"Do what I say, don't do what I do" - The hypocrisy of the Left over education

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 15:03 GMT, 25 July 2012 | Updated: 17:07 GMT, 26 July 2012

Reading the obituary of the radical left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn this week, I was shocked but scarcely surprised  to discover that his Alma Mater was the exclusive Glenalmond College in Perthshire. If Fettes, Tony Blair’s old school, is often called ‘Scotland’s  Eton’ then Glenalmond is its Harrow - ie. an excellent independent school offering a superb education - at a price - chiefly to the children of the rich.

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Exclusive schooling: Radical left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn, who passed away this week, attended the exclusive Glenalmond College in Perthshire

My shock that Alexander - along with his two journalist brothers Patrick and Andrew - were educated at this elite Establishment comes from the fact that the father who sent them there, Claud Cockburn, was a lifelong Stalinist Communist, who, despite his own privileged public school education,  spent his life inveighing against the iniquities of capitalism, betraying his own upper-crust class,   shamelessly lying on behalf of his Soviet masters,  (his whoppers about the Spanish Civil War were exposed by George Orwell, no less ) - and working tirelessly for the triumph of totalitarian tyranny. Yet Claud Cockburn bought his three sons the best private education his money could buy - and presumably saw nothing wrong in such hypocrisy.

Private schools: Many Labour politicians have attempted to destroy both Grammar Schools and then independent education, whilst still sending their own children to private schools

Yet hypocrisy is the besetting sin of the Left, and it certainly didn’t die with Claud Cockburn.  I have literally lost count of the number of Labour politicians in my lifetime who have with one hand laboured to destroy first the Grammar Schools, and then independent education - while at the same time sending their own children to private schools. Recent examples include Diane Abbott, Ruth Kelly, and of course Harriet Harman. For them, it seems, it has always been a case of  ‘Do what I say - don’t do what I do’.

There is also, it seems, a correlation between the virulence of those who profess to hate the bourgeosie and middle-class values the most, and who yet enjoy its lifestyle and privileges. Over at the Guardian, house organ of the  middle-class Left, its most unreconstructured class-war warriors are themselves scions of the system they wish to destroy. George Monbiot, the newspaper’s leading Eco- fanatic, who wants us all to stop flying off on holiday, trade in our cars for bicycles, and generally adopt a lifestyle of primitive communism fuelled by cow farts, went to Stowe public school; while his editorial colleague Seumus Milne, a stern Marxist whose worldview fossilised just before Communism collapsed in 1989, is an Old Boy of Winchester. The paper’s veteran columnist, Polly Toynbee, who with her three homes is the Queen Bee of Leftist hypocrisy, despite campaigning for state education, sent her own children to private schools.

The moral decline of Labour from its origins a century ago as the genuine voice of the working class to the 21st century party of the chattering classes, is clearly  shown by the efforts that the middle class who now make up  the overwhelming proportion of the party’s members and MPs to destroy the opportunities open to the poor and under-privileged to better themselves by education. It was a Labour Education Secretary in the 1960s, the repulsive Anthony Crosland, who told his wife that his aim was ‘To destroy every f*****g grammar school in this country’ - and largely succeeded in doing so.

Despite the success of some of the Comprehensive schools that Crosland and his successors like Shirley Williams brought in to replace Grammar Schools, the fact remains that in killing the Grammar Schools, Labour chopped off the ladder traditionally climbed by able and bright kids from disadvantaged backgrounds and by doing so, set in stone the inequalities that they claim to hate. And it cannot be denied that far too many Comprehensives are, in Alastair Campbell’s memorable phrase, ‘Bog standard’ schools that are failing their pupils, and are places that our middle-class socialist ruling caste would never dream of sending their kids to.

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