To think allisons pearsons rant about Angela Rayner is full of nasty stereotypes about girls who are 16 and pregnant?

[Helhigh]

Well I’m not a fan of Angela Rayner and have never voted labour but Pearsons rant in the telegraph yesterday was half assumptions that Rayner must have been a bully who thumped classmates for doing their homework and distracted the class by talking about how many boys she shagged.
And of course reading books and having a child at 16 is mutually exclusive.
I don’t think Rayner has ever said she was like this Pearson has just made a load of assumptions because she was 16 and pregnant.

Anyway it’s behind a pay wall so I had to copy and paste the nasty part:

“I have noticed a tendency among politicians and commentators, particularly the posh ones, to praise Rayner’s flame-haired “authenticity”. That’s because they didn’t go to school with an Angela. Those of us who did know the harm that the Angelas do to kids from poorer homes who want to work hard and do well but whose lessons are permanently disrupted by those who don’t. The Angelas sit in the back row of the class putting on make-up, doing their nails and chatting loudly, throughout readings from the set book, about who they’ve sh---ed. They disdain the teachers who are rather scared of them.
Angelas have sex by the age of 13 (they mock those of us who are saving our virginity for later). Pregnant at 16, they leave school without any qualifications and work behind the till in Mac Fisheries before embarking on a romantic life which features at least two injunctions and a restraining order. By the age of 37, they are grandmothers (as Rayner was).
Believe me, all the kids who want to get on in life breathe an almighty sigh of relief that the Angelas have left school because now they can hand in their homework and try to pass their exams without being ridiculed or thumped by an Angela.
So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t join in the applause for Angela Rayner’s vibrant “back story” and her ascent to the top of government through militant trade unionism. The working-class kids I admire often came from difficult council-house homes, as Rayner did, but they clung on to education like a life raft. Or they saw a job opportunity and grasped it with both hands. They did that old-fashioned thing called bettering themselves”

Obviously it’s not generational - Nye Bevan referred to the Tories as vermin back in the1940s.

Obviously it’s not generational - Nye Bevan referred to the Tories as vermin in parliament back in the1940s.

I am far from young.

She is a woman and she is not a Tory. That's all they need.

Maybe if she had ruffled her hair and used the Latin word for scum, it would have been acceptable

After all she dared to sip champagne at Glyndebourne opera festival.

AR calls the Tories scum. Apologises, yet is hounded forever and is judged unfit for government because of it.

Johnson calls Muslim women "letterboxes" gay men "bum boys" but that's OK. He still gets to become PM.

The message is: be nice women, all the time. Otherwise your career is on the line.

@Helhigh - i agree with you, OP. I think it’s a vile way to talk about teenage girls generally - dripping in ignorant judgment and misogyny. And yes, girls who are having sex at 13 are probably being abused.

I’m only slightly younger than AP and we had some teenage pregnancies at our very ordinary state secondary school. My mum, a secondary schoolteacher, also taught some pregnant teenage girls. They weren’t disruptive bullies. They were quietly getting on with school whilst also pregnant. Having a baby at 16 was the total making of the pregnant teenager i knew best. She was drifting at school, though not disruptive, and took to motherhood like a fish to water. In fact, what i’ve seen is that a lot of teen parents are brilliant at parenthood.

I went to a school which had a fair few teen pregnancies/mums (some younger than 16) and I was a bright, hardworking kid - my experience is nothing like what is described in the latest rage-bait nonsense from AP. The teen mums I knew back then were often girls who already had a lot of responsibility at home and/or had to grow up a lot sooner than most. Didn’t Rayner do a lot of caring from a young age as the eldest daughter in a family in which her own mum had a lot of struggles? Such a vindictive take on this, which doesn’t reflect on Rayner or the reality that many of us have experienced, but it tells us everything we need to know about the state of our right-wing media - we all deserve better on that front.

Caenum,apparantly.

Then different upbringings. I never once heard my parents swear. At school a friend was excluded for swearing in our A level French lesson. It was instilled in me that using foul insults or language was in my Mothers words ‘cheap’.

I’m surprised she didn’t say “common”.

She has a potty mouth.
Cheap as chips.

Sure you don’t mean “common as muck”?

Do you have examples other than her using scum?

I once met a Tory mp and asked her if they genuinely hated the opposition party.

She said she does have many very close friends who are Labour MPs. At one Labour MP's birthday Angela Rayner was there and scoffed asking "why have you invited all these Tories"?

I am Dutch. We're quite sweaty. However, swearing in class is definitely a hard no.

There's a lot of research on the benefits of bad language, if judiciously used. And in a world where people make up lies to smear a politician they don't like, I see swearing as the lesser evil by some considerable distance.

Still slobbery, just using different words.

Wheel out your examples!

Scum is not a swear word. Making up slanderous lies about someone’s character as a secondary school student is surely worse than swearing?

Ask yourself? Do you really want Angela Rayner in charge of your children’s education as education secretary or would you prefer someone with a little more experience of…..education?

The majority of education secretaries have not been education professionals in a previous life. Someone with a degree in PPE is no more and no less able to fill the role than someone whose education has been less orthodox. Unless of course you don't want MPs who come from a range of backgrounds? I believe Estelle Morris was the last Secretary of State for Education who was actually a teacher.

How does Rayner not have experience of education?

She went to school.

I would be perfectly happy to have Angela Rayner in charge of my children's education if they were still at school. Only three politicians (all female) have worked as teachers before becoming Ministers for Education/Schools. These were Estelle Morris, Jacqie Smith and Ellen Wilkinson.

I think that it is more concerning that a significant majority of UK Education Secretaries have been privately educated, with only three (Bridget Phillipson, Justine Greening and Gavin Williamson) who attended non-selective state schools.

I don’t even understand why people say she “dropped out of school pregnant” her son was born the February after she turned 16 (her birthday being march) so she had completed secondary education.

About twenty years before staying in education until 18 became mandatory.

I assume you would rather someone whose experience of education was going to private school and Oxbridge? Because that gives so much insight into the experience of most of the population!