Conversation - Mr Cameron's Mortgage, Grammar Schools and Secondary Moderns, Randolph Churchill's Benign Tumour

I’ll take this chance to respond to some of the postings over the weekend..

 

The first is quite straightforward, from Edward Willhoft: He wrote :  ‘If you're going to reduce an allegation of an "immense mortgage" held by Cameron and which is paid for from the public purse, to hearsay by avoiding its quantification then it's easily denied by the perpetrator and further undermined as inaccurate as guestimates are presumed by your readers. Any reason why you avoided a factual quantification?’

 

None at all, except perhaps that I’d done it  before and didn’t feel the need to drag the details out again. First of all, here are Mr Cameron’s own words (with my interpolations)  from a bizarre meeting he held in his constituency in May 2009, at the height of the Parliamentary expenses frenzy. He himself calls it a ‘very large mortgage’ .  It’s certainly far. far larger than the biggest mortgage I ever had, and I am well-paid by most standards - though I only have one house. Please note while reading this that these figures concern a second home, within 70 miles of his far-from-poky main home in London:

 

Mr Cameron said ‘From 2001 to 2007 the only thing I really claimed for in respect of my second home was the interest on a mortgage, not the repayments but the interest. It was a very large mortgage, it was £350,000 worth of mortgage, it was about £1,700 a month that I was claiming. That was quite close to the maximum you could claim at the time but I did not at that stage claim for anything else...’

 

(My comment: To me, £350,000 seems to be a colossal mortgage, especially for someone on a Parliamentary salary, as he was when he first took it on, or even the Leader of the Opposition's salary, which he is now drawing. We do not know whether this sum paid in full for the Camerons' country home. I would suspect that it probably didn't, since large properties in pleasant Oxfordshire villages generally went, even eight years ago, for rather more than that. Several questions arise. Could he have paid for the property out of his own resources? Did he need such a large house? Did he, before the current scandal, assume that he was bound to benefit in the long term from the likely increase in the price of the house during what promised to be a long political career? Now, of course, this is ruled out, but was it then? And £1,700 a month, tax free, is a lot of money, more than the total that comes into quite a few households. How urgent would the need be to justify this?).

 

Mr Cameron continued:  ‘....In 2007 I was able to pay down the mortgage a little bit, so it was a £250,000 mortgage, paying about £1,000 in mortgage interest every month, and so I also claimed for what I would call some pretty straightforward household bills, council tax, oil, gas, erm, and other utility type bills and insurance on the property. And that has been the case from the beginning of 2007 right through to now. I now claim less than the maximum allowed, I don't claim all of those utility bills, I claim a percentage of them, because I think that's right and fair.’

 

(My comment: He 'paid down' the mortgage' a 'little bit'. That 'little bit' turns out to be £100,000, once again a very large sum by most people's standards. And also, if you choose to run a second home, shouldn't you accept that it's up to you to insure it, pay the fuel bills and council tax on it? And wouldn't it be prudent to choose such a home on the basis that you would want to keep such bills low, rather than expect others to defray them?)

 

The whole account can be found in the archives of this blog here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/05/how-to-hold-an-open-meeting-in-private.html

 

I am still quite shocked that this story, though the startling facts are undisputed, remains largely uncovered by the mainstream media and almost entirely unknown to the public as a whole. Mr Willhoft’s reluctance to accept my word makes my point, that what could, in other circumstances, have been a colossal media storm, has passed most people by. I hope this makes people think about future media storms – why this one, why not something else? For once you start asking this question, you are on the trail to understanding what news is, and what history is, come to that.

 

 

 

Now we get on to grammar schools.

 

Doreen McCormack writes:  ‘I was a victim of the system that segregated 70% of children from the other 30%.

It was a blight throughout my career, particularly when filling in application forms. It would be surprising if grammar schools, creaming off the 30% brightest children did not realise good results. In areas were grammar schools still exist parents love them until their offspring do not get a grammar place. Then panic sets in at the realisation of the alternative! Personally, I would get rid of all the remaining grammars and put more funding into the comprehensive system. The only true and fair education system.’

