Eton alone has provided 20 of the 55 prime ministers we’ve ever had. Harrow produced another 8 and Westminster 2. In other words more than half went to just three public schools. Does it matter?
Reading the Observer article one would say yes. It is written by Richard Beard who attended just such a school, Radley College. But like all the others, he was sent away to prep school when he was eight years old, deprived of family love and forced to develop coping mechanisms in order to survive:
"I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken. We lost everything – parents, pets, toys, younger siblings – and we could cry if we liked but no one would help us. So that later in life, when we saw other people cry, we felt no great need to go to their aid. The sad and the weak were wrong to show their distress, and we learned to despise the children who blubbed for their mummies. The cure was to stop crying and forget that life beyond the dormitories and classrooms existed. Concentrate instead on the games pitches and the dining hall and the headmaster’s study. By force of will we made ourselves complicit in a collective narrowing of vision."
And:
"From the teachers we learned about mockery and sarcasm as techniques for social control, with our boy hierarchies regulated by banter, ranging from a sharp remark to a knuckle in the crown of the head. Attack was the best form of defence, and ridicule was honed as a deeply conservative force, controlling by means of fear, either of being the joke or of not getting the joke. There was plenty of fear to go round. The author Paul Watkins, in his memoir Stand Before Your God, remembers at Eton the huge amount of energy, in the time of Cameron and Johnson, that went into “teasing and ignoring people”. “I felt a harshness that I’d never felt before.”
Despite having had the most expensive education money can buy, they are apparently the worst possible people to act as leaders. Public schools, particularly Eton, are in the business of knocking out men (always men) who are trained to think of themselves as superior beings, leaders born to lead while being uniquely badly qualified to do it. They have no empathy with ordinary people whatsoever.
Beard makes a key point, that men like George Orwell (an Old Etonian) and others like him were "exposed by war and other calamities to a seriousness that grew their stunted selves and tempered the isolated and ironic cult of an English private education."
Johnson and the most recent crop had no such grounding in the harsh realities of life to bring them to their senses and hence we get calamities like Brexit.
The article prompted a response on Twitter by Nick Duffel, a former boarding school teacher who wrote a similar piece for The Guardian in 2014:Why boarding schools produce bad leaders. His article was about David Cameron, Boris Johnson only gets a fleeting mention, nobody seriously thought he would ever become PM.
"With survival but not empathy on his school curriculum from age seven, Cameron is unlikely to make good decisions based on making relationships in Europe, as John Major could. He can talk of leading Europe, but not of belonging to it. Ex-boarder leaders cannot conceive of communal solutions, because they haven't had enough belonging at home to understand what it means."
Duffel says Cameron's European counterparts are different, Angela Merkel held "multiple fragile coalitions together through difficult times by means of her skill in relationships and collaboration." Obama's relations with Putin are covered as a way of illustrating how people from non-public school backgrounds manage things on the international stage far better, and Duffels says despite their elitist education, and because of it, our own "wounded leaders" can't manage such statesmanship.
I’m a prole from a nondescript council estate, somebody an Etonian would regard as an oik. But the state school I went to (a secondary modern) in the late 50s actually wasn’t all that different. We had maps on the wall showing the extent of the British empire as it had been prewar, still embracing India and huge swathes of Africa.
It was somehow drummed into us that we, the bottom layer of English society were naturally superior, even with our rough east midlands accents and holes in our shoes, wearing threadbare jumpers our Mam’s had knitted, were privileged above people from all other nations. Amazing, eh?
It wasn't until the mid 70s when I began to travel and visit Europe that I began to suspect it might not all actually be as I had been taught. Now I know it wasn't.
Reefers
Yesterday’s post about HGV drivers and potential food shortages was I think fairly accurate as will become clearer as the weeks go on. I noticed later someone on Twitter had reinforced the basic reasoning and added a bit of extra detail. It concerns reefers. These are refrigerated trailers used extensively to transport fresh produce. There is a limited number available in Europe.
What has exacerbated the driver problem is the lack of reefers.
Why? Firstly, we are not importing as much fresh food because EU drivers don’t want to come here. Paid by the kilometre, hanging around in customs isn’t attractive plus the restricted opportunity of cabotage (trips inside the U.K) and the lack of return loads carrying fresh food like shellfish being exported to Europe, means they find it hard to make a trip to Britain pay.
So, they don’t come. This has reduced the general availability of reefers for trips inside the UK something they have been doing for years, but now are not.
But worse, what fresh food is being exported to Europe now has to be done by British drivers and British reefers. This has further reduced the chilled distribution capacity here by taking reefers and drivers out of the domestic supply chain for long periods.
I don't suggest this is a perennial problem, it can be fixed - given time. Will it be fixed in the next few months? No.
It is another unforeseen problem of Brexit but of course many people are still in denial:
I’m quite impressed how the RHA and Hauliers have managed to convince large amounts of people on Twitter that the current driver shortages are all because of Brexit and thus only the Governments fault, it’s worked a treat on large sections on “remain/Rejoin” Twitter..
— Mick (@Lordofthevan) August 10, 2021
What Mick doesn't tell us is, if it isn't Brexit what is it?
Finally, a quote from John Redwood from September 2018 about 'project fear':
"[Remainers] said 'There will be delays and queues at the UK ports leading to food shortages'. The UK government has made clear it is not going to impose a new range of delaying checks and procedures at our ports to hold up food we wish to buy from the continent after we have left. Why would we want to do that?"
Why indeed?
