Why should going to Eton make you less part of 'real life'?

Class war will never be dead as long as a child born into a poor family needs to have an IQ 20 points higher than a child born into a rich family in order to have the same income in adult life.

class war is dead?? rofl yes sure it is

It doesnt.

its all part of the last ditch attempt to stay in power by Labour, who think they can get people worked up about class. The class war is dead, it died years ago. Someone needs to tell Labour though.

LemonMuffin - I personally wouldn't waste time beating DC with the Old Etonian stick ... 'cos some of his policies are that much better as beating-stick material. I wish I had time to put all my thoughts about them down here. But sadly I don't because DH is babysitting and I am off to the pub to watch the leaders debate

It doesn't make you any less aware of real life at all.

It's just a useful stick to beat Cameron with when his opponents can't think of anything else to use.

I met a girl at University who didn't even realise that children in comprehensives did GCSEs. She was rather shocked to discover that they even made it to Cambridge (in droves!).

What was tragic was her family had little money (having spent most of it on school fees).

Yes I do too, he seems to have changed an awful lot since stepping down as leader

I don't disagree with you actually Beta, I know lots and lots of people like that too, especially working in the public sector and all. But it doesn't negate the argument that Cameron's inner circle is drawn from a very narrow pool of backgrounds and might lack depth.

Am liking "Bootstraps Brigade". DH and I are definitely fully paid up members of that one. Once you've starved (literally), been in foster and care homes etc and have still made a succesful life, you DO think that anyone can.

Don't think it matters where they went to school, but they do need vision, an ability to see the big picture, and to grasp complex ideas. Which means they probably need more than a couple of Grade G GCSEs

I've just remembered too a month or so ago when the Tories published a policy docuemnt saying that 50% of teenage girls had babies (or were single mothers, I can't quite remember). The real figure was 5% and that document must have been checked by several people before it was published.

That they found that figure credible does imply a "there be dragons" attitude to life less privileged than their own doesn't it?

I remember reading htat Iain Duncan Smith when he set up the Centre for Social Justice started taking Tory policy bods/MPs round deprived areas and he said the one thing that they all said to him was that they just didn't know.

MayDayMayDay - agree with you. This arguement just annoys the pants off me.

There are plenty of people who profess themselves to be Labour voters and hate Cameron because of his 'out of touch Eton background' but yet they went to nice state schools then Oxbridge. Lived in Islington/Putney as children, never saw their parents or grandparents unemployed and have a completely care free life and live in relative wealth now. Frankly they have no clue what life is like for people living on benefits or in unemployment blackspots in the North of England.

I met plenty of them at University. Me and DW used to call them 'trendy lefties'. They wore their social concience like a badge but as soon as they left university they went into the City or married a banker.

I went to private school too but was born in a mining area and married a girl from a two-up-two down then went to the City and married a banker. My experience is their experience plus a bit more real life grit.

Gordon Brown is not from a poor background. Nick Clegg is a descendant of European arisocracy, went to Westminster school and then studied archeology at Robinson College Cambridge. See his wikpedia entry.

When i was at university I had a boyfriend who had been to a silmilar school . He didn't realise that some people didn't take A levels and left school at 16

"It's one thing to know about these things in an academic sense, but if you have known real people in these situations, you're much more likely to appreciate how trapped many people are. Whereas if such people are just statistics to you, you're more likely to think that they should jolly well pull themselves up by their bootstraps."

you would think so wouldn't you Policy? But there are plenty of conversations on here where the bootstraps brigade are actually the ones who come from the deprived backgrounds and are saying 'if I did it anyone can'. Bit like Norman Tebbit telling people to get on their bikes like his dad did.
Whereas the ones with the sheltered lives (me for instance) are often more sympathetic.

Why would you take Eton over Kircaldy High MmeB? Would you take it over Kesteven and Grantham Girls School?

there are so many old etonians in the tory party. does eton not teach them to do anything else?

School is only one part of your life though, and over by 18. How many of you would like to be judged on where your parents decided to send you to school, and how you were at 18? I am of the same era as DC, slightly older perhaps, and I wince sometimes at what I was like at 18; and I can see post 40, just how much I have changed and grown in that time. I expect that DC has done so too.

Gordon Brown has bugger all in common with me, and his experience of 'real' life is different from mine - why is his more real than that of DC?