@AbolishEton?

I am the first to say that the condition of a commercial school’s continuing charitable status should be its having been adjudged good or better by the same means as a state school, using the same criteria as for a state school, with the report published, and with the value-added measure applied, thereby requiring that school to have demonstrated how it had improved pupils’ abilities. 

But the benefits conferred specifically by commercial schools are not academic. They are socioeconomic. To have gone to Eton matters so much more than to have gone to Oxford that Boris Johnson, rather than any of his Oxford contemporaries, is about to become Prime Minister.

And commercial schools do regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools of the municipal Labour Right. Jeremy Corbyn no doubt turns down numerous invitations. George Galloway regularly accepts them.

While we are seeking to make the world better, then we still have to live in it as it is. It is not hypocritical to do so as best we can. The hypocrites are the highly activist, usually Conservative, Education Ministers who buy their own children out of the practical application and implications of their policies. Their hypocrisy is never, ever called out. Well, it would certainly be called out by me. 

The Left and the working class, and perhaps especially the rural working class, need to bypass both the municipal Labour Right and the Liberal Establishment both in education and in the media. The EU referendum result has confirmed that the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, are now the key swing voters who deserve direct representation on local public bodies, on national public bodies, in the media, and at the intersection of the public and media sectors.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. A new party is now in the process of registration. I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham even if I can raise only the deposit, which I could do by going pretty overdrawn, although that was not how I was brought up. I would still prefer to raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign, but I am no longer making my candidacy conditional on having done so. In any event, please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.