Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 191

Our latest weapon in the war on terror? Organic free-range tripe

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Is David Cameron the man who will destroy freedom in order to save it? His strange, wild speech on Monday suggests that he is. Mr Cameron, as careful observers already know, has a surprisingly poor grasp of history and politics and does not seem to be very clever.

The reception given to his outburst was mostly friendly, all across what is supposed to the spectrum of media opinion ��� though increasingly it is not a spectrum but a monolithic bloc.

Did they read it? I did. It is full of seething organic free-range tripe.

He actually tries to pretend that Britain���s involvement in the Iraq War has had nothing to do with the development of resentful Islamist militancy here. He does this by saying that the September 11 attack on Manhattan took place before the Iraq War.

Indeed it did. It was motivated ��� as one of the hijackers, Abdulaziz al-Omari, made clear in his own recorded testament ��� by Arab fury over America���s support for Israel, and the continued presence of US troops on Saudi soil. And it succeeded in changing US policy on both.

Strong words: David Cameron gave a speech on terrorism on Britain on Monday and how the country will face the challenges ahead going forward

 

Terror is rational. Terrorists know that it works, or why has the USA started supporting the two-state solution in Israel which it long opposed, and why is Martin McGuinness invited to Windsor Castle these days?

If Mr Cameron doesn���t like terrorism, then he wouldn���t have met Mr McGuinness and the even ghastlier IRA mouthpiece, Gerry Adams, at Downing Street last week. But he did. How can that be if, as the Prime Minister says, ���British resolve saw off the IRA���s assaults on our way of life���. Oddly, you only saw the pictures of this pair meeting Jeremy Corbyn on the same day. The Downing Street meeting was not, it seems, filmed.

But that���s only a part of the problem. Mr Cameron claimed that we have, in this country, a ���very clear creed���. But do we?

He says: ���We are all British. We respect democracy and the rule of law. We believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of worship, equal rights regardless of race, sex, sexuality or faith.���

Little of this is true. Few regard themselves as British any more. Votes are bought by billionaire donations and incredibly expensive marketing. Democracy is surely not respected by the growing legions who don���t vote. And, as Mr Cameron acknowledged, there are now areas of this country where votes are rigged and voters intimidated for the first time since the days of Dickens.

Terror is rational. Terrorists know that it works, or why is Martin McGuinness invited to Windsor Castle these days?

 

Freedom of speech, for those who don���t accept multiculturalism or the sexual revolution, is increasingly limited, mainly by threats to the jobs of those who speak out of turn.

Mr Cameron is also plain wrong when he says our freedom stems from democracy. Democracy these days involves agreeing with whatever slogans the Murdoch press is shouting.

Our freedom comes from the 1689 Bill of Rights, which he doesn���t seem to know exists, from Magna Carta, which he can���t translate, from Habeas Corpus, which has been whittled away on the excuse of counter-terrorism, and from jury trial, which is fast disappearing. Freedom of speech certainly can���t be defended by banning ���hate-preachers���, which Mr Cameron is so proud of doing. Freedom of speech is freedom above all for those whose views you dislike most.

Nor can it be strengthened by demanding that people publicly declare that they don���t hold certain opinions. Mr Cameron actually said: ���We must demand that people also condemn the wild conspiracy theories, the anti-Semitism, and the sectarianism too. Being tough on this is entirely in keeping with our values���.

How on earth is he going to make this happen? Electric shocks until they get their minds right? Personally, I���d much rather know that such people held these frightful views, than have them forced to pretend they didn���t.

Then there is: ���We need to put out of action the key extremist influencers who are careful to operate just inside the law, but who clearly detest British society and everything we stand for.���

Put out of action? If they are inside the law, which protects the freedom Mr Cameron so values, what does this foggy phrase mean? Sandbagging them as they come out of the mosque?

I���m also not very reassured that we have a Premier who thinks he can advise TV companies on who they should and should not invite on to the airwaves. I think we can all see where that leads.

Mr Cameron and Mr Blair, and their predecessors over decades, have gone a long way towards Islamising this country through uncontrolled immigration and state multiculturalism. They have begun to panic, because they at last realise what they have done, and rightly fear they cannot stop it.

 
 

For a moment or two, I thought my media colleagues were finally going to grasp the fact that cannabis use is now more legal in this country than it is in Amsterdam.

When an actual Police and Crime Commissioner can come out and say that he doesn���t think his force can be bothered to pursue small-scale cannabis farmers ��� and is not then disavowed or removed ��� that should be clear enough.

But the Billionaire Big Dope Lobby needs to make the false claim that we groan beneath a harsh regime of ���prohibition���, under which harmless persons are ���criminalised��� for supposedly victimless crimes.

By claiming this, it can win what it really wants ��� cannabis on open sale in the high street and the internet, marketed and advertised. Many politicians, frantic for new sources of money to service our gigantic national debt, also long to tax it. So the truth, that cannabis has been decriminalised in this country for decades, cannot be acknowledged.

And the other truth, that this very nasty drug is strongly correlated with lifelong mental illness, must also be suppressed.

Hardly a week passes when I do not hear a new story of a youthful cannabis user becoming mentally ill, his life and the lives of his family wrecked for ever.

How strange, in a country which frowns on greasy fast food and sugary drinks, and which rightly discourages alcohol and tobacco, that the legalisation of this dangerous poison is considered a noble and liberating cause.

 
 

A touching Tango on the road to Nazi disaster 

One of many good things about the excellent new film 13 Minutes ��� about a failed attempt to kill Hitler in 1939 ��� is its thoughtful portrayal of Germany and Germans as they slid relentlessly and unconsciously downwards into disaster.

Like us, they had their carefree moments ��� would-be assassin Georg Elser (played by Christian Friedel) is here shown dancing an impromptu tango with his mistress Elsa (Katharina Sch��ttler).

But power and evil march on regardless, ruining the lives of those who ignore them. 

 

New release: 13 Minutes is about a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1939 with Christian Friedel and Katharina Sch��ttler, pictured

 

It is enjoyable watching the Warmist fanatics trying to cope with a 41 per cent increase (yes, 41 per cent) in the volume of Arctic ice in 2013.

According to their dogma of relentless man-made climate change, it shouldn���t have happened. But it did.

Any rigid ideology ends up not being able to cope with facts, and either suppressing them or bending them.

Meanwhile, we close perfectly good coal-fired power stations and risk blackouts, especially if it is, once again, colder than the Warmists expected. 

 

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The Man (You've Never Heard of) Who Tried To Kill Hitler

What a lot of twaddle we have had to read and listen to about a silly, meaningless film of Royal children giving the Hitler salute. Our understanding of the Hitler era, and of the war that followed, actually seems to get poorer as the years go by.  The left-wing fantasy that the British upper classes were in some way Nazi sympathisers is somehow inescapable. No doubt a few boobies were initially taken in. Many others saw something admirable about the German revival, failing to notice, or hiding from themselves, the evil aspects of National Socialism. But the numbers who remained pro-German once war was certain were tiny. I am not sure this could be said of Soviet sympathisers (see below), who opposed the war against Hitler until 1941.

 

Many open-minded British people in the 1920s, including the (then) Communist sympathiser Graham Greene, thought Germany had been harshly and unjustly treated at Versailles. Winston Churchill famously had a few good words to say about the early years of Hitler as a national leader and a reviver of his country. Personally, I like to think (though I cannot know)  that I would have realised from the first what sort of person Hitler was. I think it would probably have been quite difficult to do.  

 

What is fashionable now was of course unfashionable then. This is a thought that one needs to retain in one���s mind when considering Atticus Finch in ���To Kill a Mockingbird���. When it was fashionable to be racially bigoted and to ignore justice for that reason, Finch courageously resisted fashion. Now that it is fashionable to be unbigoted, Finch is somehow reclassified as a bigot, by people who might well have accepted the nasty conventional wisdom of 1935, had they been there at the time. The orthodox are always orthodox, whatever the orthodoxy is.

 

One of the few in Britain to realise and repeatedly warn of the full extent of Hitler���s murderous Judophobia was the highly conservative Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson. He did so before the outrages of Kristallnacht in November 1938 made it plain to even the semi-conscious that lawless homicidal race-hatred was on the loose, licensed and encouraged by the Hitler government. Henson was , I am told, treated as a bore and nuisance for ���banging on��� about this subject. See http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/queen-nazi-salute-it-is-shocking-now-but-many-once-saw-hitler-as-funny-10400518.html

 

 

But the Left has always sought to divert attention from its own almost universal admiration for Stalin, which continued long after the crimes of the Bolsheviks had been exposed by ��migr�� revelations, by alleging a matching admiration for Hitler on the right.  There���s also the misrepresentation of the Chamberlain policy of appeasement as being motivated by some sort of sympathetic softness towards Hitler. Does Winston Churchill���s later much greater appeasement of Stalin (firmly backed by his Labour and Liberal coalition partners) represent sympathy with Stalinist Communism? I do not think so. Both Chamberlain and Churchill were motivated by what appeared at the time to be realistic common sense, at the time. I also have to add at this point that the British and French Left had no great enthusiasm for the rearmament which both countries rather belatedly embarked on , once they realised that a war in Europe was inevitable.

