Nick Clegg's 'social mobility' drive stinks of hypocrisy

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 11:29 GMT, 22 May 2012 | Updated: 21:49 GMT, 22 May 2012

Politicians as a breed are professional hypocrites. It is an essential part of their stock-in-trade to pretend to be what they are not. To lecture the rest of us on how we should behave, speak, dress, eat, drink, and bring up our children whilst practicing in private conduct completely at variance with their public stance.

As it lifted the skirts on Westminster's very dirty derriere, the expenses scandal revealed the full loathsome extent of the hypocrisy of those who misrule us.

Thus George Osborne can preach the politics of austerity while jetting off to Munich to watch a football match, or recommend that we should all tighten our belts, while partying on a luxury yacht off Greece (Greece!)  with a Russian billionaire oligarch, a Rothschild and Peter Mandelson.

Hypocrisy: Politicians urge the public to tighten their belts whilst enjoying the high life themselves

Or David Cameron can assure us that 'we are all in it together', while charging us taxpayers with the bill for trimming the wisteria adorning the walls of his constituency home in Oxfordshire.

Cabinet Ministers Francis Maude, Andrew Lansley and Michael Gove 'flipped' - or attempted to -  the designation of their second homes so that they could claim thousands of pounds from the taxpayer.  (Needless to say, the behaviour of Labour politicians was no better, and often  - as in the cases of those MPs who were jailed - a great deal worse, than that of their Conservative counterparts).

This sort of low grade, petty hypocritical cheating we have come to expect from our rulers, since politicians long ago ceased to be exemplars to whom the general public can look up with respect, and are generally and rightly despised for their arrogance, their dishonesty, and their sheer fumbling incompetence.

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Egalitarian: Nick Clegg has called for more social mobility

But is there a more egregious example of rank, naked hypocrisy in  British public life today than the pronouncements of that absurd, posturing ninny who rejoices in the empty title of Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Nicholas William Peter 'Nick' Clegg?

In case you may have missed it, Clegg has followed up the threat he made in March to monitor us all from the cradle - (watching our children's birth weight is one of his yardsticks) - to the grave to see whether we are meeting his criteria for achieving a more egalitarian society, with a new demand: that our top universities should lower their standards to allow state school pupils a 'fair race'.

Let us be quite clear what this means. Clegg is recommending that our leading centres of higher education should deliberately lower their exacting standards, skewing their admissions so that the less well-educated can get in. He denies that this is 'dumbing down' but it is very hard to see what else to call it.

Mr Clegg attended £30,000-a-year Westminster School, but argued that the rift between attainment in private and state schools is 'corrosive'

I have a very personal reason to bitterly resent Clegg's patronising, ill thought out and above all monumentally unfair proposal. My own state-educated stepson has just won a place to study at one of the universities Clegg is talking about - Cambridge. As it happens, Cambridge University is also one of the elite universities where Clegg himself was educated. So from the elevated heights of his own exalted privilege, Clegg is seeking to deny the same  chances to those who would follow him.

For let there be no mistake. By bending the rules to admit a raft of half-educated products of what Alastair Campbell memorably termed 'bog standard Comprehensives', precious places will be denied to children not only from private schools, but to bright students like my stepson who have been lucky enough to attend a decent state school and have got to university not, like Clegg, through daddy's money or privilege, but by the sweat of their brows and their own God-given ability.

And by reducing and devaluing standards, Clegg is seeking to debase the coinage of a top university education. He wants to perpetuate and complete the tragedy set in train by the abolition of Grammar Schools and dumbing down GCSEs which has already produced generations of ill-educated youngsters unable to compete in life's tough race.

To plumb the full depths of Clegg's nauseating hypocrisy you only have to glance at his CV. The man who wants 'to break the grip of the middle classes' on the best paid jobs and promote his half-baked 'social mobility strategy' is himself the perfect product of money and privilege, almost all of whose advantages in life have come from inherited wealth and influence rather than his evidently very thin abilities.

The son of a banker, Clegg attended Westminster, one of our top fee-paying Public Schools, which costs parents a cool £30,000 a year, before going up to Cambridge. His family's wealth, in other words, bought him the education and the advantages  he wants to deny to others. In so doing, he is following in an ignoble tradition set by many leftist members of our upper crust.

Presumably for reasons of misplaced guilt over their own comforts such people - the Toynbees, the Benns, the Blairs - believe that by cutting down tall poppies in the name of a spurious equality they will create a fairer, juster society in which none shall fail, and all shall have prizes. Sorry Mr Clegg, but life just ain't like that.

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