So we get the stealth-privatisation of education, including free schools run by people like Toby Young, but we’re reassured this is about “driving up standards” as measured by the constant testing of harried school kids.

Long term Gove fans: his greatest hits are in the speech, including the idea that you can only be creative when you have “mastery of deep knowledge”. Presumably this means my kids will need constant testing on fronted adverbials before they can achieve anything in life.

What is so ironic about this is that Gove himself displays no deep knowledge about ANYTHING, especially in this speech. He’s absolutely the product of a pedagogy which rewards ‘cleverness’ & superficiality, & a media which is too nervous to cry bullshit on empty grandstanding.

See, for example, his bonkers analogy to the American Revolution; deep knowledge of the Confederation-era U.S. government in this aside, yup.

Back to the radical thinking: foregrounding the 'forgotten man' and doing better analytics are two of Gove’s New Deal pillars. (I can see FDR writing this down carefully.) The third pillar is “experimentation”.

No problem with seeing that as a crucial feature of the New Deal. In FDR’s case, it actually meant massive government investment in agriculture and industry, job creation programmes, the creation of a sweeping welfare system. Some of it worked, some didn’t. And for Gove?

It’s about…being willing to grant procurement contracts to left-field suppliers?

The idea that you are going to deal with ‘forgotten’ citizens by outsourcing your contact tracing to Serco rather than funding local authorities is where the bankruptcy of this speech is most apparent. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/serco-wins-covid-19-test-and-trace-contract-despite-1m-fine

The core problem facing Britain is that government doesn’t innovate or experiment enough? YOU LET TOBY YOUNG RUN A SCHOOL! You let him run the universities watchdog until we complained about his eugenics-adjacency. Experimentation is not your strong suit! https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/09/toby-young-resigns-office-for-students

But of course the game that’s being played here is to present Britain’s problems as mostly down to the dead hand of bureaucracy, regulation and political correctness: business and capital are completely off the hook throughout Gove’s speech.

There isn’t a single critique of modern capitalism, despite Gove’s disingenuous admission that capitalism seems to be in crisis. OK, there is one: he claims that corporations are too ready to hire social responsibility officers who point out what he mocks as “micro aggressions.”

And so the radical premise of the entire speech - that capitalism is in crisis - vanishes. Instead, it’s government/the civil service that’s in crisis because it won’t let the Tories give even MORE contracts to their friends or share your private health data with companies.

I don’t work on the 1930s and my only qualification for writing this thread is that I have actually read some books on the New Deal. But I only ask that journalists who report this as some kind of masterplan for government do basic diligence: talk to a historian.

Ask them politely if they recognise this as the kind of speech FDR would have given, or if the policy prescriptions and experiments of the New Deal look ANYTHING like Gove’s calls for undermining planning regulations & yet more school ‘choice’.

I’ll leave the last word to Franklin D. Roosevelt, from his acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic Convention. I think he sums up Toryism pretty well. And perhaps there’s a message for Keir Starmer here, too.