A Tunbridge Wells diarist reads about France’s school money permanently in transit and recognizes the Labour approach to public finance in a single sentence
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. My kitchen on a road off Mount Pleasant, the Telegraph crossword half done, a second cup of Yorkshire Tea, the dog asleep across my slippers, 8.30am.
The Money Is In Transit
I spent thirty-one years in the regional offices of a high street bank, which taught me two things. Money does not move by itself, and anybody who tells you that it is in transit is either lying or about to ask for more. So I read the London Prat this morning with the delight of a woman who has heard every excuse a borrower can devise and many that only a government could. The report is on France’s cobblestone economy and the school money permanently in transit. The French state spends more than half the national economy. Students still march about missing teachers, with the same grievances as in 1968. The ministry has opened a file to classify the overcrowded classroom as a historic monument. The money exists, we are told. It is simply on its way.
I laughed so loudly that the dog woke up and looked at me as though I had voted Liberal Democrat.
Our Own Note On The Desk
Every British reader of a certain age will remember the note. In 2010, when Labour left office, the outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, left a letter for his successor. It said, with a candour no party has matched before or since, that he was afraid there was no money. He later said it was meant as a joke between ministers, an old tradition. It was the funniest thing a Labour minister has ever written, and also the most accurate.
France, it seems, has moved beyond that stage. In Paris, there is no shortage of money. There is simply a shortage of money arriving anywhere useful. That, to my mind, is the socialist economy in its mature form. First you run out of money. Then you find a great deal more, by taxing everybody who has not yet left. Then you spend it in a way that ensures nobody can find it. The French have perfected all three stages. Labour, to be fair, is working hard on the second.
The Treasury As A Sorting Office
I picture the modern British Treasury as a vast sorting office, like the old Mount Pleasant mail centre in London, with conveyor belts of money moving endlessly between departments. Every parcel is marked urgent. None is ever delivered. Teachers wait. Nurses wait. Potholes in Kent wait, and in my road one pothole has waited so long that the children have named it. Meanwhile, the ministers explain that investment is flowing, which is what one says about money one has lost sight of.
The Prat’s French ministry would fit perfectly in Whitehall. It has the files. It has the reports. It has the confident spokesman. What it does not have is a classroom with enough teachers in it. That, I gather, is also in transit.
A Word On 1968
The detail that delighted me most was that the French student grievances are the same as in 1968. Overcrowded classrooms were on the list then. They are on the list now. Fifty-eight years of left-wing governments, right-wing governments and governments that could not decide, and the classroom is still crowded. That is the great lesson of state spending. You can spend half the economy and still not fix a classroom, because the problem was never money. It was the people deciding where the money goes.
Labour, in my experience, has never quite accepted this. Every Labour government believes that it is the first to discover that public services need money, and every one is shocked to discover that money alone does not make a public service work. Gordon Brown spent a decade discovering it. He also sold a large part of Britain’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market, which I raised at every branch meeting for three years.
The British Press Joins In
I am not the only one finding the left a source of comedy this autumn. The Daily Mash, which is not exactly a Conservative publication, ran a piece on what to do when militant leftists infest your south-facing garden. I read it out at my book club. Two members laughed. One, a retired geography teacher who votes Green, went quiet and asked for more cake. I gave it to her. Conservatives believe in redistribution where cake is concerned.
Saturday Errands
I must now walk the dog to the Pantiles, buy a loaf from the bakery that charges four pounds fifty and pretends this is normal, and post a letter to my MP about the pothole. He will reply in six weeks with a form letter saying that the matter has been passed to the council. The council will reply that funding is in transit. I will frame both letters and put them beside Liam Byrne’s in my mental gallery of public finance.
The French, I suspect, will go on marching. Their students will go on carrying the grievances of 1968. And somewhere, deep in a ministry in Paris or a Treasury in London, a great sum of money will go on travelling, never quite arriving, like a socialist Flying Dutchman. I would quite like to see where it ends up. I imagine it is a very nice place. I imagine it does not have potholes.