PETER HITCHENS: No 10 disaster! Minister is caught telling us the TRUTH

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

WHAT fun it is on the rare occasions when a Cabinet Minister tells the truth. It upsets all the right people.
The Government squawks and flaps and tries to drown out the revelation with fresh lies. The semi-official political press starts babbling about how the culprit has made a ‘gaffe’, a word used by nobody else, meaning ‘embarrassing but honest statement’.
And the rest of us can enjoy it. So it is with Foreign Secretary Johnson’s attack on Saudi Arabia’s nasty, violent meddling in other countries, mainly responsible for turning Syria into a wasteland of ruins, full of corpses and weeping mourners.
He was careful – and correct – to level the same charge against the Iranian ayatollahs. But attacks on Iran are politically and diplomatically acceptable, and anyone can make them. Justified criticism of the Riyadh despotism is taboo because this country has crawled so deep into the pocket of Saudi Arabia that it cannot find its way out.
Actually, I understand why we need to grovel quite a bit to the Saudis. We are poor and they are rich. They have lots of oil and ours has almost run out. They buy our aircraft and our weapons, which most people prefer not to do.
So a certain amount of politeness and flattery are necessary. They can have as many Royal visits as they like, and I can put up with us flying flags at half-mast when Saudi royalty dies. Why not? We recently entertained the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Buckingham Palace.
We get a lot in return for such gestures. But in recent years, the Saudis have asked too much. We should never have agreed to support their attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.
It was a policy motivated by spite. It required Britain to back the Al Nusra front, a bloodthirsty gang of hate-filled fanatics. These are exactly the sort of people we warn against in our ‘anti-extremism’ programmes at home, and it is very hard to tell what separates them from Islamic State.
We have been reduced to pretending, to the laughter of all who know anything, that these merciless Christian-hating, church-defiling sectarian brigands are ‘moderates’. Worse, by helping them to destabilise Syria we have created the biggest wave of Middle Eastern migration into Europe in history. Worse still, we picked the wrong side.
Russia, understanding the Middle East far better than we do, bet that Syria’s Assad would beat off the Saudi attack. And the battle of Aleppo has proved them right. Moscow’s prestige and influence in the Middle East is now at an all-time high. Ours is pitifully low.
Even now we don’t realise it. The head of MI6, who was a much more impressive figure when we didn’t know who he was than he is now we can actually see and hear him, made an unwise public appearance last week.
It seemed he had not read the papers or watched the news, as he used the occasion for an ill-timed and particularly ill-aimed attack on Russia. He wrongly blamed the Kremlin for turning Syria into a desert (that was the Saudis, egged on by us, the French, the Turks and the USA). He also attacked Russia for ‘alienating’ supposed moderates in the Middle East.
This from the Chief of Intelligence of the country which has done more to annoy open-minded, pro-Western people in the Middle East than practically anywhere else, from the overthrow in a squalid putsch of Iran’s beloved (and elected) leader Mossadegh, to the Suez, Iraq and Libya fiascos.
Perhaps his agents out there are still telling him what he wants to hear, rather than what is actually happening. Once, all this stuff was far-away and theoretical. But now that the people whose countries we have wrecked can find their way to Calais in their tens of thousands, it isn’t.
And that’s why I prefer Boris Johnson’s gaffes to official falsehoods. Those who refuse to admit the truth cannot protect this country against the many dangers which threaten it.

 

The search for Sully's enemy

CLINT Eastwood’s clever and engrossing film Sully, about the amazing landing of a passenger jet on the freezing Hudson River, needed a villain. Who could it be?
After all, pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger behaved like the well-trained and self-disciplined gentleman he is, keeping his head and using all his years of experience to land an Airbus on water without killing anyone, after geese destroyed his plane’s engines and turned it into an enormous glider. And the passengers, instead of scrambling over each other and clawing for their possessions as the plane sank (which must have been a temptation), behaved like grown-ups and made their way sensibly to the exits.
All the rescue services did as they should have done.
Who was left to be the bad guy? The government. To put it mildly, the movie plays up the investigations which concluded that Sullenberger might possibly have made it to an actual airport runway, if he’d acted inhumanly fast.
I found all this very believable. But actually the pilot had already become such a figure of admiration that in real life he was more or less above criticism. It tells you a lot about the modern USA, and the victory of Donald Trump, that the authorities are the ones who come out of it badly.

 

The myth of wind power...blown wide open

THE current mild weather may make us forget that British winters can still be ferociously cold. How will we cope with such cold, once the current plan to shut down coal-fired power stations is complete?
I asked National Grid to tell me where our electric power came from in the mainly chilly week from November 28 to December 4. For most of that time, an average of just above 14 per cent came from coal, while less than six per cent came from wind.
In the Friday of that week, just two per cent of our power came from all those forests of windmills which cost us so much and make such a mess of the landscape.
A surprisingly large part of the rest was made up of nuclear (just over 25 per cent) and gas (just under 55 per cent) with a small amount sent across from France and the Netherlands by undersea cable.
With coal gone, as it soon will be, and as our worn-out nuclear stations close as well, what are we going to do? Solar power, in midwinter? We are not building any new gas generators, new nuclear plants are many years away, and the wind often doesn’t blow much in very cold weather. France’s nuclear systems are getting old and are breaking down more and more frequently.
Any company or householder looking at figures like these would worry, and act. Yet we do neither. It is because our elite’s minds are closed by Warmist dogma. Quite soon, sensible people will be buying their own private generators, as they do in Third World countries.

*******

I’M not sure why the Government is so chipper about the big Commons vote for beginning the process of leaving the EU. One of the rules of politics is that really big majorities, like very long-standing ovations, are signs that people are concealing their real feelings. It is in the late-night sessions, the committees and the lobbies that the pro-EU MPs will try to frustrate the process.

*****

IT’S no good moaning now about the new plan to persecute soldiers for actions they undertook during the Northern Irish troubles, while IRA murderers go free. This is the ‘Peace Process’ you foolishly bought from the Blair creature back in 1998. It was a surrender, not a victory, and it is time we grasped that.

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PETER HITCHENS: This isn’t a revolution – it’s New Labour in a blue frock

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

British politics has finally vanished up its own pretensions. The old signposts and measurements have all been removed. We have no idea who stands for what or where we are going. Who would have thought to see a Tory conference applauding a Prime Minister for vowing to raise more tax and weaken employers’ rights? Surely that’s the job of the other lot?

In fact most of Chairman May’s speech could have equally well been written and delivered at a Labour conference. She may have derided Jeremy Corbyn personally but she has noticed quite a lot of his ideas are rather popular, especially with the young, and stolen them.
Who can blame her? She faces nothing but uncertainty and danger. The Labour Party is very nearly dead but her own Tories seethe with intrigue, rivalry and suppressed dissent.

The landscape before her is like one of those lakes covered in bright green water weed that looks – at a first glance – like a smooth lawn. In fact it conceals slimy depths. Only a fool would try to walk on it.

Her inexplicable breezy confidence about leaving the EU makes me shudder, and I am a veteran campaigner for national independence.
I wouldn’t dream of activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which starts the two-year clock for our exit, because it places all the negotiating power in the hands of our continental rivals. And they, especially Germany, hope to scare all the other EU nations into staying in. The last thing they want to do is to make an exit easy for us.