 

On the contrary, the Labour Party was voting against Defence Estimates and conscription as late as the Spring of 1939, and the French Communists (who after the Stalin-Hitler pact regarded war with Hitler as ���imperialist��� and thus not worthy of support)  may well have been responsible for the demoralisation of the French Army in 1939-40.  The myth of the ���Guilty Men���, and of British ruling-class sympathy for the Nazis, dies hard.

 

All of which brings me to the actual subject of this posting, the newly-released (in Britain) film ���13 Minutes���, about Georg Elser, who in November 1939 came very close to assassinating Adolf Hitler, but whose extraordinary lone action is little-known and little-celebrated, in his own country or abroad ���  in sharp contrast to the Stauffenberg Plot of nearly five years later, which is so well-known that it has even attracted the notice of Hollywood.

 

���13 Days��� is not a Hollywood production. Its title in German is ���Elser ��� er hatte die Welt verandert��� (forgive my failure to include the umlauts)  which means ���Elser ��� he changed the World���. The Director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, was also responsible for ���Downfall���, the tremendous film about the last days of Hitler in his bunker, whose scene of Hitler driving away the truth with molten rage has been abused in many a subtitled spoof.

 

It is almost as good as ���Downfall��� and in some ways better. Its portrayal of the assassin himself is far from straightforward hero-worship, with an (often but not always)  selfish and troubled personal life ,   though most will still come out of the film full of admiration for his act of lonely, righteous, morally-complicated courage.

 

Very little dramatic tension is squeezed out of the attempted killing itself.  After all, we know already that it failed and the most potent part of the story (unlike in the fictional 'Day of the Jackal���) lies in what happened to the would-be assassin after he is caught.

 

Elser was an accomplished and inventive craftsman, who, entirely on his own, designed an efficient and powerful time bomb, stole the detonators and explosives from various workplaces,  and very cleverly and patiently concealed it in a pillar close to where he knew Hitler would make his annual speech to former party comrades in the BurgerBraukeller in Munich.  It really ought to have succeeded. Had it done so, I suspect few would remember the innocents who did undoubtedly perish as a result, history being what it is. History would of course be wrong to do so, and if anyone thinks that assassination is morally simple, even when Hitler is involved, let them consider the Munich waitress, blown to pieces, and her bereaved family. If it is true (and I strongly suspect it may be ) that we cannot do evil that good may come, can the great evil of Hitler(much of it unknown and undone in November 1939) overcome that problem? You tell me. Elser, who returned strongly to his Christian faith in the weeks before he acted, plainly worried about the matter. At one point, broken down by torture and despair, he tells his interrogators (in the film, I do not know if he actually said this) that he now fears that his action was wrong, because it did not succeed, the implication being that God had not wanted it to succeed. How he coped with the rest of his life, I cannot imagine. He was never tried. Instead he was kept in special zones of Sachsenhausen (near Berlin) and Dachau (near Munich) concentration camps until he was murdered by the SS (his death falsified as the result of a bombing raid) . Thus led to (baseless) claims that the whole thing was a put-up job, designed to make it look as if Hitler was guarded by providence in which he had been a Gestapo catspaw. The inability of people to believe that he had acted alone would always be a problem.

 

 

 

As in the later failed attempts to kill Hitler, recounted by Alan Clark in his superb ���Barbarossa���, there is something rather diabolical about the fact that Hitler escaped what would otherwise have been certain death by just 13 minutes, leaving the hall earlier than expected to catch a train (he had meant to fly back to Berlin, but fog was threatened, so he decided to take the train). Hence the English-language title of the film.

 

His arrest, thanks to an astonishingly clumsy attempt to sneak across the Swiss border at Konstanz, led swiftly to his detention and interrogation (his pockets were full of evidence pointing towards his involvement) .

 

The film subjects us to part of that interrogation. Grim as it is, it does not begin to replicate the savagery of the real thing, which left Elser beaten until he was almost unrecognisable, with his eyes bulging out of his appallingly swollen face (we know this because the Gestapo brought members of his family to see him during the questioning) . Heinrich Himmler is said to have taken part personally in the interrogation ��� mainly designed to get Elser to confess to working for the British secret service, or some other outside force. Hitler could not believe he had acted on his own,  none of his close associates had the courage to contradict this belief, and so Elser had to be compelled, by hideous methods, to agree with Hitler. Except that he would not do so. This is totalitarianism in action. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?

 

During this ghastly process (imagine making a  full and truthful confession, and finding yourself then surrounded by cruel , violent all-powerful men who refuse to believe you and want you to say something else), the camera indicates all too clearly what is going to happen, and what has happened, but does not, I am glad to say, actually show it happening. Like the female Gestapo stenographer, we are spared the worst but horribly aware that it is taking place.

 

Intercut with this muted horror are scenes from Elser���s former rather rackety  life in a Germany rapidly descending into barbarism. I have seldom seen this process better portrayed, as it takes place in a small, poor town ( I believe the handsome town of Weidenberg, in Upper Franconia, is used for most of the scenes, though much of the film seems to have been shot in the South Tyrol, that strange anomaly, a piece of Austria lost at Versailles that Hitler never demanded back, out of gratitude to Mussolini ���  Hitler had intended eventually to resettle its German-speaking people in ��� Crimea, long coveted by German expansionists).

 

The organised harassment of churchgoing Christians by the Hitler Youth, busily singing insulting anti-Christian songs, portrayed here, will come as a bit of a surprise to those who are convinced that National Socialism was a Christian enterprise. The pressure on all normal people to compromise with the Party and regime is also shown in a convincing way ��� private neutrality simply wasn���t an option in such places. Even the way you said ���hullo��� in the pub or at work marked you out.  And the idea of Germans as uniform, subservient conformists is also dealt a bit of a blow ��� though it���s sadly true that Elser���s family were treated as unpatriotic pariahs in postwar, liberated Germany, whose conversion into a liberal, tolerant open society wasn���t exactly instant.

 

There���s a startling and rather horrifying postscript, concerning one of Elser���s interrogators which I won���t say any more about here.

 

You���ll swiftly forget that the film is subtitled. Like ���the Lives of Others���, ���Good Bye Lenin��� and of course ���Downfall���, this is an absorbing and thoughtful film which will stay with you long afterwards. Being foreign and subtitled, it will of course be difficult to see unless you live in the sort of place that has an arthouse cinema. Once that would have been that, now, there���ll be a DVD.

It���ll tell you much, much more about Hitler, Germany , morality, terror, history and truth than any number of films of little girls doing mock Hitler salutes in long-ago London gardens.

Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth

I know by heart the first two verses of Arthur Hugh Clough���s ���Say not the struggle naught availeth���, the warning that ���if hopes were dupes, fears may be liars���, and that apparent defeat may conceal real victory.  I used to say them softly to myself quite a lot, when it seemed as if the various battles I have fought for the last 15 years were lost.

 

I don���t bother these days, since the total failure of my main project, namely the destruction of the Conservative Party. Hopes were dupes. Fears weren���t liars. It really is that bad.  Through the most dishonest manifesto in modern history, and the use of huge piles of hedge-fund money in immensely clever and brilliantly-targeted direct marketing schemes, the Tory Party achieved what I had thought and hoped would be impossible, its first national parliamentary majority for 18 years.

 

Even so, I sense that some of my micro-battles, tiny guerrilla struggles and coastal raids behind enemy lines, are not as doomed as the main project. I think the obvious truth and force of the grammar school argument has genuinely penetrated the public mind, and even the elite mind, and the terrible error of 1965 may at least partly be undone before I die.

 

So perhaps I had better learn the second half of the poem, which runs:

 

���For while the tired waves, vainly breaking

     Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

     Comes, silent, flooding in, the main.

 

���And not by eastern windows only,

     When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

     But westward, look, the land is bright.���

 

 

Now two of my other campaigns, on ���antidepressants��� and marijuana, are also beginning to get a hearing, through the white noise of conventional wisdom.

 

Today���s blatant announcement by a ���Police and Crime Commissioner��� that he wants his local police force to ignore Parliament and refuse to enforce the law against cannabis cultivation, (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3169435/Police-s-latest-potty-idea-no-longer-prosecute-smoke-grow-cannabis-small-scale-reduce-costs.html )

has alerted many people to a fact I���ve known for years and which I tried to make better-known through my book ���The War We Never Fought���. I failed because the book was destroyed by a canny mixture of abuse and silence, and the people at whom it was aimed don���t know I���ve written it , what it says or even that it exists.

 

Our laws against cannabis are vestigial and wilfully unenforced. They are maintained on the books only to fool  conservative-minded voters and gullible politicians (and journalists) into thinking that there is still a serious effort to combat drugs which have, in effect long been decriminalised.

 

There are several reasons for this, one being the continued existence of international treaties which oblige us to maintain these laws on the books, but don���t tell us how we should enforce them.

 

But the main one is that much of our elite is already corrupted by drug-abuse, its own and that of its children. And the next one is that powerful forces, which are working night and day for total legalisation, open commercial sale and heavy taxation, need to maintain the pretence that the current laws are oppressive.

 

This falsehood, widely believed, enables them to recruit to their cause gullible simpletons who can be made to think that the law against cannabis is an affront to the liberty of the individual. These dim dupes can then imagine that they are fighting for a noble cause as they act as unconscious advocates for one of the most cynical billionaire lobbies in the world, one that hopes to make still more billions out of human misery, and is on the moral level of Big Tobacco.

