This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday Column



There aren’t enough public sector houses to go round. Would it then make sense to demolish all those houses and make everyone except the rich live in tower blocks?

Of course not. Yet this mad principle – that if everyone cannot have something, nobody can have it – governs our education policy, and no major party disagrees with it.

Half a century ago, everyone agreed that secondary modern schools were not working. Everybody knew that the technical schools, promised in 1944, had not been built.

The one good part of the system was the grammar schools. They were enabling a wonderful revolution in which the very best education was flung open to anyone who could pass an exam, and our obsolete class system was finally being overthrown by unfettered talent.

Alongside them, and based on the same kind of selection by ability, was a brilliant scheme known as the direct grant, by which scores of the finest private day schools in the world took in large numbers of state school pupils free of charge.

Girls and boys from grammar and direct grant schools were storming Oxford and Cambridge by the end of the 1960s, elbowing aside public school products without any special concessions or quotas.

The sane response to this would have been to build the technical schools (which we still badly need), improve the secondary moderns and encourage and expand the grammar schools and the direct grant schools.

The actual response of Tory and Labour governments was to destroy hundreds of superb grammar schools, some of them centuries old, and abolish the direct grant system. You could fill several books with these follies, and I have.

One of the many crazy results was the revival of the dying private schools, which held open their ornate gateways to paying refugees from the comprehensive madness. The comprehensives were so bad and so disorderly that basic competence and order could be sold as top quality for fees of £25,000 a year.

It was a typical example of our governing class’s habit of finding the things that are healthy, good and beneficial, and destroying them.

As it happens, this particular mistake is reversible, and has been corrected in recent times. When communism collapsed in East Germany, thousands of parents petitioned their new free state governments to restore the grammar schools which their Stalinist rulers had ruthlessly replaced with comprehensives.

Comprehensive schools, as too few understand, have never been designed to improve education. On the contrary, their inventor, Graham Savage, actually admitted that his plan would hold back bright children.

They are a revolutionary scheme designed to enforce equality of outcome. That is why it is against the law to open any new grammar schools, and why this week’s odd legal fiddle in Sevenoaks is causing so much fuss.

But a tiny rump of grammar schools continues to exist. They are so much better than the comprehensives which replaced them that even Labour politicians, such as Harriet Harman, have readily endured derision and career damage to send their children to them.

This is why the remaining few grammars are so besieged. Their enemies repeatedly lie about this. Because a tiny few oversubscribed schools are dominated by the middle class, they claim that a national system, available to all, would have the same problem. This obviously isn’t true, yet they keep on repeating the falsehood.

Why can’t we restore the lost grammar schools when huge numbers of parents want them and they are proven to work?

It is time for these lies to end. As things are, state schools are rigidly and cruelly selective, but their pupils are picked on the basis of their parents’ wealth and ability to live in the right catchment area, or their public piety – or both.

The rich and powerful (including many Tory and Labour politicians and some of the keenest campaigners against grammars) play a constant Game Of Homes to lever and wangle their offspring into the best postcodes and the best ‘comprehensives’. Many of these are so socially selective that they have hardly any poor pupils receiving free school meals, though you never hear this fact mentioned.





Why do we put up with it? Why can’t we restore the lost grammar schools when huge numbers of parents want them and they are proven to work?

How dare we laugh at the Germans for being subservient and obedient, when we tolerate this stupid, dishonest policy, which wrecks the hopes of thousands each year and madly wastes the talents of this country?

What's so saintly about destroying a happy family?

It was absurd to deny votes to women for so long. But the fashionable new film Suffragette is deeply misleading about how this came about, and rather nasty. Did Meryl Streep know what she was doing when she lent her stardom to this production?

It makes a saint out of a (fictional) working-class woman, played by Carey Mulligan, who ruthlessly destroys her small, happy family for the sake of an abstraction, ignoring the pleas and kindly advice of good men.

And it makes a heroine out of another fanatic, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who is in fact a terrorist, and helps to blow up a Cabinet Minister’s home.

I hope the makers are not prosecuted under the absurd and unBritish 2006 Terrorism Act, which created the offence of ‘Glorifying Terrorism’, though some may think that is what their film does.

There is quite a lot of evidence that the militant suffragettes actually damaged the cause they so noisily pursued. The film doesn’t even mention the First World War, which did far more to bring about votes for women than hunger strikes, broken windows or arson.

David Cameron’s twin bungles in Libya and Syria, where his ignorant interference helped cause the huge migrant wave, have transformed the EU referendum campaign.

Cameron's pro-EU argument has been so weakened by the migrant crisis that a vote to leave Europe may now acually be possible

He has been doubly unlucky. First, he unexpectedly won the Election with a majority, so he has to keep his promise of a vote. Second, a largely indifferent public has spotted the connection between EU membership and our undefended borders.

This means that a vote to leave is actually possible, which I must admit I hadn’t thought it was. The pro-EU argument has always been feeble and dishonest, as the comically useless launch of the ‘Stay-in’ campaign last week showed. And the Prime Minister’s ‘renegotiations’ were always hopeless. But now this is becoming painfully obvious to those who would normally not have cared.

I just hope that, if we do decide to leave, we have enough strength and wealth to act as a nation once again. Our national muscles have shrivelled and wasted in the 43 years since Westminster was turned into a glorified county council.

And we still have no major political party that supports national independence. So will we know what to do with it when we get it?