Francis Beckett

He admired Maxton but never wanted to be like him. Maxton never budged on his ideals. Brown considers himself a practical politician. It’s clear from the book he wrote that the lesson he learned was: if you insist on demanding everything, you will achieve nothing.

Yes, there is something left, but it is hard to say how much. I noticed the other day that, speaking on education, he praised his own Kirkcaldy school and the pressurized fast-tracking that wernt on there, which resulted in him going to university two years early. At the time he hated it, thought it caused untold human misery, and it turned him against selection in schools.

So anxious is Lord Adonis to bring the fee-charging schools on board that he is allowing them in without paying a penny. Dulwich College, the very expensive and very rich south London public school, is sponsoring the Isle of Sheppey academy, and is putting up no money at all. All the money is coming from Kent Councty Council – that is, from kent ratepayers. Dulwich College is contributing “help in kind” – time and expertise, apparently. What expertise this school, which educates only the sons of the rich, has to offer a school in the deprived Isle of Sheppey, I have no idea.

The reason had nothing to do with the money the sponsors provided. This money always was a drop in the ocean, and has now been reduced to the point where it is irrelevant. The real reason seems to have been a conviction that there was nothing the public sector can do which the private sector can’t do better. So at first the government hoped that academies would be sponsored entirely by business and by churches – the only organisations in whose hands it seems to believe our education system is safe. Of course this fell apart quite quickly. Churches were anxious for control, but did not want to put up large sums of money for sponsorship, and would only take control when given a business donation which covered the sponsorship. And the number of businesses willing to put up money for state education is very limited. So now the government is falling back on public sector sponsors like universities – and even, bizarrely, local authorities.

