Reet Elite

Much has been spat out of the internet about the 1%, the supposed ruling elite who control virtually all of the world’s wealth and are engaged in a heinous plot to subjugate the working man forever. Speaking from a position at the arse end of the remaining 99% I say good luck to them. I wish it were true. It’s not. In fact, it’s bollocks.

If the top earners, industrialists and entrepreneurs could even be bothered to address the situation they would long ago have worked out that their position could be made perpetually tenable by ensuring the 99% didn’t get pissed off enough to turn to armed revolt. They would set up businesses in deprived areas, fund schools and hospitals and enable social mobility through education to ensure fresh new blood arrived, eventually, at the top. Facilitate aspiration – that would be the clever move.

But they don’t do that. Because - just as you and I would – having made/inherited/lucked-into their pile they are rightly enjoying it. And the system that allows this state of affairs to continue is not capitalism, it’s socialism. Capitalism is the system that distributes according to ability. Socialism tries to ‘correct’ what it fairly sees as injustice by levying punitive tariffs against those who create and thus attain for themselves, wealth. In other words, biting the hand that feeds.

But socialism goes even further, seeing any form of meritocracy as elitism, a structure it has decided, without any sensible debate, is always, but always, wrong. If education is (and it undoubtedly is) the way up, how do you forgive the way in which education has been handled since ever more left-leaning governments (whatever they've actually called themselves) have been in charge?

Grammar schools, which gave a leg up for the working man's son? Elitist, therefore wrong. Technical colleges, where the artisan-inclined apprentice learned his trade? Even worse, condemning working men to, er… work. Cut them down forthwith. Polytechnics, where the less academic could nonetheless gain a footing in administration and business skills, communication, practical engineering and management? Poor men’s universities! Smacks of hierarchy – get rid.

And so on. In a bid to even up life’s chances the leftist agenda drives education standards forever down. Or are the employers (the nasty, elitist wealth creators, remember?) all wrong? Why does Michael Gove attract so much vilification from the left when he proposes a re-boot back to when the education machine was actually working? And why do the proponents of educational technology insist that the catastrophic introduction of ever more expensive distractions in an effort to ‘engage’ the kids is NOT complicit in the downward trend in school-leavers’ ability?

(See the original at Stripgenerator)

 I’d like to think that the Socialists are merely misguided, but maybe I’ve misjudged them and Socialism is, after all, a big plot to subjugate the masses?