ABSTRACT
The question which remains unanswered about James Callaghan’s Ruskin speech of 1976 is whether it represented a swing towards the right-wing views of Rhodes Boyson and the ‘Black Papers’, or whether it was, as Callaghan himself has maintained, the breaking of new ground which brought parents into the debate about education and created for Labour its own distinctive education reform agenda. In re-examining the speech, I interviewed not only James Callaghan but a number of other politicians, as well as policy-advisers and educationalists, who were close to the events of the day, and have drawn on many of those accounts for this chapter (see Appendix I).
