Degrees Of It

Why the hell should people get publicly funded internships merely for having degrees? Their contemporaries have been getting up at six o’clock in the morning, in some cases for five years (full years, not half years), to pay for this.

Still, the more attention paid to internships and the like, the better. Access to things like politics and the media is now restricted to those who can work for little or no pay after university, and often during the university vacations as well. Universities, moreover, that have been thoroughly debased by the absence of the grammar schools, which has turned them from world-class academic institutions into the finishing school Seventh Forms of certain gilded playpens for the offspring of the rich.

Britain has now descended into self-parody, in which everyone who is anyone has known each other since they were 19 at the oldest, and routinely a great deal younger than that. Any figure or movement that emerges from outside the Golden Circle is completely ignored, and thus killed off. Even David Miliband or George Osborne can expect to be treated as a serious figure, something completely unimaginable when there was proper competition. Thank you, Tony Blair.