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The artichoke/think tank axis.

THE SELF-ASSURED BARMINESS 0f the establishment classes is more constant than Caesar’s Northern Star and as predictable as wind after Jerusalem artichokes.

Thus we have Anthony Seldon, Head of Wellington College, one of Britain’s posh independent schools, recommending that well-off parents who want to send their children to the better state schools should be charged up to £20,000 a year

He also suggests private schools should be compelled to set aside a quarter of their places for children from less well-off backgrounds.

This is all to promote social justice (whatever that is), bring extra money into the state system, increase social mobility and reduce the power of the middle classes to dominate everything in sight.

In order to homogenise and equalitise everything, then, the middle classes should be discriminated against, have their social mobility clipped and, if they do not or cannot afford to cough up the cash, endure sending their children to mediocre state schools. All while continuing to pay through their taxes for the education of the children of those who are insufficiently middle class to have any choice. Power to the proletariat, comrade Seldon!

These ideas are published in a document published by Social Market Foundation, who describe themselves as “a leading cross-party think tank, developing innovative ideas across many economic and social policy areas. We champion policy ideas which marry markets with social justice and take a pro-market rather than free-market approach.”

Not just any old think tank, you see, but a “leading” one, and cross-party at that, just to convince you that they’re not really lefties in disguise, as if all three major parties are somehow ideologically different.

IT’S AN IRON rule that all such groups and individuals talk in pretentious code. Hence “innovative”, an adjective that should be restricted to describing children’s tv programmes, followed by that tart-for-all-consciences, “social justice” and then the most weasely of all their weasel phrases “pro-market”. The latter is a smarmy liberal’s phrase for price and wage controls, ie, state capitalism. Dress it up as you will, there is no way that a non “free” market is anything but a controlled one, and not really a market in any acceptable sense.

These are loony ideas from the loony end of the liberal congregation and are being dismissed, even by the media left (“Fees for state schools is an evil idea”). It doesn’t mean they’ll vanish for good, however. Bad ideas, like bad politicians and bad smells, tend to hang around. I quite expect to see some part of this idiocy returning in another form under some future administration.

Michael Blackburn.

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