Mick Hartley

The government – well, the Department of Education – has issued a warning to schools against using ‘resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters’, and defined ‘anti-capitalism’ as one example of an extreme political stance. Naturally this has provoked strong reactions from the likes of John McDonnell.

“On this basis it will be illegal to refer to large tracts of British history and politics including the history of British socialism, the Labour Party and trade unionism, all of which have at different times advocated the abolition of capitalism.

“This is another step in the culture war and this drift towards extreme Conservative authoritarianism is gaining pace and should worry anyone who believes that democracy requires freedom of speech and an educated populace.”

Economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said the guidance showed “how easy it is to lose a country, to slip surreptitiously into totalitarianism”.

He added: “Imagine an educational system that banned schools from enlisting into their curricula teaching resources dedicated to the writings of British writers like William Morris, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Paine even. Well, you don’t have to. Boris Johnson’s government has just instructed schools to do exactly that.”

The panic spread:

A writer at the Canary tweeted: ‘Under new guidelines the Johnson government is banning from schools in England works by William Godwin, William Morris, JB Priestley, Noam Chomsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell and many others who critiqued the economic model of the established order.’ Author and broadcaster Stuart Maconie joined in: ‘So ironic that this would mean no teaching George Orwell.’

All of which is nonsense, of course. The warning was against using ‘resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances', not against the teaching of George Orwell – or indeed anyone else.

Daniel Finkelstein, in the Times, fights back:

The government is right to include overthrowing capitalism in its list of extreme stances.

There are lots of ways in which capitalism can be reformed and its institutions changed. Much of human progress over the last two centuries has come from gradually improving the regulation of private enterprise and the provision of social support. Abolishing capitalism is extreme, reforming it is not.

It is the attempts to replace a capitalist economy altogether that have, without exception, ended in murderous disaster.

In his book Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies Kristian Niemetz puts to the sword the excuse that socialism hasn’t really been tried. Of course it has.

As Niemitz notes: “Over the past 100 years there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society. It has been tried in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Hungary, China, East Germany, Cuba, Tanzania, Benin, Laos, Algeria, South Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua and Venezuela.”

Each of these disasters has gone through three stages. First there is a honeymoon period in which the latest socialist model is proclaimed to have avoided the pitfalls that doomed its predecessors. Not for Venezuela, for instance, the errors of Stalin.

Then there is the excuses stage when obvious calamity is blamed by advocates on western imperialist intrigue or sanctions.

And then, finally, when the whole sorry dictatorial, poverty-creating mess can no longer be denied nor the blame diverted, the model and its leaders are disavowed. It wasn’t “real socialism” after all, we are told.