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ANDY MCSMITH

Why do my Labour friends send their children to private school?

Agood friend said something strange the other day. Her daughter, who is approaching her final school year, has asked if she can leave private school and go to the local sixth form college because she would like to make some new friends.

Her mother was brimming with pride as she relayed this news — pride, and relief, that her progeny should be so open-minded as to volunteer for the adventure of breaking loose from her peer group and entering a place where she will meet teenagers who are working class.

I should include a brief social profile, to put the anecdote in context. Our friend has a salaried public-sector job which brings her into contact with working-class clients every working day. I don’t think she will read these words, because I doubt that an organ so right-wing as The Spectator would find its way into her household. If she did not go out demonstrating against the Iraq war, it was because something else cropped up. She is a Labour voter through and through.

No surprise, then, that she should approve of her child’s willingness to mingle with the common folk. The great mystery is why — given their politics and general social tolerance — she and her husband parted with a small fortune so that their children could have an exclusive education.

And exclusion is what the game is all about. I vividly recall being caught once in a hotel abroad in a bar full of businessmen who were there for a sales conference, all senior managers from manufacturing firms. Over cigars and liqueurs, the talk turned to where they sent their children to school. Out popped the name of one famous boarding school after another, as each explained what determined his particular choice. Not one of them mentioned the cost.

I would have hated to be the only man in that milieu who had to say that, actually, our Raymond picks up his school satchel every morning and takes the bus to the local comp. In some circles it is expected that you will educate your child expensively. It shows a soundness of outlook and demonstrates that you are successful enough to afford the fees.

What mystifies me is that there should be a similar mindset in our neck of the woods, which is inhabited by teachers, lecturers, doctors, social workers, planning officers — Labour voters all. These are not executives whose jobs require them to be competitive and status-conscious. They should be free from the rigid ideological conviction that private provision is always best, and, anyway, the top public schools are way out of their price range. Yet they will scrape together the cash to send their children to privatelyrun day schools.

They are not all doing this to rescue their children from the hell of an inner-city sink school. There are, of course, examples of parents who are driven by sheer anxiety for their children’s wellbeing to turn, regretfully, to private providers. In any school, children who are obviously different can be the target of ghastly bullying. I know one father whose 11year-old was having a miserable time at a comprehensive, so he turned up one day at the school gate to drive the boy home. The wretched child pleaded with him never to do it again: to be marked as the boy whose father had a car could bring down yet more abuse. The child was moved to another school.

But round our way there are also some outstandingly good comprehensives and city technology colleges, where discipline is strong and academic standards high, and from which hundreds of children are turned away every autumn because of the competition from parents to get their children into them.

Yet I know parents who have turned down these prized places to have their children educated privately. These are often people who were themselves state-educated, and therefore do not know from personal experience what they are buying. It does not seem to cross their minds that, just as there are private firms that rip off their customers by offering shoddy goods at inflated prices, there are private schools that will overcharge for an educa tion well below the highest standards that the state can offer. And even those who are buying a good standard of academic achievement might pause to consider what it does to children to be told, at the age of 11, that they are going to be segregated and treated differently for the rest of their schooldays.

Years ago, when we had a Conservative government, I was talking to a public school headmaster, and observed that the accompanying party of sixth-formers included no black faces. ‘Oh, I don’t accept any of them,’ he explained. ‘We get hundreds of applications from them. If I let one in, I’d lose some of my other parents.’ What, you wonder, has happened to his precious charges since they left his establishment and encountered people from ethnic minorities for the first time; or have they found an enclave of ethnic purity where they can hide?

That is an extreme case, of course, but the fact remains that private education is a form of early social segregation. It can permanently affect the way a child behaves, as has been demonstrated so many times by adults whose irritating behaviour advertises their expensive education. And yet parents who profess to despise the class system, and who consider themselves tolerant and left of centre, choose to put their children through it.

It was once axiomatic that people who educated their children privately would be expected to cut all ties with the Labour party. When the social history of our times is written, it may emerge that Melanie Phillips’s spiritual journey from Guardian journalist to rightwing siren began with a decision to abandon state schooling, because no one whose children have actually been through the state system could despise it as Melanie does. But now it seems to be a common occurrence that people in liberal professions — including, indeed, journalists on liberal newspapers — will send their children off to private school without drawing any concomitant conclusions about the importance of rolling back the frontiers of the state and giving back taxpayers more of their own money to spend as they choose.

This phenomenon is an aspect of the political genius of Tony Blair, who gave middleclass voters permission to go private and stay with the Labour party. So pervasive is his influence that even the Conservative party has caught on.

Andy McSmith is a political writer on the Independent.