 

I can’t and won’t dispute her own personal experiences, though she doesn’t give more detail about how her life in fact turned out. But I would say once again that this is not an argument against selection or against grammar schools. I had to make this point on Twitter to my fellow York Graduate Linda Grant,  who so far as I know attended a direct grant grammar school (an interesting and valuable type of semi-private school open free of charge to 11-plus successes, but also taking fee-paying children,  abolished in a fit of spite by the 1974 Labour government).

 

(I have often dealt with this argument by telling the story of how Evelyn Waugh was told that his old friend and adversary, Randolph Churchill, had been taken to hospital for the removal of a non-malignant tumour. ‘How typical,’, remarked Waugh, ‘that the medical profession should rummage through the entire large body of Randolph Churchill, find the only non-malignant thing in it, and remove it’ The point being that the critics of the pre-1965 British state school system found the only part of it that was working well, and destroyed it –  believing for some reason that smashing the grammar schools would help those who didn’t go to them. It  didn’t, of course).

 

The failings of the Secondary Moderns, and the absence (for the most part) of the technical schools intended under the 1944 Education Act, were not caused by the existence of grammar schools. Nor were they eased by destroying grammar schools. The criterion of selection was simply shifted, from ability to money.

 

What could (and should) have been done instead by a rational government?

 

The undoubted shortage of grammar school places in many areas , especially for girls, could have been put right by the building of more grammar schools, especially for girls. Abolishing grammar schools seems an odd solution to a shortage of them. I have many times said that I don’t support the rigidity of the eleven-plus, and believe selection should be by assessment and mutual agreement, with those on the margins given a chance at a grammar school education if they think they can handle it, and plenty of points at which late transfers can be made.  Not all children are anything like fully developed at 11. But once again, these are arguments for a reformed system of selection, not arguments for a comprehensive system.

 

Good technical schools would have been, and would still be, a huge asset to this country and would be very welcome to the many children who have no great academic aptitude, but who desire strong vocational training. But once you have compulsory secondary schooling, which has been the aim since the Hadow report in the 1920s, then there will always be a problem in dealing with those children who are neither particularly academic nor particularly technically talented.  I am not a utopian and have no solution to this, but a good straightforward curriculum aimed at literacy, numeracy and a reasonable background of general knowledge seem to me to be worthwhile and attainable objectives for such schools. But why children should be compelled to stay in them long after the point when they can learn anything useful beats me.  

 

As the compulsory school-leaving age has crept upwards (for reasons not entirely clear to me) children who would probably be better off out at work are confined in classrooms, and have to be given exams to aim for, which they can pass.

 

What I really can’t accept in Ms McCormack’s contribution is the claim that comprehensives are fair. How can any informed person make this claim? It is now I think generally acknowledged by all informed people that there are many different sorts of comprehensive school, and that those in poor urban areas are strikingly worse than those in pleasant market towns or affluent suburbs. It is also accepted, as Sir Peter Lampl (who has researched this a lot)  states in my article, that admission to the better schools is generally determined by income. What sort of person calls such an arrangement ‘fair’? I can only assume that Ms McCormack isn’t paying attention. Half of this argument could be resolved if only the tribal supporters of comprehensive education would think about what they were saying.

 

I’m relieved that at least we’ve been  spared the other hackneyed non-argument, about how the few remaining grammars are dominated by the children of pushy well-off parents from many miles around. Of course they are. Large numbers of them are accessible to commuters into London, who know that if they can buy into these areas, their school-fee problems are solved form the age of 11 onwards. So they spend on houses, prep-schools and tutors. This distortion is caused not by the *existence*of the schools, nor by the *nature* of the schools, nor by the fact that they are selective. It is caused by the *shortage* of such schools and the very high demand for good state education, not in any way fulfilled by the comprehensive system which determines the nature of 95% of state schools in England, and all of them in Wales and Scotland.

 

 

A person calling himself ‘Oportoman’ opines :’Peter's world, almost everything was so much better in the 40s and 50s, irrespective of any evidence to the contrary.’

