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

[MayDayMayDay]

I have friends who went to Eton and other leading private/boarding schools. Between them they have: children at state schools, cancer, children with disabilities, been made redundant, parents with dementia, been unable to afford a house, become alcoholic, suffered marriage breakdowns, lost family in accidents, voted Labour, worried about the future...

We all have different experiences of life. Who really thinks one life is more 'real' than another? I might vote for David Cameron, I might not. Whatever I vote it will have nothing to do with where any of the party leaders went to school. I'll leave those considerations to all the snobs who can't recognise themselves as such.

I actually think it helps to be slightly separate from the general populus if you are in politics. How can you possibly rationally and objectively consider cutting services which will lead to the death of some people (e.g. health services/elderly support) if you are firmly ensconced in that community.

If you are in business recovery (where you go in and restructure, to save the business) you don't try and get close to the staff - you'll have to sack vast swathes of them in order to keep the business afloat. Often the previous managers have been unable to stomach this fact and it takes someone who is external and removed to come in with a scythe.

I think politics is quite like this. You need decent principles. You need to think Ethics is not a county north of London . But you don't need to have been in the gutter to know the gutter exists IYSWIM.

Has anyone mentioned the Etonian Old Boy's network yet?

How can a system be deemed fair when you have eg judges, landowners etc who are part of this network yet who hold sway over so many of us?
How many of them have been genuinely down to their last fiver and had to decide if it is for food or fuel?

The aristocracy are not quite dead yet and the feudal system is alive and kicking in some parts of Britain.

lincstash - you are not a proper Darwinian. We are conceptual animals. We are tool-building animals.

We are way past mammoths.

But you are clearly just bored, and want a laugh. Because that last post was so poorly thought out it was clearly written on the hoof. It doesn't cohere with anything you wrote earlier. So you are clearly just after a wind-up. Shame because culture and evolution and invention are interesting subjects.

And the issue of global, mobile wealth and power, and how that intersects with Britain's experience of bifurcation/disparity of wealth and power is similarly fascinating.

Britain has made the handling of mobile capital its primary wealth-generating activity. That has meant that Britain is not in a position like that of Scandinavian countries, which have a more economically homogenous public life. Policies of Labour have attempted to offset some of the effects of that -- but they're fighting a battle they surely can't win. The economic base of the country rests on mobile, trans-national capital, and must surely reproduce its forms in our society. IT's going to be interesting (in a bad way, imo,) to see what happens when the safety-nets are removed over the next few years.

Anyway, all that's off-piste, and I must make lunch.

women working on building of canals and railways - oh God, so many examples.
women and children made the bricks for many of the tunnels
The Canal du Midi in the south of France has a reservoir built mainly by local women.
most often women (and children) were involved in carrying stuff - eg carrying away spoil.
merely camp-followers - pah.

I like the way whomovedmychocolate put it. go girl, that does make sense and lets face it at the moment we need someone to come in and do some serious business management to get the country back to a reasonable level of debt.

@ SethStarkaddersMum

indeed they did make bricks, and lots of other side industries. Thats not labouring though, is it, if you read my original post, were talking about labouring - navying, humping sleepers and rails about digging by hand.

do stop redefining your terms as you go along, Lincstash.
You were trying to avoid giving women any credit for building stuff - when I pointed out what they did do you arbitrarily decided these tasks didn't count. Which is a fairly typical strategy used to denigrate women's work by chauvinists.

UM, LINCSTASH, if your education was so fantastic why do you make so many spelling & punctuation errors?

It is simply not true that all state schools are dreadful. DS is at a grammar with 100% A-C levels at GCSE and 85% A or A* at both GCSE and A level. A very high proportion of the pupils go to Oxbridge.

And it's free!

Mayday, I agree with you. Just because Cameron went to Eton does not mean he would not make a good Leader, Nick Clegg went to Westminster school, one of the best public schools in the London, does that mean he too
could not run this country, most politicians have gone to public schools, so all this nonsense about what schools they went to is a waste of time.

linctash, what you say is absolutely right, the standard of state education is terrible, and I would send my children to private schools if I could. It is irrelavant if you are a man or a woman on these posts, I.m glad your commenting on it and challenging some of these women who appear to hate men, (wonder how some of them got husbands!).

Cameron is a twat. He'd be a twat if he went to a crap comprehensive - just a less fortunate, more deprived twat.

Nick Clegg went to Westminster and Cambridge.

His grandmother was an aristocrat.

Funny how nobody seems to have noticed.

Nick Clegg has more social and communcation skills than DC. DC is trying so hard present himself as one of us that he's doing the opposite.

It's very simplistic to look simply at Cameron, or any of the other party leaders and judge purely on the basis of their educational backgrounds. We don't have a presidential system, and should not make decisions on that basis. Yes the PM is important, but what matters more is the depth of skills, aptitudes, knowledge and experience of the whole front bench.