 

Crucially, it also enables them to claim that the many problems caused in our society by drugs are the result of a non-existent ���prohibition���, when the truth is the almost exact opposite.  The widespread and tragic abuse of drugs in our society is the *consequence* of 40 years of unofficial decriminalisation. It will be far worse if we are fool enough to take the next step ��� to full legalisation .

 

This plan is falsely described as ���regulation��� by its slippery advocates, falsely because this so-called ���regulation��� will actually be deregulation by comparison with the current state of affairs, unleashing a hideous free-for-all in the dangerous drug market.   

 

Anyway, apart from the Durham incident, we also have more evidence of my suggestion that there is a correlation between drugtaking and the violence in our midst which we often seek to explain purely as terrorism, when in fact its perpetrators have been driven out of their minds by legal or illegal drugs.

 

I have studied these cases so often that I now know that it will usually be just a matter of time between the report of the outrage and a (much less prominent) story about the perpetrator���s drug problem.

 

A few evenings ago, reports came in of a supposed terrorist atrocity in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Apart from the unlikelihood of the So-called Islamic State targeting military facilities in such a place, I immediately thought that there were features of this (especially the lone killer) which made it likely that it was an act of madness. Very quickly it emerged that the killer, Mohammod Abdulazeez, had previously been pulled in by police for driving under the influence,  while stinking of marijuana and with a crust of white powder round his nostrils.

 

Now it turns out that he was a ���deeply troubled young man who struggled with mental illness and drug abuse at the same time��� and who had also been ���medicated��� by doctors in his school years then ���turned to drugs and alcohol���, then lost a job for failing a drug test. His diaries, written shortly before his crime,  are described by those who have read them as ���gibberish��� .

 

In this he is similar to almost all of the drifters and drug-abusers who have been involved in two recent murders of soldiers in Canada, the Lee Rigby outrage, The Charlie Hebdo murders and the linked killings in and around Paris, the Tucson, Arizona attack in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 13 others were badly wounded, and six people died . Not to mention the entirely non-political killings of Palmira Silva by Nicholas Salvador, and of Jennifer Mills-Westley by Deyan Deyanov (both these, horribly, involved the beheading of the victim, an act commonly associated with Islamist fanatics).

 

Then there was the utterly irrational and purposeless (but dreadfully violent) killing of Alan Greaves, a Church organist, by two known cannabis users in Sheffield. The thread which runs through these incidents and which, I suspect, runs through many more less-reported ones, is that the killers were drug-abusers and that they behaved in a wholly unhinged and irrational fashion.  

 

My first interest in this was stimulated by what still seems to me to an extraordinary correlation between the use of legal ���antidepressant��� medication and rampage killings.  Many of these killings are scantily reported in the British press, because the numbers of dead and wounded are ��� comparatively ��� small. So I sometimes contact local journalists in the USA to ask for details. I found that, in some cases, there was genuinely no trace at all of the use of ���antidepressants���, but there were suggestions of marijuana use. Over some years of examining such cases,  I came to the conclusion that this is still a correlation which badly needs investigating, a correlation between mind-altering drugs, legal and illegal, and irrational acts of severe violence. Such an investigation would need a lot of money and a lot of power, especially to demand the opening of sealed medical records which are a surprisingly common feature in such cases. I believe this is also still a problem in finding out exactly what ���medication��� the German wings pilot who deliberately crashed his plane , Andreas Lubitz, may have been taking. I have to ask who benefits from this secrecy.

 

I���d add at this point that the linked problem of ���antidepressants���, drugs whose efficacy seems to me to be unproven and whose side-effects are beyond doubt, also seems at last to be getting some attention . Though again, people seem unable to see what is in front of their noses.

 

I watched the start of a BBC News Channel programme on Monday. I think the first three individuals who spoke said how ���antidepressants��� had a) done them no good and b) been very hard to relinquish. Rather than pursuing this, the presenter then went off into a general discussion about how mental illness was still not treated as the same as physical illness, which is undoubtedly true and also not wholly irrational, given the absence of objective diagnoses in this field.  

 

This followed a powerful article in the ���The Times Magazine��� last Saturday, which is behind a paywall, but which I urge you to read. In it, Luke Montagu, the future Earl of Sandwich, recounts his experiences with ���antidepressants��� .

Here���s a small sample:

 

���For the past 20 years, Montagu had been taking antidepressants - first Prozac, still new back then, now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs of all time, subsequently other common antidepressants such as Seroxat.

���Yet when he was first prescribed these drugs at 19, Montagu was not depressed and had never been diagnosed with depression. He was a student at New York University, and had recently undergone a general anaesthetic for a sinus operation that left him with headaches and feeling, as he puts it, "not myself".

���Without carrying out any tests, a British GP announced that he had a "chemical imbalance of the limbic system" and prescribed Prozac. Montagu, "impressionable and in awe of doctors", swallowed them unquestioningly.���

 

You���ll have to read the whole thing to find out all the dreadful things which followed.

 

But the bit which rang the strongest bell with me was this  ���One of the worst things the family has had to endure has been the scepticism of others. Antidepressants and sleeping pills are everywhere - one in three British women will take antidepressants in her lifetime and one in ten men. People don't like to hear that something supposed to make them feel better might actually be harmful.���

 

Once people have themselves been prescribed these things (last year there were 57 million ���antidepressant��� prescriptions in England) they become advocates of them. They want to believe they are being helped. So they refuse even to consider that they might  possibly have been prescribed a useless or even harmful drug.

 

Like so much of modern life, the whole thing reminds me of that great and terrible film ���Invasion of the Bodysnatchers���. People cease to be who they were, and those who notice and complain are vilified and isolated.

 

And yet, and yet, if such an article can appear in such a place, perhaps a painful inch has in fact been gained.

'Go Set a Mockingbird', or 'Don't Kill the Watchman'

I suspect I wasn���t the only person who *thought* he had read ���To Kill a Mockingbird��� . When the squabble erupted about Harper Lee���s other book ���Go Set a Watchman��� , I decided that I had better read ���Mockingbird��� again, the better to judge the new work. I searched the house. It wasn���t there. It dawned on me, slowly but shamefully, that I had never owned or read it in the first place, so couldn't re-read it. I had seen the film, several times, and persuaded myself that I had read the book on which it was based. Check your own memory. If you sort-of think that Gregory Peck is the same person as Atticus Finch, and are quite surprised to see a picture of the real Atticus Finch, then you���re probably a victim of the same false memory.

 

 

Well, I���ve read it now, and have to say that the film is an astonishingly accurate depiction of the book, closer than almost any film I can think of apart from David Lean���s heartbreakingly good version of ���Great Expectations��� . Both films, of course, have to leave a lot out. But neither leaves out anything essential. 

 

And I���m a little baffled by all the fuss about the revelation that Atticus Finch was not in fact a politically-correct 21st-century American liberal. The book is not in fact about political opinions. It is about courage and goodness.

 

For those who don���t know, let me summarize. Atticus Finch, a respected but fairly poor lawyer from an old family, in a hot and humid, wholly segregated Alabama town in the 1930s, is landed with the awkward and unwelcome job of defending a black man against a plainly false charge of raping a white woman.  He decides to defend him properly, rather than (as expected by most of his neighbours) feebly going through the motions.

 

I won���t tell you the outcome, as it would spoil book or film for you to know. But I will tell you that Finch���s actions and attitude put him and others close to him in peril of their lives and earn him the spite and hate of many of his neighbours, most especially of the chief prosecution witness who he cross-examines devastatingly but wholly courteously (this is typical of Atticus Finch, a large and passionate soul, concealed by exquisite good manners). I will also mention that his own decision to do the right thing influences several others (who the reader might at first have expected to be on the other side) to do the same. He does not act alone.

 

It���s that courtesy you have to understand. Atticus Finch has not, back in 1935, realised which opinions and attitudes will be beloved and popular 50 or 60 years later among fashionable liberals. He fears, as the more intelligent white Southerners of the time rightly did, that they will one day be paid back for their treatment of their black neighbours, though he has no grand theory of how the wrong should be put right. But he is, in the most profound sense of the word, a gentleman.  He is guided by the principles of chivalry. He reminds me a bit of Arthur Conan Doyle���s great creation, the mediaeval knight (Sir) Nigel Loring, whose elaborate, courtly good manners deceive a number of foes into underestimating him.

 

As a gentleman, Finch defends the weak as a matter of duty, and desires justice for its own sake. He loathes violence and coarse language. You would regret swearing or using the n-word in his company, for you would know that you had sunk permanently in his estimation. He is (for example) a superb shot but will not, except in cases of great need, so much as handle a firearm, and hates it when his children shoot birds.

 

It is when he���s explaining this that he says he knows they will shoot birds with the airguns he has given them, but tells them that even so they must never kill a mockingbird. For the mockingbird does no harm.  All it does is sing beautifully, so to kill one is an undoubted sin . This exchange gives the book its title.

 

He is polite and forgiving to those who are horrible to him, or just horrible, and tries to educate his children to do likewise. When he goes to church, he sits alone, so as to be able to think. He reads a great deal, and laughs softly at a lot of things.   Such people do actually exist (generally I think they are the most courageous among us) and Gregory Peck did a wonderful job of portraying one such, and of helping the rest of us to imagine how we might be if we became better people, which is why both book and film are morally important.  

