Just look at the headline of this piece of fluff written by, or perhaps on behalf of, Rishi Sunak where this near billionaire equates higher education with money. If you don’t go into finance, then Sunak thinks you’re a loser. It’s tin-eared, ignorant and quite clearly class war. This is what Sunak said:
“Too many young people are being sold a false dream and end up doing a poor-quality course at the taxpayers’ expense that doesn’t offer the prospect of a decent job at the end of it.
“That is why we are taking action to crack down on rip-off university courses, while boosting skills training and apprenticeships provision.”
It’s bullshit, pure and simple. And it’s a full frontal attack on aspiration and ambition of working class children who are, because of our class-based system, the least likely to succeed in life and Sunak wants to keep it that way by forcing the lower orders to carry out more manual work. It is impossible to interpret what he has said in any other way. He read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford university after receiving the best education money can buy at Westminster college. Many people would suggest that philosophy and politics might not represent the best definition of what a good-quality course might look like. But Sunak doesn’t care. Why should he?
Working class kids have none of the advantages of the upper classes, like Sunak has enjoyed. I cannot know whether his pampered education enabled him to establish connections in the business world, but mingling with the upper echelons of society, and the future leaders of finance and industry can’t have hurt his chances, can it? I’ll bet Sunak didn’t have to work to help him get through university and being worth three quarters of a billion quid meant he didn’t have to fret about scraping together the deposit for a mortgage. He bought his luxury pile in Yorkshire with small change.
Sunak’s twitter feed is these days a simple list of lies. And his statement today is just another lie. He doesn’t want to “crack down on rip-off university courses”, he wants working class people to better know their place.
“Improving education”, says Sunak, “is the closest thing to a silver bullet there is – it’s the main reason why I came into politics.” And by cutting education spending to the bone and dissuading the wrong sort of people to go to university he reveals his his real mission.
If you can’t see what’s going on here, then you’re not paying attention. This is a new low, even for this little toad. Don’t let him get away with it.
