Education is a right and a social benefit, not a commodity to be traded by the rich

After nine years of deliberate Tory vandalism the UK education system is in absolute chaos, but Labour have a fantastic proposal to reverse this damage and make the British education system fit for purpose again.

Under Jeremy Corbyn Labour have developed some fantastic policies, such as publicly owned not-for-profit rail, national grid, water supply and Royal Mail, a National Investment Bank like Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, decentralisation of political and economic power, restoration of the NHS, investment economics instead of austerity fanaticism, and the long-overdue closure of the depraved Tory disability denial system.

But the shining jewel in Labour's policy proposals is the establishment of a National Education Service to provide quality education, for free, to all who require it.

It's a fantastic idea because access to a good education is a right, and an obvious benefit to all of society. And the Tories are horrifyingly wrong to have treated education as a commodity to be traded for profit by the rich.

The Tory damage

The damage the Tories have done to our education system over the last nine years will echo down the generations in the form of squandered opportunities, misallocated resources, wasted potential, and unpayable debts.

From the roots of the education to the branches Tory education policy has been a disaster. Here's just some of the detail.

• The imposition of unprecedented 8% school funding cuts since 2010, inflicted as a result of the Tory fixation with economically illiterate austerity fanaticism (to check the damage they've done to your local schools since 2015 use this school cuts calculator).

• Tory contempt for humanities and the arts has resulted in a sustained ideological attack on stuff like arts, drama and music in schools. The Tories don't seem to give a damn that the creative industries is one of the few areas where the UK is still a world leader, nor that this sector is now worth over £100 billion per year to the UK economy.

• Inequalities between schools have been dramatically exacerbated by Tory education reforms, meaning that whether your kids get a good education or a poor one is even more of a Postcode lottery than it ever was before.

• 75% of secondary schools in England transferred to the ownership of shockingly unaccountable and profiteering Academy chains which are designed to topslice our (already diminished) kids' education budget via bloated executive salaries.

• The imposition of outrageous levels of student debt via £9,000 per year university fees on rip-off inflation+3% repayment terms that mean 83% of post-2012 graduates will never pay them off, despite entire working lifetimes of paying out 9% of their disposable income in "aspiration tax".

• The Tory fixation with austerity dogma has had its most damaging effect on the education system in adult education, which has suffered an astounding 45% funding cut since 2010. It should be stark-staringly obvious that a well-funded and easily accessible adult education and retraining system should be a vital component in an ever increasingly volatile jobs market, but the Tories have cut it to shreds.

National Education Service

Labour's concept of an integrated National Education Service to provide quality education from cradle to grave is absolutely brilliant, and could revolutionise education in the same way that the introduction of the NHS in 1948 revolutionised our health system and improved our nation's health.

Stop the profiteering

The right-wing idea that education is a commodity to be traded by the rich is an affront to basic common sense.

The primary purpose of an education system should be to provide the best standard of education, not to extract quick profits out of the system.

It's just absurd short-term thinking to think about the education system as a primary source of profit (via profiteering academy chains, dodgy no-bid supply contracts, rip-off student debt repayments ...) rather than a crucial component of future economic prosperity.

The better educated we are as a nation, the more economic potential we have, and the more cash that gets siphoned away in bloated executive salaries and private profits, the less is left to actually spend on the principal task of providing a quality education.

The establishment of a National Education Service would squeeze out the profiteers and reorientate our schools, colleges, universities, and adult education facilities back towards what always should have remained the primary objective: providing the best possible education.

Workforce flexibility

Perhaps the most obvious area where the National Education Service would be an advantage would be the provision of adult education and retraining.

Instead of using draconian sanctions to hound people into finding work (that often simply doesn't exist), referrals to the National Education Service for retraining would clearly be an awful lot more effective.

Someone who loses their job in their 50s doesn't need hounding and abusing until they find work, what they probably need is a skills upgrade, from computer literacy to new skillsets entirely, and a National Education Service that provided these courses free of charge to anyone who needs them would be an obvious economic benefit to the nation in the long-term.

Education for all

One of the most commonplace right-wing whinges goes along the line of "why should I pay for other people's education opportunities when I didn't get a good education myself".

This unbelievably selfish but incredibly commonplace whinge would be eliminated by the introduction of a National Education Service providing access to free education for all.

If everyone is entitled to free education and training, then the only ones left whinging would be those who don't want to benefit. "why should I pay for other people's education opportunities when I don't want to be educated myself" doesn't have quite the same impact does it?