I’d insist on getting all the talking done before taking this dangerous step. As for her Great Repeal Bill, it is nothing of the sort. Until we actually get out, it just confirms 40 years of EU laws and regulations.

Already her Cabinet is openly divided about keeping access to the Single Market.
And if anyone thinks that the Bad Losers’ Party has given up its dream of rerunning the referendum, just wait and see. They will fight this in the courts, in the Commons, in the Lords, in the civil service and in the BBC.

Given all these perils, it is only wise of Mrs May to blow kisses in the general direction of Labour voters, while also trying to persuade refugees from Ukip to come back to mummy. The 2020 Election seems far away, but its result will probably be decided during the next two years.
You may not like any of this. I certainly don’t. But it comes, as so many bad things do, from taking short cuts and trying to bodge complicated bits of carpentry with a few swift strokes of the hammer.

Millions of voters thought they could have a policy without a government to implement it. They thought they could leave the nation’s fate to the political class rather than taking a hand in it themselves.

They fell for David Cameron’s promise of a referendum, which he never expected to keep because he intended to continue the Coalition with the Lib Dems until 2020.
They thought they could rely on the Tory Party to take them out of the EU, even though it had let them down on so many other things.

So, deep down, they changed nothing. A few toyed with the Dad’s Army party of Ukip, now once again enjoying ripping itself to pieces, its main activity. But they wouldn’t see that the Tories had become a blue-tinged version of New Labour.Now there’s a new collective delusion, that Theresa May is the new Margaret Thatcher. Actually she’s the new Harriet Harman. I’ve charted her embrace of political correctness here over many years.

Even her increasingly vague promise to maybe, just possibly, open one or two new grammar schools, provided the middle class cannot get into them, will probably trickle away into the damp sands of compromise where truly good ideas end up in our system.

*****

I know I’m not going to like Netflix’s The Crown, the new drama about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. In fact I think it should not have been made, and should not be made for another 20 or 30 years when the actual facts are known and the papers available.
Even then, it would probably be nearly as bad. Like all such productions, it exploits the real people it pretends to portray. If it were about fictional royal figures, and did not claim to be their real lives, nobody would watch it.

But it cannot possibly be true. Above all, like the misleading, over-rated film The King’s Speech, it tries to see people through the distorting lens of present-day prejudice. My parents and their friends were more or less of the same generation as the Queen and Prince Philip, and my father was a naval officer.
And it seems to me that even the faces of Claire Foy, who plays the Queen, and Matt Smith, who plays the Duke of Edinburgh, are wrong. They lack the depth and grief and sense of duty carved into the faces of that generation by their stern upbringing, and by the war. They are too knowing about trivial things, and too innocent of important ones.

Their attempts at the accents of the time sound as if they have been laboriously taught them and they long to burst out laughing, not as if they think it normal to speak like that, as such people really did.

And the odd thing is that they spoke like that while enduring danger, pain and fear and, in a way, saving the world. There wasn’t anything funny about it
I am told King George VI, that improbably decent monarch, is shown using the c-word. I doubt he did. Naval man though he was, and so familiar with the whole range of filthy language, I think he would have regarded it as impossibly crude.

And if they can get that wrong, it is like a clock striking 13. All that went before, and all that comes afterwards, is in doubt as well.

*****

I am not sure that the alleged comedian David Baddiel was trying to be nice when he urged the BBC to give me a ‘Right-Wing Hour’ on Radio 4.
The last time we met, on a TV review programme, I said that I was pleased and relieved when his dreary film, The Infidel, came to an end. He may not have forgotten.

But even so he now joins many other BBC types, from Andrew Marr to Mark Thompson, in admitting ‘there is generally a centre-Left, liberal bias to its output’.
And this is getting worse. As this newspaper revealed last Sunday, diversity commissars are culling BBC performers on the grounds of race and sex. This is a mad outcome.

When I was a Leftist in the 1960s, we at least believed that discrimination of all kinds was wrong. To this day I write ‘human’ when asked for my ethnic details by some busybody.

Even an hour a week in which such wicked ideas could be attacked and mocked would be better than nothing.

*****

One of the saddest sights in the university town where I live is ‘Freshers’ Week’, which means nightly pathetic processions of bewildered teens, clad in uniform joke T-shirts, being led off to bars to be taught how to get drunk. I really hope that the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference was right when it said today’s sixth formers are sick of the Olympic boozing that has become so universal.

It is the drinking, of course, that also leads to so many of the rapes and alleged rapes that cause so much misery of so many kinds. I wonder why we treat this sad business as a joke.

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PETER HITCHENS: Charmer Cameron put us on the slippery slope to disaster

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column 

So, Mr Slippery has finally slipped away, just before he was found out. I wish David Cameron lots of money in his future life, so much of it that he at last begins to wonder if that is what he really wanted.

But can we pause for a moment and ask how it was that this charming but pointless person rose to such prominence in our country?

His single most important action was to lend Western air forces and other assistance to Islamist fanatics in Libya. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee last week explained just how clueless and irresponsible this was, though it is a pity that so many of the MPs on this committee supported the Libya folly at the time. 

The same goes for much of the media, which reported the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi more or less as if it was a sporting event, and the fanatical rebels were our team. They also gullibly repeated the most ridiculous atrocity propaganda, something any knowledgeable journalist is trained to treat with suspicion.

I have checked my own writing and broadcasting at the time and find I warned clearly against it, for example this from March 2011: 'Who are the Libyan rebels? What do they want? Why do we love them so? I've no idea, and nor has Mr Cameron… Some of the longest wars in history started with small-scale intervention, for a purpose that looked good and achievable, and ended up ruining millions of lives.

'The Soviet takeover of Afghanistan in 1979 ended with countless innocents driven into refugee camps, and the collapse of the Soviet state itself. It also left Afghanistan as a worse snake pit than before.'

I did not know the half of it. David Cameron's war created the appalling, unstoppable crisis of mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa, a gigantic movement of people unknown in previous history, which will in the long run transform the economic and political fortunes of our continent.

This catastrophe was his most notable act. He ought to be remembered for it. Many of you will be able to think of others, some deliberate (such as his daft energy, education, migration, economic and aid policies), others exploding cigars, such as his incompetent and contemptuous handling of the European Union issue.

He was one of the worst prime ministers we have ever had, but have we – have you – learned from this experience? Will you continue to turn to the smooth, the well-spun, the expensively suited and rehearsed, the ones endorsed by the same media who gushed over the Blair creature?

Already the forces that put David Cameron in power are uniting in a dishonest spasm of hatred against Theresa May's grammar school policy and the referendum result.

Will you be fooled by them again? Or will you learn that there is no such thing as 'the centre' and that those who claim to stand there are driven by nothing but personal ambition and vanity? And that they do not offer safety, but danger? 

*****

 

Late last year a strange new law came into force in this country, making it a crime, punishable by prison, to use repeated ‘controlling or coercive behaviour’ in the home.

You might think there’s nothing wrong with that. 

But what if it becomes one of the many offences in family law where social workers, police and courts assume that the accused is guilty, and he or she has to prove his innocence?

The growing numbers who have fallen into this pit simply do not get fair trials. No doubt some of them are guilty. But in many cases this simply is not proved beyond reasonable doubt. They lose homes, families, children, livelihoods, reputations and – sometimes – liberty.