Oh, and to the person who asked about our voting system, we all vote only for our local MP, the party with the most MPs then forms government, from that party the Cabinet and MP is chosen (and it is up to the party how to do that, whether by internal election or smoke filled rooms).

I am public school educated, and I agree with whoever commented on Etonians being a bit different, that has been my experience too, although only I think for ten years or so after they leave. But it is undoubtedly true that being very privileged affects your outlook on life (as of course all of our upbringings affect us).

On the whole the evidence (from business) suggests that diversity is a good thing because it brings a variety of experience and outlooks to decision making and makes it more likely that people are recruited and promoted on merit rather than old boy type networking. Of course it may also be uncomfortable, which is why people tend to be more likely to group together with other people of a similar background and outlook.

Clegg is posher than Cameron
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1266826/The-United-Nations-Nick-Clegg.html
he is just keeping quiet about it

A very high proportion of all MPs have received public school education compared to the general public, and that has increased (there used to be a large grammar school intake). So all the parties could be accused of being elitist really. But given Tory party policies tend to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor it's a better stick to beat them with. Although as has been said for this election there are other more pressing issues around policy (although I do wonder about George Osbourne's capabilities)

Eton is a problem because it's a toxic combination of:

1. Extraordinarily vast sums of money
2. Ossified views about privilege and status

Eton and Westminster (Clegg's school) are both technically public school, but they are worlds apart in mindsets. Eton remains full of chinless wonders who think they were born to rule the world, who do the season, and whose parents own half of Oxfordshire. Westminster is full of smart-as-a-whip kids whose parents are at Goldmans or are partners in top-rank management consultancies, or are diplomats, or CEOs, etc. They have a very different mindset: they think of themselves are very international, very lucky, very very bright, and as technocrats -- problem-solvers. Clegg going to work for the EC exemplifies this.

Re money, it's important to realise just how rich people who go to Eton are. By and large, you don't go if daddy is earning £100k -- a figure that is beyond the dreams of avarice for the majority of the UK population. You go if daddy is earning £300 or £400k at a minimum. You don't live in flat in Hampstead or a nice semi in Putney, you live in a several million pound pile in the home counties, and may well have an apartment worth the same in a Crown Lease estate on the edge of Regent's Park or in Mayfair. Your family is likely to be richer than 99.99% of all other families in the country (yes, I mean .99, not just .9). Your life is just astoundingly different from that of nearly everyone in the country. (Westminster is similar although not quite as extreme.) It takes truly vast amounts of empathy for an Etonian to truly get it, in their guts, that there are millions of people in the same country who have never been on a plane, or live in a small damp flat, and that it's not their fault.

Slhilly - Nick Clegg's wife is an (equity?) partner at DLA Piper and must be earning at least £400,000 - £500,000 pa. He has refused to rule out sending his own children to a private school in the future - perhaps he'd like them to go to Westminster just like him.

The Eton vs Westminster thing was covered in the Sunday Times by Dominic Lawson who went to both.

Slhilly - the current fees at Eton are £9,617 per term. Way beyond anything I could dream of, but you don't need a minimum of £300,000 to afford it.

I do know a few chinless Old Etonians - exactly the sort you mention. But I also know a few who are nothing like that. They have professional parents (lawyers, doctors, advertising etc) but not all their parents went to public school. They became successful and decided to spend their money investing in their children - as most of us do within our means - for better or worse but with good intentions. Some struggled to keep up the fee payments, some could easily afford to send more than one child there. Some boys there are on bursaries and scholarships. One I know has a severely disabled brother, another lost his mum to cancer while he was away at school, another appears to have so far had a charmed life and is using his cash to fund and run a homeless charity. People can learn empathy in many ways.

Some people are tossers, some people aren't. Some are tossers who went to Eton, some couldn't be arsed to turn up at school at all. What matters is what they do now. That is my point. Cameron might not be the man to run Britain but not because of where he went to school.

I know some nice Old Etonians BUT they don't tend to hang out almost exclusively with other OEs. Or promote other OEs and survivors of a tiny elite group of public schools to the exclusion of anyone else. The OEs I know manage to surround themselves with colleagues who are a mixed bunch of people from all sorts of backgrounds.

It wouldn't matter so much that Cameron is an OE if it weren't for the fact that he's promoted other ex-top public schoolboys and seems unable to find anyone from an ordinary background fit to help him run the country.

Edam - William Hague??

George Orwell went to Eton. So did the environmentalist Jonathon Porritt. So I don't think that everybody from Eton is of the same mindset.

Not read the whole thread but worth remembering that Nick Clegg went to Westminster.

Where these people went to school is NOT relevant, contrary to what Gordy would like you to believe.

The whole Eton thing is being vamped up, doubt he [Gordy] will dare to attempt do the same to Clegg - if he did he [Gordy] would be seen for what he is.