Policy-based debate

The proposal of a National Education Service is a fantastic policy, but few people know about it because the Tories and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media know that Labour and the left would win hands down when it comes to policy because the general public strongly support most of it (see image).

That's why politics is continually debased to such an extent with an endless barrage of trivial nonsense and outright smears.

Corbyn didn't bow properly. Corbyn didn't sing the national anthem. Corbyn doesn't dress in expensive Saville Row suits so he's unfit to be Prime Minister. Jeremy Corbyn's an IRA supporter (because he met members of Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionists to appeal for a peaceful resolution to the conflict). Corbyn went to Morecambe. Corbyn is a Czech spy. Corbyn supporters are all Stalinists and Trotskyites. Let's focus on anti-Semitism in Labour all the time (when there are way more anti-Semites in the Tory ranks). Corbyn supported Hitler during WWII (even though he wasn't even born). Corbyn is a Russian stooge (even though the Tories are the ones raking in £millions from Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies). Corbyn muttered "stupid woman" (or was it "stupid people"? let's debate this for several days!)

The barrage of nonsense and smears is as endless as it is deliberate.

They'd much rather we expend our time and effort defending Corbyn, and Labour, and the left in general from this constant bombardment of gibberish, than spending it discussing and explaining Labour's policies.

And the concept of a cradle to grave National Education Service is one of the best Labour policies of all. Maybe let's talk about that for a while, rather than continually fixating on the latest faux outrage or manufactured smear?

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Why are the BBC actively amplifying Lib-Dem lies?

Last night on BBC Question Time the Lib-Dem MP and party leadership candidate Jo Swinson told a blatant lie claiming that just 4% of kids from Govan in Glasgow end up going to university, blaming "lack of aspiration" and "lack of investment".

The real figure is that 22.8% go on to university or higher education colleges, which is not particularly high compared to more affluent areas, but 570% higher than Swinson's unsourced claim.

The worst thing about this Lib-Dem lie isn't that Swinson used fake statistics, it's the pure classism of making out that kids from poor areas like Govan are less likely to succeed academically because of "lack of aspiration".

The lie also seemed to be motivated by a desire to terrify middle class English voters by raising the awful caricature of the terrifying working-class Govan shit hole (which is a bit like using Moss Side's fearsome reputation to terrify southerners about the whole of northern England).

Then there's the fact that the Lib-Dems actively helped their Tory mates to absolutely trash investment in education between 2010 and 2015 resulting in an unprecedented collapse in per pupil funding.

Furthermore the Lib-Dems helped their Tory chums to significantly lower infrastructure investment in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England, while massively boosting investment in London and the South East.

This means that that any kids from working class communities who do overcome the odds to succeed out of austerity-ravaged areas will end up being drawn away to London and the South East if they want the best jobs and opportunities. A brain-drain scenario that leaves abandoned northern communities even further behind.

And let's not forget that Swinson and her Lib-Dem pals' broken promise not to hike tuition fees, resulting in English students facing the highest fees in the world to study at public universities (Scotland escaped this grotesque Lib-Dem betrayal thanks to devolution and the SNP government's commitment to education as a right, not a commodity to be traded by the rich).

Even more concerning than Swinson's classism, lies, and white-washing of her own party's track record in government is the way the BBC uncritically amplified what she said.

Of course nobody expects the host Fiona Bruce to know precise higher education attainment statistics for every local area in the UK off the top of her head, but we could at least expect the BBC to check that statistics aren't lies before they tweet a clip of the lie, with an uncritical repetition of the lie written in the actual text of the Tweet!

If the BBC had any intention of actually holding the political class to account, they'd fact check the all of the Question Time clips they're thinking about tweeting to make sure they're not amplifying lies, and then publicly call out people who get caught lying on their show in order to actually hold them to account.

But far from calling this lie out, the BBC actively helped Swinson spread it even further by uncritically retweeting it.

Middle class Brexit-sceptic Lib-Dem types are often the first to complain when the BBC actively helps to amplify Brexiteer lies and false promises, but in order to avoid being total hypocrites they also have to complain when one of the darlings of their pro-austerity, pro-student debt, pro-privatisation, anti-investment, welfare-vandalising Lib-Dems spouts made up statistics. Especially when the made up statistics are intended to push the classist trope about kids in poor working class areas "lacking aspiration", as if it's their own fault for having severely reduced life opportunities, when in reality it was the Lib-Dems and their Tory mates who spent five ruinous years slashing education funding and deliberately rigging the UK economy against kids from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England.

