The Labour Party has its Oxbridge officer class but the other ranks have to be kept in check or they - its power base - may wander off.
As with the cynical saying about drug companies (‘a patient cured is a customer lost’), a voter who aspires to the middle class is a mutineer to socialism. The ladder is, or was, education.
So in 1965 grammar schools were in Tony Crosland’s sights: ‘If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking Grammar School in England. And Wales. And Northern Ireland.’
His government Circular 10/65 succeeded in kicking away 1,200 ladders; there are now only some 230 left in England and Northern Ireland.
Does it matter, given the switch to comprehensive schools?
Yes, it does. My late friend was at a grammar school in Cardiff when the changeover occurred. Some of the merging secondary modern crowd attempted to bully the swot; unfortunately for them he was physically strong and merciless, so they learned to leave him alone.
Unless a comprehensive headteacher is ruthless, this instinct of the herd to pick on outliers and achievers will prevail. Thank goodness for Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela School, which gets outstanding results by dominating and stretching its non-selective intake - and has received much bitter criticism on Twitter for her pains. She had previously been ousted from the academy at which she taught for daring to tell the Conservative Party Conference and the world about the uselessness of much of our education system. How dare she succeed!
Now, unless your child is in the Michaela’s Wimbledon catchment area, or that of a wealthy suburb where riff-raff are excluded by house prices, what do you do, if you can just about manage it?
You go private.
The coming VAT tax slap on private schools will not deter the richest. They can afford it, and if riled too much may send their sprogs to some finishing school on the Continent.
No, the people this will hit will be the aspirant working class.
I taught - tried to teach - for half a term at an out of control comprehensive. One of my colleagues was a black woman whose salary was spent on private education for her three young children; she was not having them held down by indisciplined schooling. The cook, as it were, knew better than to eat at the restaurant where she worked. But would she be able to afford another 20% in fees?
As so often, Labour’s jealousy and malevolence, disguised as seeming to want the best for all, will have its worst effect on the people for whom the Party was formed.
And with any (bad) luck, it will help to keep its voting base corralled.
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