A truly fantastic article.
blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/06/christine-blower-the-nut-and-the-bigotry-of-low-expectation/
My favourite snippet:
This is what separates British left and right now. The left, in their post-Blair phase, is no longer very worked up about the poor doing badly at school. (?It may matter or it may not,? Blower said about poor children not going to top universities). The standard left response is to talk philosophically about inequality in society, as if this has the slightest bearing on whether the concept of a sink school ought to be tolerated in this day and age.
By contrast, the right are hopping mad about educational inequality. When the subject is raised in front of Michael Gove, it?s like flicking a switch. He blows his top. When I last interviewed him and raised the subject about whether it poor kids should be expected to do as well as rich, he replied in a crescendo of anger.
Politics
Why is it only the right that gets angry about how state schools fail the poor?
longfingernails · 23/06/2013 19:08
Moondog, you'll find a reference to the 47% approx half way through this
"Big government? slashed the debt
The UK?s sovereign debt varied up and down prior to the mid 20th Century, mainly according to the costs of wars against the other big powers. In the initial and classical capitalist period, there was little or no state welfare, and the income and wealth of the rich was barely taxed; British sovereign debt was over 100% of GDP from 1750 to 1850, spiking at 250% of GDP in 1815 following the war against France. During the late 19th Century and until 1914, the national debt continued to fall fairly steadily, even though this was the period in which the beginnings of the modern public sector emerged and expanded, with for example free and compulsory schooling for children, the road network, sewage, the water supply, gas and even telecommunications being arranged by the state at national or local level. Subsequently, the cumulative effect of two world wars and the intervening massive economic crisis sent UK?s sovereign debt back up to two and a half times GDP at the close of the Second World War.
It was then that what could be decribed as ?big government? was established in peacetime conditions. The utilities and much of industry was nationalised (with compensation paid to previous owners), and the main institutions of the welfare state were set up and expanded- to the extent that by the mid-1970s, government-managed expenditure (including transfers, ie benefit payments and interest) was almost half of national production, and state spending on investment and services- ie, excluding transfers- had risen to 27% of GDP by 1975- compared to between 10% and 12.5% during most of the years between WW1 and WW2.
Yet at the same time as this huge growth in ?government?, the sovereign debt was reduced so rapidly that between 1946 and 1975 it fell from 252% to 45% of GDP" 21stcenturysocialism.com/article/sovereign_debt_is_a_capitalist_issue_02079.html
Now, government spending accounts for around 47% of GDP and yet debt to GDP is around 85%. In short we have a "big" spending government and they have nothing to show for it except rising debt.
Basically the government is now spending money, be it welfare, health, education, R&D or defence etc,.....and this money is finding its way into the hands of private businesses and individuals. I could explain further why that money never finds its way back into government hands, workers pockets or R&D and investment into production. You're probably already yawning 
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