The news that tax exile and wannabe City Academy sponsor Andrew Rosenfeld has withdrawn from his involvement in the attempt to set up a new academy in the London borough of Brent gives a boost to the campaigners who have fought so hard to defeat the Blairite privatisation swindle.

Their protest camp, pitched on the Wembley Park sports ground that is the proposed site of the academy, has scored a notable success against a Blairite measure supported by the ruling Lib Dem council.

The coalition of teachers, parents, local residents and sports enthusiasts which has seen off the intrusion of tax avoider Rosenfeld has much to congratulate itself for.

But ATL and NUT national executive member and Brent resident Hank Roberts is right to stress that the fight doesn’t stop there.

Desperate to save their sordid little adventure into the marketisation of education, the Lib Dems have dredged up, wouldn’t you just believe it, a tatty group of hedge fund speculators as a replacement to front the project.

Not that this group, which is linked to Goldman Sachs – a company that gives its leading pirates bonuses bigger than the annual wage packets of all but the richest of Brent residents – is going to have to shell out all that big a percentage of the costs in order to have a disproportionate say in the education of Brent’s young people.

The going rate used to be up to about £2 million, but that is peanuts compared to the real cost of these establishments.

The two city academies singled out by the National Audit Office as poorly performing schools last year cost the taxpayer around £100 million to run.

And the government, having failed to find enough sponsors to live up to the £2 million price tag, first added on the codicil in cash or in kind and then dropped the price tag altogether, announcing that sponsors no longer needed to put money up front at all, merely commit to making “endowments” at some vague and unspecified future time.

As Jack Straw commented on the sponsors of their predecessors, the city technology colleges – in 1990, that is, when he was Labour education spokesman – sponsors tended to be “second-order companies whose directors were interested in political leverage or honours.”

Well, we all know where that scenario has left Labour. Its Prime Minister interviewed by the police, members of its staff arrested and so forth.

But these are not the only reasons that this shabby, back-door privatisation measure should be fought wherever it appears.

The real danger is that our children could end up being educated, given the very real nature of the influence over curriculum and direction that sponsors are accorded, by a pack of mercenary dog-eat-dog City villains with about as much in the way of morality or civilised values as the normal hedge fund or private equity company – and that isn’t much.

So good luck to Mr Roberts and the campaigning citizens of Brent. You have seen off one maurauding capitalist and, given reasonable luck and the support of the entire movement, you will see off his successors. More power to your elbows.