You have to hand it to Williamson: he lurches from catastrophe to catastrophe with a truculent insouciance, or an insouciant truculence, which he must have imbibed from a close study of Alexander's antics, who regards any criticism of his government as inherently unpatriotic. Of course, not wishing to be unfair, blame has to be apportioned to our smiling Chancellor, who could not see the social benefits of this spending, and decided that (unlike Trident, Alexander's new yacht for oligarchs, HS2, the tunnel under the Irish Sea), this expenditure was unaffordable. If the Treasury refuses to shell out now, during a national emergency, we will all pay in several years' time, through increased crime and the costs of ill health.
As a consequence of the latest disaster, the Treasury have butchered (there is no other word for it) the recovery plan for education which the government's own adviser had advocated. This is why this is so important. Education is not just about the '3 Rs', although much government rhetoric, which has often assumed a Gradgrindian quality over the past thirty years has had this as an operating assumption. Music, art, drama and sport are not luxury 'add-ons', but absolutely inherent to the central purposes of education, namely the socialisation and flourishing of human beings. It is the experience of learning together which has been so lacking since March 2020, and which is so damaging for the education of so many children. These activities also encapsulate the Deweyan ideal of 'learning through doing.'
I am not saying that everything that private schools do should be praised, but in recognising the foundational importance of these activities, private schools are (literally as well as metaphorically) right on the money. So many private school pupils derive their self-confidence from participation in these activities. There will never be parity of esteem between the public and private sectors in education until the public sector has sufficient resources to undertake them properly.
This is before you consider the other government policies which impact harshly on the poorest, which will inevitably affect the poorest children. Insecurity of work and of living conditions (exacerbated by the failure to include employment legislation in the Queen's Speech, and the coming abolition of special pandemic measures to protect tenants) presage a 'perfect storm' for the most vulnerable. These will also continue to affect the education of these children very adversely. For them, 'normality' is the problem: the pandemic was merely the exacerbation of existing conditions which were already intolerable.