Think more of a furious old cat, hissing away through toothless jaws.The nationalists, in any case, are not yet in the driving seat. Ditto the Hague tribunal’s hopes of getting hold of the two most wanted war criminals of the 1990s, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
Not only does Seselj’s victorious Serbian Radical Party not apologise for the carnage in Bosnia in the 1990s – it would do the same again. Bang go any hopes of integrating the former Yugoslav republics into the European Union. The electoral triumph of Serbia’s ultra-nationalists led by Vojislav Seselj leaves Western strategy in the Balkans in ruins. Ministers, sadly, seem disinclined to follow the bold path they set out..

We have seen too much of that sort of confusion since May 1997 to be confident about the future of this reform.We should perhaps treat the latest piece of “blue skies” thinking from Downing Street as just that; a hint about how the future could look Yet, as is often said, advisers advise and ministers decide The Downing Street advisers have done their job. Worse, schools might even find themselves in the position of having to answer to three separate and competing Whitehall fiefdoms: Number 10, the Treasury and the Education Department itself. As a spur to raising standards, competition and choice has few peers; making it work in public education is no easy task, but at least this is evidence that there are some in government thinking imaginatively about how to achieve it.The danger is that this well-meaning idea, if it were ever to be put into practice, would simply revert to the usual dismal pattern of New Labour reform, with centralisation of decision-making in London and the micro-management of individual schools through a web of targets, tables and regulation. Those local needs could and should be expressed through the sort of parental choice that ministers often talk about but all too rarely deliver. Taken together with parental freedom, this embryonic Adonis-Barber plan has the potential to be as revolutionary in its impact as the 1944 “Butler” Education Act.

Just as with the foundation hospitals in the National Health Service, granting full self-government to individual schools would liberate them to make the sort of decisions on, for example, hiring staff or buying equipment, that most suits their – local – needs. So Mr Adonis and Mr Barber face formidable institutional resistance to their plan, with or without the backing of their boss, Tony Blair.Yet the scheme has merits beyond its attractions as a quick fix to get council tax down. If the “nationalisation” of the schools meant a true devolution of power to individual headteachers and boards of governors, it would have a good deal to be said for it. The teachers and the local authorities fear a loss of power; the Education Department seems to think that it would get the blame for every classroom failure in the land; Mr Prescott fears what it means for his “new localism”; and the Treasury dislikes the implications for national taxation levels. The question is whether this particular idea is too clever by half.It is certainly garnering some powerful enemies. Not only can it be reliably expected to repel the local authorities themselves, the teaching unions and some Labour MPs, it is also apparently regarded with fear and loathing by the Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke; the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott; and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown All have vested interests to protect. Mr Adonis is the co-author of a book about the poll tax, so he knows a thing or two about local government finance and the political disasters it can inflict on unsuspecting ministers Both men have a reputation for cleverness.

And “cutting out the middle man” in the town halls in favour of direct funding from Whitehall would reduce council-tax levels, the rise in which threatens to inflict considerable political damage on the Government in next year’s municipal elections.The progenitors of this scheme to “nationalise” schools are Andrew Adonis, the Prime Minister’s adviser on public-sector reform, and Michael Barber, the head of the delivery unit. Or at least that must be the view from Number 10.
Removing the nation’s secondary schools from the control of local authorities would end the constant fear in central government that councils are not spending effectively the vast amounts of public money now being invested in education. It is none the less unfortunate, and disquieting, that they turned to ultra-nationalists in order to make their protest. The reformist parties, a coalition of which will continue to try to govern Serbia, have been warned.. As a solution to two separate and intractable political problems, the latest wheeze from Downing Street is rather neat Or at least that must be the view from Number 10. There is no reason to dispute, for example, the explanation for his party’s success proffered by the Radical Party’s deputy leader, Tomislav Nikolic, that the citizens of Serbia wanted “jobs, peace and security”. Gangsterism and assassination are emblems of political and economic weakness.