On Radio Four this morning, Sir Gerald Kaufman spoke movingly of how he would have followed his father, his brother and three of his five sisters into factory work if he had not won a grammar school scholarship to Oxford. But he didn't seem to see the main point. His other two sisters, of whom his parents were so proud because they went to teacher training college, must also have gone to grammar school. How many factory workers' children become teachers now? Never mind Ministers of the Crown and Knights of the Realm.
But perhaps even more telling was the story of what has happened to football. The big clubs now expect the cost an annual really major trip to see a concert or a theatrical production, but they require it ever other week. Football is now working-class men acting as performing monkeys for middle-class, and indeed upper-middle-class, men. That is their only way of getting on.
The two paragraphs above are, of course, connected.
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