Tristram Hunt has managed to get a great deal of attention for his proposals for private schools helping out state schools, with even his own (private but sufficiently stuffed with Socialist children to be OK) alma mater getting rather annoyed at what it calls a ‘tasteless’ policy which espouses ‘what some might deem an offensive bigotry’. In summary, the Shadow Education Secretary wants to make the £700 million worth of tax breaks that the private sector enjoys conditional on the schools helping those in the state sector by sharing facilities, deploying teachers to help out with lessons, and making sure that they participate in the same leagues for sports, debating and other activities where private schools often only compete amongst themselves.
This is being interpreted as an angry class war attack on people who can afford (often only just about) to send their children to private schools. And indeed Hunt did turn on his special Estuarine accent that he uses whenever he’s drawing class dividing lines between Labour and the Tories.
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