If you want more reason for dealing with the political elite’s career structure in the Labour party, just look at who represents Yorkshire in Labour’s shadow cabinet. Labour has 32 MPs from Yorkshire (the Tories having gained 10 seats in 2010), just 12% of the 258 won by Labour in 2010, but it has 37% of the MPs in the Shadow Cabinet (10 out of 27). This makes Yorkshire the best represented region of Britain at Labour’s top table.
Yorkshire’s finest includes the only member of the shadow cabinet that earned a living as a manual worker, former plumber Jon Trickett. But of the 10, half went to Oxford and all but 2 to a Russell group university (the 24 which see themselves as the UK’s best). Only two were born (though three grew up) in Yorkshire and no more than two live in Yorkshire now. Seven out of ten were SpAds (or the equivalent in the European parliament), and 2 others had worked full time in politics.
It’s good to have high fliers representing Yorkshire, but how many of them, apart from Jon Trickett, could be said to have had “ordinary jobs”? The answer to that is a bit subjective. My sample of respondents suggests some would say none. Others no more than two or three. Judge for yourselves. Continue reading
Gove, the epitome of undisguised reaction, is driven by three aims for the UK education system: to privatise every bit of it he can via academies and free schools, to put English traditionalism at the heart of it (symbolised for example by sending every school a copy of the old encrusted King James’ Bible), and to ensure that ‘more intelligent children’ (code for the better-off classes) were not held back by any truck with egalitarianism. 