 

**This is flatly untrue. I have never expressed any such view for the simple reason that I do not hold it.  This twisted misrepresentation is typical of my less scrupulous opponents who are unable or unwilling to engage me on what I actually say. My concern is with the present and the future. The past is a) irrecoverable and b) contained many bad things. But as we cannot return to it and cannot alter it, our interest in it must be to gain experience. The alternative - to ignore the past because you believe nothing at all that was good ever happened in the past, and that things are automatically better because they are new, is pitiable.

 

Mr Oportoman’ continues ‘As a result, his rose-tinted view of that period ignores some inconvenient truths about grammar schools. First, it was a minority of children who went to grammar schools and the remainder went to schools (secondary moderns) from which the majority left without any qualifications.’

 

**I don’t ignore it at all. I write about it quite often, as the index will show. It is in the nature of selective schools that a minority will attend them. We can’t all live in Lake Wobegon, where ‘all the children are above average’. Such a belief would involve not just rose-tinted glasses, but a wholly skewed idea of reality. What kind of person regards it as a criticism that selective schools select? This sort of thing fuels my increasing belief that my opponents, who love to call me ‘bonkers’ are in fact themselves gravely out of touch with reality. Their other actions (repeated bloody, expensive wars which damage this country, the closure of badly-needed, modern and viable power stations, incessant official lying about economic statistics and crime) tend to confirm this.

 

Mr Oportoman continues :’As a result the levels of illiteracy were far higher then than now.’

 

**That is an interesting assertion. Can he please produce figures which confirm it? In the Britain of my childhood and teens, popular mass market newspapers a) sold far more copies than they do now and b) contained far denser, more literate material than they do now. How strange that this should have been so in a less literate country. In any case, as another contributor points out, reading and writing are not taught in secondary schools.

 

Mr ‘Oportoman’ continues: ‘Secondly, it has always been a popular deception that grammar schools were egalitarian, in that the children of poor and illiterate parents were able to get the same education as those from more privileged backgrounds. Only a tiny minority fell into that category. Most of those who went to grammar schools came from backgrounds where money may have been tight, but they were not poor or working class.

 

**This is a matter of definition. Of course schools cannot overcome all the disadvantages of homes where learning is not respected. Of course the grammars did not find or lift out of ignorance every child who deserved to be found and lifted, though I believe many dedicated primary school teachers did what they could to help where they could.  I would suspect that many of those who benefited belonged to such groups as the lower middle class and the skilled working class, the very groups who are now often palmed off with bog standard comprehensives and have no possibility of buying their way out of them. But I still stick with my contention that there was far more opportunity for bright children in poor homes than there is now.

 

Mr Oportoman’ continues : ‘Furthermore, even then, private tuition was vital for all but the most brilliant.’

 

***Really? Can he provide any sort of evidence of this? His own experience ( ‘I should know, I only passed my eleven plus as a result of the private tuition I received’) does not really reveal a general situation. There is certainly a lot of private tuition going on now, often among the children of left-wing public figures who dare not send their children to private or openly selective schools, but still want them to get into Oxbridge.

 

He then says :  ‘What is needed is not a return to the days of yore, but a thorough and honest appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the education system we have now. Sadly, this will not happen all the while that Michael Gove and Peter Hitchens promulgate the lie that we are falling behind in the imaginary league table of world education.’

 

***Well, Mr Gove and I don’t agree about education policy and though I am his friend I am not his ally. Mr Gove is as opposed in practice to grammar schools as Mr ‘Oportoman’ is in theory. While I have no doubt that this country’s state education system is one of the worst in the advanced world, I don’t rely on the supposed measures of this, as I agree with Mr ‘Oportoman’ that ‘The statistics upon which such bogus claims are based are not fit for purpose.’. The PISA measurements don’t properly compare like with like and have many other faults. However, it is quite plain (from visiting either country and from the economic and social situations of these countries compared with ours) that Germany’s young people, and Switzerland’s,  are incomparably better-educated than ours, and the only thing that keeps our standards up is the existence of private schools, all but unknown in Germany. By comparison, France, which adopted a comprehensive system some years after us, under Francois Miitterand, is rapidly catching up with us in the race to the bottom.

