Grammar schools are an interesting case - just like the Laffer curve which has also been a cornerstone of Tory thinking. Even after it became known that Cyril Burt - whose supposed ‘research’ was the entire basis of the idea of selection at age 11 - had in fact simply invented his ‘results’, and there is in fact no evidence that selection at 11 is possible, most Tories continue to believe in it.
Bizarre or what? No - not at all - since the central belief of the political right is that details like evidence and reason and truth don’t matter.
I think you’re tying yourself up in knots there, Geoff. She’d previously criticised Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for sending their kids to private school. She even characterised her decision as ‘indefensible’, while gamely trying to defend it. Pure hypocrisy. I agree though that she doesn’t have the monopoly on that, as the current government regularly demonstrates, although I don’t get your road analogy!
You mistake a neatly tied up argument for a knot Pete.
The point of the roads analogy is that it exposes the double-standards of those on the right that accuse the left of hypocrisy for doing things in their own lives they would like to end in future, improved social organisation.
As somebody with red/green political beliefs, I want to see investment removed almost entirely from roads and directed into public transport - expansion of railways and (electric) buses. But until this happens I have to live in the real world - in my particular circumstances, now, I need a car (which is electric by the way).
Right-wingers think it’s hypocritical of me to have a car (they really have said this many times) - just as they think it’s hypocritical of somebody to believe in and work towards an excellent state education system that meets everybody’s needs, but in their own particular circumstances, now, send a child to a non-state school.
The double standard is clear, isn’t it? Right-wingers don’t live their own beliefs, but only see this as hypocritical in others. For example, they advocate a small state, privatising public services, etc - but in their own lives continue to use public services (such as state built and maintained roads).
If they held themselves to the same standards they expect of others, they would refuse to use public services, wouldn’t they?
But my argument - and the analogy - still hold, don’t they?
The right doesn’t advocate abolishing roads as such - nor does the left advocate abolishing schools as such. (Actually the left doesn’t advocate ‘abolishing’ private schools either - the Labour Conference motion on this was widely misrepresented, naturally - this was actually discussed at length here on SurviveFrance - rather, Labour, and the left generally across the world, advocates integrating private schools in the state system, as indeed French ‘private’ schools generally are already.)
But you raise an interesting point. In it’s fervour for privatisation and ‘free markets’ the right makes certain exceptions, like the police, the army, and roads ! Could this be, do you think, because these excepted areas are precisely the public services they need to use ‘freely’ for the protection of property and extraction of profit?
But it’s the whole idea of ‘free markets’ that really takes the biscuit for hypocrisy, isn’t it?
For a start it’s nonsense - no market can take place outside of strict legal and/or cultural regulation.
But moreover, the opposition to regulation - just like the opposition to public services - is highly selective, as clearly exposed by intellectual property rights. Yes - you guessed it - all those multinational corporations and their apologists that keep demanding freedom from red tape suddenly turn into arch-regulators when they want to assert their own property rights.
It’s all just a tissue of blatant lies and obvious self-deceptions. Just like the idea that the focus on Diane Abbott truly reflects her unique corruption (really? in this Parliament?) and not the simple fact that she was the first and for years the most prominent BLACK woman there.
If you think you’ve seen free market lunacy in the UK, wait until Liz Truss gets in. I swear John Redwood, Steve Baker etc are camped out around a microphone, telling her what to say through an earpiece. She’s going to be a very useful idiot to those rabid free marketeers, which is what this is all about.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on schools. My point is really simple. Diane Abbot condemned Blair and Harman for sending their kids (I paraphrase here: ‘it sends the message that we say one thing and do another’). That is hypocrisy.
Regarding her being black, she’s had to put up with the most appalling abuse. Her appearance in front of the select committee, speaking about that, was very sad. It shouldn’t happen. But I think she’s made enough gaffs on TV, schools aside, to question whether she should be speaking for the Labour Party now.
They could do a lot worse than appoint Mick Lynch to that role!
…and totally unsuited to the rôle.
Watch what professor tim wilson has to say about her involvement in the release of raw effluent on to Britain’s beaches and rivers…
Your point about Diane Abbott doesn’t affect mine Pete, because I emphasised the particular circumstances that lead to the decision to use a private school. Abbott probably knew these in relation to Blair and Harman - we don’t. If their decisions were based on the usual reasons for choosing private education (to gain prestige and privilege) then that is hypocritical: if they were based on the genuine educational need of each child (as I understand Abbott’s was) then that is not hypocritical.
Nor does any of this affect my central point: that the very people that harp on endlessly about Abbott’s hypocrisy are generally themselves far more hypocritical.
As to Abbott’s ‘gaffs’ - I well remember her getting the odd figure wrong, endlessly replayed in the media and repeated across social media. I answered those posts at the time simply by collecting really, really stupid figures that white middle-aged male politicians had quoted (one of them I recall was one Boris Johnson) and asking why the media kept going on about Abbott’s mistake but hardly ever mentioned theirs.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out the answer, does it?
can one also factor into this that the Blairs were well off their home territory living in a grace and favour apartment in Westminster whereas their home was ‘up norf’ so to speak?
Ms Abbott is a Londoner but as you say, there were special circumstances…
It’s ironic that these free marketeers worship the private sector but have no idea that if they withhold £24m funding, the companies aren’t going to do the job out of goodwill. Even by current standards around Westminster, she is spectacularly stupid.
Which, of course, will suit Redwood, Baker and the ERG just fine.
Assuming you’re in France, you’re at a safeish distance, I suppose. We might join you. At least I’m an Irish citizen and hopefully I can sign my other, British half in!
We live permanently in France as you say.
As for “safe distance” arms length perhaps but significantly impacted by pension income from the UK and its constant devaluation against the Euro.
Further, a constant worry about the health and well-being of relatives remaining there.
It brings me to a point though - Abbott is a Cambridge history graduate, albeit she “only” got a lower 2nd class degree but at a time when only the top 5% (or less) got to university at all - the same is true of many politicians who’s CVs read well but time and time again come across as … well … thick.
Indeed not, I’d suggest insisting on at least tertiary education but even that would not get rid of some of the worst (though it would disqualify Dorries, so there’s that, I suppose).
Moreover, she got to Cambridge from a very modest background (her Dad was a welder and Mum a nurse). To have achieved this as a working-class black woman at the start of the 70s is truly amazing. Believe me, I know this - I sat the Cambridge entrance exam and got an interview at King’s - at which it was completely obvious that my interviewers had no notion of where somebody like me was coming from (even though I was white and male, my class background was even more modest that Abbott’s).
Judging from this alone, my guess would be that however she comes across on television, Abbott is a hell of a lot cleverer than any of us.
