End the Rule of the Rich and Thick. Bring Back Grammar Schools

This Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

If a democracy is a place where we tell our rulers what to do, why is it illegal to open any new grammar schools?

Once, this country was dotted with hundreds of these fine institutions,
open to all regardless of wealth, on the basis of ability. Then, mad
egalitarian vandals destroyed all but 164 of them in a spiteful frenzy.

They believed that if everyone couldn’t go to them, then nobody should.

Education: Grammar schools must be reintroduced for the good of the country, says Peter Hitchens

What this meant in practice was that
from then on, money, rather than talent, decided who got a good
education.

And so it has been for 40 years. It is my view that the
dim, greedy stupidity of much of modern Britain is a direct result of
this certifiable decision.

 
  


 

The privileges of thick, rich people
were preserved and protected. Untold thousands of clever children from
poor homes were condemned to lives of disappointment and exclusion.

Our elite, closed to fresh ideas and to hungry, ambitious young men and women, went stale.

All sensible people now recognise that
this was a terrible mistake. Despite the massacre of grammar schools,
it has now emerged that the remaining few survivors are besieged by
parents and educating record numbers of children.

They are also capturing large numbers
of places at the best universities, though nothing like as big a share
as they used to get before the 1960s revolution made Oxbridge once again
the preserve of the rich.

Of course, there are good state
schools that are not grammars.

But as the Sutton Trust reported last
week, they are incredibly socially selective. As the Trust’s chairman,
Sir Peter Lampl,  said ‘The bottom line is: how good a school you go to
depends on your parents’ income.’

Sir
Peter’s ludicrous solution to this mess is a sort of lottery, which
would just juggle the injustice around in a different way.

I
don’t understand how he reaches this conclusion, any more than I can
understand how some TV personality can be of any use in promoting
‘social mobility’.

Is it
that neither Sir Peter nor the political elite dare defy the Marxist
obsession with ‘equality’ which has done so much to wreck Britain
already, and which has actually made it much more unequal? Probably.

The way to fix it is to return to open selection by ability, and repeal the Blair law banning new grammar schools.

We don’t need to restore the old eleven-plus – German grammar schools select by assessment with plenty of second chances.

But
it does have to be done in a way that finds, encourages and nurtures
talent, rather than in a way that finds money and privilege, and
entrenches them.

 
A blast of truth that nobody can ignore

It
is very fashionable to sneer at Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, and
to sympathise with his (often equally dubious) opponents.

At the same time it is modish to make excuses for Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and to dismiss his opponents.

In
the world of London think tanks, the self-important, frequently wrong
and always bumptious Economist magazine and the BBC, Putin is bad and
Erdogan is good.

Brutal: Police in Turkey fire pepper spray at 'Woman in the Red Dress' Ceyda Sungur

Actually they are very similar,
except that Erdogan locks up more journalists, is more intolerant of
criticism and holds more political trials. I am not sure how to measure
which of the two countries is more corrupt. It is a close-run thing.

But in one thing, Erdogan is far more worrying than Putin, who is a simple autocrat.

Erdogan
is also a cunning and subtle Islamic fanatic, who knows he will get
further if he pretends to  be moderate, and in an unguarded moment said
that democracy is ‘a tram you ride as far as you want to and then get
off’.  

I have been pointing
this out for years, and so I was amused when at last the liberal elite
were forced (reluctantly) to acknowledge it.  

Erdogan’s
unpleasant state machine showed its real face when citizens of Istanbul
tried to save one of that city’s few remaining green spaces from
tasteless redevelopment.

The
stupid, thuggish and unprovoked gassing of one such citizen – the
now-famous ‘Woman in the Red Dress’, Ceyda Sungur – should tell us all
we need to know about the ‘mildly Islamist’ Turkish state – but only if
we want to listen.

Once again, our outrage is selective. And selective outrage is always a fake.

 

The scenes of horrible crimes are often demolished, because nobody can bear to live there.

Or at
least the names of the streets are changed, as happened with Rillington
Place, in London, site of the gruesome Christie murders.

So I was
surprised to see that the guest house which was the site of many of the
disgusting actions in the recent Oxford paedophile case, is still
advertising itself to tourists who arrive at the city’s railway station.

 
A human sacrifice won't clean up politics

Claim: David Cameron legitimately received thousands in mortgage interest payments through MPs expenses

I happen to think that entrapment is
slimy and unBritish. If you tempt someone into wrongdoing, and then
expose them, you have yourself done wrong.

But
even if you approve of the latest exposures of an MP and some peers for
allegedly taking money to lobby for causes, ask yourself this: are
these things really the problem with our political system? Surely it is
what is allowed that is the problem?

Nobody
exposes MPs when they abandon their principles for the sake of a
career, and allow themselves to be bullied into voting against their
consciences by the hired government thugs known as whips. This is normal
behaviour.

So is that of Mr
Tim Yeo MP, a noisy zealot for the Green lobby which is wrecking our
economy and our countryside, who last year made a six-figure sum from
companies which benefit from unhinged ‘renewable energy’ policies.

So
is that of the Prime Minister, who got away completely with being one
of the greediest housing expenses claimers in the entire House of
Commons (despite also being one of the richest MPs).

Media scandals are selective. Someone picks the victim. While they do so, they are generally ignoring other possible targets.

Some
stories are followed by everyone. Some, like your generous subsidy for
Mr Cameron’s immense (and perfectly legitimate) mortgage interest
payments, remain almost totally unknown to the general public. They
still think his only sin was to claim for clearing wisteria from a
chimney.

The real story lies
elsewhere – in a played-out, incompetent and scornful elite which
cannot admit its mistakes and which hates the voters

If that scandal ever properly catches fire, then we may get somewhere.

This stuff is merely the offering of an occasional human sacrifice to the mob, to keep them from seeing what is really going on.