Guido Fawked - Labour Privilege Hypocrisy

[Update at end of post]

As the field of candidates for the Labour leadership seems to have stabilised, so the attacks from the right-leaning punditerati have gathered pace. Some of those attacks verge on the desperate, and typical of these is yesterday’s effort from the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, titled “The All White, All Oxbridge People’s Party”, coming from an, er, all-white source.

Fart in lift Inquiry experiences following wind

“All of the Labour Party leadership candidates are scions of privilege” declares the post, on the grounds that all five declared hopefuls attended either Oxford or Cambridge University. However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, this is not in itself a mark of privilege: one need not hail from an elite background to go up to Oxford or Cambridge. Perhaps we should consider where they all went to school.

And here the Fawkes analysis comes badly unstuck: only one of the five, Tristram Hunt, attended an independent school. All the others - Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh and Liz Kendall - went to state schools and colleges. So the Fawkes rabble are only 20% correct in their assertion. And it gets worse - as in much, much worse - when one  looks to see who authored that post.

Now who might be sitting in an awfully draughty glasshouse right now? Yes, you guessed it: this pile of steaming bovine by-product was the work of the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole, Staines’ tame gofer, who knows all about being a “scion of privilege”, because he is one. Master Cole, unlike four of the five Labour leadership hopefuls, went not just to an independent school, but a singularly exclusive one.

Tonbridge School, so its Wiki entry tells us, “is an independent day and boarding school for boys … it is a member of the Eton Group, and has close links with the Worshipful Company of Skinners, one of the oldest London livery companies … Tonbridge's fees are among the highest of all the independent schools in Britain in terms of Boarding, at £35,163 per year, compared to Eton's £34,434 or Harrow's £34,590”.

Yes, the buffoon Cole went to Tonbridge School, and there he is calling “scion of privilege” on the likes of Andy Burnham. That’s not just hypocrisy, it’s M&S hypocrisy. It’s hypocrisy that should generate a straight-A f*** right off in response. But then another thought enters: if Master Cole attended an Eton Group school - the kind of school that sends so many of its pupils up to Oxford and Cambridge - why didn’t he go there?

And then the additional thought enters that Cole has always had a tendency to shonky grammar - in addition to the exaggeration and dishonesty - and leads to the impression that, while Andy Burnham went up to Cambridge to read English, the flannelled fool might not have been good enough. Were that to be the case, this amateurish smear of the Labour Party could just as easily be described as a fit of petty jealousy.

Master Cole went to Edinburgh to read politics. And he’s shite at that. Another fine mess.

[UPDATE 20 May 1155 hours: this morning, Tristram Hunt concluded that he may not be able to gain sufficient support from Labour MPs - any candidate for the leadership needs the backing of 15% of the Parliamentary party, or 35 MPs - and so has withdrawn from the race.

Instead, he had given his support to Liz Kendall, which means that all the remaining Labour leadership candidates attended state schools. That makes the hypocrisy of Master Cole yet more glaring. Someone who went to the exclusive, Eton Group Tonbridge School calling four state-educated MPs "scions of privilege" is beyond parody]