Make education a level playing field
BORIS Johnson can thank Nigel Farage for his win in Hartlepool, where in the General Election the Brexit Party took more than 10,000 votes. In short, once the habit of a lifetime’s loyalty to one party was broken, voters found the courage to switch completely. Indeed, Boris owes the size of his parliamentary majority to the Brexit Party’s having taken votes away from Labour and there are still some 36 seats where the combined Brexit Party/ Conservative vote was greater than the winning Labour’s and which therefore could still fall to the Conservatives in a future general election.
Of course, it hardly helped Labour that it put a Remain candidate in a seat where the Brexit vote had been 70 per cent in the referendum, thus turning its nose up at its own supporters, whose views it loftily ignored. That however is now political history; what matters is the future.
At the next election, Boris will be judged in such seats less by Brexit than by the success or failure of the “levelling up” programme.
One of the most telling factors in that process will be rigorous education, which opens up opportunities for the children of the less well-off.
TONY Blair recognised that when he made a mantra of “education, education, education” but his answer was to level down with rampant grade inflation and prescriptive rather than analytical exam answers. We need grammar schools, which provide for free what thousands of parents go without to afford and which can rival most public schools in results and Oxbridge entrance. One in every major northern town would be a good start for levelling up.
That cannot be done overnight but it can be started easily within the lifetime of this parliament. When I was an MP I was fortunate to represent a constituency which still had grammar schools and the eleven-plus, for which poll after poll showed widespread support.
Boris benefited from the best education in the land so will he please extend some of that opportunity to the less fortunate?