 

The key to the book is of course in the trial, as it has to be. Here all the strands knit together into a thick cord of moral power and truth. We have already experienced the pitiable misery of the poor whites, the grim, subject lives of the poor blacks, the plump, thickly-powdered smugness of the southern ladies, the dense cloud of humidity, gossip, unspoken secrets and inbreeding in which the little town sits and stews in the insufferable damp heat of Dixie.  It���s all very picturesque in its way, observed through the pages of a book or the flickering pictures of a film. Now we see how very nasty it can get. 

 

In the midst of it, Atticus Finch gives away the fact that he is no sort of radical.  In his speech to the jury, he explains what he thinks Thomas Jefferson meant when he said that all men were created equal

 

������a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the executive branch of Washington [Eleanor Roosevelt in case you hadn���t guessed, the Hillary Clinton of her day] are fond of hurling at us��� .

 

Note that ���us��� a, defiant identification by Atticus Finch with Dixieland.Whatever he may think of some of his neighbours, he still abhors a Yankee. .

 

I found the next bit particularly striking, for it is a marginally relevant attack on crude egalitarianism in education.  In an earlier scene, in Scout Finch���s classroom, we see a bitterly satirical attack on the egalitarian education experiments of the kind, already well under way in that era, which end by Scout going home and asking her father to stop encouraging her to read, because it is getting her into trouble . These nonsenses are blamed in the book on the theories of the American radical educationalist John Dewey (who, by the way, is not connected to Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System of library classification, though Scout thinks he was).

 

 

It seems to me that British left-wingers who have hero-worshipped Atticus Finch, and have now dropped him because in ���Go Set a Watchman��� he is outed as a racialist,  might now have *two* reasons for not liking him. But if they���d read the book, they���d have known about his views on egalitarian education anyway, which just goes to show they haven���t read it.

 

Here���s the key bit:

 

 

���There is a tendency in this year of grace 1935 for certain people to use this phrase [all men are created equal] out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious ��� because all men are created equal , educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority.��� 

 

��� We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe ��� some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they���re born with it. Some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others - some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men���.

 

Which is of course a simple statement of the facts.

 

But it is followed by a great, pealing plea ( alas, not actually true most of the time)  for real equality in the conduct of justice: ���But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal ��� there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.���

 

Well maybe. But in any case these are conservative pleas. This is not an early Martin Luther King come to demand equality. It is a decent man, limited by his time,  seeking to do right according to his lights.

Personally I think it absurd that, in ���Go Set a Watchman���, Atticus Finch is said to have joined the Ku Klux Klan or to have taken a passive uncritical part in meetings in which racially bigoted sentiments are expressed. It doesn't fit with the one we see here. 

 

For example: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/review-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-gives-atticus-finch-a-dark-side.html?_r=0 (Multiple spoiler alerts)

 

These don���t seem to me to be the acts or thoughts of the sort of chivalrous gentleman we see portrayed in ���To Kill a Mockingbird���.  Maybe after a few years in New York City  a liberal-minded ��migr�� Southerner might pretty much lump all 1950s Dixieland conservatives together. Perhaps it���s just and fair to do so. I wasn���t there. I don���t know. It just seems strange to me. Atticus Finch wasn���t that advanced in 1935, and he wasn���t that backward in 1955. But when tested once in his life (which is more than happens to most of us), he sought to do what was right.

You Can Put the Clock Back

I thought I had posted this before, but following last week's discussion about school selection with 'Kent Mum', I thought I'd re-publish an April 2004 article I wrote in the Mail on Sunday about the reintroduction of Grammar Schools in the former East Germany. I found one of the new schools in the lovely old Baltic seaport of Wismar. Note that grammar schools in Wismar encompass half the secondary-age schoolchildren in the town:

'How pleasant at last to find a place where political correctness is actually in retreat, where old values are treasured, common sense is respected and history is not treated as a rubbish dump to be forgotten, but as vital, irreplaceable experience.

Welcome to the former East Germany, struggling to rebuild civilisation in the ruins of Socialism. Here, until 1989, political correctness took solid form; equal this, equal that, equal the other.

Every slogan on every daft radical demonstration you have ever seen was turned into official policy. Everybody was so equal they had to put up a large fence and build miles of minefields to keep them all in, and keep them all equal.

Take education. In the same sacred cause of 'equality', all children went to the same sort of comprehensive school, at least officially, which is of course what our own Labour Party would dearly like to happen, and works tirelessly to achieve. The East Berlin government proclaimed that it had abolished inequality. As its official propaganda booklet stated: 'The first step taken was to eliminate all educational privilege. Social status and the size of father's bank account no longer determined the quality of education a child received.' What this meant in practice was that dozens of fine old grammar schools, known as Gymnasiums, free to all those who could pass their rigorous entry tests, were shut down across the East German state, even more ruthlessly than they were in Britain a few years later.

Everyone went instead to Gesamtschule: comprehensives. Everyone, that is, except an elite, who at 16 were able to transfer to special sixth form colleges while everyone else went into the factories.

But that elite was selected not by bank balance but on political grounds. If your parents were not working-class enough, or not loyal enough Communists, or were known to be Christians, or had some other mark against their name, then the best exam scores would not get you in. And that meant you could never take the Abitur, Germany's A-levels; the guarded gateway to every profession, to university, to the secret privileges of well hidden wealth and comfort that the regime reserved only for the loyal, the subservient and the silent.

Meanwhile, across the barbed wire, West Germany's self-governing states preserved their grammar schools in some cases because parents took to the streets in their thousands to protest against planned closures by local SPD politicians (the equivalent of the Labour Party).

And the moment the fences and the walls came down and the minefields were pulled up, East Germany's new free local governments began to rebuild the lost grammar schools, something we in Britain are told cannot be done.

Well, it can.

One of these new schools is the Gerhart Hauptmann Gymnasium in Wismar, a heartbreakingly beautiful seaport town on the Baltic coast now recovering at last from 50 years of shameful neglect, one of the biggest concentrations of unspoilt 17th Century architecture in Europe.

The same spirit of proud rebirth is obvious in this school, housed in a fine old Edwardian-era building with a frowning arched entrance, stern granite staircases and high-ceilinged proper classrooms.

Only one of the standard prejudices about Germans is confirmed here. The students wear no uniform, the atmosphere is democratic and relaxed rather than regimented. But education is taken very seriously.

Wolfgang Box, the school's director and a survivor of the old Communist system, is immensely proud of the opportunities his establishment is giving to the children of Wismar. It is one of two new grammar schools founded in the town. Herr Box says: 'There was so much demand for this sort of education from parents when the first one opened that this one had to be founded as well. Before the change, only ten per cent of local children took their Abitur.

Now it is 45 per cent.' Almost half Wismar's secondary-age students go to grammar schools.

Herr Box and two colleagues who also experienced the old days, Christine Michaelsen and Verina Runge, all independently agreed that the new system was both far better and more equal in outcome than the comprehensive system which it replaced. They are particularly pleased that bright children no longer have to be held to the pace of the slowest in mixed-ability classes, and can move ahead from the earliest possible age.

The Gerhart Hauptmann school has 855 pupils aged from 11 to 18, slightly more than half of them girls. Not all of them take the Abitur, a notoriously tough test, and those who can't keep up the demanding pace in serious subjects are made to go back and do a whole year of study all over again.

The typical student takes Maths, English, German and Biology, though Music, Art, Russian and the other sciences are on offer.

Last year, out of the 77 who tackled the exam, 25 got 'A' grade scores and 33 achieved 'B' grade.

Only two failed, but in Germany failure is still a real risk at this level. Interestingly, all the teachers I spoke to were happy to admit that exam standards have fallen in recent years, with less attention being paid to mistakes in grammar and spelling. There is no attempt to pretend that everything is the same as it used to be.

Even so, with results like this it is not surprising that Herr Box shrugs with puzzlement about the tiny minority of German parents who send their children to private schools, which are almost all boarders-only. 'Perhaps it is because they want to get rid of them.' he says, 'Such parents are regarded as eccentric here.' Herr Box took me to meet a group of sixth-formers. Among them was Ulrika Becker, a strikingly pretty and clever 18-year-old who speaks superb English. I would be amazed if any normal comprehensive school in an equivalent small town in Britain could produce anyone who speaks German to this standard. Ulrika has spent a year in an Essex comprehensive, which she declined to name, for reasons which will become clear.

She had been brought up to believe Britain was a very polite, orderly country. She was amazed by what she found in many classes - swearing and disorder: 'They did not have any respect for the teachers. They just stood up and would not sit down when they were told to. The teachers were just helpless. And if a teacher can't get a student to respect him, then he cannot do anything'.

She began by being impressed by the uniforms but then noticed the undone top buttons, the loosened ties, the shirts deliberately left hanging out, making the whole thing meaningless.

Germany is not immune to the problems of the modern world, especially in the unemployment-ravaged East. You see graffiti on the walls and violent, drunken, jobless youths lurk in the rougher parts of the cities. What's more, everyone acknowledges that there are discipline problems in the non-grammar schools.

But it is plain in this state school that the very idea of disorder, or of disrespect to a teacher, is shocking. Herr Box, a slight, bearded fiftysomething, has huge authority because he is plainly the boss. I saw him spot two hulking 18-year-olds playing cards in a classroom during a break. As soon as they saw him, they hurriedly hid the cards, and looked suitably chastened after a few soft words of rebuke.

