Tuesday 7 March 2017

"Some of Them Could Be Grammar Schools"

Of course, none of them will be grammar schools.

That would be illegal under the Statute Law, a provision for the changing of which  there is no conceivable majority in either House of Parliament.

Including that change in a Conservative manifesto would be enough to split the Conservative Party organically in two.

Europe never did that, and never could have done. But this could, and it would.

There was in fact such a manifesto commitment in 2015 on the part of a party that, despite almost comical levels of media hype, managed to go from all of two MPs to all of one.

The exclusion of the working classes and the poor is of course precisely why Theresa May's base wants grammar schools.

That they are middle-class and even upper-middle-class ghettoes, as they always have been, is what endears them to those who feel any such endearment.

Mrs May herself did not gain admission to a grammar school until she was 13, following several years of private education to that end.

When she was 15, however, her girls' grammar merged into the much larger and mixed comprehensive that sent so unpromising a candidate to Oxford.

But if she feels any gratitude, as well she should, then it is outweighed at her resentment at having been made to share a classroom, or even just a building, with the oiks after all.

More broadly, though, the Left should be more on board with the changing structures of education.

Why is it protecting the principal powerbase of the municipal Labour Right and its hangers on; of the people who put the petty into petit bourgeois?

What have they ever done for us?

We ought to be bypassing them in order to cut our own deals with regard to, for example, representation on governing bodies.

We now have the organisational means by which to do that.

Something very similar is true of the potential acquisition of the whole of Sky by Rupert Murdoch.

Why are we protecting the privileged position of the BBC? What has it ever done for us?

Indeed, on this morning's Today programme, while discussing grammar schools, Angela Rayner was incessantly hectored, interrupted, and condescended to.

Whereas Toby Young was heard in a respectful silence that bordered, if bordered, on awe.

For all his faults, Rupert Murdoch does not do awe.

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