Peter Hitchens has criticized Labour politicians for what he terms as hypocrisy, claiming they purchase homes in affluent areas to secure spots for their children in top-notch schools, while simultaneously criticizing the privately educated as a “sort of pestilence.”
During a recent episode of the Alas Vine & Hitchens podcast, the veteran columnist from the Mail on Sunday highlighted an instance involving a Labour “power couple” who acquired a residence in a prestigious London neighborhood.
Hitchens remarked, “The catchment area for a particular girls’ school in North London is so limited that purchasing a house there will set you back by millions of pounds.”
He continued, “Although I can’t prove their intentions, I won’t disclose the identity of the very glamorous Labour couple who, a few years ago, bought a house within that catchment area.”
According to Hitchens, “They managed to get their daughter into Oxford and set her on a career path similar to one she’d have had if she attended a private school, but without the stigma now associated with privately educated students, who are seen as a sort of pestilence.”
There has been much discussion about the fact that 92% of the members in Keir Starmer’s projected 2024 Labour cabinet attended comprehensive schools, marking it as one of the most state-educated cabinets in recent times.
However, Hitchens pointed in the podcast to a new type of ‘well-hidden privilege’ by which middle class parents continue to game the state education system.
Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens has accused Labour politicians of exploting a new type of ‘well-hidden privilege’ to game the state school system
He said: ‘Alan Milburn and his social mobility campaigns and Ofsted have constantly fed the idea into the employment market that you that if you discriminate against privately educated appeals, you’re helping the poor.
‘On the contrary, the new form of privilege which exists in this country has nothing to do with private schools, everything to do with well-hidden privilege.
‘And the thing that I wanted to dwell on here is that left-wingers actually love privilege, provided it’s only for them, and it’s not just this couple, there are several schools in London.
‘Some of them are religious, though not all of them are, and they are full of the children of the left-wing elite who then progress to Oxford and Cambridge, who do not discriminate because they’ve gone to private school.
‘So this is, this is hugely endemic problem in in our middle class and our education system, the civil service and professions everywhere.’
To illustrated his idea of ‘disguised privilege’, in the same episode Hitchens shared an anecdote about his time living is Moscow, where he served a a foreign correspondent between June 1990 to October 1992, reporting on the final days of the Soviet Union.
‘I had to go out on my own and try and find somewhere to live in Moscow, which is complicated.
The Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, pictured in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square in 2005. He previously lived in the city in the early 1990s as a foreign correspondent
‘I struck very lucky, and I was introduced to a member of the Soviet elite who was going abroad on some sort of mission for a couple of years, and he had a superb flat on the 11th floor of a block built, as all the best buildings in Moscow are, by German prisoners of war in the 1940s – very solid construction work.
‘Fourteen foot ceilings, chandeliers, Moscow in both directions, over the river on one side and from the university down to the Kremlin on the other. It was actually one of the nicest places I’ve ever lived.
‘During a period of vodka rationing, I got my vodka ration. Officially, it was just like any other Soviet flat but obviously it wasn’t.
‘I saw disguised privilege when I drove through Moscow, I had to drive past the Kremlin clinic, which had a 15 foot stone wall around it and trees planted within it, so you couldn’t actually see the building.
To hear Peter Hitchens and Sarah Vine debate middle class parents’ gaming of the state school system in full, search for Alas Vine and Hitchens wherever you get your podcasts.