Ulrika translates for me and speaks for the whole class as I interview them.

They are all amazed by Britain's education history: that a country which had hundreds of excellent grammar schools, and hundreds of less-good secondary moderns, dealt with the problem by closing the good schools. In fact, they laugh, thinking I have made up the story.

Their parents are mostly professionals; architects, doctors and teachers.

But among them is the son of a shipyard worker. They have come from every district of the town, poor as well as wealthy.

This school takes its pupils from all the local primary schools, not just a few. There is none of the secret education apartheid of Britain, where people get big mortgages to live in the catchment area of a good comprehensive. 'Everybody can come here. There are no differences, no one has to pay anything,' Ulrika says, slightly surprised at the suggestion.

She and her classmates are baffled at the idea that students at other Wismar schools might resent their success. 'I have friends who go to the ordinary high schools. I don't think they are enemies. I think that is because anybody who wants to can come here. We don't think we're better than students from other schools. But we do have more chance of getting a job.' For in Germany there is no rigid 11-plus exam. There is selection, but it is done in a way that somehow seems easier to accept. Parents can insist that their child goes to grammar school.

But if the child then cannot keep up after a year or so, he will be given two chances to catch up and only if he still fails will he be transferred to an ordinary high school, where he will still be able to take the Abitur but where standards are not so high.

German education experts are puzzling-over how to improve these schools, but it has not occurred to anyone that the solution is to close the grammar schools, or to merge the two types into comprehensives.

Interestingly enough, the biggest education debate in Germany now is about whether to found a small number of elite universities, modelled on Oxford, Cambridge and the French Grandes Ecoles, because the existing 'open-to-all' system is failing badly.

Once again, successful Germany wants the things which failing Britain plans to throw away, and seeks to abandon the things which Britain hurries to adopt.

It is astonishing that British education experts, especially conservative ones, have paid so little attention to this German counter-revolution. It shows not merely that the state system can provide what parents want, but that selection does not need to be harsh and arbitrary. And that if you truly want equality, then the best way to provide it is to offer quality to all who can benefit from it.'

Don't tell Iain Dale but I've been on the BBC Again

Please don���t tell Iain Dale, the publisher, former Tory parliamentary candidate and broadcaster, who thinks that my occasional guest appearances on the BBC, in which I cannot choose the subject under discussion and can be shut up by the presenter at any time , somehow negate my complaint that BBC is unsympathetic to my point of view. But I was on two BBC discussion programmes over the weekend.

 

The first was Radio 4���s Any Questions, as it happens my first appearance on this programme for more than two years ( I was rather proud of my last appearance, in April 2013, when I responded to Lord Heseltine���s weary jibe ��� of didn���t you used to be a Trotskyite?��� by asking him ���Didn���t you used to be a conservative?��� Which caused an enjoyable silence).

 

On this occasion I was sitting next to Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary,. Also on the panel were Chuka Umunna, the man who might one day be Labour leader, and Frances O���Grady, the TUC general secretary.   You may be able to work out for yourselves why I was slightly puzzled by the order and shape in which the questions came up. Subjects included bombing Syria, child tax credits, trade union laws and Jeremy Corbyn,

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b061tsym

 

Then there was Sunday Morning live, in which we discussed how to help people not to get fat (with a sideswipe at the ���addiction��� fiction), civil liberty and whether Britain is still a Christian country. The was quite a high number of those silly twitter comments in which people complained that they had found themselves agreeing with the hated Peter Hitchens. That unfamiliar sensation is called ���Thinking���, guys. Try not to let it happen too often, or you might end up like me.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b063jwgd

 

 

There IS a way to raise women's pay, Dave... and it's not more baby farms

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column 

Nobody in Britain still pays women less than men for doing the same job. They wouldn���t dare. So why does the leader of the So-Called Conservative Party say he wants to ���end the gender pay gap within a generation���?

Dressed up as a demand for equality, it is in fact a determined attack on what is left of family life in this country. This is a legitimate point of view, though I loathe it. The Left have always preferred the state to the family. The interesting thing is that a supposedly pro-family party now takes the same line.

The So-Called Conservatives pretend to be alarmed by the Leftism of people like Jeremy Corbyn, but these days they really aren���t much different from him. Rigid, state-enforced sex-equality is a Marxist policy, pursued to the outer limits in the old East Germany and now being adopted here.

Average male pay is higher than average female pay for a simple reason. Despite decades of enforced equality, women still have babies, and men still don���t. So women who wish to spend any substantial time at all with their own offspring will fall behind in their careers, and their earnings will be less.

Despite all efforts to blur the old boundaries between the sexes, this problem of who has the babies is likely to remain so for a few decades yet. It���s not polite to mention it, or the effect that it must have on women���s careers.

When the Left-wing New Statesman dared to mention last week that many successful women politicians are childless, this statement of an objective truth was met with rage and contempt.

The exceptions, in general, have been rich enough to afford the sort of expensive childcare that is way beyond the reach of most. 

We���re not supposed to mention that either.

Whenever you see a power couple, man and woman both highly successful, pictured with their children, there���ll always be a costly nanny and/or a willing grandma hidden in the background.

These vital people are rarely seen, named or even acknowledged, because they mess up the ���You can have it all��� propaganda. 

You can only have it all, in reality, if you have servants.

And the millions of ordinary couples struggling to raise children and earn two incomes realise pretty quickly that this is so. 

And for growing numbers of these women, there���s a terrible choice between career and motherhood.

Choose your children, lose your career. Choose your career, hand over your children to strangers.

I can already hear the militant voices squeaking: ���What about the fathers?��� 

I���d only say that most men aren���t as good at raising children as women ��� once a statement of the obvious, now a subversive heresy. 

Good luck to those men who want to be full-time fathers. But, given the chance, it would be mainly women raising children.

The trouble is that if large numbers of women took career-breaks to raise their young, average pay would stay unequal for ever.

If we were seriously worried about this, we would find a way of bringing women back into senior positions in the workforce after they had finished the job of bringing up their children. 

Such women have a huge store of wisdom, responsibility and experience. A rational society would rush to employ them in senior posts. But we do not.

As it is, the only solution we offer is the nationalisation of childhood by vast state-subsidised networks of misnamed childcare. Which is what the East German communists wanted, as it meant there was less private life, more conformism and more loyalty to the state.

Does David Cameron want this? If he doesn���t, why does he support a policy which leads to it? If he does, in what way is he a conservative?

Here���s a simple rule for the BBC. If it wants to make the sort of programmes that could just as easily be done by ITV or commercial radio, such as Strictly and EastEnders, not to mention Radio 1, it should finance them with commercials.

I can���t see why advertisements would do any harm to such things. But while it���s doing the sort of thing that commercial broadcasters would never do, such as the whole of Radios 3 and 4, serious drama, news and current affairs, it should continue to use the licence fee, and stay advert-free.

Or it could just stop trying to chase ratings. The sad truth is that since Margaret Thatcher destroyed the old semi-serious commercial TV companies with the 1990 Broadcasting Act, the BBC has had hardly any real competition.

The lovely Elizabeth Banks - and a real happy ending

Maybe it���s because it���s so frank about the damage done by drugs, and so rude about quack psychotherapists, that the powerful new film Love & Mercy ��� about the tragedy and recovery of Beach Boys��� songwriter Brian Wilson ��� hasn���t made as much noise as it should have done. It���s not all ugliness and anger. 

The lovely Elizabeth Banks, right, pierces through the gloom, playing Melinda Ledbetter, the woman who rescued Wilson from a sort of hell and married him in a real happy ending. 

Blundering about in bloody confusion 

Almost everything they have told you about the Middle East now turns out to have been wrong.

The Iranian people long for Western friendship. Properly treated, Iran could be our best ally in the region.

It���s worth noting, as well, how hard the supposedly wicked and evil Kremlin worked to help us get the nuclear agreement with Tehran.

But we have clung weirdly to our friendship with Saudi Arabia, which hates Iran and which is the source of most of the trouble in the region, as well as financing the spread of ultra-militant Islam, from Afghanistan to Bradford. The Iranian deal at least gives us a chance to reconsider our position, but what a mess we are in. Iraq will not recover from our attempt to democratise it for at least a century, if ever.

The world is full of weapons and explosives (and homicidal mad men high on drugs) from Libya, thanks to Mr Cameron���s ill-considered overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.

We have at last changed sides in Syria, having supported the Saudi-backed Islamist rebels until they had turned the country into a blood-drenched ruin ��� and then decided to back the Assad regime after all.

But what can we do? Last week one of our ancient bombers was flying back from the area having failed to find a target for its Brimstone missiles. As it landed in Cyprus, the missiles fell off. Luckily they did not explode. We don���t know what we���re doing and, after five years of Tory-led government, our Armed Forces are decrepit and tiny.

Instead of trying to bring freedom to the Arab world, couldn���t we just concentrate on trying to fend off the European Union and defending our own porous borders?

