If you wanted proof that the Labour party has severed all its links to the past you need look no further than Gordon Brown’s intention, ex-pressed last week, to “bring business into the classroom”.

The founders of the socialist movement and their assorted gods and gurus - the Webbs, Shaw, William Morris, Tawney, Orwell, etc. - would all of them have been turning in their graves at such a brazen betrayal of everything they ever believed in.

To these idealists who provided the Labour movement with its intellectual ballast , and whose influence survived still in the Labour party of Harold Wilson, education was an end in itself, a quasi-religious cause which had nothing to do with economics, let alone business.

Education, as believed by Blair, Brown, Blunkett, Woodhead and co., is now just a means to improve Britain’s economic performance.

Richard Ingrams, June 24