What Toynbee doesn't get

mitch

Its lucky for Polly that the gruniad picks its people on family/friends grounds if it was ability she would know what its like to be poor.I only read her stuff to see how deluded she has become as for the book I will waste no time in reading it.

PJ

You just don't get it, do you? It's a disgrace that they mow the lawns in Oxbridge. Poverty in Britain's sink estates would clearly be eradicated if undergraduates had to put up with grass two feet high.

Unemployment amongst gardeners might increase slightly of course, but they aren't going to vote Tory whatever, are they?

Keith

Why doesn't Polly just bugger off to Chiantishire and shut her big fat useless mouth? She is an apology for a woman and a hypocrite to boot.

mart

Good article, Pete.

Once again the basic mistake is to focus on equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

A focus on inequality of outcome is misplaced, because there are so many variables influencing it. Not least, personal choices, ability, skills, effort.

The best focus is on increasing opportunity - notably by increasing quality of education provision. Then, let people make the most of what has been given to them in life.

But complaining when a few (and it is a few) are able to reap large rewards, is just envy.

How does it help the poor to complain about how rich the rich are?

Martin Morrow

Why is it Polly Toynbee reminds me of Marie Antoinette?
Possibly the advice she hands out?

TGF UKIP

After the amusing europhile rubbish Daniel Korski of the Guardian has entertained us to over the past week or so, perhaps the Dear Editor would like to invite Polly to contribute to the gaiety of the Coffee House during the remainder of the silly season.

Better still of course would be a permanent Polly presence in the Coffee House. Just think of the fun that would bring.

ToMTom

Polly is just miffed because she was sent down from St Anne's, Oxford, for being an academic failure.

When you are born to things and comptetition shows you are simply not up to it.....well it grates a whole lifetime.

Poor Polly, failed at everything and depended on background for advancement

JONNY

Strange though she's suddenly put all her weight behind one excessively bright and pampered graduate from a very privileged intellectual nursery indeed called ... Oxford. I refer of course to David Miliband.
Having read her piece in The Guardian I'd hazard a shrewd guess she's 'mad about the boy.'

Verity - Saving darts already

Brilliant piece, Peter, and a simply dazzling suggestion from TGI UKIP. Think of the hours of innocent merriment! The carefree sport! The mental muscles developed thinking up new and interesting responses for the amusement of fellow Coffee Housers!

I suggest Saturdays to contribute to the wild air of demob exhileration!

Verity

PJ - While I do agree with you that poverty would disappear from Oxford if they stopped mowing the lawns - it makes perfect sense to me - are you absolutely sure gardners vote socialist? People who enjoy conserving things actually usually vote Tory.

G. Short

Polly Toynbee is the ultimate cliche of what non-Guardianistas think of the The Guardian.

Over-privileged, over-paid, under-informed, prim, and out of touch.

Bit of an old fashioned Tory, really.

Jeff

put a link up to the Coren piece

Verity

"Manicured lawns"? You mean they put little acrylic extensions on each blade of grass?

Pete Hoskin

Jeff: thanks, I've added it now.

Austin Barry

I have spent this morning researching in depth the name "Polly". My conclusion: In the whole of recorded history the sum contribution to mankind of people called "Polly" is zip, nil, nada, rien.

mitch

do they have a pedicured football pitch?

salieri

wot about Polly Esther, then, Austin?

JH

I doubt if Polly will have seen all this as she's probably in Tuscany where there are absolutely no streetwise black kids from Brent.

Verity

The great German-Jewish linguist Dr Polly Glot?

Faceless Bureaucrat

Not forgetting the one with the kettle fetish...

mitch

She hasn't forgiven the public for not voting her a place at the trough and a proper pulpit to whine from .

JONNY

Just another thought.
No undergrad ever trod those hallowed Oxford lawns in my day in my college. The most extreme case of Oxford exclusiveness? It must surely be to that that they owe their legendary springiness.
I suppose the Dean may have been allowed on feast days. And I do seem to recollect a rather arrogant Tory don called Tevor-Roper, whom nobody now remembers, striding negigently across in full daylight - and in his riding boots ! That's your Oxford Polly. Small wonder you hate it so.

