It's because their most dogmatic and divisive education policies have been adopted by New Labour that Conservatives are rushing into the mythical place to the right of Thatcherism, where nought but dragons dwell.

They have learned something from the Conservative failure. In 1986, the then education secretary, Kenneth Baker, announced that business would pay "all or most" of the estimated £10m cost of a CTC. The Tories quickly found that business did not fancy paying up anything like as much, and were forced to drastically revise their expectations downwards.

Labour wants only about £2m from its sponsors. What will happen is what happens every time governments try to palm off the cost of education on to business. It's what killed CTCs, as well as David Blunkett's education action zones. Within a few months we will hear that cash isn't required - contributions in kind will do. Business contributions for Mr Blunkett's action zones included construction giants Mowlem and Laing in Newham offering to show pupils round their training centre and asking whether they fancied a career in construction. That went down as a £40,000 contribution to the zone.

For £2m, less than a fifth of the likely cost, the business owns the school and gets the right to put its name and logo on it. It gets to decide what specialism the school has and, within the limits of the national curriculum, what subjects are taught. It can even impose its own ideological slant on the teaching.

Thus Sir Peter Vardy, an evangelical Christian who believes in creationism and already controls two schools, is to control at least two more. In his schools, he demands that Darwinism be taught not as science, but as one theory of the way the world came into being. Another equally good theory, the pupils are taught, is that the world was literally created by God in six days.

Ministers claim this gives parents a choice, but try telling that to the residents of two villages near Doncaster - Conisbrough and Denaby. They only have one local school, Northcliffe, and 150 out of 180 of their children go there. Unfortunately for them, Northcliffe is next on Sir Peter's shopping list. Some local parents do not want children indoctrinated with his eccentric views on religion. But they are going to be.

The 200 city academies will also have the right to pay their teachers above the national rate. But in many secondary schools right now, the salary budget does not stretch to putting teachers on as high a salary grade as their experience and ability entitle them to. Hundreds of teachers are kept "below the bar" because their schools cannot afford to put them above it. My own daughter's school is one of dozens that have had to shed staff because the government refuses to find the money to keep them.

Yet now, apparently, it can find the money to set up another school nearby where teachers will be paid above the odds. Teachers, naturally, will go to the better-paying school, if they can get jobs there. Other local schools will be staffed by teachers the city academy doesn't want.

I recall, years ago, visiting the Conservatives' first CTC. It bristled with modern computer equipment, its classrooms were lavish, its reception area was like a good hotel. I went on to visit a nearby secondary school: a crumbling, leaking, poverty-stricken hole, where a few brave teachers struggled to educate children.

So there will be two sorts of school - well-funded ones and cash-starved ones. But surely, at least, poor children will have as good a chance as rich ones of getting to the new academies? The prime minister has promised.

But that promise is not worth the paper it's written on. Already better-funded schools are allowed to select 10% of their children by "aptitude" (which is no different, in practice, from selecting by ability). Parents who can work the system always stand a better chance of getting places in the desirable schools. No measures are planned to prevent this.

And many of the new academies will be run by faith groups. Confining your intake to children of religious parents is a way of weeding out many of the problem children, and forcing less well-funded schools to take them. There are no plans to stop faith schools doing what the London Oratory school does, which is to interview the child, with both parents, and decide whom to accept. Both the prime minister's school-age sons went there, and his daughter is to join its sixth form in September. But it has almost no children who are eligible for free school meals.

· Francis Beckett is a writer specialising in education