Boarding Schools

A Select Committee of the House of Commons is to give some much-needed attention to the damaging effects of boarding schools.

There are many ways in which the Tories have long, or even always, been actively hostile to the views and values of those on whose votes they depend. Support for the anti-national, anti-farming, anti-manufacturing, anti-shopkeeping, anti-local, anti-family “free” market is one. Their actual record in office on the EU and on Northern Ireland is another. And there are plenty more.

But is there any more flagrant and fatal than the fact that they are not just largely products (which they cannot help), but also almost invariably users and stalwart defenders of these, just about the most anti-family institutions imaginable, founded on the premise that children should be brought up with as little parental contact as possible except when it comes to paying the bills, and organised towards the acting out of adolescence in single-sex residential environments?