Private Friends

No, there really shouldn’t be private schools. But it is not hypocritical for a Democrat to send his children to a private school. No such suggestion afflicted the Labour Party, either, back when it really was the Labour Party: the party of the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, workers’ rights, the unions to protect them, progressive taxation, strong local government and a strong Parliament. Indeed, it still is not, just as it has never been, the policy of the Labour Party to abolish private schools by legislation.

But it is the triumph of the unrepentant old Communists, Trotskyists and fellow-travellers who became New Labour that no MP could now answer to a Constituency Labour Party (such as there still are) while doing as Harold Wilson himself while Prime Minister, like numerous other Old Labour figures, did as a matter of course.

And it is the triumph of the unrepentant old Communists, Trotskyists and fellow-travellers who became New Labour that they themselves can instead get away with sending their children to the London (and other) equivalents of the Lenin High School, Havana – [de facto] private schools that have the effrontery to send their bills to the taxpayer – without anyone’s raising so much as an eyebrow, never mind the slightest objection.

Selection by clout and pull is fine, as is selection by house price. But selection by ability and aptitude is unconscionable. All three “different” parties agree on this. Well, of course they do.

The Washington school to which Barack Obama will be sending his daughters is a Quaker foundation. I very much hope that he will involve himself as much as possible in its life, so that he might be exposed to, and take heed of, the Peace Testimony, with its long and ongoing outworking as anything but a quietist approach to the world’s conflicts and injustices.

Similarly, although I rather like the idea of his occasional occupancy of the Presidential Pew in Saint John’s, Lafayette Square (because I like the idea of such occupancy by any President), I hope that he will resist calls for him to attach himself to the National Cathedral, and will instead, since he will presumably be remaining a Protestant, remain in not less than weekly touch with at least his wife’s and daughters’ roots in the black church.

The liberalism now dominant in the Episcopal Church cannot and does not produce the searing critique of which greed and its wars stand in constantly urgent need. Obama won on the votes of almost all attendees at the black church, and of the clear majority of Catholics. If he wants to win again, or even to do anything very worthwhile in the meantime, then he must remain connected to their concerns, and thus to the theologia, the theology and spirituality as one, that feeds and sustains both those concerns themselves and any action upon them.