PETER HITCHENS: Beware steel-hard Bridget – she’s extra Left-wing than she pretends and is on a mission to make all colleges equally unhealthy

Beware Bridget Phillipson, the steel-hard Education Secretary. Unlike the incoherent shambles that is the rest of the Starmer Cabinet, she knows what she is doing and how to do it.

She is impressively self-disciplined. On the one occasion I met her, as a fellow panellist on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, I could barely get a word out of her as we waited to go on air.

I rather admired her reserve. I was not her friend and she knew it. What if she accidentally committed some news? Well, she is committing it now, but she is not embarrassed by it, as it will almost certainly help her with Labour Party members of several sorts.

On Tuesday she struck twice. First, she seemed to say she was fine with boys wearing dresses in primary schools, so endearing herself to North London Leftists. Next, she announced plans to force state schools in well-off areas to take more poor pupils, bringing joy to clenched-fist class warriors all over the country. 

Even if these actions do not help her become party leader or Labour’s first woman Prime Minister – which I think is entirely possible – this is hard grown-up politics, and the schools move will change the country.

Ms Phillipson is no fool. She got into Oxford University from a troubled council estate in Washington, County ­Durham. And she is very tough, in a way Labour ­politicians used to have to be, but mostly are not nowadays.

Her background is as bleak as the 1930s. Her teacher father walked out of the family home before she was born. Even though he continued to live close by, he left Ms ­Phillipson’s mother – later a highly respected and effective campaigner against domestic abuse – alone and broke. Ms Phillipson’s maternal grandparents helped out, but money was so short that a worried neighbour actually posted cash through the ­letterbox so her mother could buy young Bridget a coat.

And do not ever think that the schools brief, which she now holds, is soft or marginal. It has been the spearhead of Leftist revolution in this ­country for many years now. She is also Minister for Equalities, deeply engaged on other vital fronts of radical social change. As a recent deep-dive profile in the New Statesman magazine noted, ‘she is more Left-wing than she lets on’.

Bridget Phillipson’s plans to force state schools in well-off areas to take more poor pupils brought joy to clenched-fist class warriors all over the country, writes Peter Hitchens

On the one occasion I met her, as a fellow panellist on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, I could barely get a word out of her as we waited to go on air, Peter Hitchens writes

I treasure a picture of her on election night 2024, surrounded by Labour Party workers, many of them giving that clenched fist salute which, to put it mildly, is not a Right-wing greeting.

She also showed her Leftist teeth when she came into office. First, she delayed and diluted laws designed to ­protect free speech on university campuses. Then she launched the most damaging offensive against private ­education ever attempted by a Labour government, by slamming VAT on fees.

This action was not aimed at hurting the rich, or even at raising money, and it did neither. The wealthy can always pay, and the Treasury will have swallowed up the money raised and spent it in a few seconds, probably on debt interest. Its aim was to cut the number of people who could even dream of affording ­independent education.

She also knew it would impoverish and, in the end, close many small and far-from-grand private schools, which live from hand to mouth. Ms Phillipson once sneered on Twitter: ‘Our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery. Our children need mental health support more than private schools need new pools. Our students need careers advice more than private schools need Astro Turf pitches.’

But she must know that many independent schools do not have embossed stationery, swimming pools or Astro Turf pitches. Those that do will probably be the ones that survive her VAT raid.

Ultimately, Labour knows that only a lawless dictatorship could actually ban ­private schools altogether. It would breach the Human Rights they claim to worship.

But the party’s Left has always resented the way that parents have been able to escape its comprehensive schools revolution by paying fees. Comprehensives were never about education. They were about imposed equality and classroom propaganda. There was never any evidence that they improved standards, and the man who invented the term ‘comprehensive school’, Sir Graham Savage, always admitted that the policy would lower standards.

British Communist ideologues, such as the aristocrat Brian Simon and the teachers’ union leader Max Morris, were prominent leaders of the ­campaign for comprehensive education, because they knew it would favour their cause. Schools are a far bigger and more important weapon in the arsenal of socialism than nationalisation ever was.

Ms Phillipson and Sir Keir Starmer visiting a primary school together

Anthony Crosland, as ­Education Minister 60 years ago, forced the mass destruction of grammar schools. Some wondered why the highly educated Crosland was so hostile to high-quality schools. He explained it in his 1962 book The Conservative Enemy, saying that Labour should regard education ‘as of far greater significance to socialism than the nationalisation of meat-procuring or even chemicals’.

But when he introduced the policy, he quickly found out that the middle class fled from it where they could. The ­abolition of state grammar schools gave a great boost to private education all over the country. But there was another escape route.

The document urging local authorities to get rid of ­grammars and create comprehensives was called Circular 10/65 in England. It admitted ‘particular comprehensive schools will reflect the characteristics of the neighbourhood in which they are situated; if their community is less varied, and fewer of the pupils come from homes which encourage educational interests, schools may lack the stimulus and vitality which schools in other areas enjoy’. Which is putting it mildly.

The circular contained a ­feeble and empty call for councils to do what they could to make all schools ‘as socially and intellectually comprehensive as is practicable’. But they created the ‘Game of Homes’, which has been used since then by parents unwilling to pay actual fees, and by rich Left-wingers trying to get their children into Oxbridge without going private.

By 2017, the authoritative Sutton Trust was reporting that more than 85 per cent of the highest performing state comprehensives took in fewer disadvantaged pupils than they should, given the population in their catchment areas. It calculated that houses in the best catchment areas were around 70 per cent more expensive than those within reach of less-favoured schools.

The organisation Teach First reported in the same year that 43 per cent of pupils at England’s most outstanding state secondary schools were from the wealthiest 20 per cent of families. Poorer pupils are half as likely as the children of the well-off to be heading for an outstanding secondary school. This is obviously wrong.

The best way to solve it would be by going back to selecting pupils on merit, an idea I am sure Bridget Phillipson hates. The worst way to solve it is the one she has ­chosen – to make all the schools equally bad.