There are plenty of reasons for getting all uppity with the Labour Party now that it is firmly in the hands of the ultra left. My issues with Labour are not just with policy, but also with competence and hypocrisy. It is the latter to which I wish to refer today.
Labour is currently and rightly engaged in a campaign to oppose Theresa May’s plan to reintroduce grammar schools. All well and good there, to fight for good education for all and not just the elite, but, yet again, the entire debate comes back to the ‘do as I say, not as I do” attitude of Labour’s elite. It is very hard to take anything they say at all seriously when confronted with some uncomfortable evidence. There are numerous other examples, but let’s begin with the latest one.
Shami, now Baroness, Chakrabarti was until recently a member of no political party at all, until Jeremy Corbyn appointed her to carry out a report that would show there was no problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party. To no one’s surprise, the former lawyer and director of Liberty came up with the report Corbyn wanted, joined the Labour Party, was handed a peerage and is now believed to be the next shadow attorney general in waiting. Nothing untoward there, then. I refer to Baroness Chakrabarti’s recent history merely to illustrate there is more to her than meets the eye.
Just two years ago, Chakrabarti gushed how she was “very grateful for a wonderful state education”, showing her to be one of the people. Now we find that she sends her son to one of Britain’s top private schools, Dulwich College, which annually charges £18,000 for day pupils and £37,000 for boarders. A little awkward for the comrades, perhaps?
Corbyn, who himself attended an elite grammar school (not his fault), divorced his wife when she insisted on sending their son to a grammar school and now Sebastian Corbyn is former grammar schoolboy John McDonnell’s chief-of-staff, so no jobs for the boys there, then. And Diane Abbott, that champion of the working classes, sent her own son to a private school when she sniffily declared local schools were not good enough for him.
And then there’s Emily Thornberry, Corbyn’s shadow foreign secretary, who sent two of her three children to selective schools using the argument that “all parents would do the same thing, which is to maximise the chance for their kids.” So that’s all right then, Emily. Everyone can send their children to private schools or grammar schools if they don’t fancy their local schools, can’t they? Provided they are wealthy enough of course, very socialist from the sneering anti white van man MP.
Look everywhere in Corbyn’s top team and the same thing applies. Even his multimillionaire spin doctor, the IRA and Stalin apologist Seumas Milne, sent his two children to elite grammar schools, ignoring the many schools that were merely comprehensive near his home.
People, if they are wealthy enough, are free to send this children to private schools if they do wish and they are free to send them to top grammar schools, too. I might not agree with the way people can buy their children privileged education compared to everyone else, but that is the system we have agreed to and accepted through our democracy. But for me it is the rank hypocrisy at the top of the Labour Party that grates.
So many from Corbyn’s coterie represent a certain strain of the affluent middle classes, who have benefited from an elite education which they have then bestowed on their children, but which they seek to seek to deny to others.
How can you take someone like Diane Abbott seriously, on anything actually, but particularly any comments she makes about schools?
The cult of Corbyn is a plaything for the chattering classes, many of whom preach one thing but do quite another. And I wonder when the Corbynistas are out canvassing on education, they are honest about the people at the top whose private arrangements only come about when they are exposed by the media, as with Baroness Chakrabarti whose reputation as a fine, upstanding and honest citizen is in tatters.
