Thunder on the Left

To Britain's gusty, professionally disgruntled Labor Party, the last important flags of privilege in a land now heavily socialized fly from the most offensive fortresses of all--the nation's great public (fee-charging) schools. For years, Labor leaders have stressed their blood bond with the common man by declaring ringingly that public (i.e., private) schools should be closed down--even when, as has sometimes been the case, the Labor orators have been Eton or Winchester men themselves.

Labor's committee on Education published a lengthy report last summer. Instead of thunderous denunciations of tuition institutions, it made sensible recommendations for strengthening the spotty government-supported school system. But thunder was in the air, and at last week's Labor Party Conference (see FOREIGN NEWS) it boomed deafeningly.

Hot Words. Labor M.P. Fred Peart cried that fee-charging education "buys positions of privilege in industry and politics. What's good enough for the dull son of a rich man must be good enough for the brilliant son of the poor man ... I condemn racial segregation; and I condemn social segregation."

Peart's oratory--aimed at preventing ratification of the education committee's report as part of the next Labor platform --ignored facts that, as a minority member of the education committee, he knew as well as his listeners. Scholarship programs ensure public-school education for brilliant sons of the poor; and while the fee-charging schools have always been centers of privilege, snobbery is less important than the fact that they provide Britain's best pre-university education.

In hot-worded debate, Labor's educational moderates, among them onetime Minister of National Insurance Jim Griffiths, pointed out the obvious: to close the privately supported schools would be vindictive foolishness, and to socialize them would merely place a huge additional drain on already skimpy government educational funds.

Narrow Margin. But the abolitionists railed louder than ever; pretty young Delegate June Hay derided the committee report as a mere excuse for Laborites who send their own children to private schools. Slyly, onetime Defense Minister Emanuel Shinwell dug at Hugh Gaitskell and other private-school men among the platform-sitters : "I wish I had gone to one of these schools; there is no saying how far I would have gone."

When the proxy vote came, it was close: 3,067,000 in favor of abolishing private schools, 3,544,000 against. Then, by a wide margin, the conference approved the committee report, which urges raising the compulsory school age from 15 to 16, seeks to do away with the rigorous examinations that now decide the educational future of most British children at the age of eleven.

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