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'Kent Mum' makes a cautious U-turn

Some readers may be interested in this courageous public change of mind by 'Kent Mum'

 

http://kentschoolshope.com/2015/07/18/a-cautious-u-turn/

 

 

 

'Kent Mum' responds

Having published the posting by 'Kent Mum' and my detailed reply to it, I thought it only fair to link to her riposte to my reply, here

http://kentschoolshope.com/2015/07/16/somebody-stupid-somebody-clever/

 

 

 

A New Discussion About School Selection

To Select by Wealth or by Ability - That is the Question

I have been engaged in a discussion on Twitter with a parent from Kent, about grammar schools.  I suspect this person has mistaken my point of view, which is not that I care much about the expansion of grammar schools in Kent itself, but that I wish to see the national restoration of school selection by ability round about the age of 11, using the German system of assessment and mutual agreement rather than through the 11+ examination and with plenty of opportunities for later cross-over for late developers.

 

The age of 11 is crucial because it gives a much greater chance of affecting the pupil���s life chances if she or he comes from a poor home.  Later selection, for sixth-form colleges at 16 or for universities at 18 (which is allowed in our system, despite its pious horror at selection at 11)  tends only to confirm the advantages already won or given.

 

My arguments have been many times stated on this blog and can be found through the index under ���Grammar Schools��� , but they  are summed up in an essay, complete with references, in this pamphlet (search for ���Peter Hitchens���)

http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/theselectiondebate?dm_i=14DE%2C394UK%2CC1OSBY%2CBNAMO%2C1

 

Kent���s grammar schools, like most of those remaining,  give almost no guide to the operation of a national selective system. Being within range of London commuters, who can afford high house prices and tutors, and in some cases prep-school fees, these schools are not so much oversubscribed as besieged. Why wouldn���t they be?  Seven years of comparable private schooling would cost something in the region of ��150,000 in *post-tax* income. What���s more, state-school pupils have a great advantage in applications to Oxbridge , and grammar school pupils are perhaps best-placed of all to reap this advantage, since they are academically excellent.

How to get into Oxbridge, and be loved by everyone 

As a little-noted but gripping Sunday Times news story (headlined ���Comprehensives still fail to make Oxbridge grade���) of 17th December 2006  (by Geraldine Hackett) made clear, ���less than 20% of secondaries provide[d] all the entrants [to Oxbridge] from the state sector, with most of the successful applicants coming from grammar schools or sixth-form colleges.��� At the time the ancient universities were both taking about 48% of their pupils from the state sector, responding( as they must) to political pressure to do so.  In the days before the abolition of the national grammar school sector, the numbers of state entrants rose anyway, without political pressure.

 

Using Freedom of Information laws, Ms Hackett found (for instance) that one Kent grammar school, St Olave���s  in Orpington(much favoured by Blairites in the past) got 20 of its 167 sixth formers into Oxford or Cambridge.  Church-based ���comprehensives��� such as the Roman Catholic London Oratory, favoured by Anthony Blair himself, also did well, though not as well as the grammars.

I doubt very much if these figures have altered significantly in the past ten years. 

 

Taking the Bolshevik View

So I do not much care whether the current attempt to create satellite grammar schools in Kent succeeds or fails (though I rather expect it to fail, given the current state of the law) . It is an attempt to ease the strain without actually reforming the system.   If I took a wholly Bolshevik view, I���d probably prefer it to fail, as I  don���t want to create safety valves to ease the pressure on our existing system to change. For that reason I oppose the current development of so-called ���Free Schools���, which I think are just another escape route for a small number of privileged,  time-rich well-off parents. They are comparable to the many obliquely selective schools (selecting through catchment area, or public religious practice) such as those used by Blairite politicians.  If such schools did not exist, the pressure for the restoration of selection by ability would greatly increase. As it is, it���s probaby fairer to say that I���m neutral about the Kent plan.

 

Nobody wants the Secondary Moderns to Come Back...because they Never Went Away

But my remarks in last week���s column led to the usual cries of ���Nobody would want the secondary moderns back���, which is the standby slogan of the comprehensive lobby, and the argument I set out to combat most thoroughly in the essay referenced and linked above, which points out that selection continues to exist, by money rather than ability; and which also points out that the general state of secondary education, for all, was damaged by the abolition of grammars. What we have, for most people, is ���secondary moderns for all���, rather than the ���grammar schools for all���, which Labour promised in 1964. No need to bring back the Secondary Moderns. They are still with us, only bigger and more disorderly, and called ���Bog Standard Comprehensives���.

 

In which I make the acquaintance of 'Kent Mum'

Anyway, one of those who came up with the ���What about the secondary moderns?��� non-argument was the author of the blog to which I link here,

 

http://kentschoolshope.com/2015/07/14/how-does-closing-good-grammar-schools-make-bad-schools-better/

 

This was produced by someone I know only as ���Kent Mum���. She wrote it in response to a Tweet from me, repeated several times , in which I asked (not having got an answer at first)  ���How does closing good grammar schools make bad schools better���.

 

I���ve reproduced this response in full below, and interleaved my responses (marked ****) with the author���s points

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: 'In a recent Twitter debate Peter Hitchens asked (five times apparently) ���How does closing good grammar schools make bad schools better?��� That���s not easy to cover in one 140 character tweet so here���s my reply.

 

First off I am not in favour of ���closing��� Kent���s excellent grammar schools, but I do want to make the best schools available to all, and I see evidence in Kent that selective education has a negative impact on the school system.���

 

****PH writes: Isn���t she in favour of closing them, though? In A separate posting on the same site, here http://kentschoolshope.com/2015/07/09/a-gentler-kinder-way-to-make-kent-schools-better/ ,

 ���Kent Mum��� clearly states she favours a comprehensive system, which entails the destruction of grammar schools, though in a sort of Pollyanna way which assumes that this time ti will be different, and comprehensives in Kent will turn out better than they have anywhere else. She writes  : ���Let���s assume we need to change things to give grammar school parents pretty much what they have now,  but in mixed ability schools, and without the exam and unfairness bits that no one likes.

We need to give grammar school parents an absolutely great comprehensive system, and a careful change that won���t bother them much at all. Then surely everyone will be happy?! (I said I was an optimist.)���

 

 

**** PH continues: In another posting on the same site http://kentschoolshope.com/2015/07/05/hello-world/, ���Kent Mum��� says : ���I don���t need to be told that the comprehensive system is flawed,  that the middle classes milk the system by buying property close to good schools. I know the comprehensive  system isn���t perfect, but, with all its flaws I think comprehensive schools are better than Kent���s selective system. Here children get worse schools just because they fail an exam at ten. 

���If Kent took the opportunity to move to a comprehensive system I think most areas would be starting from a good place, without issues of  house prices effecting catchment areas. My own town would gain a community school that truly reflected our community; and our community happens to have lots of smart active people who would get involved in fighting for school improvements.���

 

***PH writes: Well, how do you ���move to a comprehensive system��� without abolishing selection at 11 and closing Kent���s excellent grammar schools?   That���s what ���moving to a comprehensive system��� has meant everywhere else it has happened. She does in fact think that closing good grammar schools will make bad schools better. There is absolutely no evidence for this contention at all. It has made good schools worse, everywhere it has been done, and created a large number of schools which can be described as mediocre at best, and which have not been able to maintain the standards of the better schools which they replaced.

 

Earlier in the same piece, ���Kent Mum���  says : ��� If it was proven that comprehensive education failed bright kids then there might be some case for it, but evidence suggests clever kids do just as well in mixed ability schools. I understand the argument that the secondary moderns in Kent could improve and the grammars should be left in peace, but there are a lots of reasons why this doesn���t work practically.���

 

*** PH: Once again, this clearly means that she favours the replacement of Kent���s selective system with a comprehensive system, and believes that closing good schools will make bad schools better. She couldn���t be clearer that she thinks the Secondary Moderns cannot be improved if the grammars are ���left in peace���.

 

What does this mean if it does not mean the destruction of grammars through comprehensive mergers, as has happened almost everywhere else in the country? I would like to know what her basis is for the assertion that ���evidence suggests clever kids do just as well in mixed ability schools.

 

As I show above, grammar schools still utterly outdo even the best and most selective comprehensives in Oxbridge entrance, the supreme test of academic standards in any school.  And, as my article in the pamphlet (linked above) shows quite clearly, the destruction of the selective system was followed by a dilution and then the abolition of the GCE ���O��� level, which mixed-ability comps simply couldn���t cope with. Similarly, the GCE ���A��� level has also been seriously diluted in the same period.  Even Sir Graham Savage, inventor of the comprehensive, admitted that standards would suffer from their introduction (see the chapter on this subject in my book ���The Cameron Delusion���) .

 

If ���Kent Mum��� became, say ��� Oxfordshire Mum���, she would find very swiftly that there was still selection at 11, just as ruthless as in Kent, except that it was by wealth rather than ability. And that even then, if she could afford the better comprehensives, those schools would not reach the standards attained by Kent���s Grammar Schools. Hence the many flourishing private day and boarding schools in that county.

 

Back to the arguments of ���Kent Mum���:

 

'In Kent the selective system creates a two tier system of good schools (grammar) and bad schools (secondary moderns.) I think it���s far more relevant to ask the question a different way.  My question for Peter Hitchens and other selective education fans is, how does opening good grammar schools make bad schools better?'

 

****PH writes: I have never said that it did. Graham Brady says that the local high schools in his (selective) area are excellent, and John Marks  believed that secondary moderns in many cases outperformed comprehensives, but I���ve never seen any actual research on this, and I���m not sure that anyone with any power or money would want to do it. The pro-selection movement has survived for years on little but the passion of its supporters, has no big money and no political or academic clout. Research doesn���t just happen. People have to commission and pay for it.  