And if we stop caring if they’ve been properly tried, we forge a weapon that may one day be used against us.

That’s why I really dislike the great fuss recently made about the BBC Radio 4  soap opera ‘The Archers’.

In this programme - which I have many times explained is openly intended as propaganda for ‘progressive’ ideas -  two actors pretended to be a married couple. This long drama got under way as the new law came into force.

For months, the male actor pretended to be a perfect example of the ‘coercive control’ which extreme feminists claim is so common. Again and again he bullied and belittled the female actor, as if he were a Victorian squire who had her imprisoned in a cottage miles from civilization.

She submitted to it meekly for months in a way I doubt any modern woman would do for more than about five minutes. Then, in a bizarre and incredible scene, the male actor pretended to goad the female actor into pretending to stab him.

There was then a pretend arrest, and a pretend trial. There was even a pretend jury, made up of celebrity actors. And the nation was supposed to be terribly engaged, anxiously hoping that the fictional jury would pretend to acquit the female actor, so she could pretend to go back to her fictional home.

This rubbish had two propaganda aims. The first was to make more people willing to believe that this kind of thing is common, when we have no way of knowing.

The second was to give the audience information it never normally has, in any proper courtroom drama. Listeners thought they already ‘knew’ what had ‘really happened’. They ‘knew’ the male actor was ‘guilty’. Actually, they didn’t. They just knew what the scriptwriters had decided to portray, a fictional wicked man, fictionally coercing and controlling, and fictionally trying to get away with it.

But in any real trial on this charge, without solid evidence, and where the only two witnesses disagree, I am sure that some real jurors’ minds will be influenced, by this programme, towards convicting. As a result, an innocent defendant might go to prison for years. I think the BBC has done a wrong and shameful thing. 

******

The story of the Prague assassination of the SS monster Reinhard Heydrich is a thrilling and bitter one, and has now been made into a major film, for the second time, or perhaps the fourth, if you count 'Hangmen also Die' and the Czech film 'Atentat'  The new version ‘Anthropoid’, which stars Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, gets closer than before to the savage horror of the Nazi reprisals, and made me wonder, yet again, if this sort of assassination was justified.

The evil of the Third Reich continued all too efficiently without Heydrich. But the torture and collective punishment visited on the Czechs (whose subjugation we couldn’t and didn’t prevent) were frightful. Was any good really achieved? I grow less sure year by year.

**********

Why do suckers always fall for the claims of ‘medical cannabis’? Its advocates are invariably mixed up with the lobby for general legalisation. America’s leading campaigner for legal dope, Keith Stroup, said in a candid moment in 1979 that he was using medical cannabis as ‘a red herring to give marijuana a good name.’ Cannabis may make some people feel better, but so did Thalidomide. A drug correlated with severe mental illness may just not be the ideal miracle cure.

 

 

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PETER HITCHENS: You stole my idea, Mrs May... and I've plenty more for you

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

It’s not every day that a Prime Minister steals a soundbite from me, and I’m pleased that she has done. What’s more, she is welcome to use it again, and I have plenty more where that came from.
She rightly swatted away narrow-minded enemies of grammar schools, saying: ‘We already have selection in our school system – and it is selection by house price, selection by wealth.’
I’ve been making this exact point for many years, as part of a lonely campaign to restore our lost grammar schools. When I started in the 1990s I was told it was a lost cause. Nobody’s saying that now. It’s winning because it’s right, just and wise.
If Chairman May has really decided to bulldoze aside the nasty, spiteful egalitarian garbage which blocks the road to good state schools, she can count on my total support against all who get in her way. I haven’t been keen on her before, and wasn’t even sure she cared, but her bold strike on Thursday night was impressive politics.
It is national madness to refuse to select children for the best schools on academic ability. We must have wasted oceans of talent thanks to the idiotic comprehensive system. We should not waste another drop.
I have this picture in my mind of the desolate faces of clever boys and girls trapped in howling, chaotic classrooms where academic excellence is actively despised, resigned to failure and disappointment, and going off into lost lives of needless mediocrity, from which their parents were powerless to rescue them.
If people ever wonder why we lack the talent, skills and competence that used to be normal in this country, it is because our state schools threw them in the bin in the name of ‘equality’. And even now the enemies of promise are still ganging up to hold back the talented but poor.
The BBC, to its lasting shame, is running what amounts to a campaign against grammars – which it is forbidden by its charter to do. Its reporters are allowed to intone at the end of reports that ‘many people’ doubt that grammars aid social mobility, weasel words which they can use to smuggle their own opinions into what is supposed to be impartial journalism.
Many people, I can assure them, think the opposite and have evidence to prove it. But they rarely get asked on.
The Corporation, ever the reliable voice of the smug, wealthy Left, has readily swallowed the anti-grammar propaganda which concentrates on the tiny number of untypical grammar schools which still survive in a few areas.
These schools are besieged, and no wonder, when seven years at their private equivalents would cost a minimum of £120,000 in post-tax income.
The top comprehensives, secretly selective in various clever ways, are actually more socially exclusive than these hopelessly oversubscribed grammars. If there were, once again, more than 1,000 such schools all over the country, this pressure would drop away. Lots of other things would happen. Standards would rise.
Sir Michael Wilshaw, chief inspector of English schools, bafflingly opposes grammar schools despite having gone to one (and would this son of a postman have risen so high otherwise?).
YET he admitted in a recent speech: ‘The fate of the most able pupils in non-selective [i.e. comprehensive] schools is particularly depressing. Some 60,000 youngsters who achieved the top levels at Key Stage 2 did not achieve an A or A* in English and maths five years later. Indeed, only a quarter achieved a B grade. According to the Sutton Trust, 7,000 children a year who were in the top ten per cent nationally at age 11 were not in the top 25 per cent at GCSE five years later. These youngsters are drawn disproportionately from the white working class.’
Why is this? Well, these facts may help. Grammar schools, where excellence is encouraged rather than bullied or ignored, get better results than comprehensive education.
In 2015, no less than 96.7 per cent of pupils in England’s grammar schools got five good GCSEs. Only 56.7 per cent of pupils at comprehensives (in fully comprehensive areas, not in any way ‘creamed off’ by grammars) did so, whatever their background.
And what about those supposedly dreadful secondary moderns which comprehensives are meant to have saved us from? Almost half (49.7 per cent) of pupils at non-selective schools in grammar school catchment areas won five good GCSEs.
So, after 50 years and billions of pounds, comprehensives have only a miserable seven per cent advantage over today’s equivalent of despised secondary moderns. But grammars still have a 40 per cent advantage over comprehensives.
Smashing up the grammars did not help a single child in a secondary modern. But it ruined the hopes of many who might otherwise have gone to grammars, but were dumped in bog-standard comprehensives.
Closing the grammars because the secondary moderns were bad was like cutting off a man’s left leg because his right leg is gangrenous. In short, it was mad. Let us welcome this long-awaited return to sanity, even if the privileged rulers of the BBC refuse to do so.
Theresa May needs the support of all of us to do this good thing, and to take it further.

The real menace on the roads

 

I have to try not to grind my teeth when I read about people who kill their innocent fellow creatures because they think it’s all right to text while driving.

