After Mr S’s colleague Harry Mount wrote in The Spectator that the Labour party has undergone ‘a brain transplant’ under Jeremy Corbyn with a purge of the Oxbridge set, Martin Amis went on to accuse the Labour leader of being undereducated. The best-selling novelist said that he suspected Corbyn — who achieved two Es at A-Level before enrolling at the North London Polytechnic to study trade union studies for a year — possessed ‘slow-minded rigidity’.
Now Corbyn’s cheerleader Owen Jones has waded into the debate. Writing for the Guardian, Jones comes to the Labour leader’s defence arguing that an Oxbridge degree isn’t everything. He says that opting to study at a red brick university over Oxford or Cambridge is not something that should be sneered at as Oxbridge is the place where the most privileged — rather than the most intelligent — go to study. He says that ‘if Oxbridge drew more students from non-selective comprehensives, the status quo would be less objectionable’:
‘Unless you are a social Darwinian who believes the richest are the brightest, in no sense can Oxbridge be described as an academic elite. More than 43% of Oxford students went to a private school, as did 7% of the rest of the population; many of its state school students went to grammars, and a terrifyingly small 11% of Oxbridge students are working class by origin.’
As for Mount and Amis? Their academic achievements are — in large — down to the fact that they are both very privileged, attending private schools and born into wealthy families.
‘Would they have racked up their achievements without their privileged background? It is possible. But very unlikely.’
All very well, only when it comes to Corbyn’s academic shortcomings the argument may fail to explain why he himself did not excel. After all, Corbyn — who grew up in a seven-bedroom manor house in Shropshire — was the only Labour leadership candidate to attend a private school, studying at the independent Castle House Preparatory School before moving onto the selective Adams’ Grammar School. What was that about privilege again?
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