As used to be be asked at interviews for approved panels of Labour candidates for local government. What would be Pat Glass's answer? Until her recent election to Parliament at the age of 53, she had devoted her life to education.
Yet she has nominated David Miliband. Back when he was Schools Minister, I more than once heard him tell teacher-heavy, and therefore gobsmacked, Labour Party and Fabian Society audiences that disparity within schools, which is greater than disparity between schools, was a matter of "which teacher you are given". Yes, those were his exact words.
And now comes mainstream coverage of how he got into Oxford, a story which this blog has been running since 31st July 2008, when I wrote the following about Milly:
He only got into Oxford because his super-posh school was nominally part of ILEA, which had a special access scheme effectively controlled by his father. But nobody is mentioning that. His father then got him into the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, clearly at the beck and call of a pro-Soviet fanatic. But nobody is mentioning that.
He has never worked outside politics. But nobody is mentioning that. His predecessor at South Shields was ennobled at the last minute in order that he could be imposed on that safe seat without reference to the Constituency Labour Party. But nobody is mentioning that. Local council candidates there are now chosen by his London office, with no local input at all. But nobody is mentioning that.
He was a staggeringly bad Schools Minister (I repeatedly heard the heavy gasps from Labour and Fabian audiences full of teachers as he displayed just how spectacularly ignorant and incompetent he was, all the while assuming that he was uttering axioms and truisms), mirroring David Cameron’s baleful record as Shadow Education Secretary, during which period the Tories literally had no education policy whatever. But nobody is mentioning that.
His Guardian article is drivel, as everything that he has ever published has been, with an attempt to set out his stall in the last days of Blair eventually accepted by the Daily Telegraph as a joke after the Guardian refused to soil itself by printing it. But nobody is mentioning that. Even his weirdo brother is better. But nobody is mentioning that.
And so one could go on, and on, and on.
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As I think Laban Tall has noted, with two brothers running and the sons of Jack Straw and John Prescott commenting on it all, and the media boosting La Abbot, there is a good chance of finding an Austrian cellar that is less incestuous than this competition for whatever the Labour movement has become.
ReplyDeleteIt's obvious that not just the House of Commons but the mainstream media and the best writers in Britain, like Peter Hitchens and Neil Clark, are reading this blog avidly and being inspired by it! You gave them the story of Silly Milly, the Marie Stopes Nazi scandal and the plot to assassinate the Pope. The new political movement that you've worked so hard will be lucky to have you as leader.
ReplyDeleteSily Milly has been doing a perfectly good job of that for many years.
ReplyDeleteOn Marie Stopes, I don't know, but I suspect that Peter has been trying to get the facts about her into his column for years. It says a lot that he now has.
The Kill The Pope Lobby, meanwhile, seems to have been seen off. The worst that we can now expect is probably Peter Tatchell being Peter Tatchell, as would have happened anyway. But we must not be off our guard.
Lindsay is a very regular poster of comments on Hitchens' blog and the Hitchens paragraph on Stopes was the previous Lindsay post on this blog nearly word for word. Not the first example of Lindsay's direct influence on Hitchens' column, other articles and recent books.
ReplyDeleteLindsay also has ties to The First Post, so don't be surprised if his claims about Miliband buying babies on the Internet and being an Israeli citizen also end up in it. After all the stuff about Miliband's Oxford entrance has, having appeared nowhere except this blog up to then.
No one has done more than Lindsay to silence protests against the Pope's visit. As Lindsay himself smugly says, those protests have been reduced to "Peter Tatchell being Peter Tatchell, as would have happened anyway."
Unfortunately, David Lindsay's readers more than make up in position what they lack in numbers. He is a very influential man and a very dangerous one.