 

Also, isn���t  it interesting that, as ���Kent Mum���  tweeted to me today (15th July) ���Unfair allocation of places still happens [In Kent]. In a selective area we get a 2nd tier of selection with houses near good sec moderns���. So there is in fact a three-tier system. Had we kept selection in 1965, and reformed it instead of destroying it one reform that would have got plenty of support would have been the creation of more grammar schools, which were unevenly spread across the country and at the time were very unfair to girls. I���ve never seen any reason for stopping at 20% or even 25%, and I���d be interested to know what percentage are educated in the German and Swiss equivalents of grammar schools.

 

���Kent Mum��� asks : ���Isn���t it the bad schools we want to improve? Don���t we want to improve education for the majority of ordinary children?���

 

****PH replies: Who could disagree? I have many ideas for improving bad schools, most of them to do with reforming state primaries.  But that is not what *this* specific argument is about. This is about a) saving good schools from being wrecked and b) reintroducing a fairer system, better for the British people as a whole in that it wastes less talent.

 

���Kent Mum��� writes : 'This is the way pupils get places in ���good schools��� in these two systems.

 

Comprehensive education:

 

The good schools are full of middle class kids whose smart parents buy expensive houses in the right catchment area. They walk to an excellent comprehensive school.

 

Selective education:

 

Good schools are full of middle class kids whose smart parents give them the right genetics to pass a test, or tutoring if they���re not quite there. They get a bus or a train to an excellent grammar school.'

 

****PH writes:  This is a distortion, and I find it hard to believe that those who offer it are unaware of it. As I have many times explained, in a national selective system, as we had before 1965 and as Germany now has, there are ( or can be)  enough good schools for academically-inclined pupils of all classes.  If there aren���t, it surely makes more sense to open *more* grammar schools than to close them all down because there aren���t enough of them. Tutoring is rare in such a system because there is no need for it.

 

Tutoring in Kent is a consequence of the siege of a small number of schools by thousands of families spread over a vast segment of the London commuter belt, most of it comprehensivized (hence the enthusiasm among London Labour elite types for St Olave���s Grammar in Orpington).  Many children from poor homes escape their backgrounds, which they cannot do in a comprehensive system. This system will of course also benefit the middle class, which is especially concerned with education.  Why shouldn���t it? What���s wrong with the middle class? But that doesn���t negate its good effect on children from poor homes.

 

���Kent Mum��� says:

 

I���ve yet to see an argument for selective education that explains how the 80% of ordinary children in ordinary schools do any better with a selective system.

 

***PH writes: Her reliance on this actually irrelevant point is astonishing.  It's not what it is about. Abolishing grammars didn't help those who didn't go to them. How could it have done? As for the effect on other schools, we don't have a reliable comparison. See above. Such an argument would require research into comparative outcomes which I think is lacking.  I���ve yet to see anyone seriously claim that our national education standards, as a whole, have risen since the abolition of selection.  All my anecdotal experience, plus the dilution of exams discussed above, which is measurable,  suggests precisely the opposite.

 

���Kent Mum��� says:

 

We always hear how great grammar schools will be. Do the secondary moderns get a mention? No.

 

***PH writes: On the contrary. The non-sequitur that Secondary Moderns were bad is incessantly brought into the argument about selection. None of those who ever advances this argument can show that Secondary Moderns were bad *because* Grammar Schools were good. Nor can they explain how abolishing grammar schools would make them better. Grammar Schools are good precisely because they select . Any system which does not select will be inferior to one that does.   Can those who advance this ���argument��� show that Secondary Moderns were any worse than today���s bog-standard comprehensives?

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���All the time we hear how excellent everything is for bright children in great grammar schools. Do we hear how this helps ordinary Jimmy in his ordinary secondary modern school? No.���

 

***Once again, this is not a reasoned argument. My answer to it, which began this exchange, is  ���How does closing grammar schools help those in bad schools?��� It remains unanswered. There is no answer. It doesn���t help them, hasn���t helped them, won���t help them.  

 

���Kent Mum��� says : 'So we are leaving 80% of children out of the discussion. People want to change the education system to ���fix it��� for only 20% of the children? That doesn���t seem very ambitious.

 

****PH writes: We are also leaving the armed forces, Tony Hancock, Iran, Strictly Come Dancing, Greece, Kate Moss,  the BBC licence fee, the weather and Wimbledon out of the discussion. That doesn���t mean we don���t think these things are important or interesting. It just means we aren���t talking about them just now. That is the nature of the discussion. Schools will select one way or another. Why, they even select in Communist Cuba.  A minority will benefit. The questions under discussion are ���Which minority? and 'Is it fairer and better to select by ability, or by the wealth of the parent?���.

 

 

���Kent Mum��� writes : ���I am not convinced that this is the one and only answer to house price selection and ���bog standard��� schools. I hope this is not the best we can do. I prefer to look for other answers.���

 

***PH writes: First, why look for another solution? Selection by ability in fact worked very well between 1944 and 1965. Huge numbers of scientists, doctors, political and media figures got educations they couldn���t have dreamed of otherwise, and which their present-day equivalents could not get now. Go through Who���s Who and see how many distinguished men and women of today came from poor beginnings and rose to great heights thanks to grammar schools.  

 

In concert with Direct Grant schools, a highly successful alliance of state and private sectors, pupils from modest backgrounds stormed Oxford and Cambridge and pushed out the public schoolboys.  Two of Europe���s most successful countries, Germany and Switzerland, retain selection with good results. When Communist east Germany collapsed, one of the first changes was a wave of petitions from parents for the restoration of selection, which has been successfully achieved across the former GDR. Earlier, when West German leftists sought to abolish grammar schools in North Rhine-Westphalia, parents (many of them themselves Social Democrats)  took to the streets in their thousands to save them, and succeeded.  A selective system in northern Ireland survives, and ( see my essay, linked above) poor children from the province have a 50% greater chance of getting to university than their equivalents in fully-comprehensive Scotland (30% greater than in largely-comprehensive England). Why abandon a winning formula?

 

 

Anyway, we know from the quotations above that the ���other solution��� sought by ���Kent Mum��� is not some mysterious work of genius which will somehow square the circle of achieving excellence without selection. What she wants is the failed, discredited comprehensive system, under which British school standards have fallen so catastrophically that the whole examination system has had to be subjected to lowered standards and rampant grade inflation to cope with the decline.

 

���Kent Mum��� writes :���Are we even absolutely certain that the 20% we are helping in these great new grammar schools are the ones who need help the most?���

 

****PH writes. I am not sure what she means by ���needing help���. But I am quite certain that Kent���s distorted, besieged system of vestigial selection, surrounded on all sides by areas which have gone comprehensive, whose parents cross the border to see if they can get excellent education without fees,  is not doing the job which a national system would do.  Give the adjoining areas the same sort of schools, and the system could one again function as it ought.

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���The thing that gets ignored in this whole debate is that society���s academic sorts are predominantly wealthy, confident and manage to sort things out for themselves. This means they sort out good comprehensive schools. It���s a lovely idea that there are millions of working class children who are super smart and not getting a great education, I am sure there are some. But the top 20% academically able types are more likely to be from wealthy high achieving families. But, hang on, aren���t wealthy high achieving families the ones doing best in our current system?���

 

***PH responds. I am not sure what point is being made here. It would hardly be surprising if educated  parents did not encourage their children in their education.  But I am by no means sure that all educated parents are wealthy. In modern Britain, the costs of housing are now so high that what would once have been a comfortable income is no longer anything of the kind. Under our current system, many such families have no access to good education. Even where they do (see above) it is inferior to what they could have got under a selective system.

 

I have never heard anyone argue that ���there are millions of working class children who are super smart and not getting a great education���. I am not even sure what the term ���working class��� means any more in our deindustrialised society. What I am sure of is that only the rich have any guarantee of a tolerable, let alone good education for their children, and that academic selection would improve this dire circumstance. As for ���aren���t wealthy high achieving families the ones doing best in our current system?��� Yes, of course they are. Such people know how to play systems and can if needs be pay for tuition, for as good postcode or even for fees.  But there are plenty of valuable people, achieving much, from priests and police officers to teachers or small businessmen and women, who achieve much but are not wealthy (they may not even be able to afford Pizza Express)  and never will be. A society which closes good schools to them is damaging itself.

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���Here in East Kent the middle class parents work with their children to practice Kent Test papers, or pay for eleven plus tutors. It���s no surprise that their children take the grammar school places. If this didn���t happen my middle class friends would simply move to be near a good school, or pay for private education.���

 

****PH writes: We have discussed this distortion, not a feature of a national selective system, many times already. All she is saying is that, because it is besieged by parents from miles around seeking a good free education,  Kent is really just a  modified version of the comprehensive system. I agree. Let us get rid of the comprehensive system, and we will have more merit and more justice.  If  ���Kent Mum��� *really* wants Kent to be fairer, she should be campaigning for a national selective system.

 

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���Academic selection is not fixing the ���problem��� It is giving good schools to a section of society least likely to need them.���

 

****PH writes. I have answered that point above. I suspect ���Kent Mum��� has little idea of what a good private education now costs. Very few middle class people can now hope to afford such fees.���

 

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���I have yet to see an article that says selective education is any better for the 80% who don���t get to grammar schools.���

 

****PH replies: She has made this weary, increasingly desperate point many times already. She has no evidence to the contrary, either.

