Tory attack on funding for Africa education shows they're descending towards Trump's crude populism


Russell Findlay, the new leader of the Scottish Conservatives, is an adroit communicator, his penchant for straight talking honed by decades as a successful tabloid reporter. “Stop playing to the minority and start governing for the majority. Focus on common sense, for a change,” he told his party conference last month.
What he clearly meant was “let’s focus on populism”, as his party’s reaction earlier this week to a government announcement of £12 million to educate children in Africa showed. Miles Briggs, usually a mild-mannered man, thundered his disapproval.
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Hide Ad“It’s the wrong call to send money overseas when Scotland’s schools are facing the prospect of cuts and urgently need more money… it shows how disconnected the SNP are from what matters most to parents here in Scotland,” he said. “When money is tight, difficult decisions need to be made and we must prioritise funding for our own schools, however worthy the overseas programme may be.”
Girls desperate to read and write
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with Briggs that the Scottish education is a mess, from nursery care to university funding. I have four grandchildren currently in the system, from primary school to further education. My niece, a recently qualified primary school teacher, is on a temporary contract, desperate for a permanent job but may not get one.
Seventeen years of nationalist rule, where the primary focus is the mythology of independence, has taken its toll on our once-proud education system, as it has done in other areas of our daily life, from housing to the NHS. During most of those 17 years, I might add, Findlay’s party ruled the roost at Westminster. The state of Scotland’s public services is down to two things: the SNP’s incompetence and Tory austerity.
So Russell Findlay, don’t you and your party dare use girls who are desperate to read and write but are instead forced into an early marriage, or children whose bodies and minds have been damaged by malaria, to curry favour with voters disillusioned by mainstream politics and open to cynical populism.
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Hide AdLooking forward to a bright future
Girls like 16-year-old Jessy, who I spent time with yesterday in her secondary school in central Malawi. When asked where she wants to be when she is 25, she said her ambition is to be a bank manager and that she wants to build her parents a house to replace the two-room mud-brick home where she and her family currently live.
Jessy, in her final year of secondary school, is able to contemplate a bright future because of the generosity of Scots who donate money to the McConnell International Foundation – set up by former First Minister Jack McConnell – for its Keep Girls in School scholarship programme. Their hard-earned cash pays for Jessy’s school fees, the cost of her national examinations and her uniform, which is compulsory.
It is a modest scheme compared to large scholarship programmes delivered by Unicef and the like, but it is changing the lives of 200 girls and their families. Scots supporting Malawians – the “wrong call”, according to the Scottish Tories.
Deep scars of colonialism
Economists, development experts and politicians have argued for decades about why countries like Malawi are so poor that they cannot afford to educate all their children and young people. The answers are as simple as they are complex. The global economy has no need of Malawi, unless it was to suddenly discover rich seams of rare earth minerals for rich economies to exploit.
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Hide AdClimate change, caused by centuries of industrialisation in countries such as our own, has devastated Malawi’s eco-system, making it even more difficult for the population to feed itself through subsistence farming, let alone grow crops for export. Colonialism left deep scars, as yet unhealed.
Malawi’s future lies in the hands of young women like Jessy – but if she and her generation are to navigate their way through the complexities of the global economy, if she and her generation are to have any hope at all of a life beyond mere survival, then they need an education.
School fees of £50 a year
According to Malawi’s education minister, only 17 per cent of Malawi’s children of secondary school age receive a secondary education. The most basic state secondary schools, such as the one that Jessy attends, charge school and exam fees of around £50 a year – so even if a child is lucky enough to win a place, her parents often simply cannot afford for her to attend.
Do we really want to be part of a world that deliberately condemns millions of young people like Jessy to a life of extreme poverty so that we might prosper just a little more, or do we want to help our brothers and sisters flourish, so that we can at least try to build a more equitable, safer planet?
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Hide AdIt is understandable that at times of hardship and uncertainty, such as we are experiencing, people hunker down to protect their own. I too am angry with the SNP government and the Conservatives for the harm they have done to my family through their careless stewardship of our economy and public services over recent years.
I still grieve for the way the secondary education system casually and cruelly abandoned my grandson in his adolescence. But I believe that Jessy deserves a decent education just as every boy and girl in Scotland deserves the best our rich nation can provide.
This is not a zero-sum game. Scotland can have the best schools in the world, while supporting young people in Africa. Surely the values of the Scottish Conservatives are far better than the crude populism of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. Findlay and his party may think that supporting girls like Jessy is the “wrong call”, but it is he who is out of touch, unconnected with the real world.
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