How can we bring home to these homicidal, heedless cretins that their actions are at least as dangerous as letting off a gun in the street? Try speaking politely to them if you spot them (as I have). 

They will threaten and swear at you. One said to me: ‘You know perfectly well the police don’t care. I can do what I like.’ He is, alas, quite right. He shouldn’t be.

Last week Christopher Gard (pictured, right) was jailed for killing Lee Martin, a cyclist. Gard, because he was not looking where he was going, drove into Mr Martin at 65mph. He then tried to conceal that he had been texting at the time. This was not a moment’s carelessness. 

It was a deliberate risk. For the sake of a text about taking his dog for a walk, he deprived Mr Martin’s two daughters (12 and 15) of a father, and his wife of a husband.

Gard knew his actions were stupid and illegal. He had eight convictions for using his phone at the wheel and had promised magistrates to stop doing this six weeks before he destroyed a happy family.

There’s only one solution. A year’s loss of licence and a vicious fine on a first conviction, and prison on a second; and the police instructed to enforce the law with maximum rigour, as they once did with the breathalyser and seatbelts. 

Police and magistrates who ignore this crime, or deal with it lightly, are risking the lives of others. Stop it.

Question time for our drug law MPs 

The saga of Keith Vaz MP (before whose Home Affairs Committee I once appeared in a vain attempt to persuade them to stop weakening the drug laws) prompts this suggestion.

Any MP involved in influencing drug laws should be asked, on oath, when they last used any illegal drug, or observed others using such drugs including their children.

If we can demand details of financial interests, this is only reasonable.

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Chairman May Borrows my Grammar School soundbite - but is she just posing?

I see Chairman May has borrowed my soundbite on school selection. She responded to anti-grammar moaners complaining about the alleged unfairness of selection by ability,  by pointing out that we already select by house price. She did so in a meeting with Conservative MPs at the 1922 Committee on Wednesday .

She is very welcome to this soundbite and may use it as much as she likes, but, like the Permanent Secretary at the Education Department,  I am still unsure of what she really intends to do.

Much like the EU issue, the grammar school controversy allows people to take positions which appear to be more radical than they really are.

It’s necessary to recall that academic selection was largely destroyed in the late 1960s and 1970s, so making grammar schools pretty theoretical in most parts of the country.  Only in Northern Ireland is there still a fully functional academically selective system.

In 1998 the Blair government actually banned new grammar schools by law, not that there had been any great effort to create any in the intervening 20 years. It was just that, from then on, any talk by the Tories about recreating them would need *at the very least* to involve the repeal of this ban as a manifesto measure.

Since then,  the numbers of academically selective state schools in England has dwindled to a besieged and untypical rump, from whose problems and successes we can learn something *only* if we allow for this.

I have many times made these points,  not least in an exchange with ‘Kent Mum’ which those adept at the internet can doubtless call up with ease. But here’s most of it : http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/07/a-new-discussion-about-school-selection-.html

But now the Tories have plainly made a political decision to seem to embrace the grammar school policy (perhaps to outflank UKIP, perhaps to please the conservative media). So we need to go further

To *say* you wish to abolish the ban on new grammar schools, when this wasn’t in your manifesto, leaves you in a pretty safe position. You can put up a Bill which the Lords (heavily dominated now by the cultural Left) will chuck out. And, as you didn’t put it in the manifesto, the Westminster Convention cannot be invoked to require them to pass it out of respect for the people’s will. And it will die.

But if you win the next election, you will be reminded of this. So you will have had to put it in your manifesto before that election. And so, bit by bit, it will creep up the stairs of urgency until you have to legislate seriously.

And of course I’d be delighted if the 1998 ban were repealed. But then we’d only be back where we were in 1997, when there were hardly any grammars and no plans to create any new ones.

What we need, for this to matter, is a  government determined to build and open hundreds of new grammars. Do we have such a  government? No, the current Education Secretary, whose name I forget, is plainly not keen. Chairman May herself, despite borrowing my soundbite concealed for years her own attendance at a grammar school and cannot be said to be an actual enthusiast.

The Tories are most of all committed (as are many Blairites) to the stealthy nationalisation of education, through ‘academies’ , which allows them to hand over the running of state-financed schools to private companies, via an agency which is almost entirely opaque and unaccountable.

Grammars, which were often based upon local pride and in many cases built and founded by old-fashioned Labour town halls, are unlikely to emerge in any numbers from this system, which is selective in more subtle, less politically difficult , more unfair ways.

I think we may be being played for suckers here. I will need to see significant numbers of new grammars before I am persuaded that Chairman May is doing anything other than posing.

 

PETER HITCHENS: All that's missing from this sorry line-up is a seat for Humpty Dumpty

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

What are the real thoughts of Chairman May as she sits amid a Cabinet made up mostly of nonentities nobody would recognise in the street?

There this feeble Politburo hunches, squeaking amid the Elizabethan grandeur of Chequers, a government committed to a task most of them hate. Even Boris Johnson doesn’t really want to leave the EU.

‘Brexit means Brexit,’ intones the Prime Minister. But this slogan seems to have escaped from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where Humpty Dumpty proclaims that words mean what he says they mean.

If I were her, I’d be scared of the months to come. France, our ancient rival, has spotted that nobody in London has decided what we really want. 

As we dither, they will undermine us. Before long it will be clear that either we exit the EU single market and take our chances, or do a deal under which we stay, more or less, under Brussels rule.

France wouldn’t be able to bully a government committed to departure, backed by a parliamentary majority. 

Such a government could be genuinely tough in talks, because it had a real, much desired aim.

But this lot? As Winston Churchill said of a similarly soggy Cabinet in 1936, they are ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity’.

From behind them come the endless whispers, especially from the USA, which drove us into the EU in the first place, that we might ‘walk back’ the decision. 

Plus there are the mutterings of the Civil Service, the diplomats, and the BBC.

These are tricky times. Chairman May, who claims to admire the first Queen Elizabeth, may find that she faces nearly as many foes as that cunning monarch did, at home and abroad. 

But the most dangerous ones will be among the smiling faces round the Chequers table. 

She is not there because she is strong but because – for the moment – nobody else is stronger.

Cowardly truth about Oxford's state school 'success'

Oxford University boasts of increasing its state school intake to 59.2 per cent. How cowardly of it. On the same day we learned that most boys (50.46 per cent) leave state primary school without reaching the Government’s pretty basic standards in reading, writing or maths. Many will never catch up.

If state school children are getting into Oxford, it’s either because they go to super-exclusive fake comprehensives, surrounded by expensive houses or open only to churchgoers; or they go to besieged and rare grammar schools; or they have private tutors; or they have been given special treatment and are not really up to Oxford’s standards.

In the days before ‘comprehensive’ schools, Oxford’s non-public school intake was rising fast without any of these tricks or reduced standards – from 38 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent by 1965. 

If grammar schools had survived, many reckon it would soon have reached 70 per cent, and maybe higher. Oxford should campaign to bring back selective state schools, not cringe before the equality commissars. 

But we are at the mercy of crude egalitarians. The supposedly Tory Government continues to employ Alan Milburn, the Blairite former Cabinet Minister and (so far as I know) unrepentant student Marxist.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, regularly attacks the privilege of private education, though never that of the socially exclusive pseudo-comprehensive state schools favoured by well-off Leftists.

