Across the pond

Travelling down to Dorset today I bought The Independent, on the basis of its front page lead, quite different from the rest of the newspapers. The headline was: ‘Enough of this educational apartheid’. It was, so the sub-head told me, ‘a devastating attack on our two-tier education system.’

It was written, not by one of The Independent journalists, but by the headmaster of Wellington College, which I know as one of the minor British public (i. e. private or ‘independent’) schools, Wellington College, one Dr Anthony Seldon.

As a working class lad educated quite effectively at the Wolverhampton Municipal Grammar School, I smarted in my young adult life, from all those minor public school boys who made fun about my many social gaffe’s and my dreadful Wolverhampton accent, which has none of the atrractions of the almost lyrical Scottish, Irish or even Yorkshire accents. It is plain ugly.

So now, in 2008, I have the master of Wellington College speaking up for people of my ilk. But what is his solution. He does not want me to suffer the embarrassment of going to Wellington College and getting mocked for my accent and my relatively inadequate educational background. He wants me to feel comfortable and still get the benefits of a public school education. So his solution to ‘educational apartheid’ is for Wellington College being allowed to start one of the these new-fangled Academy Schools, which as a result of the Blairite vision of new Labour, are now part of the system. Instead of teaching by teachers we have academies run by the rich of all persusions, who are allowed to educate the nation’s youth. So there is one that is sponsored by David Beckham, and is going to make football a priority.

For me that smacks of the worst of American capitalism, i. e. football scholarships. And the worst of Soviet communism. Concerned to rear athletes to win gold medals, rather than education of the whole person.

The name Seldon was familiar. So I went into Wikipedia, and discovered that Anthony is the son of Arthur Seldon, who with Ralph Harris, founded the Institute of Economic Affairs, devoted to the free market and the philosphy of Hayek. I knew both of them quite well in the early 1960′s, when they were using their think tank to preach the gospel of the free market. I liked both of them, because although I disagreed with their thinking, I admired the zest with which they espoused it.

And of course in those days we never thought that the world would revert to nineteenth century ideas about how national economies should be run. But of course the world did. And Margaret Thatcher came to power on the ideas of their think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, although Wikipedia does not tell you.

And as a result we now live in a world where the City men and the bosses of public companies earn one hundred times the salary, which long educated and hard working members of the middle classes can hope to achieve. Seldon’s dad and Ralph Harris, would not have been happy with this outcome. They certainly did not want such inequalities. And in a truly free market, of course, it should not happen, because the men who are pulling down such huge salaries, are doing so because they have managed to grab the reins of power and to pay themselves vast salaries, even when they fail.

Young Arthur Seldon rebelled against his father in writing a mostly laudatory biography of one Tony Blair, the architect of New Labour, who, as readers of this blog will know, has just accepted the golden sovereign from the arch-capitalists, J. P. Morgan.

Today’s Independent also has a four page article reporting how during his premiership Blair took mass, with his wife and children, administered in Downing Street, by one of the assistants of the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, who had a reputation for winning celebrity converts (including Anne Widdecombe).

This should be the stuff of a BBC comedy show, if it were not happening to our leaders. And Blair, although he has accepted the Morgan sovereign, apparently wants to be President of Europe. Whereas for people like me he has never understood that Europe is not, like the UK has been mostly, America’s reliable ally, but an independent voice in the world. Not anti-American.But not slavishly following everything that emerges from  American power.

Blair still has his followers. Here is a link to their web site, which I discovered when one of them posted a comment on my blog.