Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot, Hugh Gaitskell, Baroness Jay, Roy Jenkins, Peter Mandelson, Lord Longford, James Purnell, Jacqui Smith, Shirley Williams, Harold Wilson, Ruth Kelly……what a chamber of horrors they'd make! Between them, that little lot destroyed the British economy, its education system, democratic politics and the nation’s moral standards. Good God! – are the people running this course over the years all in the pay of the KGB? Or Satanists? Did they all sit around in late-night huddles cackling with glee as they planned the destruction of our way of life?
As for current (or very recent) LibDems, these include Ed Davey, Danny Alexander, Alan Beith and, or course, CAUC-in-Chief Chris Huhne.
There's lots of Tories as well – mostly of the sopping west variety, including David Cameron, Damien Green, William Hague, Phillip Hammond, Jeremy Hunt and one of the chief architects of the student fees fiasco, David Willetts. Of former Tory politicians, one’s eyes are drawn inexorably to the name of the worst Conservative politician of the 20th Century – Ted Heath.
This all looks like some David Icke-style conspiracy, especially when you look at the extensive list of media types produced by exactly the same system: Jackie Ashley, Jana Bennett, Michael Crick, Nick Cohen, Evan Davies, David Dimbleby, Stephanie Flanders, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Mehdi Hasan, Peter Jay, Simon Jenkins, Ian Katz (current Newsnight editor), Seumas Milne, Robert Peston, Lance Price, James Robbins, Nick Robinson, Will Self, John Sergeant, Mary Ann Sieghart, Hilary Wainwright, Toby Young, Tariq Ali, Tony Hall, Christopher Hitchens, Ken Macdonald (Director of Public Prosecutions) and Steve Hilton (spin doctor).
Look, I had a privileged education myself (and I went to a far more distinguished university than Oxford) so I mustn’t be too judgmental. Nevertheless, this has all the hallmarks of one of those David Icke-style conspiracies where the country is being run by a race of alien lizards – except the idea that the Oxford PPE department is a sort of British version of The Illuminati (or Opus Dei, or whatever), pulling the strings of our national life in order to shape the world in their distorted, smiley-faced, egalitarian image strikes me as perfectly feasible.
I would dedicate the rest of my life to exposing this conspiracy, but I don’t really want to end up being pursued across the globe by assassins set on my trail by the PPE conspiracy’s sinister Inner Circle.
It’s interesting to note that Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbitt didn’t study PPE at Oxford, while Nigel Lawson, the chancellor whose fiscal laxity resulted in an inflationary spiral which almost derailed the whole Thatcherite experiment, studied PPE at Christ Church.
If you haven’t heard from me again within 24 hours, contact David Icke – but, for your own sake, use a pseudonym. They are everywhere - just check the Wikipedia list, here.
This is not the first time the anti-PPE sentiment has appeared - it has been growing for a few years now, often to be found in 'wing nut' comments on blogs (where, clearly, I spend far too much time).
ReplyDeleteIt's long overdue for expansion into the wider media, so good on everyone who spreads it.
Rather than expose the plague carriers, surely what we need is a list of the bastards who concocted the toxin in the first place? Just who is responsible for it?
I will gladly provide the piano wire when they are unmasked.
I hope you haven't been hanging around on any of those "Dark Enlightenment" sites - I'm pretty sure that illegal!
ReplyDelete