Here's a revolutionary idea from the education secretary. Get private sponsors - anyone with £2m to spare - to own, run and operate schools. Appeal for "potential sponsors in the business community, churches and existing educational trusts". The government will pay all running costs and most of the capital costs. Sponsors will contribute to the initial capital required. City academies? No, this was an announcement made exactly 20 years ago, at the 1986 Conservative party conference, by the then education secretary, Kenneth Baker. And he called his bright idea city technology colleges (CTCs). Academies came much later, in 2000, when the then education secretary, David Blunkett, told us they were to be "owned and run by sponsors" who could be "businesses, individuals, churches, other faith groups or voluntary bodies". The only difference is that sponsors of academies are even freer. They are no longer restricted to urban areas, nor to secondary schools. Academies can be all-age, and specialise in any subjects. Other than that, city academies are the same as CTCs. So when the Labour government arrived in 1997, it should have been able to look at the history of CTCs to see if the idea worked. The first thing it would have found is that Labour had thought the idea a dud. Labour's then education spokesman, Jack Straw, told the House of Commons: "No programme has been such a comprehensive and expensive failure ... [it] is wasteful and wrong, so why does he [the education secretary] not scrap it altogether and immediately save £120m, which could be spent on a crash programme of repairs and improvements, as we have demanded?" He was horrified that the government was spending many times more money on CTC pupils than on state school pupils. He was pretty scathing about the rest of Baker's policies, too. Baker was "the architect of the lethal combination of city technology colleges, opting out, the local management of schools, an inflexible national curriculum". Every one of these is now the policy of the government Straw has adorned since 1997, without the smallest protest from him. But perhaps his deadliest attack was a 1990 press release in which he said sponsors were "second-order companies whose directors were interested in political leverage or honours". In the case of academies, we have had to discover this for ourselves. Baker's 1986 announcement was the creation of a "pilot network of 20 city technology colleges in urban areas". Sponsors would own their CTCs and run them, employing all staff. At first, Baker wanted sponsors to put up £8m towards capital costs, but it rapidly became clear they were not going to put up anything like that amount. He made it known that he would accept £2m. The government would happily stump up the rest - on average, about £10m. The one lesson that should have been learned from the CTC episode is that wealthy people and big businesses do not part with anything like enough to build a school, and normally expect something in return. Baker realised there was no point in expecting sponsors to contribute more than a token sum. Labour took a long time, and the searing experience of its ill-fated Education Action Zones, to learn that lesson. But by the time city academies were launched, it had learned it. So it decided on Baker's bargain £2m for its academies. Of course, £2m was worth far less by March 2000, when Blunkett announced the creation of city academies. By then, a new school cost not £10m, but more like £30m. In order to attract sponsors, Baker said business people could name their colleges after themselves or their companies, and dictate the curriculum. It was to be the ultimate sponsorship opportunity: to be known as a company that cared about education, to have your name and logo engraved on the hearts of schoolchildren, and even to ensure they were taught the skills your company required. Yet it was not enough. Margaret Thatcher herself had to be called in to try to twist arms, personally telephoning the chairman of BP, who turned her down, even though his company was at the time spending £9m on community activities, £1.9m of it on education. So CTC sponsors tended to be smaller companies. Michael Ashcroft was chairman of the Bermuda-registered security services company ADT and a guarantor of the Conservative party's overdraft. He paid just £1m to sponsor the ADT CTC in Wandsworth. In January 1990, he made it clear how his business interests and Wandsworth council's politics could benefit, in a private letter to the council leader, Sir Paul Beresford: "From a political point of view, the higher the profile that can be given to the creation of the CTC concept here in Wandsworth the better, and no doubt this will be of much help to local Conservative candidates for the May 1990 elections. "I have suggested to the prime minister and Kenneth Baker that it would be helpful if a small ceremony could be held on or around April 2 1990, so that the college can be formally handed over ... to the new CTC trust. The prime minister's presence would, of course, guarantee publicity." You might wonder whether a tobacco company ought to be sponsoring a school, but British American Tobacco's money was accepted in Middlesbrough. Brighton property speculator Ivor Revere's aborted CTC in Sussex triggered a National Audit Office investigation after it was discovered