As head of the creepy quango the Social Mobility Commission, he cranks out regular reports claiming that public school toffs rule the world. He’s just got lots of headlines by claiming that City bankers still discriminate against applicants who wear brown shoes.

His evidence for this? A 15-year-old book about the death of the traditional banking industry, by a man whose name his report misspells, and another book on the City by a Dutch expert on the Middle East.

People do believe what they want to believe, I find. 

It's official: The British bobby IS dead

My ‘I told you so’ department is now back from a much-needed holiday, after a long summer of full-power gloating and smirking. Immediately it has new work to do. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary has (after 50 years) finally grasped that police foot patrols have been abolished.

Congratulations, HM Inspector! Well spotted! Even so, he buried it in his complacent survey report, where among all the politically correct stuff, it reveals on page 38 that one third of us have not seen a uniformed police officer on foot in their area in the past year – in the past two decades, in my case. 

Even this fact is turned into a PC lecture about ‘more deprived areas’. One in four say they see one once a month. If so, he was probably nipping into Costa Coffee for a flat white.

So what are they doing instead? As we learned again last week, car pursuits seem to appeal far more than plodding the pavement deterring crime and disorder. Are these pursuits – which in some years have led to as many as 20 innocent deaths – even remotely worth the risk?

But while resources are available for such chases, what of shopping centres such as The Stow in Harlow, where a Polish man, Arkadiusz Jozwik, was violently (and fatally) attacked? Gangs of menacing youths smoking cannabis, that peaceful drug Sir Richard Branson wants to legalise, have been patrolling The Stow for months, promoting fear and disorder.

But police – as everywhere – seem to have paid little attention to either the menace or the illegal drug abuse. Now, too late, they are present – for a while. And there is a lot of grandiose stuff about a ‘hate crime’. 

Maybe, maybe not, but it might also be ‘Dope Crime’, that growing category, and also a ‘Neglect Crime’, the sort of thing that happens on streets which the police have quietly ceded to the violent and lawless.

Can there be any simpler way of putting this? Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity that can just be withdrawn. 

People living with pain and fear cannot be deliberately ignored by those trained and paid to help them.

 

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

 

 

'Brexit Means Brexit', says Humpty Dumpty.Some Thoughts on the Coming Autumn Crisis

Well, here we are in the blackberry-picking season, when the dewy early mornings are deliciously cool, especially in contrast to the noonday heat, and Michaelmas isn't far off,  and normality is beginning to reassert itself after the strange, dreamy unreality of August. Do huge events happen in August (as they do)  precisely *because* people lose their grip on reality in this time of somnolent heat and institutionalised lassitude, when so many people vanish from their posts?

I’ve always had mixed feeling about this time of year, which, for a privately-educated Englishman of my age, used to be a strange mixture of smug separateness, anticipation, melancholy and trepidation – as my school terms didn’t start till the 18^th or 19^th of September and I could watch the normal world restart, and yet stand aloof from it.  For some reason I associate it especially with the haunted windy coast near Stokes Bay in Hampshire, just opposite the Isle of Wight, littered with ruined fortifications and site of MI6’s secret training school, from which one could watch the last great ocean liners steaming in and out of Southampton and (if unwary) be smacked in the back by their huge bow-waves as they reached the stony beach from two miles out. Canadian troops practised their D-Day landing there.  One of them had come back and set up an ice-cream business near the beach. Canadian ice-cream was very exotic in that world of Walls vanilla vs Lyons vanilla cylinders.  

I can’t have spent more than three summers there, if that, but they are the most memorable of my childhood.

And of course there were the blackberries, so many more of them than now, because the heathland on which they grow was swallowed up in the great building boom of the middle 1960s. All those Kennedy Crescents, Kennedy Ways and Kennedy Closes! I still spot them from time to time.

And so off the Cabinet go to Chequers, to try to square the circle of a government and establishment intent on staying in the EU, and an electorate narrowly in favour of leaving.

I always said this would be a mess if it happened. When it became clear that it would happen, I prophesied a constitutional crisis. So far, it has mainly affected the two big parties, both riven by paradoxical revenges. But as Parliament and normal government resume, and the courts return, the depth, length, height and breadth of the mess will become obvious.

A contributor here has rightly reminded me of the remarks of John Kerry, US Secretary of State, back on 29^th June (see here https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/29/john-kerry-brexit-could-be-walked-back-david-cameron )

Mr Kerry(who, like the rest of the US establishment was appalled by our vote – the USA was the party most determined to keep us in the EU) made no pretence of neutrality:

’ The US secretary of state has raised doubts about whether Brexit will ever happen, suggesting most leave campaigners do not truly believe in Britain’s divorce from the EU and do not know how to achieve it.

Claiming there were a number of ways in which Thursday’s vote could be “walked back”, John Kerry, who visited Downing Street on Monday, said David Cameron was loth to invoke article 50, the EU exit procedure.

He said the British prime minister felt powerless to “start negotiating a thing that he doesn’t believe in” and “has no idea how he would do it”.

Apparently referring to Boris Johnson, one of the frontrunners to replace Cameron, Kerry added: “And by the way, nor do most of the people who voted to do it.” ‘

Well, how powerful does Mrs May feel in negotiating  thing she also doesn’t believe in, which her Cabinet doesn’t believe in, which her civil and diplomatic service and judiciary don’t believe in, and which the bulk of the media don’t believe in either.

‘Brexit is Brexit’ really isn’t much use here. It’s an Alice in Wonderland sort of statement, or even a ‘Through the Looking Glass’ one – Chairman May does increasingly remind me of the Red Queen, much bustle and speed, no visible achievement. For ist corollary is that the statement works just as well the other way round.

By this I mean ( readers of ‘Alice’ , that great politico-philosophical tract will know) that the second of the two ‘Brexits’, that is, whatever Chairman May comes up with at the end of whatever now happens, will replace the first ‘Brexit’ – the vague, ill-formulated yearning for national independence and border control which won the referendum for the ‘Leave’ campaign back in June.

And where now is that campaign? Al ‘Boris’ Johnson is now a member of Chairman May’s politburo, her creature, existing at her whim and committed to make any failure look like a success. Michael Gove is, I am told, growing a beard. Gisela Stuart has vanished into the jungle of Labour’s civil war. Andrea Leadsom has been swallowed up.

As for David Davis, the only real shark in Chairman May’s lagoon, he is mainly occupied fending off his rivals, Liam Fox and Al Johnson.  Both Mr Davis and Mr Fox know that they are dead men on leave,  appointed because they agree with the voters and disagree with the government. They have no real support from No 10 or the Treasury, let alone from the civil service or the diplomatic service. The Parliamentary lobby, the journalists licensed to write about politics and to receive and process targeted unattributable leaks aimed at damaging Downing Street’s foes and boosting its friends, are power-worshippers. They will inevitably take their cue from Chairman May’s Downing Street media operation. The Johnson-Fox-David trio are expected and intended to fail, and will get all the help they need to fail,  from Chairman May and her allies. Mr Johnson, whose commitment to the cause is , shall we say, the weakest, may survive by ensuring that ‘Brexit’ actually isn’t ‘Brexit’ at all.

