Britain | Britain's privately educated politicians

Learning the hard way

Parliamentary privilege exists in more ways than one

THE opposition Labour Party, which champions equality in education, has long struggled with the notion of private schooling. Its politicians often attack the Eton toffs of the ruling Conservatives in Parliament because of their privileged background. But some Labour cabinet ministers in the past have put their children before party conviction and sent their kids to private schools. Labour's current education spokesman, Tristram Hunt, says that private school is an option for his children. All of this does not help heal Labour's old wounds over class.

Those wounds will not be salved by new research published today by the Sutton Trust, a foundation promoting social mobility. The striking figure in its examination of educational backgrounds of prospective parliamentary candidates at the forthcoming election reveals that Labour hopefuls are nearly twice as likely to have gone to a private school than the party's current members of Parliament (see chart 2). That has left the party red faced. The repeated trumpeting by Ed Miliband, its leader, of his days as a pupil at a comprehensive school to boost his ordinary-guy image suddenly seems rather hollow.

Although the number of MPs from elite schools has declined over the decades, the proportion getting the best tutoring that money can buy is still greatly out of step with the general population. Only 7% of the population has attended private school, compared with a third of today’s MPs. For prospective parliamentary candidates the figure is 31%. The gap is even more conspicuous when it comes to Oxbridge. Sutton says that less than 1% of Britons have gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but a fifth of the new parliamentary candidates have been educated at either university, which closely matches the current profile of Parliament. Labour’s Oxbridge quota has nudged up slightly, too.

And as for the populists led by the blokeish, beer-supping Nigel Farage, the UK Independence Party now cannot escape criticism of being part of the Westminster elite that it wants people to vote against on May 7th. Its collection of candidates is second only to the Tories in having a private-school background and are twice as likely to have a degree than the population as a whole. Sutton's data raises the question of whether this election really will be a vote for change.

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