I agree with the Daily Mail

Tweet

Now that’s not something I’ve said before, and I may never say it again.  But the fact that I agree makes me wonder whether they’ve really thought through the implications of what they’re saying.

The practice used by holiday companies of charging significantly more during the school holidays than they charge during term time does indeed make it difficult for many parents, and leads directly to the sort of case we’ve seen recently where parents find themselves before the courts for failing to send their children to school.  The practice is, however, based on what economists call the law of supply and demand.  When demand is high, prices rise, and when it’s lower, they fall.  And what the Daily Mail is calling for is, effectively, government regulation to force the companies concerned to ignore that law of supply and demand.

As it happens, that’s precisely why I agree with them.  Markets are a human construct; all markets work within sets of rules and the question is really about who should set the rules and in whose interests they should be set.  I’ve always been in favour of the idea that governments should act in the wider social interest by setting rules and constraints on how markets should operate.  Supporters of entirely ‘free’ markets believe, on the other hand, that markets are there to enable individuals to pursue their own selfish interests with no outside intervention; some will win and some will lose.  There’s a significant ideological divide there.

One of the consistent themes of papers such as the Daily Mail during the Brexit campaign was that we should abolish all that horrid EU regulation which was constraining businesses from making profits by doing what they thought was most in their own interest.  That is in direct conflict with the position which they’re taking today.  So, has the Daily Mail switched ideologies overnight?  No, of course not; they’re just taking a populist position on the basis that it will help them sell newspapers.

It neatly underlines one of the problems with populism.  Combining a series of policies which are individually popular can never create a coherent or consistent whole; quite the reverse.  For that, we have to start from principles or ideology.  On that, the gulf between me and the Daily Mail is as large as it ever was.

More of the same?

Tweet I have no argument with the statement by Michael Gove that the length of the school day and the timing and duration of school holidays, both of which were set at a time when agriculture was rather more central to the economy than it is now, should be up for consideration.

Nor do I disagree with his observation that some of the Asian countries with longer school days and terms are outperforming the UK significantly and consistently when it comes to educational attainment.

I’m not convinced, however, that drawing a straight line from those statements to his conclusion that the school day should be longer and holidays shorter is justified by hard evidence.  There’s a parallel of sorts with the Welsh Lib Dems’ continually banging on about spending as much per head on average in Wales as they do in England – it’s about grabbing hold of a simple solution without really understanding whether that solution actually addresses the problem.

I have seen no evidence that the real problem with education in the UK is simply that pupils don’t spend enough time in the classroom; and if that’s unproven, then merely increasing the amount of time that they do spend in the classroom is missing the point.  If, for instance, the problem is more to do with the nature of the educational experience itself, then it has to be at least possible that increasing the exposure to it will have no effect - and conceivably even have a net detrimental effect.  More of the wrong thing isn’t necessarily better for anyone.

Personally, I suspect that the difference has more to do with attitude towards education; the fact that some countries have both longer hours and better results could easily be down to that.  And politicians tinkering with the curriculum and the length of the school day does anything to address that underlying attitude problem.