IN PRAISE of education, Thomas Paine wrote: “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” The Norfolk-born radical-turned-French-revolutionary was writing of the crisis in his adopted American homeland with perhaps greater optimism than more recent developments in that country might justify.

Having now twice elected a president not especially endowed with a subtle mind, the United States is really in trouble with a population 28 per cent functionally illiterate which since 2017 has become even more so.

For the purposes of comparison we can note that Cuba has a 99.9 literacy rate (and it is not expected to get very much better!)

Before we get complacent about Britain’s relatively high level of literacy — just a smidgen below Cuba’s — note that schools in Britain face a £630 million cut in funding next year.

When the School Cuts Coalition estimated that this amounts to the salaries of 12,400 school staff they are really drawing attention to the government practice of shifting budgetary control onto schools without raising the funding allocation to take account of increases in salaries.

The consequence is that school administrators and heads — often the same person — become adept at robbing Peter to pay Paul.

This is just one aspect of the austerity regime bequaeathed us by Tory and Lib Dem governments in the recent past and which have been adopted wholrsale by the Starmer government.

The thing about austerity is that is passes the tasks of dealing with decreasing budgets from the executive level — government — to the operational level — public services, health, housing and education.

The mixed messaging coming out of Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street reflect the dilemma any administration faces if its conceives of its economic option entirely bound by the dictatorship of the bond markets and the demands of the banks and the City of London.

The government is pulled in one direction — double down on austerity to pay for war spending while simultaneously assuring the money men that all is under control — or go another way and deal with the political crisis which threatens to relegate Labour as an electoral also-ran.

Thus we have Keir Starmer splurging on school meals for an extra tranche of kids from families on benefits while cuddling up to Ursula von der Leyen in the hope of hitching a ride on her Panzer.

Next week brings us Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Spending Review. This is less a review of how much has not been spent on health, educations, housing and adult social care and more how much is going to be spent on missiles, planes, drones, tanks and guns, not to mention any number of technological whizzes that cost a fortune.

Saturday’s People’s Assembly demonstration is the opening of a new front in the essential battle to change the direction of this government. The government’s policy problems and its electoral anxieties have a common root.

This is the fundamental conception that there is no alternative to the consensus policies followed by each of the parliamentary parties of government. This is not an especially British problem — all capitalist countries confront these same issues — but Britain’s low investment rate, flatlining GDP growth and low-wage economy means it is especially vulnerable to external shocks even while it is afflicted by many domestic problems.

The only way out of these problems within capitalism — given that the people with capital are decidedly unwilling to invest — is the short-term adoption of “dirigiste” policies of state intervention, directed investment and capital controls.

Even if this is effective in the short term, the structural problems of our private ownership system are increasingly unsolvable.

In the aftermath of Saturday’s manifestation we should direct our thoughts to to find a more permanent solution to our country’s problems that entails the working class taking the initiative.