At some point in the course of the next five years, it will probably be agreed by acclamation that Scotland is the most political small country in the world. The independence referendum produced two years of such colour and drama that, for a few weeks in the late summer of last year, Scotland and its future became the world’s favourite reality television show.
By the time the next independence referendum comes along, probably around 2018, Scotland will have participated in a UK general election and a Holyrood election. The country’s screenwriters even now ought to be visualising a brooding 10-part television series called Holyrood! and speaking to assorted studio executives in Sweden and Norway about distribution rights.
Even while this five-year festival of politics and electioneering is unfolding, those who are less engaged by the cut and thrust of declaring and declaiming can simply sit back and enjoy the process of Scotland becoming the fairest and most socially progressive country in the world too.
Describing her first-ever programme for government last November, Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said: “These plans aim to build a sense of shared endeavour about how we create a wealthier and more equal society. And it is founded on three key priorities – participation, prosperity and fairness.” The following month, Jim Murphy, new leader of the Labour party in Scotland, said this: “I want Scotland to be the fairest, most dynamic country not just in the UK but in the world. I want the only barrier to achievement in Scotland to be the limits of our young people’s imagination”, all utterly braw from both.
I’m not entirely sure how exactly we will be able to establish a suitable fairness matrix but we’ll probably know it when we see it. The first test of the integrity behind these admirable aspirations is already upon us. Admittedly, it may seem a small examination of the nation’s conscience but it should provide an early indicator of how well the country will proceed along the highway of fairness and scale the chalk face of equal opportunity. It came in a petition to Holyrood at the end of last year to end the charitable status enjoyed by Scotland’s private schools.
Fewer than 5% of Scotland’s pupils attend these schools, many of which demand annual fees that are higher than the nation’s average take-home pay. To help them maintain their buildings and meet their costs, the rest of us grant them an 80% discount on their non-domestic rates. In return for this, these institutions are supposed to provide bursaries and permit their facilities to be used by sections of the community. The number of children in the wider community benefiting from bursaries is negligible, though, and last month it was revealed that Fettes College in Edinburgh, the creme de la creme, gave 100% bursaries to under 2% of pupils. Children from Scotland’s most disadvantaged communities need the full bursary to allow them access to these places.
Of course, the bursary quotient is simply a fig leaf to hide what is really going on here. Effectively smart, progressive and fair Scotland acquiesces in a grotesque form of social engineering in which a tiny percentage of school pupils from the country’s most privileged backgrounds are bred to wield power and influence over the rest of us.
A snapshot of this is provided in the nomenclatura of first and second division judges in Scotland’s College of Justice. Of these 12 only three attended a comprehensive school.
Of the 34 judges who sit at the court of session only a third or so attended a state school.
Yet we delude ourselves that these men and women are fit to judge the rest of us whose society they were spared by Mummy and Daddy’s cash.
In Britain today, as it always has been, the upper branches of the civil service, the army and the Westminster government are reserved for a privileged society within our society. The system is not designed to ensure that only the best reach these positions but only those whom the “right sort” deem to be the “right sort”. It’s why we’ll never get to the truth of the matter of our participation in the Iraq war. Inquiries into this are given only to judges with the “right sort” of education who are then told to investigate the actions of those with whom they shared an Eton education.
According to last year’s report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, in the UK under 7% of the public attended a private school, yet more than 70% of top judges and 62% of senior officers in the army did so. More than 50% of the permanent secretaries in the UK civil service attended one of these hothouses for the elite, as did more than 25% of senior executives in the BBC. Around 20% of Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet attended a private educational facility.
In effect, the tiny gilded community that alone decides how our society is administered and arranged is a ghastly, distorted, inbred facsimile of real life in the UK. Whatever kind of society you think you belong to do not delude yourself that it is a democracy. Is how this country will look 30 years from now currently being planned in half-a-dozen independent schools? All the elections that will occur in the interim are simply devices to make the rest of us look the other way.
In Scotland, the first step is to deprive the private schools of their charitable status. Then we must impose an appropriate annual levy on these schools for hiring teachers who were educated at great expense from the public purse but who have chosen to deploy their skills for the benefit of a tiny, anointed elect.
The few that remain extant after this could be hoovered up by appropriate use of compulsory purchase legislation once it can be proved that the entire community would benefit. Get to it, Nicola and Jim.
