Andrew Neil has just written a thought-provoking piece about the composition of the new House of Commons and what it tells us about the "post-meritocratic" nature of contemporary Britain. He points out that 53% of Conservative MPs were privately educated, 20 of them at Eton. The number for the Lib Dems is 40% and labour 15%. Perhaps most shockingly, the percentage of privately-educated MPs has gone up not down, increasing from 30% in 1997 to 37% today. Pretty amazing when you consider that only 7% of British schoolchildren attend fee-paying schools:
Now we have two private school boys who went to Oxbridge (Messrs Clegg and Cameron) negotiating the future shape of our country behind closed doors while a non-Oxbridge grammar schoolboy (Gordon Brown) is merely an observer. Hard to think of a more poignant visual symbol of the end of the grammar school dominance of British politics than that. So much for education, education, education. (To read more, click here.)
