School Report

The schools preferred by this country's governing party allow parents to take pupils on holiday whenever they please.

But the legal acceptability of 90 per cent attendance at a state school means that every Friday afternoon, or every other Friday all day, can now be spent getting an education instead.

At the very least, you should take yourself off, perhaps to read or even write a book, during the hour or more of every week that is still given over to wholly non-academic sporting activity, not as a break, but as part of the curriculum.

The ongoing resurgence of the Left in this country is due in no small measure to the state secondary schools' ever-shorter days and ever-long holidays.

Although it is amazing the extent to which schools think that they own the evenings, the weekends and the holidays.

Finish at three o'clock, before facing two hours of homework? Why not be in school until five o'clock, then? That is hardly the middle of the night.

And reams of homework to be done over the quarter of the year when the school is locked up? What's that about?

The ongoing resurgence of the Left in this country is also due in no small measure to the independent schools, especially the fearless major public schools whose wealth and reputation enable them to do more or less as they like.

Left-wing speakers have no difficulty in gaining access to those institutions. They are invited on a very regular basis.

By contrast, even Jeremy Corbyn himself would struggle to be allowed anywhere near a school controlled by the municipal Labour Right.

The state school system is the Labour Right's principal powerbase. Until Corbyn's first campaign for the Leadership, 50 per cent of Labour Party members were teachers.

Diane Abbott is now being mocked on Twitter by the same trash that thought it the height of wit to jeer drunkenly at Corbyn in the Westminster Kitchen.

I would never call them Tories. Their lack of class is the reason why that party would never take them, and they know it.

Abbott is also reviled for the school to which she sent her son.

But he will have had far more contact with the Left there than he would ever have had under the aegis of Hackney Borough Council.

Those coming after him, however, can simply arrange that contact for themselves during the 10 per cent of school time when it is now perfectly legal for them to be pursuing educational opportunities.