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Jacob Rees-Mogg's anti-intellectual fans want him purged from politics because he's got a degree!

Anyone who has ever taken a look through the various Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson fan pages on Facebook will be familiar with the racism, bigotry, anti-Muslim hate, xenophobia, anti-immigrant abuse, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, lionisation of far-right ideologues like Tommy Robinson and the Britain First hate group, extremist rhetoric, threats of violence & civil war, and gleeful fantasies about the public execution of their political opponents [sources 1,2,3,4,5,6] ... but in this article I'm going to take a quick look at something that is somewhat less sinister because it's quite frankly hilarious.

 

Anti-intellectual purges of the political system are actually a rarity
on a page where abuse, bigotry, racism, threats, conspiracy theories,
and fantasies about the public execution of political opponents
are the norm.

 Between all the abuse, bigotry and threats of violence that can be found in the Jacob Rees-Mogg Supporters' Group on Facebook, there's an extraordinary thread in which numerous Rees-Mogg supporters fantasise about an  anti-intellectual purge of the political system where anyone with a university degree is thrown out of the House of Commons and barred from standing for election!

The obvious problem of course is that their own demagogue Jacob Ress-Mogg would be one of the victims of this anti-intellectual cull of MPs as a result of the undergraduate degree in history he obtained from Trinity College Oxford in 1991 (in the days before the neoliberal-fixated Westminster establishment club introduced staggeringly high tuition fees designed to enforce a lifetime 9% education tax on those with parents unable to stump up tens of thousands per child to cover the fees).

The absurdity of wishing their own hero out of parliament because he's fallen foul of their anti-intellectual standards is hilarious, but it's also illustrative of the way anti-intellectualism is spreading like wildfire on the political right.

Surely everyone remembers Michael Gove's extraordinary "we've had enough of experts" appeal to anti-intellectualism during the EU referendum debate, and how experts and academics were almost completely sidelined in favour of fact-averse rhetoric-spewing Tories on either side of the debate?

And there's a reason the political right love to tell people to trust their base emotional instincts rather than looking to the kind of facts, evidence, logic, and reason that people like experts and university professors tend to use.

The reason for this anti-intellectual propaganda is that facts, evidence, logic, reason, and observable reality tend to defy their far-right worldview.

The extreme-right need people to reject facts, evidence, reason, science, and logic because reality has a left-wing bias.

If people actually listened to the evidence then it would be obvious that quitting the largest free trade area on the planet with an unprecedented shambles of a Tory government running the show is bound to end up causing a socio-economic chaos.

If people actually listened to the evidence then endlessly giving away not-for-profit public services to private profiteers so they can rent them back to us at way above the original cost is a bloody awful idea.

If people actually listened to reason they'd pin the blame for declining living standards and collapsing public services on 9 years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, social security cuts, and deliberate under-investment in public services and infrastructure projects, and never buy the extreme-right snake oil explanation that immigrants, the EU, political correctness, and human rights are somehow to blame.

So in order to dissuade people from thinking along these lines the extreme-right have to continually spread mistrust of experts and academics.

They tell us "why believe the experts when you can believe your own gut instincts instead?"

And they tell us "don't trust academics because they're actually terrifying lefties spreading dangerous "cultural Marxism" in order to destroy white western civilisation".

The Nazis used exactly the exact same techniques to justify their ideological purges of academia and the business world, and in fact the whole "cultural Marxism" theory the extreme-right use to discredit expertise and academia these days is lifted straight from Nazi Germany where it was called Kulturbolschewismus and blamed squarely on the Jews.

So yeah, the absolute ignorance of anti-intellectual right-wingers calling for their own demagogue to be purged from politics because he's got a degree is hilarious, but the anti-intellectual ideology that underpins this absurd nonsense is actually quite concerning.

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How thick does Theresa May imagine students are?

Theresa May and the Tory party have some incredible brass neck to announce that they're going to conduct a year long review into education funding because of the shocking levels of student debt that graduates are building up as a result of the Tory/Lib-Dem policy of imposing the highest tuition fees in the world for study at public universities, and applying rip-off inflation plus 3% interest on the resulting debts.

It's absolutely extraordinary that Theresa May is now pretending to be concerned about these extreme debt levels when she voted in favour of this impoverishment strategy along with the rest of her Tory chums.

