When Labour decided to get rid of grammar schools and to extend non-selective comprehensive education, I wonder if, realising the new system would produce an even greater number of uneducated and unemployable school-leavers, they decided they’d need mass immigration to provide people to do the jobs which, even though largely menial, would now prove beyond the capacity of many indigenous people.
And given that many of these victims of Shirley Williams’s impeccably egalitarian destructive frenzy would therefore have no legitimate means of making a living, maybe it was decided to create a benefits system generous enough to at least keep them alive – and, of course, to keep them voting for their Labour paymasters.
Then, having created a mass of unemployable youngsters with nothing better to do than hang around council estates getting into trouble (obviously, the education system had already taught them that they were vicitms, and the legal and welfare systems had armed them with the knowledge that expecting them to get off their arses and do something about improving their lot would constitute a breach of their human rights), did it then dawn on Labour that a massively engorged police force would be needed just to patrol these job-free estates? That would have been ruinously expensive, so maybe they plumped for tying half the available police up in meaningless paperwork, while encouraging the other half to get stuck into easier targets – namely, the middle classes, who tend to respect authority, and don’t tend to riot or carry weapons, and usually have spare cash to stump up for a variety of silly fines, mainly involving cars.
That meant the police could give the impression of being busy, while handing many estates over to heavily-armed gangs of drug dealers (a bit like the“Hamsterdam” experiment in The Wire, but without any form of supervision by the authorities, and, of course, no protection for decent people adversely affected by this dereliction of duty). Problem solved!
Hell on earth for several million Britons, of course, but weren’t they living proof of how deeply unfair our society is and how uncaring the Tories are, and how much good work there still is for Labour governments to accomplish?
Of course, because the vast majority of comprehensive schoolteachers are left-wing, that means hundreds of thousands of fairly bright kids leaving school without any desire to work in the private sector, and simply burning to study politics or gender studies or Caribbean studies – i.e. subjects which, even in the unlikely event that the student turned out to be right wing, would give most business interviewers pause for thought (at the very least).
Better create a mass of pseudo-universities, so the kidz can feel good about themselves and don’t have to study the sort of useful things they used to teach there when they were polytechnics. And bully proper universities into excluding well-educated pupils from private schools in favour of poorly-educated “students” who’ve been through the state sector: the toffee-nosed snobs at these disgustingly elitist bastions of privilege can spend a year or two trying to sort out minor things like the student’s inability to read or write properly (over-rated accomplishments, in any case).
Oh bugger! True, that takes care of the graduates from legitimate universities, but what are we supposed to do with the ones who went to “formerlies” (i.e. The University of Greater Surrey (formerly East Croydon Polytechnic))? The ones who actually managed to get to the end of their course still can’t read or write properly and they’ve got useless degrees and they’re full of silly left-wing ideas.
Better massively expand the civil service and create dozens of overstaffed, government-funded agencies to make social problems worse and render the collection of eye-wateringly high taxes even more inefficient and expensive than it used to be.
That should do it!
And, of course, send the bill to those smug middle class bastards who work in the private sector – hell, they pay for everything else, so why not for this as well? After all, the selfish sods would only waste it on private schools for their pampered offspring otherwise.
Well, that might have been the thinking behind it all. Or maybe the politicians responsible for this mess were experimenting with hallucinogens. I can’t really think of any other convincing reasons for destroying a decent education system and an excellent police force.
(And before I receive the inevitable complaining emails – these are fantasies. The state system boasts many fine schools, dedicated teachers and able pupils, many of whom could wipe the floor with their private system counterparts – and often do. I am personally acquainted with many state-educated contemporaries who regularly run rings around this privately-educated dunderhead. But does anyone seriously believe that the destruction of grammar schools improved the chances of bright kids in the state system – or, for that matter, raised the academic standards of their less academically-gifted colleagues?
And, after all, isn’t that what all these terrible, destructive changes were supposed to achieve?)
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