This interesting article by Paul Mason in ‘the Guardian’ suggests that the EU leaders are by no means as devastated or divided as some like to think

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/29/europe-brexit-britain-theresa-may-single-market

As Mason rightly says, French diplomats are trained from their cradles to spot an opponent’s weakness and aim repeated blows at it and ‘May’s administration goes into this critical negotiating process with an obvious weakness. It does not know whether it wants to remain in the single market.’

This is the point around which it will all revolve. By the way, I already knew this, as I am interested in what happened to Western Europe’s Communists after they gave up on the Soviet Union,  but how many of you grasped the significance of the location of the Mediterranean summit, the bleak island of Ventotene, used by Mussolini as a prison for his opponents? ? It was a homage to the Italian Communist Altiero Spinelli, One of the original designers of the EU utopia. Yet his original politics are either not known to, or never mentioned by, most mainstream, reporters. Why would that be? My friend Christopher Booker, of course, knew and noticed. See here;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/27/the-secret-history-of-the-eu-written-on-an-italian-prison-island/

All Schools Are Comprehensive. But Some Are More Comprehensive Than Others

Feeble and Dubious

 

AS we are about to find out, thanks to Theresa May's feeble and dubious leak of plans to, just possibly, maybe, (but probably not) allow some more grammar schools to be created, without actually committing herself to creating them, the Grammar School argument is often extremely one-sided.

This is because it is so important. It is in fact the real ‘Clause Four’ of British politics, the absolutely non-negotiable demand by the Left, that the state schools should be absolutely directed by egalitarian social engineering, with education a poor second. And when I say egalitarian, I mean not equality of opportunity (for comprehensives absolutely do not provide that, even if they work), but equality of *outcome*.

 

Blatant Hypocrisy 

I have said many times here before that there is no *educational* argument for comprehensive schools. Their advocates almost always seek to evade them for their own children, either by blatant hypocrisy or by sending them to schools which are secretly selective which allow them to escape the comprehensive experience, as undergone by the poor and powerless.

The opponents of academic selection generally ignore or distort the case for grammar schools -yet these people dominate educational journalism. Here’s an example

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/theresa-may-grammar-schools-lift-ban-education-bring-back-grammars-no-champion-of-social-mobility-a7177216.html

As usual, the writer believes that ‘resources’ are the basic answer to educational problems, and is uninterested in the way in which schools are organised and therefore how those resources are spent. The article tediously repeats research on the *existing rump* of grammar schools in England, concentrated in commuter belt areas, and concludes from this ( absurdly and illogically) that an evenly-spread national system of academic selection would have the same effect.

 

Top Comps are Highly Socially Selective

For example, this oft-repeated citation: ‘A recent study by the Sutton Trust found that, of the 164 grammar schools still open in 2014, 119 had fewer than 3 per cent of students eligible for free school meals; the national average across all state schools was 18 per cent. That is not a figure representative of a system that promotes radical social mobility.’

Note the 119, by the way. These will be those grammars within easy reach of large concentrations of middle-class parents reasonably anxious to avoid private secondary school fees which can cost nearly a quarter of a million pounds per child in pre-tax. income.

What about the other 46?

But this is why such research always ignores the last fully-selective system in the UK, in Northern Ireland, where outcomes for children from poor homes are demonstrably better than they are in mainland comprehensive systems.

 

Social Segregation in the name of Equality

By contrast (as so often I am grateful to Geoffrey Warner for the research  there is ‘[A] Sutton Trust report of March 2010 which stated that “Comprehensive schools in England are highly socially segregated and the main reason for this is their admissions and selection processes rather than their location…[Moreover] the country’s leading comprehensives are more socially exclusive than the remaining grammar schools…[R]esearchers found that the country’s top 164 comprehensive schools took only 9.2% of children from income deprived homes although they drew pupils from areas where about 20% were income deprived. The 164 remaining grammar schools, also drawing their pupils from areas where 20% were income deprived, were found to be more inclusive, admitting 13.5% of children from poor homes.”

See note 27 in this document

http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/120100312_mobility_manifesto2010.pdf

 

The actual report is here 

http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Worlds_apart.pdf

 

My thanks to the Sutton Trust for providing it from their archives. 

 

 

It points out : 'Both the 164 grammars and the 164 most socially selective comprehensives drew pupils from areas where about a fifth of children were income deprived, but the comprehensives were the more socially selective taking only 9.2% compared with the grammars 13.5%. Nearly all (97.7%) of the pupils in grammars attained five good GCSEs including English and maths compared with 66.7% in the comprehensives.

 

I would also, like to insert here this contribution from Geoffrey Warner, which is of interest in this context and ought to be on the record on the Internet: 'On 3 August the Department of Education released a document on 'Widening Participation in Higher Education, England 2013/14 age cohort'. It showed that while 64% of students with A levels or equivalent qualifications from independent schools and colleges went on to the most selective universities, only 23% of students from the state sector did so. This was reported in the media. What was *not* reported was that 61% of students with A levels or equivalent qualifications from selective state schools (i.e. grammar schools) also went on to the most selective universities compared to 19% from 'other' state schools (i.e. comprehensives).

 

Just as interesting is this later report

http://www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/top-comprehensives-socially-selective-half-national-average-proportion-pupils-free-school-meals/

…which includes this information: ‘England’s highest performing comprehensive schools and academies are significantly more socially selective than the average state school nationally and other schools in their own localities, according to a new report by the Sutton Trust today.

The average rate of free school meal (FSM) eligibility and uptake at the top 500 comprehensives – all have more than 69% of pupils achieving five good GCSEs in 2012 – is just below half the national average figure, 7.6% compared to 16.5%, and 15.2% in their respective local authorities. There are nearly 3,000 comprehensive schools nationally. FSM is a measure of the overall social selectivity of a school.

95 per cent of the top 500 comprehensives have a smaller proportion of their pupils on free school meals than their local areas, including almost two thirds (64%) which are unrepresentative of their local authority area, with gaps of five or more percentage points.’

My recent essay ‘Why is Selection by Wealth Better than Selection by Ability?’  (to be found on p.167 of a book published recently by the think-tank Civitas) deals in some detail with these arguments and can be found here

 

Branded as failures - by postcode

It shows that thousands of children each March are branded as failures on National Offer Day, when, thanks to their parents' poverty or lack of sharp elbows, they are relegated to second or third-rate schools. Somehow, this Game of Homes and selection by chequebook does not offend the egalitarians who moan that selection by ability is unfair. 

http://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/theselectiondebate.pdf

 

What We Lost after 1965

 

There is also, of course, the evidence of the past, the wealth of working class and lower middle-class talent propelled into public service, education, business, science, politics and the arts by the free grammar school system which existed from 1944 to 1965. I saw the last flowering of it, not realising that what I saw would never be repeated.  I think most of my fellow-undergraduates in my year at the University of York, who arrived there in the autumn of 1970, had been educated in grammar or direct-grant schools.

But examining the past can also be misleading, if done without sufficient knowledge or wit. People who believe the past was like the present assume that the main aim of secondary education in the 1950s and 1960s was to get pupils into University. It was not. Especially before the Robbins Report, which created plate-glass universities such as mine, university was a rarity.

 

Nobody ever said Grammar Schools could cure every social ill

For example, this ‘The Gurney-Dixon report of 1954 found that, in their heyday, only a tiny proportion of grammar school students from an unskilled working class background ever gained entry into university. The same report found that, of the tiny proportion of working class students that attended a selective school, two-thirds left without achieving three O-levels.’