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���At best it���s ���no worse��� for these children, but here in Kent I see plenty of evidence that local grammars do make secondary moderns worse.���

 

PH replies :That *is* an interesting claim. What precisely is this evidence? Give details.

 

���Kent Mum��� writes:

 

���Here���s why:

 

���Willingness to learn

 

Grammar schools have less disruption ��� kids in these schools like to learn and do well. So the knock on effect in Kent���s ���bog standard��� secondary modern schools is that there are more children disinterested in learning. There is more disruption and ���difficult kids��� than a mixed ability comprehensive. In my daughter���s school there is a general lack of ambition and aspiration, the other kids make her think being smart is ���embarrassing.���

 

****PH writes: On what factual evidence does she base her assertion that there is *more* disruption in Kent Secondary moderns than there is in Bog-Standard comprehensives in fully-comprehensive areas?

I have seen no measure of this, but there are plenty of such schools (Bog-standard comps)which are disorderly and where there is strong hostility to learning. In several comprehensive schools in (fully comp) Oxford, including one with a ���good��� reputation, bright children find it wise to keep their heads down if they do not want to be the butts of teasing and bullying. To be called a ���Boffin��� (the local term)  in such a school is to be despised and often ostracised. I have seen no surveys of this but the C4 programme ���Undercover Teacher��� https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae1gmuKeuXw  and the ���Guardian��� articles by ���Secret Teacher  http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/series/the-secret-teacher suggest she may be idealising comprehensive schools.

 

���Kent Mum��� writes:

���Better teachers

 

There is a shortage of good teachers. It���s common sense that the best teachers will want to teach nice kids who complete their homework and want to learn. This means secondary moderns have lower quality staff and more staff leaving when a nice grammar school job becomes available. My daughter���s two secondary moderns have had an endless stream of supply teachers, none of whom set homework because they might not be there to collect it.���

 

****PH replies: once again, I do not think that comprehensive schools are immune from this problem. Nice rural schools, or schools in good postcodes, get good long-staying teachers,. The others must cope with supply teachers and a mixture of saints, martyrs and the defeated. 

 

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���Parental involvement

 

Grammar schools parents tend to be the sort who get involved with schools. Sadly the lower middle class kids tend to have less involved parents, possibly through work commitments. Grammar school parents fundraise for new equipment or might ask for after school clubs. Kent���s secondary moderns have less school funds and rarely have after school clubs.���

 

****PH replies : See above. The same distinctions are to be found between bog-standard comps and comps in better postcodes. The main difference is that selection to these schools is by wealth.

 

 

���Kent Mum��� writes : ���Less choice

 

My friends with children who pass their eleven plus get a choice of all local schools. They can apply for eight schools in travelling distance, while I have a choice of only four. This was actually the thing that started me questioning the selective system. When I looked at schools for my daughter I saw the local grammar schools were ���outstanding��� while the schools I could choose from were mostly Ofsted ���goods��� or ���needs improvement���.���

 

****PH replies: I think she should  ask parents in fully-comprehensive areas what the process is like for choosing your child���s school, and how it feels on ���National Offer Day��� when they don���t get their first choice . Officially, 20% don���t. Actually, the figure is far higher because parents don���t put down their real first choice unless they���re very confident of getting it, for fear of failing to get into the next best and sliding all the way down to the bottom of the snake as a result.  She seems to view fully-comp areas much as 1930s fellow-travellers viewed the Soviet Union, a sunny paradise of ordered equality. It ain���t so.

 

 

���Kent Mum continues : ��� Class differences

 

This really gets me. My daughter can���t tell her school friends she eats at Pizza Express, and she has to dress in Primark to fit in! Secondary moderns are set up to ���teach a trade���. I couldn���t believe there was no library in my daughter���s school. I am ok with the hairdressing and mechanical school, I am sure some children will benefit from it��� but it seems there���s a general lack of ambition in secondary modern schools. The children see no excellence to inspire them, they see no high achievers to make them want to push themselves a little harder. If all your peers are settling for leaving school and an apprenticeship wouldn���t you be less likely to try a bit harder and reach university?���

 

****PH writes: I really don���t think the stuff about Pizza Express and Primark is to do with what sort of schools she has locally. In our post-Christian world, brands and consumerism are pretty important among both the well-off and the poor, and inverted snobbery is always a problem in modern Britain.  But once again, does she really think there are no bog-standard comps where the same is true? There may even be some that don���t have a library, or where the library is so inadequate that it might as well not be there?  I agree that this is a shocking thing, and she is right to be appalled by it. But in many schools with libraries there is, alas, not much incentive or encouragement to use them and rather too many who can barely read the books they contain.

 

 

 

���Kent Mum��� continues: ���Labels

 

This one alone makes me think the selection system is flawed. We keep getting told not to ���label��� our children as stupid, or lazy, or bad. But we label children ���not academic��� every year in Kent. I have a teenage daughter, and I don���t need to watch the latest Always #LikeAGirl ad to know most girls have a confidence problem. I don���t think being told you���re ���not as smart��� as your peers is a very good way to treat a ten year old.���

 

***PH writes: Nor is it especially nice, on ���National Offer Day��� to be told you���re not rich (or apparently religious) enough to go to a good school.  The world���s neither fair nor perfect. Even so, merit���s better than wealth or blind chance, if there must be a choice. And there must. By the way, at what age does she think people can be judged without minding? Universities select. Employers select. Sports teams select. Rejection comes to us all from time to time, and it���s never much fun. The important thing is not to be defeated by it, whenever it occurs.  

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���No flexibility

 

In Kent (presumably due to the admin headaches of the system) a fail is a fail. If you mess up one day when you are ten you can never get to a grammar school. My daughter is now getting about the same marks as her grammar school friends, but her fail in the eleven plus disallows her from grammar schools the whole of her educational career. A system like this has to be very sure it is right and that no mistakes are made. But August born children are under represented in grammar schools. I am sure there are many mistakes, or children who excel at maths but fail at English or vice versa, so it seems it is not a perfect system.���

 

**** PH writes : If this is so, which surprises me greatly, as it certainly wasn���t a universal feature of the pre-1965 system, then it is plain wrong and stupid, and I would happily join ���Kent Mum��� in campaigning against it. I have long thought the 11+ a poor method of selection, and favour the German system of selection by assessment and mutual agreement, with those who reject their assessment being given (I think)  two years in the Grammar School to prove the assessors wrong. This is a good part of the problem. Proponents of the grammar school system *as it was* chose to destroy the whole thing rather than reforming the parts which were bad, and keeping the bits which were good. Too few places? Build more grammar schools. Too few girls? Admit more girls. Selection too rigid? Make it more flexible.  Poor primary schools in poor areas disadvantaging the poor? Put resources into those schools to bring them up to the highest standard. And so on.

 

 

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���I also worry that no one ever asks ���the 80%��� what they think of this idea. I���ve yet to see an article or argument in favour of academic selection from someone who is the ���type��� to fail their eleven plus. That makes me uncomfortable; especially because telling secondary modern ���types��� they are not as clever as the rest might mean they lack confidence to enter the debate.���

 

****PH writes: Not all wise policies are popular, and not all popular policies are wise. If you asked the 80% and they said ���Right,  let���s abandon selection forever���, would they in fact be benefiting themselves or the country in which they lived? I am sure they would not.  Almost all serious statesmanship will hurt somebody or something at the expense of someone or something else. Alas, if you cannot stomach this difficulty, best stay away from politics as a whole.

 

'Kent Mum' writes: 'I am organising a series of education debates in Kent in the autumn, and I hope these will get a mix of people along. I think talking about education is a great way to make it better. Maybe comprehensive education is not the answer, or maybe it���s not selection either? Or maybe academic selection needs to be turned upside down and we give excellent schools to the bottom 20%? Or maybe we allow academic testing but use it to create streams in mixed ability schools?

 

I don���t pretend to have the answers, but I would love to keep the debate going. I hope Peter Hitchens and other selective fans might answer my question,  how does opening great grammar schools make the bad schools better?

 

**** PH responds:  Once again, I���d be glad of some facts on which we might base such a discussion. It has never been my claim. I have only ever said that the best schools are better under an academically selective system and that such a system is far fairer to those involved and far more beneficial to the country. This is demonstrable beyond doubt, and is enough for me.

 

���Kent Mum��� writes: ���Otherwise we���re revising the whole education system to benefit only a small percentage of children. And, in my opinion, this will be giving good schools to an academic few while disadvantaging many ordinary children.���

 

****PH retorts. No such thing follows. We have no idea what the effect is on the rest of the system, as no serious comparison has been made. As for  ���giving good schools to an academic few while disadvantaging many ordinary children.��� That is a tricky formulation, with the word ���while��� cunningly suggesting that the ���disadvantaging��� is *caused* by giving good schools to a minority.  Is it? Is there in fact any ���disadvantaging���?  How do we know?  And if there is, what is the cause of it? How do we know that? A lot of stuff is written about ���creaming��� of good pupils  by grammar schools. But the same thing is done by the better comprehensives to their bog-standard neighbours. Yet the results at those ���better��� comps are nothing like as good as they are at grammar schools. And the results at those bog-standard comps are not significantly different from those at secondary moderns.  And in any case, the purpose of schools is to educate their pupils, not to score well in league tables. Academically selective schools are better for their pupils than any other kind.