Class Act

Tristram Hunt has been on the warpath – or was that the towpath – over the government’s plan to (gasp!) not take any money from the education budget. How very dare they freeze budgets when any Labour government would automatically double them and pay for it from the fabulous wealth they would reap by holding rich people upside down by their ankles, stealing all their loose change and taxing the properties they just transferred into offshore trusts!?

This charge – that a freeze is a real terms cut when inflation is taken into account – is the only ammunition Hunt has because Labour should, just as with the economy, never be allowed to control education ever again. While Gordon Brown’s tax credits allowed employers to squeeze wages and simultaneously increase the tax burden on everybody else, and while Labour’s wilful acceptance of the EU’s open borders trampled on life chances for unskilled British workers, the children did not go unmolested. When Tony Blair said “Education, education, education!” he clearly meant something different from the rest of us.

Facilitating the furtherance of breeding and rearing by generations of hopeless under achievers should be addressed by The Equality and Human Rights Commission under the heading of child cruelty. I’m serious. A child born to stupid parents whose right to create life without the faintest clue as to how to care for that life is not human; it is bovine. Were those slow, lumbering beasts to go on and till the fields and turn the mill wheels it may be almost acceptable, but we import other, cheaper, cattle to do that for us and allow our domestic herds to wander, ignorant and pointless, procreating simply because they have nothing else to live for.

At least if we stashed the edu-tech and reverted to rigour and discipline in primary education we might have a chance of reversing the rot in a couple of generations but then why would any government be interested in policies that would only come to fruition after they were all wealthily retired or even dead? The grammar schools and the multi-tiered education system of my youth recognised and even celebrated the differences in aptitude and ability. Today, while ‘university’ graduates jostle for barista jobs or belatedly self-fund themselves into manual trade training, or settle for delivering pizzas, surely it is time for politicians to admit the unsavoury truth; we are NOT all equal.

But while we can’t all be rocket surgeons[sic] we can all graduate from the University of Life if only we are well enough prepared for the entrance exam. If you can’t read it is extremely difficult to learn. If you are innumerate the world will rob you blind, but if you acquire both those skills early they will be with you for ever… so why don’t we do that? Let's forget such nebulous idiocy as ‘citizenship’ and inculcating destructive notions of disproportionate sensitivity to differentness and offence and instead aim to get everybody over the first hurdle and equipped for the rest of the race.

Too kool for shkool?

Political correctness? Voter engagement? People power? Intersectional awareness? Who bloody cares? If there wasn’t something wrong with politics we wouldn’t bother to vote at all. If there wasn’t something desperately wrong with our current education system we certainly wouldn’t be voting for more socialism.