We know that they voted in favour of this policy because they see the huge debts and the 9% aspiration tax that graduates must pay on their disposable incomes as a highly effective means of limiting social mobility and ensuring that the economy is rigged even more in favour of those with parents rich enough to pay the tuition fees up front*.

We also know that Theresa May didn't give the slightest damn about the issue of student debt when she became Prime Minister in 2016 because one of her very first acts was to scrap the maintenance grants that helped students from low-income backgrounds.

This Tory "review" has obviously been inspired by sheer panic at the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn's proposal to scrap tuition fees and institute a National Education Service to provide free education to anyone who needs it, no matter what their age, income or background.

It's taken the Tories eight years to realise it, but lumbering the majority of graduates with vast unpayable debts with ridiculous interest rates is a sure-fire way of creating a generation of people who hate your political party with an absolute passion.

But instead of admitting that their tuition fees hike was a deeply unfair policy of erecting social mobility barriers in order to benefit the children of the establishment, and that Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely right that education should be considered a social good that benefits everyone in society, rather than a commodity to be flogged at the highest possible price, they've decided to make a big fuss about kicking the issue down the road for another year in the hope that it makes it look like they actually care.

Had Jeremy Corbyn won the 2017 General Election these outrageous rip-off tuition fees would have been abolished already, yet all Theresa May is offering is "we'll look into it and get back to you in a year".

Theresa May must imagine that students are pretty damned thick to buy this ridiculous song and dance the Tories are making about how much they care about the devastating impact of their own damned policies. And she must imagine that they're absolute bloody half-wits if they're going to accept Tory "we'll look into it and get back to you in a year" guff as preferable to a Labour commitment to immediately scrap rip-off tuition fees.

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* = Finding an extra £9,000 per year for your kid to go to university is an impossible dream for most ordinary families, but £9k is an absolute snip compared to the £39,000 per year fees at Eton (David Cameron's school)  £37,740 at Westminster (Nick Clegg's school).

What does Theresa May actually believe in?

Whatever your opinions on the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, it's very easy to see what he stands for.

There's obviously a lot of deceptive interference being run by right-wingers who despise Corbyn's political stance and want the public to believing in a terrifying caricature of the man rather than thinking about his actual policies, but if you haven't picked up the basics of what he stands for by now, you've really not been paying attention at all have you?

Here are three of the things Corbyn undeniably stands for:

• Public ownership: Jeremy Corbyn believes that public infrastructure and services should be run as democratically accountable not-for-profit organisations for the benefit of the British people and the British economy, rather than businesses with the primary focus of extracting huge profits at the expense of the British public and the British economy, in order to enrich their private owners.

• Foreign policy: Jeremy Corbyn believes that the most effective form of conflict resolution is usually dialogue between both sides, he opposes imperialist wars of intervention because they create lawless terrorism breeding grounds (Iraq, Libya, Syria ...) and he is strongly opposed to the sale of British made weapons to tyrannical Islamist regimes like Saudi Arabia, especially because it's known that they're being used to commit war crimes against civilians in Yemen.

• Social benefits: Jeremy Corbyn believes that things like health care and education are social benefits that everyone should be entitled to, not commodities to be restricted to only those who can afford to pay for them. That's why he wants to renationalise and properly fund the National Health Service, and to introduce a National Education Service to provide free education to everyone.

When it comes to Theresa May, the question of what she stands for is almost impossible to answer.

If you judge her solely by her words she cares about things like social mobility, making Britain a fairer place, and making sure nobody gets left behind. 

However if you judge her by her actions, she's clearly driven by a desire to reduce social mobility, and to make Britain a more unequal place where ever more people are getting left behind while the mega-rich elitists get richer at a faster rate than ever before.

Take May's crocodile tears in her inaugural speech over poor working class boys being the least likely to go to university of all. But then one of her very first actions as Prime Minister was to completely scrap the system of maintenance grants designed to help students from the poorest backgrounds!

Take Theresa May's claims that she wants to make Britain a fairer place. Then she continues with the hard-right wage repression and austerity policies that impoverish the poor and ordinary as the mega-rich literally double their wealth, and fall hardest of all on low-income women.

How can anyone see these brazen Tory economic attacks on students from poor backgrounds and low-income women as being remotely compatible with all of Theresa May's fine words about wanting to make Britain a fairer place?

Her speechwriters clearly believe that millions of British people are too lacking in critical judgement to spot the glaring contrast between the cruelty and elitism of Theresa May's policy decisions, and the deceptive saccharine slop they fill out her speeches with.

