ABSTRACT
English history in the eighties, declared an American historian in a book published in 1981 'may turn less on traditional political struggles than on a cultural contest between the two faces of the middle class'. If the British decline with which all politicians still wrestled in the late 1970s was a matter of culture, then that culture might be reshaped. The British Empire was now dead but its cultural/commercial legacy lingered on powerfully. When British Leyland was on the brink of bankruptcy, the Labour government took a majority share and injected massive public funds. The educational crisis was not an invention of the government. Education in a free society required pluralism and variety not 'state education'. The government looked increasingly vigorously for ways in which it could by-pass an 'educational establishment' which it regarded as intransigently archaic.
