Opportunity For All

Until the 1980s, hardly anyone had any problem with Labour MPs, Ministers and Prime Ministers who sent their children to private schools. There has never been any Labour Party policy to abolish them, there have hardly ever been Labour Governments, and the ones that there have been have ignored private schools more or less completely. The hypocrisy on education in British politics is that of Conservative politicians who buy their own children out of what, again since the 1980s, has been their highly activist approach to state schools.

But we on the Left should welcome the opportunities presented by the Schools White Paper. It is in the running of state schools that the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets the right-wing Labour machine in local government. We ought to be bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right, in order to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. Yes, that would indeed involve doing deals with the Tories. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Keir Starmers of the world.