he had paid £2.3m for the site and charged the taxpayer £2.5m for it. After Revere's withdrawal, the government was left with a disused school whose value was declining. It was still unsold four years later, in 1993, and security was costing £1,000 a week. Jack Straw thought this was the last straw. "Is not the truth of the city technology college programme that financial controls have been so inadequate that ministers and donors have been able to play fast and loose with public funds?" With academies, the government supplies the money and the sponsor spends it. If, as many sponsors do, he chooses to spend it buying goods and services from his own companies, that is his affair. For example, Sir Peter Vardy's schools paid £111,554 for "support services such as marketing and recruitment" to his car dealer firm, Reg Vardy Plc, and £14,039 to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as reimbursement for time on academy business spent by Sir Peter's brother David. None of this work was put out to tender, which is a legal requirement in state schools. A businessman, Cyril Taylor, was appointed to head the CTC Trust. Today, now Sir Cyril, he heads the trust that promotes city academies. I was shown round the first CTC, Kingshurst, near Birmingham. The spacious classrooms, full of the latest technology, would have turned most state school teachers green with envy. Nearby stood crumbling, cash-starved schools for the pupils who could not get into Kingshurst. Its sponsor, the automotive company GKN, had a manager in the school to advise the head and the teachers on teaching and curriculum matters, though he had no experience of education. Ann Jones became vice-principal of Kingshurst when it opened in 1989, and is now its principal. She thinks CTCs have been "an enormous vehicle for change in education. All 15 have valued vocational education and have given it real parity of esteem with academic education. We value being independent of local authorities, and not being constrained by what they might think." She does not think local authority interference has been replaced by interference from sponsors. "In our case at least, we have not had interference from our sponsors. We have always been student-led." The last CTC to be authorised, in April 1991, was Kingswood in Bristol. After the, by now, familiar scramble for private sector cash, the chairman of Cable and Wireless and former Tory party chairman Lord Young stumped up the required £2m. The government handed over the other £8m. Avon county council's deputy director of education, Edward Watson, bitterly contrasted that £8m for capital spending on the 900 children at Kingswood with the £4.5m he had for capital spending on the county's other 150,000 children. With the extra money, he said, all secondary schools could be fully repaired, all improvements they wanted could be done, all could have a new science laboratory, and there would be enough left over to give all primary schools an extra nursery class for a year. Watson was unlucky. If he had been able to hold out for a few months more, he would never have had a CTC on his patch. By then, while the new education secretary Kenneth Clarke was blustering about the success of CTCs, he was actually in retreat. Kingswood was the 15th and last CTC. Officially, the CTC programme never ended. No one ever said: "That's it, lads, back to the drawing board." But after the 15th of the "pilot network" of 20, there were no more. Clarke quietly killed off the only CTC in the pipeline, in Barnet, north London. Taylor started talking about his new big idea, requiring comparatively tiny amounts of private sector money and leaving the state controlling the schools it is paying for. But in the programme's dying days, a system of smoke and mirrors was invented, which the academies programme has been swift to build on. The sponsor of Haberdashers' Aske's in Lewisham, south London, the Haberdashers' Company, a city livery company, did not part with a penny. Since it was already running a state school on the site, it "gave" the site to the new CTC. The CTC Trust promptly announced that the value of this site was more than £2m, and, magically, another generous sponsor had come forward. Today, that city technology college is to become a city academy, , owned and controlled by the Haberdashers, benefiting from another large dollop of taxpayers' cash and taking over another local school. The Haberdashers' Company is still not keen on putting up money. Anything Kenneth Clarke can do, Charles Clarke can also do, and just before he left the Department for Education, the new academy went up on the department website. "The main sponsor," it said, "is the Haberdashers' Livery Company." So how much was the sponsor putting in this time, in return for control of two schools instead of one? The council says it does not know; the school says no one there can discuss it; the Haberdashers' Company says only the school can discuss it. The relevant paragraph in the funding agreement is secret, and the government successfully blocked a request to see it under the Freedom of Information Act. Local rumour puts the figure somewhere in the region of peanuts. http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/s...1885618,00.html Francis Beckett's book about city academies will be published by Continuum in March

