Goodbye, Mr Chips... hello, Mr Fries
Hold on a minute.... by Nick Cohen  

If you had been in Whitehall on Tuesday, when Dabvid Blunkett and Stephen Byers announced that their standards revolution would bring high-class education to the young, you would certainly have missed a telling detail. McDonald's, the global junk food pedlar, was given Ministerial permission to seduce a captive audience of schoolchidlren.

The Education Secretary and his deputy, Byers, a man whose ambition burns so bright it could power a metropolis, did not say as much, of course. They confined themselves to warning that those who opposed commercial involvement in Education Zones (i.e. teachers, elected councillors and other dinosaur deadbeats) were vicitmes of 'outdated dogma' and defenders of 'vested interests'.

The outdated dogma Blunkett and Byers are following is Thatcherism. And the vested interest they refuse to tackle is big business - of which, according to a recent report from Cranfield Unviversity, has been given half the places on the 75 policy tasks forces Labour has created since the election.

Of all corporations, none has a greater interest in getting at the young than McDonald's. And that's precisely what Blunkett and Byers are allowing it to do. McDonald's will be a partner in the North Somerset education zone and will send burger-flippers in local schools to help with English lessons. (Don't ask me how.)

If this were the only educational role for McDonald's, it would concern only those citizens of Weston-super-Mare who shrink from the sight of fat and spotty children. But since 1993 the company has offered teachers in all schools 'resource packs' which could take the place of elusive, expensive textbooks. History, one pack recommended, should be taught by getting children to 'explore the changes in use of the McDonald's site'. Music teachers were advised to encourage pupils to make up words for 'Old McDonald had a Store', to the tune of 'Old McDonald had a Farm'. The English pack included such literary tasks as identifying the words 'Chicken McNuggets'.

In September, the National Year of Reading with begin. Michael Barber, Blunkett's chief adviser is already boasting that the campaign will be so pervasive you will have to leave the country to escape it. The Department for Education has secured sponsorship from McDonald's and hoped it will provide free lunch-boxes for children.

Should we condemn New Labour for debasing schools by allowing McDonald's to use them as a marketplace for gullible young customers? "That is an extremely cynical view" said a company spokesman. "We have always had the philosophy that we should put something back into the community".

I've tried my best, but even my cynicism cannot match the opportunism of the McDonald's marketing managers. Their calculations came out in the McLibel trial - the longest hearing in English legal history. The BBC refused last week to show a drama documentary on the heroic defendants, Helen Steel and Dave Morris. Possibly, it was not felt politic to bring to a wider public a case which dissected modern corporate policy and England's simultaneously sinsiter and preposterous legal system. For whatever reason, the failure to broadcast what happened has allowed the myth to grow that McDonald's won a Pyrrhic victory when it was awarded damages against Steel and Morris - whose criticisms it spent two years in court trying to silence.

The judge did indeed decide that a multinational with a £30 billion turnover needed to take monet from two unemployed activists. (As so often with libel cases involving powerful men and institutions, the judge chose to hear the case alone and spared McDonald's the indignity of having to convince a jury of common people.)

But on some points Mcdonald's did not have a victory, Pyrrhic or otherwise, it lost outright. The court heard that its confidential operations manual instructed employees to remembeL: 'Children are often the key decision-makers concerning where a family goes to eat. Ronald loves McDonald's and McDonald's food. And so do children, because they love Ronald. You should do everything you can to appeal to children's love for Ronald and McDonald's.' As well as saying that the company targetted 'susceptible young children to bring in custom, both their own and that of their parents, Mr Justice Bell found 'McDonald's advertisements, promotions and booklets have pretended to a positive nutritional bnenefit which McDonald's food did not match.' It also 'paid its workers low wages, thereby helping to depress wages for workers in the catering trade'.

About two-thirds of McDonald's staff are 20 or under. As Dave Morris said, McDonald's must see schoolchildren as cheap recruits as well as customers. New Labour, whose official position is now to force the young to work for low pay, is, of course, obliging the company. The above puts a rather lazy journalistic complaint about the Government into perspective. Barely a day passes without some wit writing that arrivist Blairites want to force the 'elite' tastes of Tuscany/ Islington on the nation by banning smoking, drinking, beef on the bone and other 'inappropriate' behaviour. Gags about political correctness are then disinterred from their graves in the sad belief that they were ever funny.

But the dead cracks miss the point. New Labour is part of a genuine elite which embraces politics, the media and business. Elite members would never dream, as Cherie Blair once said, of having The Sun in the house. They would be genuinely appalled if their children became Big Mac addicts or got jobs doling out fries at Burger King. But they are more than willing to use the fading populism of the Sun when they can to maintain their popularity or the appeal of McDonald's to make their dubious policies succeed.

The funny thing is that, when you attack them, you are accused by the genuine elite of being a liberal elitist - even though neither Blair nor Blunkett would contemplate putting you on a task force because you suffer from the crushing disability of not being a big business man.

The elite/ populist muddle shows that mdoern political language is now confused to the point of idiocy. Teaching children how to spell Chicken McNuggets will not, I suspect, help them make sense of the cant.

 
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