Hypocritical Labour politicians buy houses to get their children into high-performing schools while demonising the privately educated, argues PETER HITCHENS: ‘Left-wingers love privilege if they’re the ones benefiting’

Peter Hitchens has argued that hypocritical Labor politicians are demonizing the privately educated as a kind of epidemic while buying houses to send their children to high-performing schools.

Speaking recently on the Alas Vine & Hitchens podcast, The long-time Mail on Sunday columnist cited the example of a Labor ‘power couple’ buying a house in an exclusive part of the capital.

‘The catchment area of ​​a particular girls’ school in north London is so small that if you wanted to buy a house there it would cost you millions of pounds,’ Hitchens said.

‘As I cannot prove intent, I will not name the extremely glamorous Labor couple who bought such a house in their catchment area a few years ago.

“They got their daughter into Oxford or something and gave her the kind of career she would have had if she had gone to a private school, without any of the disadvantages that people have now.” Privately educated boys and girls are seen as a kind of plague.’

Much has been made of the fact that 92 per cent of Keir Starmer’s 2024 Labor cabinet attended comprehensive schools; this made the cabinet the most state-educated in modern history.

In February the government announced plans in a new white paper to restructure school admissions to prevent parents being ‘charged to go to their local school’.

But Hitchens pointed out in the podcast a new kind of ‘well-hidden privilege’ in which middle-class parents continue to game the public education system.

He said: ‘Alan Milburn and his social mobility campaigns and Ofsted continually fed them The idea for the job market is that if you discriminate against special education applicants, you’re helping the poor.

‘On the contrary, the new form of privilege that exists in this country has nothing to do with private schools and everything to do with secret privilege.

‘And what I want to focus on here is that leftists actually like exclusivity, if it’s just for them, and it’s not just this couple, there are lots of schools in London.

‘Again, I won’t give their names, but I know where they are and who sent their children to them. These schools are known to be extremely high standard, highly selective and technically comprehensive.

‘Some of them are religious, but not all of them are, and they’re full of children of left-wing elites who then go to Oxford and Cambridge, who don’t discriminate against them because they went to private school.

‘So this is an extremely widespread problem in our middle class, in our education system, in public services and in professions everywhere.’

To show his point ‘secret privilege’In the same episode, Hitchens shared an anecdote about his time living in Moscow, where he served as a foreign correspondent from June 1990 to October 1992, covering the final days of the Soviet Union.

‘I had to go out on my own and try to find somewhere to live in Moscow, which is complicated.

Sunday’s Peter Hitchens Post, a photo taken in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square in 2005. He had previously lived in the city as a foreign correspondent in the early 1990s.

‘I was very lucky and met one of the Soviet elite who went abroad on a mission for a few years and he had a magnificent flat on the 11th floor of a block which, like all the best buildings in Moscow, had been built by German prisoners of war in the 1940s; A very solid construction job.

‘It was full of KGB men and my favorite neighbors were the families of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov.

‘Fourteen-foot ceilings, chandeliers, Moscow in both directions, over the river on one side, from the university to the Kremlin on the other. It was actually one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived.

‘In a period While I was doing my vodka ration, I got my vodka ration. Officially it was like any other Soviet office, but obviously it wasn’t.

‘I saw privilege hidden when I was driving through Moscow, I had to pass by the Kremlin clinic, which was surrounded by a 15 meter stone wall and had trees planted inside, so you couldn’t really see the building.

‘This was a hospital the size of a general hospital in a major British city, devoted entirely to members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.’

To hear Peter Hitchens and Sarah Vine fully discuss middle-class parents’ play on the public school system, look for Alas Vine and Hitchens wherever you get your podcasts.