They honestly seem to believe that a significant proportion of the British electorate are so naive that they prefer to judge people on their fine words, rather than by their repulsive and highly contradictory actions.

May's willingness to say literally anything her speechwriters put in front of her, no matter how glaringly these fine words are contradicted by her actions, makes it seem difficult to discern what she actually believes in. However this willingness to deceive is actually one of the biggest clues of all.

Her willingness to engage in this kind of deception makes it clear that she's prepared to do pretty much anything to serve her own interests. 

She knows that a certain demographic wants to hear noble words about her Christian faith and her desire to make Britain a fairer place, so that's what she says. 

But she also knows there's another demographic who fear and despise social mobility, and they're the ones who pour millions in donations into the Tory party, so she makes a big show of deliberately attacking social mobility to keep them happy.

Anyone who can act in this grotesquely dishonest two-faced manner clearly has no real principles at all, and is guided solely by their own selfish self-interest.

Then there's Brexit: The way she campaigned in the weakest possible manner for Remain because keeping her job as Home Secretary was the number one priority from a career perspective (Remain win = natural successor to Cameron / Leave win = holder of high office of state and "safe pair of hands" candidate to replace Cameron); the way she immediately switched from Remain to hard Brexit extremism when it suited her career to do so; the way she bribed the DUP bigots into backing her so as to retain her grip on power; the way she continually dances to the tune of the secretive cabal of Tory hard Brexit fanatics because she knows that she's finished as Prime Minister the moment they turn on her.

In light of all of this, how is it even possible to see her as anything but the self-serving charlatan that she is?

This deceptive and self-serving behaviour is grotesque, but in a way it's actually understandable because Theresa May is a woman who has clearly been brought up immersed in the bizarre hard-right dogma that humans are essentially self-serving economic units (homo economicus) and that the more ruthlessly self-serving people are, the more efficiently the economy operates!

In a way Theresa May is actually the logical product of the four decades of fanatical hard-right dogma that has infested the British establishment ever since Margaret Thatcher introduced it in 1979: A political leader who sees the serving of her own personal self-interest, not as a vice, but as an expression of the highest possible virtue.

So she doesn't care how incredibly damaging it is that the UK is lumbered with such a weak, directionless, self-serving, and downright dishonest Prime Minister as we face up to the most complex and risky diplomatic challenge since the 1940s, her only real political principle is to do whatever it takes to serve her own personal self-interest.

She'll lie, and deceive, and evade responsibility for her actions, and repeatedly act against the best interests of the nation, because her priority will always be to do what is in her own selfish self-interest. And anyone who expected Westminster's four decade obsession with hard-right Thatcherite dogma to turn out any other way clearly wasn't paying attention to the "greed is good" ideological lunacy that underpins it all.

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The searing Tory hypocrisy over people with histories of posting vile online comments

We all remember the outcry over the newly elected Labour MP Jared O'Mara, and his history of posting grotesque misogynistic and homophobic comments right?

We remember how the scandal was whipped up by the hard-right Guido Fawkes blog, and pushed hard by a load of grandstanding Tory MPs don't we?

We also remember that the Labour leadership were quick to suspend Jared O'Mara from the Labour Party over the scandal.

Well the Tories have triggered a scandal of their own by appointing the obnoxious right-wing polemicist Toby Young to lead their new Universities Watchdog.

Young already had a reputation as a person with very nasty views (he's written columns attacking equality legislation and disabled people, describing working class students at Oxford as "stains", and actively promoting eugenics), but this appointment inspired people to go back through his online comments to highlight all manner of vile and outrageous things he's spouted over the years.
 

These comments range from obsessing over the size of various women's breasts (including those of an underage girl), stating that he'd had his "dick up her arse" about Padma Lakshmi, accusing George Clooney of being "as queer as a coot", and describing Helen Mirren as a grandma he'd like to shag.

Young has subsequently tried to hide the evidence by deleting some 50,000 Tweets, but it's come far too late. If he'd had any sense at all he would have deleted them before applying for a public sector job, or maybe even considered not spewing vile sexist and homophobic comments all over Twitter in the first place.

Given the absolute stink the Guido Fawkes blog kicked up over Jared O'Mara, you would have thought they'd be keen to stick the boot into Toby Young over this scandal too, but somehow no!

Young has actually written a social media post vindicating himself, and thanking Guido Fawkes for the support they've given him!

