Pity the same can't be said for the people asking questions at the end, who respond to Gove's thoughtful attempts to reach out to his left-leaning education sector audience with crass political pointscoring. I've no doubt in my mind who has the better arguments.

Christian anti-Zionism: an update

You wait ages for a clear example of growing Christian hostility to Israel to come along - as evidence of a new anti-Zionism in the churches - and then two arrive together. In my two-part post before Christmas, I used an article in the Catholic weekly, The Tablet, itself inspired by Oxfam’s current campaign focused on Gaza, as the starting-point for my analysis of the reasons behind the increase in anti-Israel sentiment among Christians. But barely a week had passed before news emerged about an even more egregious instance of partisan ecclesiastical posturing on the Middle East: Bethlehem Unwrapped, a Christmas ‘festival’ at St James’ church in Piccadilly, which had as its centrepiece what purported to be a lifesize replica of the ‘separation wall’ surrounding the ancient city.

I don’t propose to offer my own critique of this controversial campaign here, except to say that it seems to me to be guilty of precisely the same sins of which I accused Elena Curti’s Tablet article, the Oxfam Gaza campaign, and (some time ago) the ‘If Greenbelt was Gaza’ event. That’s to say, the festival at St James’ manifests the same obsessive focus on the supposed sins of the Jewish state to the exclusion of all other contemporary issues; its treatment of the issue is appallingly one-sided, dishonest and misleading; and it completely obscures, and indeed shows no interest in the voices and perspectives of Israelis, and in particular of the Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism.

There’s no need for me to say any more, since others have already responded with far greater eloquence than I’m capable of. Douglas Murray bemoans the ‘absolute moral squalor’ represented by the installation at St James’, reminding us that the church has form on this issue, having previously hosted an event where participants sang ‘versions of carols which decry the Jewish state’. (‘Once in royal David’s city / Stood a big apartheid wall’ ran one particularly execrable parody.) Murray condemns the obvious one-sidedness of the current campaign, in which ‘the visitor is invited to believe that all the problems of Bethlehem’s Christians today stem from Israel’s security fence’, while no reference is made to the fact that ‘Christians are being gradually cleansed from their historic homeland by Muslim Palestinians,’ or to the wave of persecution of Christians in every other country in the region except Israel.

Barry Shaw takes up the theme of the problems faced by the Arab Christians of Bethlehem, since control of the city was handed over to the Palestinian Authority, ranging from death threats to actual physical violence from Muslim extremists. Barry comments:

How sad it is that this church, the British Methodist Church, and many other Christian leaders are blindsided in their pursuit of a perceived Jewish enemy that they fail to come to the rescue, or campaign for, their co-religionists, persecuted by those who they actively and expensively support. 

Melanie Phillips has written an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, wondering how he can reconcile the message of love in his Christmas Day sermon ‘with the fact that one of your churches, St James’s Piccadilly, chose Christmas to turn itself into a church of hate?’ Listing the lies about the security ‘wall’ embodied in the church’s campaign, Philips describes the ‘stunt’ at St James’ as part of a ‘wider anti-Israel bigotry in your church’, going far beyond this particular campaign.

One of the most powerful responses to the wall has been from Kay Wilson, the victim of a horrific Palestinian terror attack two years ago that left her friend Kristine Luken dead. She has written a letter to the organisers of the campaign, in which she describes the fake wall as ‘hopefully just a result of your own ignorance and generalisations concerning the complex situation here in the Middle East.’ Wilson adds:

Nevertheless, like all walls, it serves as a facade and a barrier. If your wall was scrutinised, one would see that underneath the whitewashed surface that concerns itself with Israeli policies, there are blocks of anti-Semitism.

Denis MacEoin has also written to the ministers of St James’ church, and his letter is notable for its generosity of spirit and for going out of its way to understand the motivation behind the campaign - but it’s no less scathing for that. Having acknowledged the positive work that St James has done in the past, Denis goes on to excoriate the church for having constructed ‘a mendacious wall on its premises in order to make an ignominious political point, something I would not have believed your church capable of. It is mendacious because it pretends the entire separation is a wall, when the wall covers about 1%. It is mendacious because it does not mention the 30 or so security walls and fences that have been built by other countries, many much longer than Israel’s.’

Denis continues:

It is mendacious because it carries no message to explain why it is there, when it is explicitly there to deter violent attacks from the West Bank into Israel. It is mendacious because it carries no statement alerting onlookers to the fact that the barrier has already saved thousands of lives. Or does saving lives really not matter to Christians? Or are Jewish lives not as important as the lives of suicide bombers and other terrorists? If you seek fairness ­and I suspect you do in a muddled way ­why did you not contact the Israeli embassy, who could have loaned you something apposite: a bus, on board which passengers died when a suicide bomber detonated himself?

Finally, Alan Johnson of BICOM took part in a debate at the climax of the Bethlehem Unwrapped festival last Saturday (transcript not yet available, as far as I know), and also debated Rev Lucy Winkett, rector of St James on BBC Radio 4's Sunday programme - the segment starts about 37 minutes into the programme.

An update on the update (8th January): You can read an abbreviated version of Alan Johnson's powerful contribution to the end-of-festival debate here.