Values

A friend of mine who was at Saint John's College, Cambridge, whence came this week's Any Questions, tells me that in his day it was still faithful to its origins in being largely Northern; there were also a lot of Welsh. Mind you, that will have been in the Eighties. And my friend went there from one of those ancient grammar schools which had by then been driven out of the state sector by comprehensivisation. As, I suspect, did many of his contemporaries. Another such institution was attended by this week's panellist, David Willetts, rightly boo-ed by the audience before he had said so much as one word.

The other panellists rightly berated him for driving the working classes even further out of the higher education to which they had ready access in, as they did not mention, the days of the grammar schools. Nor did they mention the wider culture of working-class self-improvement underwritten by the full employment that was itself always guaranteed, and very often delivered directly, by central and local government action: the trade unions, the co-operatives, the credit unions, the mutual guarantee societies, the mutual building societies, the Workers' Educational Association, the Miners' Lodge Libraries, the pitmen poets, the pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, and so much else destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Blair. She, in her time as Education Secretary, had closed so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.

Nor did they mention how much better the Secondary Moderns were than what has replaced them, turning out millions of economically and politically active, socially and culturally aware people. And nor, rather more surprisingly, did they mention that one certainly does not need to be working-class to be put off university by the prospect of £27,000 of debt even before living costs. Few of my tutees come from working-class backgrounds, but they all say this. To which I freely reply that my late father was a vicar and my mother is a primary school teacher, but I would not have gone to university at those prices. If you believe, and you should, in the economic, social, cultural and political benefits of a large and thriving middle class, then you have to support the extensive central and local government action that is directly and indirectly necessary in order to sustain it.