Our very knowledgeable contributor Geoffrey Warner has commented on this as follows :’ It's odd that the author refers to the "tiny proportion" of working class children attending grammar schools at the time of the Gurney-Dixon Report when the report itself gives it at over 60%! What Gurney-Dixon was concerned about was "Early Leaving", the title of the report. Few working class children took A levels and went on to university because (a) there were plenty of jobs for school-leavers at the age of 16 and (b) the culture of the time was quite different from what it is today. Thus, when my cousins reached that age, they were told by their parents that the time had come for them to leave school and start contributing to the family budget. These days they would almost certainly have gone on to university. The fact that grammar schools can and do send working class children to university these days is illustrated by the following figures I obtained from the Higher Education Statistics Agency. In Northern Ireland, where there are still plenty of grammar schools, 38% of university entrants come from the four lowest social classes; in England, where there are still a few grammar schools, the percentage is 33.4%. In Wales and Scotland, where there are none, it is 32.6% and 27.2% respectively.

Here is Table J from the Gurney-Dixon report , which can be accessed in full here

http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/gurneydixon/gurneydixon.html

Occupational background of pupils at maintained and direct grant schools.

And here is Table K

Comparison of pupils' achievements at beginning and end of their grammar school life (maintained grammar schools only).

The report comments

‘It will be seen that the improvement between 11 and 16 which has raised many pupils from the bottom selection group to the highest academic categories is most common (amounting to 48.3 per cent) among those from professional and managerial occupations, while the corresponding deterioration which has caused many who were placed in the top selection group at 11 to be found by 16 in the lowest academic categories is most common among the children of unskilled workers (54.0 per cent) and semi-skilled workers (37.9 per cent). There are, of course, plenty of pupils whose fathers are of professional or managerial standing who were in the lowest selection group at 11 and are still in the lowest academic categories at 16. Similarly, among the children of semi-skilled or unskilled workers 46.8 per cent and 29.6 per cent respectively of those who were in the top selection group at 11 were also in the highest academic categories at 16-18.

43. Table K is concerned solely with actual academic achievements. It might perhaps be suggested that the poor showing of children from the homes of semi-skilled and unskilled workers was caused largely by their family tradition being against a long school life and certainly against a sixth form career; that if they had not had a high proportion of very early leavers their academic performance might have been similar to that of other social groups.’

These are deep waters, and take us into the nature versus nurture argument, a vast tropical jungle of debate, from which no traveller returns. I myself have never asserted that the purpose of grammar schools was to lift large numbers of talented children from very poor homes, where the parents’ occupations are unskilled, books absent and enthusiasm for education scanty, and send them to lives of high education, culture and achievement. It would be lovely to be able to do so, and a Christian duty where possible.

But it is by its nature unlikely. Only small numbers could be expected to make such a huge transition against all the influence of home and background, in any system.

The true difference lies around the bottom edge of the middle, among those who, given a chance, will prosper, and, if neglected or forced to sink or swim in mixed-ability classrooms, will fail or never realise their potential. Such households could never have afforded private education even before its fees were pushed upwards to suit oligarchs rather than the suburban middle classes.

So to say that grammar schools fail to raise the poorest in large numbers is not really much of a criticism.

 

University wasn't the main goal till very recently

The ‘Independent’ article also asserts : ‘In the 1960s, the Robbins report showed that, while the working class community represented 26 per cent of the overall grammar school intake, just 0.3 per cent achieved two A-levels or more.

That is a record of abject failure on the stated goals of the grammar system: social mobility and academic attainment.

But a letter to the paper the following day ( from Dr John Doherty of Stratford-upon-Avon) made this point: ‘Liam Young cites the 1963 Robbins Report to show that the grammar system failed to promote social mobility and academic attainment. In truth, the report found that children of skilled manual workers at grammar school who stayed on to age 18 were as likely (65 per cent) to get two A-Levels as children of professional and managerial parents (67 per cent). Children of manual workers appeared less successful than children of the same ability in other social groups in obtaining the qualifications for entry to university largely because they left school earlier and did not take A Levels.’

The grammar schools are often blamed, by their critics, for failing to cure ills they never claimed or sought to to cure. Grammars couldn’t make poor parents richer, so their children were under as much pressure as always to leave school and start earning as early as possible. They couldn’t and shouldn’t have sought to reduce the life-chances of the more fortunate boys and girls that went to them, and it is neither surprising nor distressing that those pupils often did better than those who had come from bookless, poor homes.  This article seems to blame grammar schools for having existed in an age when there were not many universities, whereas there were a lot of responsible white-collar jobs open to people who had never been to university.

The Gurney-Dixon report, by the way, is eloquent on the huge differences in grammar school provision, varying from 10% of places in some areas to 44% in others. It is shocking that so few grammar schools were built in areas that lacked them, between 1994 and 1964, and equally shocking that so few technical schools were built . I now have some figures on this. By 1958, there were only 279 Technical Schools in England and Wales by 1958, with 95,000 pupils. There were at this time roughly 1,290 grammar schools. Far too few Secondary Moderns, the third leg of the tripod, offered even ‘O’ levels to their pupils, let alone ‘A’ levels, though some did. But the faults of the system did not lie in the existence of grammar schools as such, or in academic selection. Selection by postcode and feigned religion, which has now succeeded academic selection, has been far more ruthless.

I’d add to this a recent BBC Radio 4 ‘Analysis’ programme. This is often rather a good slot, but I have my doubts about this one, which you can listen to here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07knmpc

 

Was There Really a Revolt Against Selection?

I was especially struck and rather annoyed by this passage:

‘“Professor Alison Wolf (presenter)

‘…Fewer and fewer parents found this [the selective system) tolerable. They wanted the best schools for their children and selection withered. What is truly surprising is where this happened. It wasn’t in Labour strongholds and  it started well before comprehensives became national policy

‘It all started instead in the leafy shires with Tory councils.

Peter  Mandler: ‘This is a period of rapid demographic growth especially in school-age children, new houses and new schools are having to be built and it was very difficult to for any local authority to build a new housing estate and to build two separate schools because  it just looked like apartheid and so many Conservative authorities just made the pragmatic decision to build comprehensives or to try to fudge the issue.’

AW: Local authorities made their own decisions about whether, how and when to reorganise…’ ”

I wrote to professors Wolf and Mandler and am still in correspondence with them. I said ‘I understood that (outside such special places as Anglesey where demographic conditions prevented a selective system) the London County Council pioneered comprehensive schooling ( an idea originally developed by Graham Savage in the 1920s) for dogmatic egalitarian reasons, in the 1940s. I also believed that Leicestershire postponed academic selection to 14 but retained grammar schools until Circular 10/65 placed great pressure on all LEAs to abolish selection (a recent House of Commons Education committee survey shows the great bulk of grammar schools, which had been rising in numbers to about 1,200 in 1965, falling only after that date) This circular hardly left LEAs to ‘make their own decisions’ in any but the most formal sense.  

