SO we learn that the biggest teaching unions have threatened an all-out strike against the Government’s education policy which aims to free individual schools from the bureaucratic control of Local Education Authorities.

I have something of a hand to declare in this for I was for many years a teacher in a state school and therefore employed by the LEA.

The experience was of insufferable bureaucracy and self-interest. Our school was visited, vetted and handicapped by the LEA apparatchiks in everything it tried to do.

There were these gauleiters, called “advisers” who would descend on us from the LEA and tell us we were doing it all wrong.

Things have got much worse since those days, but now brave Mr Gove is trying his hardest to free schools from this tyranny and leave each individual school at liberty, within reason, to form its own teaching policy.

Naturally this is being ruthlessly opposed by the teaching unions who claim that Gove’s reforms will be detrimental to the pupils.

That claim is just a smokescreen for the unions’ own self-interest.

How the hell the teaching unions have the brass face to talk about maintaining standards in education when it is obvious to anyone living in England today – anyone who can read a newspaper article or review – that state education has comprehensively, so to speak, failed amazes me.

After eleven years of state education 43 per cent of our children leave school unable to read, write and count efficiently. Schools are dumbed down beyond shame. Many teachers know no grammar – and, worse, they think grammar doesn’t matter anyhow. Many are illiterate. Their idea of music is some hideous pop album. Their reading doesn’t stretch beyond the trashy airport novel.

I question why the education of our children should have anything at all to do with the state. And I will answer my own question.

It is because we have lived through a socialist- corporatist century in which it has become orthodoxy to think that the state should run the whole of our lives: in those words from the Forties Beveridge Report, for instance, “from the cradle to the grave”.

The result is a stultifying totalitarianism and a decline into the abject. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the social services.

Only last week, perfectly decent and successful parents of four children were denied their application to adopt an orphan. Why?

Because the father – an habitual non-smoker – had been revealed as a bloke who had on just two celebratory occasions in the whole year smoked a cigar. And so the social-working Gestapo denied his application to adopt.

Why we have fallen for this corporatist heresy that the state knows best is a mystery to me. Several reports have shown that children’s abilities in the basics were better in the 19th century than they are today. Let me remind you that all the great works of art from Bach to George Eliot, from Mozart to Thomas Hardy were created in regimes that were free of this corporatist stranglehold.

What Mr Gove has understood is that if you leave people to get on with the job themselves they will find ways of achieving results that are most beneficial – not for themselves alone but, by extension, for the whole of society. The failed alternative is to leave it to the state. That is to bureaucrats who not only act exclusively in their own interests but who become more tyrannical by the minute.

Every promised socialist utopia ends up in the gulag. Let’s cast it off and get on with our lives.