This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday Column

The giant fraud that is Britain’s education system strides ever onwards, messing up many more lives than it improves.

But so many of us –parents, children and teachers – are so deeply implicated in it that we dare not admit the depth, length breadth and height of the folly.

Like ‘National Offer Day’ each March, when our viciously selective state secondary schools deny so many children a good education (usually because their parents are poor) , the second half of August is a time of bad news for many.

Not everyone is jumping about and simpering when ‘A’ level or GCSE results arrive. A lot of those who do, don’t yet know that they have been cheated or are about to be.

I’ll be chided for being ‘churlish’ for saying this. I don’t care. I think illusions, which will later shrivel up into so much crumpled paper, are far crueller than an unwelcome truth told in time.

Perhaps the greatest deception of all is the wild scheme to persuade nearly half of all our young people to go to university. Like that daft advertising slogan ‘exclusively for everyone’, the problem is obvious if you think about it. If it’s for everyone it’s not exclusive. Elites are small. If they’re big, they’re not elites.

All serious elite institutions, from the great London clubs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, have always made sure that most people can’t get into them. That’s the point.

Last week we learned that the alleged universities which so many children strive to enter give them no benefits. Even the few genuinely elitist colleges cannot any longer guarantee a future for their products. Years later, many thousands of graduates are toiling away at jobs they could have got – and done - without spending three years getting into lifelong debt which will, in many cases never be repaid.

Why do we do this? Why have we, in effect, raised the school-leaving age to 21 for a large chunk of the population? Why, come to that, do we annually import large numbers of qualified nurses and other professionals from poor countries which can’t afford to lose them?

Why is almost every unskilled or semi-skilled job in this country now done by Eastern Europeans, when (at the most recent count) the UK has 922,000 young people aged between 16 and 24 who are not in employment, education or training (NEETs)?

As always, there are two possible explanations. One is that our governments know what they are doing and consciously seek to turn this country into a third-world low-wage economy. In which case this stage is simply a transition towards that, designed to soften the blow of youth unemployment and manoeuvre its victims into paying for it by getting into debt.

In that case many of the new ‘universities’ will be bulldozed for affordable housing within 20 years, and their degrees will be quaint souvenirs like Russian Tsarist bonds.

The other explanation is that the people who run this country are so stupid that they believe their own propaganda. I wish I could work out which of these was worse, and which was true.

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Big Dope is on the verge of success



Open legal sale in this country of one of the most dangerous drugs in human history is now probably only a matter of time,

Big Dope, the billionaire-backed global campaign for this outcome, has captured the minds of much of the media and of the political elite, many of them unrepentant drug abusers during their 1960s days (and often since).

This group is even more cynical than Big Tobacco, which pretended for years that there was no link between cigarettes and lung cancer. At least Big Tobacco had the excuse that they had a business to lose.

But Big Dope wish to create a new multi-billion-pound business – even though the evidence is piling up that their chosen product is linked with lifelong irreversible mental illness.

I find this willingness to profit from human misery breathtaking. And I invite you to remember it each time you see one of these reports, decorated with grandiose names, the latest drivelling that destroying your mind with drugs is a ‘human right’.

What about the human rights of those, often parents, wives, siblings and children of drug abusers, who must take up the dismal task of looking after the pitiful husks which so many drug abusers become?

And, I might add, what about the rights of those who are murdered or injured by the unhinged ultra-violence of cannabis abusers. Yet we will not even investigate this persuasive link.

The latest example is the hideous death of E’Dena Hines, the step-granddaughter of Morgan Freeman. Her alleged killer, who is accused of stabbing her 16 times in a screaming frenzy, is (as I expected he would be as soon as I heard of the crime) a heavy user of the supposedly peaceful drug, cannabis.

Our descendants will wonder if we were ourselves drugged as well as unhinged when, in future times, they mourn and regret our irreversible folly in legalising this dreadful poison. Haven’t alcohol and tobacco done enough damage, and made enough profit for cruel and greedy people?

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Looking the Wrong Way

Personally I think we have heard pretty much all we need to know about the Labour Party leadership election, Far more interesting, but (as usual) far less covered is the revelation that David Cameron’s EU ‘renegotiation’ really is a blatant fix.

The former Cabinet Minister Andrew Lansley has told select audiences that the whole thing is planned, right down to a fake table-thumping row with the French to make the Prime Minister look like John Bull.

If this got the prominence it deserved, the referendum result might be in some doubt. But most voters will still be unaware of it by the time they come to vote in September. News isn’t just what happens. It’s what a fairly small group of people decide is news.

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The Chatterley Delusion

Is there no escape from dramatisations of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, quite possibly D.H. Lawrence’s worst and most embarrassing book? The BBC are trying to whip up interest by claiming that their new version will be less explicit than the one before.

When will people grasp that the famous prosecution of this indifferent work was an elaborate panto, designed to destroy what was left of our obscenity laws?

Everyone knows the silly quote about letting your wife or servants read it. Nobody knows that there were no prosecution witnesses at all, except a solitary constable confirming that the book had been published. There were 35 defence witnesses. Almost all of them had read the book in uncensored versions, which really wasn’t very difficult even in those days. The publishers had printed 200,000 copies of the book before the trial. Most of those who bought it probably never finished it. The fuss is and always was a fake.