General UK politics VIII - The Last Tory

Vixen said:
I think this clip might be apposite here. :unsure:
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No. The response to your posts has nothing to do with your gender; it has everything to do with you posting nonsense and then doubling down when corrected.
 
Vixen said:
I profoundly disagree with you that 'Starmer went to an ordinary school'. You are judging his school by the standards of today's egalitarian system, where everyone has an equal opportunity and no-one is in competition with anyone else; marks are neutral, such as, 'A', 'B', or 'C', etc. It is a sociological fact that the type of school Starmer frequented was indeed highly elite. There would have been intense competition for such a place, it was a door opener; pupils were pitted in competition with each other; actual marks and ranks were read out in front of the class. Those with good marks were encouraged to feel pride (hence the reputation of being 'stuck up'), with those of lesser ability expected to feel envious and ashamed, and to strive to emulate the more academic. For Starmer to get into Oxford to study Law tells you that behind those boyish spectacles is a determined character who had a good school support network, given subjects like Law and English are amongst the most popular and heavily oversubscribed.

Look up the social history of the tripartite system to confirm for yourself it was not only highly elite and sought after, it was indeed a ladder into the establishment, with even fee-paying parents desperate to get a place (one reason the system was abolished) and academic success ranked higher than the traditional fee-paying schools. It gave us Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher, etcetera.


Claiming Starmer's Reigate Grammar of the 1970's was just 'an ordinary school' like the comprehensive down the road is a common misconception.


As for the rent boy joke, the caricature of the English upper classes as being effete is founded on a perception of 'camp' as being a peculiarly English thing. Like all caricatures there is a kernel of truth, given the the tradition of single sex schools.




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You haven't the faintest clue, do you?
 
The Don said:
Tutoring to get them through the entrance exam. With sufficient preparation, will and tutoring even quite dim people can pass.
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Durham School (our local private school, which the likes of Dominic Cummings and Alexander Armstrong attended) used to offer an extra year post-A-level for tutoring to get bairns into Oxbridge in the days of Oxbridge running their own entrance exams over the top of the (then) UCCA system, whereas those from the state grammar schools had to just get on with it.
 
Boris statement on Two-Tier Kier's deal.

He's an orange ball chewing gimp apparently.

Boris Johnson
@BorisJohnson
Two-tier Keir is once again going back on his promises to the people of this country - by making us non-voting members of a two-tier European Union. Under this appalling sell out of a deal the UK will have to accept EU law on a host of measures from food standards to emissions trading.

We will have to accept whatever changes the EU decides to make to those laws.

We will have to accept the rulings of the European Court of Justice in the definition and enforcement of those laws. We will therefore lose our freedom to innovate in areas such as gene editing and much more besides.

We will lose much of our freedom to do proper free trade deals. Worst of all we will have no say whatsoever in making those rules and those laws and no ability to change them.

Two-tier Keir is the orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels. He has sacrificed UK fishing interests, handing over our seas to be plundered again - when under the current Brexit agreement we are on the point of taking back full legal control, next year, of every fish in our waters. He is clearly bent on signing up to a deal on free movement which could give 80 million younger EU nationals the right to come to this country. He appears from this document to be preparing to allow the EU to regain control of UK policy on state aids and competition.

Most bizarrely of all he has agreed that Britain will once again be paying countless millions of pounds into EU coffers - for the privilege of becoming the non-voting punk of the EU Commission! What have we got in return? Wishy washy EU promises to get rid of some of the vexatious and unnecessary bureaucracy that they have been using against British travellers and business - but no real guarantees that this will be enforced and above all no real guarantee on frictionless trade between GB and Northern Ireland, which should be entirely a matter for the UK and not the EU.

This deal is hopelessly one sided. It combines the vassalage of Chequers with the surrenderism of Chagos. Starmer promised at the election that he would not go back on Brexit. He has broken that promise as he broke his promise on tax.

This deal should not be signed, should not be ratified and should never come into force and if it is the next Conservative government should kick it out forthwith.
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zooterkin said:
Is there anyone here who didn't go to Grammar School? :D
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Me. The 11 plus was stopped 4 years before I would have faced it. I went to one of the local comprehensive schools (albeit it was called a high school) , quite lucky as the school had only opened one year before so we did get a lot of funding from the LA that caused resentment from the older established comprehensives. The disadvantage is that the school was built around us!
 
zooterkin said:
Is there anyone here who didn't go to Grammar School? :D
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Me! I passed my 11+ despite living in France for the first term of the last year of junior school. Incidentally, one of my classmates at junior school was an arrogant thicko called Al. He went off to an international school and then to Eton... ;)

However, I wasn't allowed by my mother to go to the grammar school around the corner, so instead went to a relatively distant (for London) comprehensive school* for a year where nothing was prized higher than mediocrity. Then a lot of other schools as my mother continued to travel around the UK and Europe with my brother and me in tow. The longest I ever spent in one school was the two years of A-levels (at another comprehensive school).

*same school, not at the same time, as David and Ed Milliband.
 
malbui said:
I was in Maidstone. None of my cohort - born between 1965 and 1971 - had anything like a selection exam.
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The first year of that was exactly when it was stopped where I was. The grammar school I was at went comprehensive.
 
Agatha said:
Me! I passed my 11+ despite living in France for the first term of the last year of junior school. Incidentally, one of my classmates at junior school was an arrogant thicko called Al. He went off to an international school and then to Eton... ;)

However, I wasn't allowed by my mother to go to the grammar school around the corner, so instead went to a relatively distant (for London) comprehensive school* for a year where nothing was prized higher than mediocrity. Then a lot of other schools as my mother continued to travel around the UK and Europe with my brother and me in tow. The longest I ever spent in one school was the two years of A-levels (at another comprehensive school).

*same school, not at the same time, as David and Ed Milliband.
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And me. I went to the local comp, which was quite well regarded. The most famous person that ever went there was Nicolas Lyndhurst.
 
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