Bad Grammar

Peter Hitchens is utterly unimpressed.

I know for a fact that when Nicky Morgan spoke to the Sixth Formers at the private Loughborough Grammar School in her constituency, she promised them a state grammar school in every town, because she thought that that was what it was.

Not all of the country ever did have grammar schools, or even secondary moderns. Even after the Butler Act, in some poor areas, there was no 11-plus.

You just stayed on at your elementary school until, depending on the year, your fourteenth or your fifteenth birthday. On that day, you were kicked out.

The expansion of the middle class, or at least of something that economically resembled it, was a compete one-off in the decades after the War.

The economy changed shape dramatically, and there were simply far more white collar jobs to fill. That will never happen again. It had nothing to do with the grammar schools.

And it was arguably not a real middle-class expansion at all, but a takeover of the bourgeoisie's income brackets, residential areas, and so on, by other people entirely, who had remained essentially unchanged.

Today's grammar schools lobby had absolutely no interest in this subject until their own economic ideology priced them out of the commercial schools market.

So they now want what they have lost to be provided out of general taxation. If they feared for one moment that the grammar schools might include anyone who would not have been commercially educated a generation ago, then they would want absolutely nothing to do with them.

Jeremy Corbyn went to a grammar school. A highly intelligent, thoughtful and articulate man who is known to be very well-read, he left that institution with two Es at A-level, and he never graduated from the polytechnic to which it sent him on.

He came up via the real old ladders of opportunity, which were powerful local government and powerful trade unions. We all know when those were destroyed. And we all know by whom.