I doubt that Guido Fawkes has done Owain Gardner's bakery any harm. But Guido is quite wrong about Weardale; there is a reason why Richard Holden lives in Wolsingham. Guido is also wrong about the miners and intellectual life. This thread is much more representative of the sort of "loadsamoney" anti-intellectualism that recognised its own embodiment in Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, and which was mostly a Southern phenomenon.
But if small businessmen doing doctorates on the side are unacceptable as political candidates, then we may look forward to plenty of Harry Enfield caricatures instead. Although not in high office, of course. That is strictly for the men who speak Latin with public school accents. Unlike anyone's doctorate, their mediocre BAs, like mine, were obtained at public expense.
I carry no candle for the Labour Party in County Durham, to put matters at their very mildest. But all doctorates are niche by definition, and it not as if the State pays for them. And what "use" is Boris Johnson's Classics degree, for which the State did pay?
20 years ago, John Redwood told me that he never mentioned his DPhil because he would have got nowhere in the Conservative Party if anyone had known that he had had it. If anything, based on this thread, matters are now even worse. Except for Old Etonians, of course. Jacob Rees-Mogg is allowed to be a Medievalist, albeit he stopped at his publicly funded 2:1. But a working small businessman is not allowed an academic interest. Has it really come to this?
No comments:
Post a Comment