We know your game

Our Polly's a brave gal !

She takes the flack while Common Purpose continues on it's merry way subverting the nation.

Doug

"Pretty Polly" the common form of address to or by a Parrot.

Simon

Mr Coren does make a few factual errors in his article - there are many rooms in St John's College that have their own bathrooms. Most colleges (finances permitting) have upgraded their facilities since I was a student in the late 80s/early 90s. And I was the first member of my family to go to University - getting into Oxford from a not-so-great comprehensive in the midlands.

But the point about Ms Toynbee's inability to grasp that things have moved on.

1968 was a long, long time ago.

Austin Barry

Jonny, granted, Hugh Trevor Roper, was a nasty piece of work striding in his jackboots across the Quads but he had a tremendous feud with Polly's grandad Arnold about something or other. Perhaps this also explains to some extent Polly's dislike of the Oxford milieu. Silly gal.

The Carbon Footprint Monitor (Tuscany Division)

Someone over on Iain's pointed out that flights to and from Tuscany are carbonly neutral.

Ann

Toynbee is an ignorant idiot, a hypocrite and an all-round useless waste of space. Why can't she just fly off to her expensive villa in Italy and stay there for good? She is a blot on the landscape of this country, of which she covers far too many square feet.

Ann

G. Short, I am an old-fashioned Tory and I assure you I am neither over-privileged nor over-paid, under-informed, prim nor out of touch.

David Lindsay

I am by no means always in agreement with Polly Toynbee, but she has a point here.

Enormous importance is attached, by all parties, to those who think that their own sector is vastly more important than it really is (even now, the whole of the financial services sector, never mind the City alone, still accounts for less than half the GDP that manufacturing does), who are convinced that one hundred grand per year (one per cent of the population) is not rich at all, who sincerely imagine national median earnings to be poverty pay, who have managed to put about the complete fantasy that they are members of a super-adaptable global elite (in fact, they ordinarily work for the same company for decades on end, and live very settled lives indeed), who have no idea how their taxes are spent but are nevertheless convinced that every penny must be being wasted, who simply assume that nobody in the public sector is properly qualified (doctors?), and so many other things exposed in this book.

As for Oxbridge, who cares? Last year, Eton sent 95 people to Oxbridge. An Oxbridge degree just means that you are the ninety-fifth best Etonian in his year, or that person's eqivalent. So what? How good can the ninety-fifth best Etonian in his year possibly be?

Verity

David Lindsay - All 95 are the 95th best? How can this be? Surely one is the best, and another is the second-best? I feel compelled to add, "and so on?".

Fergus Pickering

That hallowed Oxford lawn
Where Trevor-Roper trod.
Shall Polly Toynbee scorn
That hallowed Oxford lawn?
Would she had not been born,
The miserable sod
To scorn the Oxford lawn
Where Trevor-Roper trod!

Frank Pulley

"What Toynbee doesn't get?"

Simple answer: "Enough!"

JONNY

This Toynbee-Trevor-Roper connection, instanced by other posters, is full of clues perhaps explaining Polly's Oxford phobia.
In one letter to Behrenson Trevor-Roper writes of his Oxford contemporary Philip T, hoping he had not visited the villa I Tatti:'I suspect not but if he had, he would have indubitably smuggled a whisky bottle into his bathroom, fallen down the stairs before dinner and perhaps seduced Augusta afterwards. He is the son of our famous English prophet, the Apostle of the Half-Baked Arnold Toynbee...'

salieri

David Lindsay:

Your conclusion is bizarre, skewed and embittered. Have you any idea how many thousands of people at Oxford and Cambridge did NOT go to Eton or, for that matter, to any public school at all? They and their parents certainly do care.

And what makes you suppose that every Oxbridge graduate is a sneering overpaid toff?

mitch

Has a Labour Government ever led the UK out of recession!?!

Any takers??

cufleyburgers

I am fed up of posting intelligent and well argued skewerings of the appalling Toynbee.

Suffice it to say that my politics oblige me to accept that she is entitled to her opinions and to express them - rather in the way the occasional dog poo on the lawn is the price you pay for an adoring and loyal companion.