New College of the Humanities: the sale of privilege
MOST reviewers considered ‘The Expendables’ to be a pretty mediocre film, as action flicks go. But there was no arguing with the box office pulling power of a cast that included Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke. I detect something of the same thinking at work when I read the [...]
Willetts’ £28k uni places won’t boost social mobility
SUPPOSE a Tory cabinet minister suggested helping rough sleepers by increasing the availability of £2,000,000 homes, the better to ease the pressure on the market for £1,000,000 homes. I mean, any increase in the housing stock will ultimately help get people off the streets, right? Such a policy would strain the credulity of even the [...]
The benefits of historical amnesia: Reply to Ed West
GEORGE Orwell famously observed that he who controls the past, controls the future. And luckily for us, it is the left that controls the past, or so Telegraph blogger Ed West would have his readers believe. What would you expect, given that we have sneakily spent the last 50 years ‘deliberately erasing British history from [...]
From bogus universities to free schools
I CAST no aspersions on the standards of academic rigour prevalent at Cambridgeshire University or Oxford International University, which I am sure are just as stringent as those in place at rather better-known institutions that so happen to bear strikingly similar names. Nevertheless, I was somewhat alarmed to read that there are now twice as [...]
Toby Young: how not to oppose ‘free schools’
I HAVE never met Toby Young, and have not the faintest idea whether he utilises commercial sex workers or not. But were I among the comrades campaigning against his plans to set up a ‘free school’ in west London, I would leave his alleged peccadilloes out of the frame on this one. Don’t get me wrong. I am, of course, [...]
Posh and Posher: grammar schools are not the answer
TORY MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is the Old Etonian son of a former editor of The Times. But don’t go running away with the idea that he is in any sense a member of a privileged class, he tells a television programme that will be broadcast on BBC 2 this evening. ‘I’m a man of the [...]
In defence of Education Maintenance Allowance
SIXTH FORMERS are spending their Education Maintenance Allowance on ‘booze, cigarettes, CDs, music festivals and clothes’, commenter jenny50 indignantly maintains in a one-sided debate on a Telegraph discussion board this morning. And she should know, having ‘worked in a large comprehensive for many years’. Well Jenny, if you are reading this, brace yourself for a shock. I [...]
Student protests: sorry kids, wait for the old gits
TWENTYSOMETHING blogger Laurie Penny is a self-proclaimed former burlesque dancer. And an erstwhile anorexic. So if you read somewhere that she shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, remember that the girl has had an eventful life so far. Now Britain’s Oxbridge-educated answer to Dita von Teese has emerged as the Danny the Red of the [...]
Thrashing royal Rollers: some public relations tips
IT IS entirely possible that the people who smashed up the royal Rolls Royce last night do not have McCann Erickson, Burson-Marsteller or Weber Shandwick on a retainer, and are largely making up their public relations strategy as they go along. And Daily Telegraph commentator Damian Thompson is clearly a man who can spot rank [...]
The trouble with student vanguardism
SOME of the kids bricking the plate glass windows at Tory HQ yesterday will be the sons and daughters of those of us who engaged in similar argy-bargy in the miners’ strike and the campaign against the poll tax. The small minority of extremists – as we liked to be known in those days, of [...]