I have yet to find (it may be there, but I haven’t located it) any substantial independent evidence for a pre-1965 suburban or leafy shires parental revolt against selection by ability. It is true that, by the early 1960s after more than a decade of Tory government, many local authorities had (as they do) come under the control of the Opposition party, which was Labour, by then dogmatically committed to comprehensive schools.  So there were probably quite a lot of schemes for going comprehensive in being by 1964, though not implemented. And the Tory government itself was never especially committed to grammar schools, indeed Macmillan’s last Education Minister, Edward Boyle, was more or less a social democrat and by no means opposed to the comprehensive ideal. It is also the case that many grammar schools had originally been built by Labour councils, and that much of the Labour Party had at the very least reconciled itself to grammar schools since the 1930s.

Above all, the real nature of comprehensives , as it would take shape, was virtually unknown either to those who clamoured for them or to those whose children would go to them. Labour spoke absurdly of a ‘grammar education for all’ . The early comprehensives continued to ape grammar schools with teachers in gowns and mortar-boards, honours boards and religious assemblies, features  which would soon prove impossible to maintain, not least because the new schools in many cases  became so huge.

Anthony Crosland, the privately-educated man who would in the end destroy the grammar schools, showed in his 1956 book ‘The Future of Socialism’, that he had no idea what he was doing. He dismissed warnings that such schools would be vast, that they would have mixed-ability classes, that standards would be lower, that brighter children would be held back to the pace of the slowest ( all this is discussed in the chapter ‘the Fall of the Meritocracy’ in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’). All utterly wrong.

But still they do not admit it. Is  it because our elite, political and journalistic,  are so wedded to egalitarianism for others  while not experiencing it for themselves?  I think so.

‘All Animals are Equal. But some Animals are More Equal Than Others’

 

George Orwell. Animal Farm.

Grammar Schools

Yes, I will soon be writing at length about grammar schools - but for the moment I will only say that stories claiming they are on their way back remind me of stories a couple of years ago saying that Michael Gove was going to restore the GCE 'O' level exam.

 

 

PETER HITCHENS: Sorry, but I won't be saluting the dimmest Cabinet in our history

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Why is it supposed to be a good thing that the new Cabinet are worse-educated than the old one? Half the media trumpeted on Friday that Theresa May’s new Government was full of state-educated Ministers, as if this were a cause for rejoicing.

But why should it be? It is a regrettable fact that this country’s private schools are vastly, incomparably better than all but a very few of its state schools. All figures and results confirm this. All employers know it.

And almost all the good state schools are academically selective grammar schools, a tiny, hugely oversubscribed remnant of survivors, utterly untypical of the state sector. And they must remain a pitiful few dozen, besieged by desperate parents – because it is against the law to open any new ones.

Most of the other good state schools select just as ruthlessly, judging pupils by their parents’ ability to afford expensive houses, or to fake religious belief, or both at once.

So what is there to celebrate about all these new Ministers? Either they have taken advantage of a rare privilege just as unfair as that used by fee-paying parents, and more secret. Or they have been poorly educated and are not going to be very good at their jobs as a result.

This very odd cult of state education among politicians used to be confined to the Labour Party, where the worse the school was, the more virtue points you scored. Private education was a matter of shame. A grammar school education was often concealed. 

I once caught a Labour MP pretending to have gone to a comprehensive when he hadn’t – because none had existed in his home city at the time. Then, the Tory Party turned into the Labour Party.

The transformation is now complete, which is why the Labour Party is biting its own tail trying to work out what on earth it is for.

And Tory politicians started bragging about sending their children to state schools, as well as looking embarrassed about having been privately educated themselves.

Mrs May seldom mentions her time at a private convent school, and tried for years to keep quiet about her grammar school days, though she now seems to have decided to trade on it as it suits her new image as the woman from Middle England.

But none of this changes the fact that in the 50 years since most grammar schools were abolished, state education in this country has been in decline – and that the continuing existence of private schools has shown it up again and again.

So let’s have no boasting about having the worst-educated Cabinet in modern history.

Instead let’s restore the lost grammar and direct grant schools that were taking on and beating the private schools at their own game, until politicians destroyed them.

Roll up for Theresa's street theatre! 

There is lots of talk about a supposedly ‘brutal’ reshuffle. But actually the fall of David Cameron is much more like an old-fashioned General Election than a reshuffle.

My generation were quite used to the rather satisfying sight of Alec Douglas-Home’s sofa, or Harold Wilson’s desk, or Ted Heath’s piano being carted out of Downing Street by whistling removal men. They lost. They went. Government really changed, in character and policy.

It was our great triumph that we had peaceful revolutions in which the beaten party were actually turned out, and accepted it. It was good and healthy and I miss it. 

But in recent years the true changes are all inner-party putsches – Lady Thatcher stabbed in the back by her own Cabinet in 1990, the long march of the Blairites in the Labour Party, the ejection of Iain Duncan Smith.

Despite all the flag-waving fuss in 1997, when Labour Party employees were bussed into Downing Street and told to pretend to be a crowd, we’ve had more or less the same government since 1990 – pro-EU, high-spending, politically correct and broadly approved of by Michael Heseltine.

If the millions who voted to leave the EU had had a party, it would have been the opposite of all that, and we’d have had a huge political change.

As it is we have to make do with Mrs May, who personally opposes her government’s main aim of leaving the EU.

And, knowing she is unlikely to deliver what the Leave majority wanted, she has cunningly provided some satisfying street theatre – plenty of heads rolling, some new faces, a furniture van in Downing Street and poor old David Davis, who she no doubt hopes will fail to get us out of the EU, so that she can sack him and do a deal with Brussels that keeps us in, in all but name.

A solution to 'terror' that no one cares about

Thought is the first casualty of terror. Nobody ever actually applies reason to the subject. And so we flounder on, uselessly doing the wrong thing.

In general, we end up doing whatever the most powerful lobby, or the Government, wanted to do anyway. Those who are not thinking ‘This is a good day to bury bad news’ are saying: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’

In the US, mass murder is blamed on relaxed gun laws, though other countries with strong gun laws have mass murders. And mass murders are new, as is the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, while America’s gun laws are very old.

Over here, mass murder is blamed on Islamic radicalisation – though the killers are almost invariably drugged-up low-lifes with criminal records for violence and theft. I can already be sure that this is what the Nice murderer will turn out to be, once all the facts are in. By definition, devout Muslims wouldn’t live such lives.

And in all cases, politicians reach for blunt instruments, such as France’s state of emergency – which has just been proved useless by the events in Nice, or more surveillance (likewise it failed to find the culprit of this outrage), or stupid travel restrictions, which treat us all like criminal suspects.

And they make pious speeches in which they growl and thunder against terrorists in general. Is this because they feel guilty about the fact that they have negotiated with terrorists in the past, or that they will certainly do so in the future, or how is Martin McGuinness getting to meet the Queen and how is Algeria independent? Either way, I find it unconvincing. So should you.

The best solution, if there is one, lies elsewhere. But there is no lobby for it, so it is never considered. Can you work out what it might be from the words above?

No one ever trusts a Robocop

If you ever wondered whether the growing transformation of police forces into heavily armoured riot squads was a good idea, this picture of protester Ieshia Evans confronting a phalanx of Louisiana cops will confirm your doubts.

The whole point of police in free countries is to be on the side of the people against crime and disorder. 

Once they climb into armour, and rely on menace, they are bound to lose a great deal of our friendliness and trust.And that will mean more armour, more clubs and more guns.

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