Hugh Reilly: Milk Snatcher’s legacy leaves a sour taste

WHEN attending a funeral, on hearing the eulogy I’ve often wondered if I have stumbled into the wrong church service. The cultural norm is to praise the deceased and absolve him of any shortcomings.

I can’t wait to take time off from warming my chestnuts in Hell to look up and listen to the lamentation over the man I never was.

As in life, Margaret Thatcher has proved to be a divisive character in death. I confess to being a little nonplussed that I didn’t receive an invitation to attend parties held in Glasgow to mark her demise. David Douglas, who studied politics alongside me at Strathclyde University in the 70s, gave a television interview in which he poured scorn on those who appear only to remember the positives of the Thatcher era.

Like many in the trade union movement, Douglas was dismissive of what he perceives to be sanctimonious guff emanating from politicians and elements of the media. As a great proponent of freedom, the lady would surely not be turning in her grave if individuals chose to publicly rail at the legacy of her deeds.

I started teaching in 1980, just before she introduced school placing requests – at a stroke ending the notion that a child attended the local school. Instead of toddling along to a designated school serving a catchment area capriciously drawn up by local authority pen-pushers, kids become valuable commodities as schools compete to attract priceless learners.

Almost overnight, the Education Spring resulted in a two-tier education system. Tipsy on their new-found power, parents eagerly shunted their prodigy in the direction of establishments in leafier suburbs. Suddenly, some comprehensive secondaries that had helped produce a tsunami of educated working-class children were deemed to be cesspools of ignorance.

New words entered the education lexicon: “sink school, magnet school”.

Schools that came second in education’s beauty pageant were placed on death row as a consequence of the Iron Lady’s policy. For example, St Augustine’s, in Glasgow, had been a thriving high school serving the Milton and Possilpark housing schemes. Sadly, the close proximity of Turnbull High School in posh Bishopbriggs resulted in the brightest and most motivated youngsters deserting the local comp. This had the twin effect of improving Turnbull’s academic success and diminishing that of St Augustine’s. Landed with the Herculean task of teaching the rump of the area’s youth,the latter closed a decade or so later.

Thatcher’s decision to allow council house sales exacerbated the situation. Perversely, only homes built by local authorities were up for grabs, the right to buy was not extended to tenants living in privately-rented accommodation (Children of a Lesser Landlord, if you will).

People living in desirable council housing stock cashed in their chips and bought into the home-owning democracy Big Fib. Tenement-dwellers, who had been stoically doing their time in the not unrealistic expectation of accumulating enough points for a back-and-front door, suddenly found themselves in a property cul-de-sac. Lower middle-class and aspirational working-class people fled the peripheral housing estates for pastures new, an eviscerating cleansing that led to such places becoming the postcodes of the unskilled, the unemployed and the unemployable. Little wonder, then, that schools in these parts were transformed into education ghettoes.

The ideological zeal of Britain’s first female prime minister drove her to destroy Scotland’s traditional industries: coal-mining, steel-making and shipbuilding. The ensuing, poverty in those areas blighted the futures of countless children. Today, Scotland still struggles to educate kids from poorer backgrounds, a fact not unnoticed by the OECD.

There is such a thing as society, despite Thatcher’s best efforts to inculcate an every-man-for-himself mentality. Scotland can be proud it offers free higher education to all its citizens, a stark contrast to the Brass Age of Education south of the Border, whereby wealth is a deciding factor in what and where a student studies.

Margaret Thatcher did it her way and I’m sure there were some good things (but then again, too few to mention).

She did what she had to do but, as far as I’m concerned, the Milk Snatcher’s education legacy is a lingering sour taste in my mouth.