Rod Liddle’s Education Policy is Antediluvian Piffle

Rod Liddle reminds us that he’s no liberal. This will not, I imagine, trouble him unduly. Nevertheless, his disaste for the middle-classes gets the better of him when he writes:

The mantra of consumer choice was co-opted by New Labour and applied to all sorts of perfectly unsuitable things. Children should go to their nearest comprehensive school, without right of appeal. If that school is failing then the local education authority, or the government, should take steps to ensure it no longer fails, by either sacking the headteacher, or spending more money on it. Middle class monkeys will still shift around from area to area looking for schools which they believe are “good”; but the scrapping of league tables – which, like all artificially imposed targets have become an end in themselves rather than a means – would lessen that likelihood. There should be no genuflection in the direction of local communities (ie no hijabs, no burqas, no Sikhs with knives, no chavs with earrings).