A Challenge to Matthew Parris - drop the inverted snobbery, back the return of grammar schools

I think this would be more of a controversy if it weren���t for the political Verdun that is the EU debate. This column by Matthew Parris (here seen in ���The Australian���) is about Britain

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/britons-must-go-on-sneering-at-posh-boys-from-elite-schools/news-story/5a8f8b8e59be5ef647054d4413207625

(I suppose it has some relevance in the antipodes, as Australia and New Zealand both have plentiful private schools, modelled on the British original).

Two passages are especially striking

���Class advantage in Britain is a disgrace, and that isn���t just a social thing, it���s a life-chances thing. Private education is key to its maintenance. Because we���ve become inured to the disgrace does not lessen the unfairness or the waste of talent. We should step back and recognise it.

Look, I know these stats are forever being trotted out, but don���t be numbed, be angry. Taking into account that only 7 per cent ��� one in 14 ��� of our population is privately educated, get this: according to the Sutton Trust, almost three-quarters of top military officers, three-quarters of senior judges, half of leading print journalists, three-fifths of the top ranks of the medical profession, four-fifths of leading newspaper editors, two-fifths of BAFTA winners, a fifth of British music awards winners, nearly a third of MPs and half the cabinet were educated at independent schools. Even Jeremy Corbyn���s Labour shadow cabinet has twice as big a proportion as the population as a whole.

���National ability and potential cannot possibly be so concentrated in the ranks of the privately educated.���

And then:

 So what to do?��� Here���s the good news. State schools have improved a lot under both parties, and are still improving. From Kenneth Baker in the 1990s to Andrew Adonis to Michael Gove, politicians have led a real rise in standards. Across much of Britain the academic (as opposed to the social) case for choosing an independent school has never been weaker. The state now puts up stiff competition.���

The first ( apart from the claim that private education, rather than disastrous comprehensive state schooling, is the key to maintaining the class gap) is a simple statement of fact. The second is top-quality,  fresh-from-the-cow,  four-letter tripe. The alleged improvement in the state schools is, if it exists at all, from such a low level that in most cases they do not begin to approach the standards of the private schools or of the remaining academically selective grammar schools. Where they do,it is because they are selective in other ways, through tiny catchment areas mostly restricted to the wealthy, or by religious selection which cannot prevent people from faking their faith. Often there is a combination of the two.

The suggestion, of flooding the private schools with ���hundreds of thousands��� of assisted places is thoughtless idiocy. They aren���t big enough, and wouldn���t be so good if they were. These schools currently educate 517,000 pupils in 1,200 schools (an average of about 430 per school) . They could not physically survive an influx of pupils on such scale.  

The conclusion, that it���s OK to sneer at public school products, is cheap and rather nasty playing to the gallery. Plenty of public school boys and girls may well be recipients of unappreciated privilege, though this is less so than ever at the good ones, which have long selected by examination, though obviously mostly from among those who can pay. Thousands of others benefit from bursaries which in some cases pay all their fees, financed by contributions from richer parents. But this is obviously limited. What else are they supposed to do?

Until 1975, when (without noticeable Tory opposition) Labour���s Fred Mulley abolished the Direct Grant, scores of first-rate private day schools took in huge numbers of state-school pupils thanks to a wise government subsidy. It was done entirely on merit. They had generally passed the eleven- plus at a high level.  Their pupils stormed Oxford and Cambridge, elbowing aside the public school hoorays. But the4 scheme relied on the continued existence of state grammar schools and of academic selection as a whole. And by 1975, Tony Crosland and Margaret Thatcher together, ably succeeded by Mr Mulley and soon afterwards to be succeeded by Shirley Williams,  were well on the way to destroying the grammar schools.

It is that destruction which has led to the class advantages which Mr Parris mentions, which also apply (though he does not mention it ) to the elite state comprehensives which select by wealth, and which a New Labour Tory, Matthew Hancock, now proposes to challenge by encouraging employers to probe the class backgrounds of job applicants.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/next-steps-for-uks-first-national-measure-of-socio-economic-background

 This measure, trumpeted on the BBC but little-noticed by print media,  will no doubt please Alan Milburn, the former(?) revolutionary who now runs an egalitarian quango for the government (and won���t say where his own children went to school, as I know because I have asked him) . Lord (William) Waldegrave and Charles Moore http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/29/young-matt-hancock-the-privately-educated-minister-fighting-a-ch/ do not like it.

Mr Parris, perhaps, does.

Well, I think it odd that Classism of this kind should be encouraged when all other imaginable forms of discrimination are so frowned on. I am reminded of the behaviour of the new ���People���s Democracies��� such as Communist Czechoslovakia, which actively discriminated against the middle class in their early years, for reasons I think it is pretty easy to work out.

Once, I suppose, it would have been worth pointing out that this is the policy of a nominally Conservative government. But do I have any readers left who do not understand that the Tory party is now New Labour in arms, wholly dedicated to the Blairite Eurocommunist agenda ��� equality of outcome for everyone except the political and business elite?

Of course a serious conservative,  and a responsible democratic socialist alike, would agree that the best way to tackle this problem would be the immediate re-establishment of academic selection, grammar schools and the Direct Grant. But such people are rare in politics.

Matthew Parris should know a lot better. Does he really think that ���The present public mood of sneering at public-school toffs is healthy. The brand must be trashed.���? Is he genuinely unaware of a far better ,more effective alternative ��� the restoration of academic selection in state schools, and of the Direct Grant? Perhaps he is.  I hope he now considers it. His voice, on the side of this much-needed reform, would be very valuable.