Just before Christmas 1945, as William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw Haw, awaited execution for treason because of his wartime broadcasts from Germany for Hitler, my father wrote to him. "Our children will grow up", John Beckett told his friend, "to think of you as an honest and courageous martyr in the fight against alien control of our country ... That is how we shall remember you, and what we will tell our people." Joyce replied that he was "deeply touched by what you say of the manner in which your children will be taught to regard me". It was a promise my father did his best to keep. While he was composing the hardest letter of his life, I was probably sleeping upstairs, as peacefully as a seven-month-old baby can sleep. All Joyce's other fascist friends, including their leader Oswald Mosley and AK Chesterton, who went on to found the National Front, rushed to condemn him. But my father never spoke of Joyce except with affection and respect. Only recently, when the MI5 intercepts on his letters and telephone calls were at last opened, did I discover that this was because he was keeping a promise to an executed comrade. In 1925 John Beckett become the youngest Labour MP of his time, at the age of 30. Moving rapidly leftwards, he was expelled from the Labour party and lost his seat in 1931, joining Mosley's fascists in 1933. He and Joyce were chief propagandists for the Blackshirts, until Mosley fired them for dissent in 1937. Joyce and Beckett formed the National Socialist League, but my father left the next year. Publicly, Joyce and Beckett attributed their break-up to my father's alarm at the stridency of Joyce's anti-semitism, but there was more to it. In his letter to his condemned friend, he refers to a conversation between them that took place seven years earlier - obliquely because both men knew their letters were being intercepted and read. "No one knows better than myself the sincerity of the beliefs which led to the course of action you chose. You remember we discussed the position in 1938, and the disagreement and respect I showed for your opinion then, remains." In Joyce's long reply - four cramped pages, his tiny handwriting covering every part of the little sheets of Wandsworth prison paper - he says: "Of course I remember, quite vividly, how we discussed the situation in 1938. I do not, in the most infinitesimal degree, regret what I have done. For me, there was nothing else to do. I am proud to die for what I have done." At that 1938 discussion, I think Joyce said he would go to Germany if war was declared, and wanted my father to go with him. He also probably explained that if ever he were brought to trial in Britain, he would rely on the fact that he was really a citizen of the US, where he was born. In 1940 my father tried to prepare the ground for this defence. Questioned by a committee which was charged with advising whether he and other fascists should be kept in prison [under the Defence of the Realm Act], he dropped a bombshell. Q: "Joyce is Lord Haw Haw, I am told ... Do you confirm it?" JB: "I cannot confirm it, but I think it is very likely." Q: "... We know Joyce has gone to Germany." JB: "He is in Germany. Of course, he was never a British subject." Q: "Was he not?" JB: "No. He was an American subject, he was born in America, but I did not find that out until after we had parted." Joyce used this defence in 1945, but that year no one was going to let legal niceties stop them from hanging Lord Haw Haw. My father did not want to buoy his friend up with false hope: "Some of our friends are working very hard to get a petition signed and I shall do my best to help them, but you will not be optimistic as to its results," he wrote. He began his letter: "I feel an urgent need to write to you, yet find it very difficult to say anything very adequate to the occasion. Certainly I know you too well to imagine there is any need to offer you consolation or exhort you to courage." And he ended it: "Goodbye, William, it's been good to know you and there are few things in my life I am prouder of than our association. Yours always, John." "As you rightly say," replied Joyce, "I need no exhortation or consolation: but to know that my motives have not been misunderstood by those whose regard I do value is to know that I shall not die in vain, and to suspect that my service in dying may be greater than my service in living. May it be so!" John's letter "could have come only from a real friend". But the petition is unlikely "to stand between me and Jewish revenge" and he would not seek mercy "from those who have denied me justice". Two weeks after my father wrote to him, on January 3 1946, Joyce was hanged. The two letters are in eight huge boxes of MI5 surveillance on Beckett in the years 1945 to 1947 which have been kept secret for almost 60 years. All my father's letters, incoming and outgoing, were opened and read, and all his telephone calls were tapped and transcribed. It was done thoroughly - the most trivial everyday conversations are recorded verbatim - but not efficiently. The then news editor of the Communist Daily Worker, Douglas Hyde, told me he once received a letter intended for my father. My father received Hyde's letter. The spooks had put them back in the wrong envelopes. There is little in the boxes to indicate why he was still worth following, and nothing at all to show why the material is so sensitive that it needed to be buried for six decades. Most of it is the humdrum life and worries of a 51-year-old man just out of prison, with no home, no money, a small baby, no job, and a name and a face which potential employers would remember and fear. I discovered with sadness how nearly he managed to rescue his life, even then. He got a job as an administrator at what later became Watford general hospital, where I was born, inventing a cover story for his years behind bars. He was "overjoyed" at the prospect of working outside politics, of earning a proper living doing useful work. MI5 considered stopping it, because he was only allowed to travel five miles from his home and the hospital was five and a half miles away. The hospital must have found out who he was, because he was soon wearily back at his old trade, running the British People's party, on the fringes of the fascist right, and living on the wealth of its president, the Duke of Bedford, until the Duke died in 1953, and then slipping into penury. But an even sadder discovery was that the file contained, not a transcription of Joyce's last letter to him, but a recent photocopy of the original. They never let him see it. My father must have gone to his grave without knowing that his friend had taken the trouble to answer his letter. Should we care about the secret power of the security services, when the victims were men like Beckett, Joyce and Chesterton, with their unpleasant political views, their racism, and their postwar belief that the Holocaust was a myth, probably invented by Jews? Yes: we cannot demand civil liberties only for people with views we consider acceptable. It's a point worth remembering today, as the government plans the greatest clampdown since MI5 stopped transcribing my father's telephone calls. This is an extract from The Rebel Who Lost His Cause - The Tragedy of John Beckett MP by Francis Beckett. It is published by Allison and Busby.

Francis Beckett is a writer and journalist, writing regularly for the New Statesman and The Guardian and for several other publications. He has published several science fiction short stories (in the Young Oxford series from OUP) and his first play, The Sons of Catholic Gentlemen, was broadcast in 1997. He is a former president of the National Union of Journalists and a former Labour Party and trade union press officer. Books by Francis Beckett include Clem Attlee (1997), Enemy Within - the Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (1998), The Rebel who lost his Cause - the Tragedy of John Beckett MP (2000), Stalin's British Victims (2004), Nye Bevan (2004) and The Blairs and their Court (2004).