Do we need literacy tests for political office?

It’s wholly true that literacy tests to be able to vote have something of a bad reputation so we’ll not start suggesting those. Jim Crow was not a happy time and we know of no evidence at all that the illiterate are unable to spot a Bad ‘Un and therefore not vote for them. However, there is a thought creeping up on us that perhaps we do need to test the literacy - or possibly just the language comprehension skills - of those with pretensions to office:

The national curriculum is set to be made more “diverse” under Labour plans.

Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has begun a review to “refresh” what is taught in schools, pledging to “breathe new life into our outdated curriculum”.

The new curriculum will be compulsory in all state schools, including academies that were previously free to opt out.

We might revel in diversity. In fact, we do revel in it. It’s rather the underlying point about markets, that diverse offerings are made so that diverse desires may be assuaged by the diversity of choice available.

But diversity does mean that different things are on offer, that different things are allowed to happen. Which is, of course, exactly the opposite of what is being proposed here. Instead there is to be the imposition of the one, single, monoculture upon the entire nation.

That is not diversity.

Which is where our potential for a language test comes in. Something modest, obviously - too strict an insistence upon being able to speak the language would have barred the late and much loved John Prescott from office and we’d not want to do that disservice to the gaiety of the nation - but that some modest proof of a general understanding of the country being ruled would be nice. No?

Diversity means difference. As that really rather left wing book, The Trouble With Diversity, pointed out a couple of decades back. A monoculture of different ethnicities and skin colours is not diverse, differences in views, opinions and even teachings is the only useful meaning of diversity.

Let us indeed revel in the gloried diversity of the country - not impose the one, single, central, set of opinions.

Tim Worstall