 

Mr Oportoman says : ’I went to grammar school and yet did not get a degree, despite going on to higher education, my son went to a good comprehensive and got a 2:1.’

 

**Well, to use the language employed by Mr ‘Oportoman’, this comparison is not fit for purpose. By what objective standard was the comprehensive ‘good’? Surely he doesn’t accept OFSTED as a reliable indicator?  I certainly don’t. How would it have fared if its pupils had been compelled to take the ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels that were set at the grammar school attended by Mr ‘Oportoman’, and marked as they were marked? What proportion of children went to a university when Mr ‘Oportoman’ went?  We cannot pry into why Mr ’Oportoman’ did not get a degree, as the reasons may be personal, but what proportion of children went to university when his son went there? How did his son’s degree course compare to his own in content, rigour and numbers who took it?  Without knowing all these things, we can draw no conclusions from this statement at all.

 

Mr ‘Oportoman’ then jams his rose-tinted glasses back on (through which he views his Golden Age of the Present Day and the Wondrous Future) and asserts : ‘What we need to do is identify what makes a good comprehensive (which might include some streaming)’

 

**Why is this what we need to do? What if it is plain that the whole comprehensive idea has failed on its own terms, on his terms as well as mine? What if it is plain (which it is that those comprehensives which may be called ‘good’ (though are in my opinion inferior to grammar schools)  are in fact selective, but selective in ways which he cannot possibly defend – money privilege, being closed to people who do not hold a particular faith, other forms of covert selection -   It has not made the country more equal, as its supporters claimed it would. It has on the contrary entrenched inequality.  It has not improved educational standards across the board. On the contrary it has lowered them across the board, necessitating the introduction of examinations with far lower standards and far less content than their predecessors, and compelling universities also to lower their admission standards ( and introduce remedial courses for entrants) to cope. Why, by the way, would ‘streaming’ be of any advantage? Surely it is a form of academic selection, which he opposes on principle? (Certainly it is very hard to get streaming, or even the less controversial setting, introduced in many state secondary schools, where teachers oppose it).   

 

Mr ‘Oportoman’ ends by jeering at me. Claiming that I wish to ‘ indulge in wistful fantasies about a return to the halcyon days, which in reality never existed.’ I have dealt with that at the start of what I have written. I have no fantasies, wistful or otherwise, about the past. Grammar schools were successfully introduced, after 40 years of hated comprehensive schooling, in the States of the former East Germany. There is nothing wistful or fantastic about proposing their restoration here. On the contrary, the ‘wistful fantasy’  is embodied in the idea that by persisting with this world-class flop, we will one day make it work. Albert Einstein made a pithy remark about those who carry on doing the same thing over and over again, expecting it to have a different result.

 

Finally, a note on my attack on the ‘Economist ‘ magazine. I find the respect with which this organ is treated quite exasperating, as it is so often wrong. I’m also worried by the fact that many of its readers believe it to be conservative, when it is nothing of the kind.  It was one of the earliest publications to campaign for the weakening of drug laws. Its attitude towards Turkey has for years exemplified its general wrong-headedness about most matters of policy. Each time the Erdogan government behaved in a crass or unpleasant way, and each time it showed its true Islamist colours, such as in its new hostility to Israel, its harsh intolerance of dissent, its willingness to host visits by dubious statesmen,   I would watch, in the ‘Economist’ to see if it continued to refer to him as ‘mildly Islamist’. And it did. Even after the current events, I think the phrase ‘moderately Islamist’ crept in.  And yet this same organ cannot stop putting the boot into Russia, a country which (though it has many faults which I do not deny) is a good deal cleaner than it was under Boris Yeltsin, whom the ‘West’ mistakenly worshipped, and is far less of a menace to the comfortable world order from which we benefit than an Islamic Turkey will be. Russia, in my view,  only gets this treatment because it defends the concept of national sovereignty, which the ‘Economist’ is less keen on. There are plenty of corrupt kleptocracies in the world which do not get attacked by the ‘Economist’ as Russia is.