Then there's the grandstanding Tory MPs who made such a fuss over Jared O'Mara's history of posting sick online comments. They're suddenly much less critical when it's one of their own who has been caught out spewing vile comments all over Twitter. In fact Boris Johnson has even tried to pass off Young's offensive stream of bile as "caustic wit"!

One of the most interesting things to consider is the fact that Jared O'Mara was hastily picked as a Labour candidate in a seat they didn't really expect to win because Theresa May called a snap election, denying Labour the time to conduct the kind of due diligence that would normally be expected.

When O'Mara's grim online comments history was discovered, he was quickly (and rightly) suspended from the party.

Now compare this with the Tory government's decision to overlook more qualified candidates to appoint Toby Young to their Universities Watchdog. They had plenty of time to carefully consider their decision, and to check that he was an appropriate candidate (by reading some of his blogs, or by looking through his Twitter feed for example).

Not only did the Tories fail to do their due diligence when they had plenty of time to do it, they're desperately retreating into defence mode now that his vile comments have been revealed, rather than admitting that a mistake has been made and that he's actually an entirely inappropriate person to have been awarded the supposedly impartial role he's been given.

If there's one thing that's even more glaring than the fact that a supposedly impartial role should never have been given to a vile hard-right polemicist like Toby Young, it's the absolute hypocrisy of the Tory Party (and the Guido Fawkes blog) for bitterly attacking Jared O'Mara for his vile online comments, and then desperately defending Toby Young when he's been caught out posting exactly the same kind of disgusting online abuse.

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The Tories just appointed the unqualified right-wing polemicist Toby Young as their new "Universities Tsar"

In September 2016 Theresa May gave a nauseatingly insincere speech in which she claimed that she wanted to turn Britain into "a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like".

Of course anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of the history of the Tory party, and Theresa May's own record in government will know that they've relentlessly attacked social mobility, and loaded the economic burden of their toxic austerity dogma onto those who can least afford to pay it, whilst lavishing vast handouts and tax cuts on the very wealthiest people in society.

The absurd decision to appoint the hard-right polemicist Toby Young as their new universities tsar just goes to prove how empty Theresa May's meritocracy speech actually was.

Not only is Toby Young completely unqualified for the role he's been appointed to (other than being relentlessly biased in favour of the Tory party), significantly more qualified candidates for the role have been swiftly rejected out of hand.

Take the case of the academic Nazir Afzal who is a former Chief Prosecutor, the pro-chancellor of one university, a director at two, and a visting lecturer at three more. He was rejected without an interview, with the job eventually going to the spectacularly unqualified Toby Young.

The highly qualified academic from a minority background is rejected out of hand in favour of the unqualified white guy who relentlessly propagandises for the Tory party. That's Theresa May's version of "meritocracy" in action.

It doesn't matter how qualified you are for the job, if there's some ridiculously unqualified lickspittle with connections in the Tory party who wants it, you might as well not bother.

This ludicrously anti-meritocratic appointment is yet another demonstration that Theresa May and the Tories are lying through their teeth whenever they talk about meritocracy.

Then there's also Toby Young's disgusting track record of spouting sneering elitist abuse to consider too.

Toby Young is an elitist snob who openly admitted that he only gained entry to Oxford University on a technicality* rather than on merit, who sneered at working class Oxford students who did get there on merit as "stains".

Toby Young is so obnoxious he described wheelchair ramps in schools as a "ghastly" policy and disabled students as "functionally illiterate troglodytes".

Toby Young is so biased in favour of the Tory Party that he smears Labour Party members as being as bad as the Britain First hate mob, but says nothing when serving Tory politicians get caught sharing vile extreme-right propaganda from Britain First and their ilk.

The University and College Union (UCU) summed up how inappropriate this ridiculous appointment is by saying that if the Tories' ne Universities watchdog was "to have any credibility it needed a robust board looking out for students’ interests. Instead we have this announcement sneaked out at new year with Tory cheerleader Toby Young dressed up as the voice of teachers and no representation of staff or students."

It just goes to show how out-of-touch the Tory party has become that they actually imagine that a spectacularly unqualified hard-right polemicist with extreme, obnoxious and incredibly right-wing biased views is the ideal candidate to impartially oversee our universities.

And it just goes to show how much contempt they have for the general public (you) that they think they can get away with making an appointment like this whilst lying through their teeth that they're actually in favour of meritocracy.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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* = Brasenose college Oxford sent him an acceptance letter by mistake, then his father, Lord Young badgered them into accepting him onto the course even though he'd failed to meet their entry requirements.