Hypocritical Labour politicians buy houses to get their children into high-performing schools while demonising the privately educated as a ‘sort of pestilence’, Peter Hitchens has argued.
Speaking on the latest Alas Vine & Hitchens podcast, the longstanding Mail on Sunday columnist cited the example of a Labour ‘power couple’ who bought a home in an exclusive neighbourhood of the capital.
‘The catchment area of a certain girls school in North London is so small that if you want to buy a house there, it’s going to cost you millions of pounds,’ Hitchens said.
‘Because I can’t prove intent, I will not name the extremely glamorous Labour power couple who, some years ago, bought such a house in its catchment area.
‘They got their daughter into Oxford and all the rest of it, and launched her on the sort of career she would have had if she’d gone to a private school, only without any of those disadvantages that now fall on the heads of privately educated boys and girls who are considered to be sort of pestilence.’
Much was made of the fact that 92 per cent of Keir Starmer’s 2024 Labour cabinet attended comprehensive schools – making it the most state-educated in modern history.
In February the government announced plans in a new white paper to restructure school admissions with the aim of stopping parents from being ‘priced out of going to their local school’.
However, Hitchens pointed in the podcast to a new type of ‘well-hidden privilege’ by which middle class parents continue to game the state education system.
Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens has accused Labour politicians of exploting a new type of ‘well-hidden privilege’ to game the state school system
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson introduced a white paper earlier this year which aimed to stop parents being priced-out of areas with high-performing schools
He said: ‘Alan Milburn and his social mobility campaigns and Ofsted have constantly fed the idea into the employment market that you that if you discriminate against privately educated appeals, you’re helping the poor.
‘On the contrary, the new form of privilege which exists in this country has nothing to do with private schools, everything to do with well-hidden privilege.
‘And the thing that I wanted to dwell on here is that left-wingers actually love privilege, provided it’s only for them, and it’s not just this couple, there are several schools in London.
‘Again, I won’t name them, but I know where they are and who send their children to them, which are noted for being extremely high standard schools, effectively highly selective, though technically comprehensive.
‘Some of them are religious, though not all of them are, and they are full of the children of the left-wing elite who then progress to Oxford and Cambridge, who do not discriminate because they’ve gone to private school.
‘So this is, this is hugely endemic problem in in our middle class and our education system, the civil service and professions everywhere.’
To illustrated his idea of ‘disguised privilege’, in the same episode Hitchens shared an anecdote about his time living is Moscow, where he served a a foreign correspondent between June 1990 to October 1992, reporting on the final days of the Soviet Union.
‘I had to go out on my own and try and find somewhere to live in Moscow, which is complicated.
The Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, pictured in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square in 2005. He previously lived in the city in the early 1990s as a foreign correspondent
‘I struck very lucky, and I was introduced to a member of the Soviet elite who was going abroad on some sort of mission for a couple of years, and he had a superb flat on the 11th floor of a block built, as all the best buildings in Moscow are, by German prisoners of war in the 1940s – very solid construction work.
‘It was full of KGB men, and my favorite neighbours were the families of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov.
‘Fourteen foot ceilings, chandeliers, Moscow in both directions, over the river on one side and from the university down to the Kremlin on the other. It was actually one of the nicest places I’ve ever lived.
‘During a period of vodka rationing, I got my vodka ration. Officially, it was just like any other Soviet flat but obviously it wasn’t.
‘I saw disguised privilege when I drove through Moscow, I had to drive past the Kremlin clinic, which had a 15 foot stone wall around it and trees planted within it, so you couldn’t actually see the building.
‘This was a hospital the size of a general hospital in a major British city, reserved entirely for the members of the Communist Party Central Committee.’
To hear Peter Hitchens and Sarah Vine debate middle class parents’ gaming of the state school system in full, search for Alas Vine and Hitchens wherever you get your podcasts.
