Ukip’s three representatives in the Lords (Stevens, Pearson and Willoughby de Broke) went to Stowe, Eton and uber-posh Swiss school Le Rosey, respectively.
Ukip’s three representatives in the Lords (Stevens, Pearson and Willoughby de Broke) went to Stowe, Eton and uber-posh Swiss school Le Rosey, respectively.
Shouldn’t that be “très posh”?
What they really need is a peer who went to Downside. A name springs to mind …
“Representatives”?!?
I thought that the two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each town stuff only applied to the House of Commons.
Ironically, two out of the three were ennobled at the request of John Major.
That says more about Cameron refusing to appoint UKIP peers than anything else.
“Will politicians’ privileged background turn off voters?”
One size fits all headline there, with a third of MPs being privately educated and a quarter from Oxbridge, I’d say the answer is probably a “no”.
More interestingly, the supposed “Little England” party has a third of its peers educated in foreign.
And Wikipedia says that Carswell was educated in Kenya, so that’s half of its parliamentarians educated abroad.
Are people from other countries obsessed with where people went to school? The UKIP peer educated in Switzerland presumably didn’t make the choice himself, and even if he did he was a child. We don’t tend to hold people to account for things they did at the age of five, or thirteen, though I suppose we could make an exception for poshos. Insofar as it matters at all, I’d rather have all our politicians properly educated that being victims of British state schooling.
Once upon a time it was possible to be both properly educated and a victim of British state schooling. Them wuz the days.
uber-posh Swiss school Le Rosey, respectively
Well he ought to be made their Foreign Affairs spokesman. As I am sure he personally knows Little Fatty Kim in North Korea or perhaps the son of the former King of Italy or someone like that.
Money can’t buy experience like that. Although, considering it is a boarding school, perhaps there is a niche Gay porn market out there.
@ dearieme
50 years ago a majority of Oxford undergraduates came from grammar schools (as have a disproportionately large number of Conservative Cabinet Ministers) thanks to the Butler Education Act.
Rab was born into the upper-middle-class*, instilled from childhood in the concept of public service, married into the plutocracy, started in academia, spent a lifetime in politics before reverting to academia, and, ignoring his multitude of vested interests, created the greatest and best vehicle for social mobility that we have seen in the UK since the creation of guilds in mediaeval England.
*His father was knighted but not a peer so, despite being Governor of the Central Provinces of India, with a population several times that of England, he was not quite an aristocrat.
PS I am not a Butlerite: I preferred SuperMac, Sir Alec and Hailsham (who was fun while being a lot sounder and a fair bit more intelligent than Boris), but my generation benefited tremendously from Rab’s education Act.
@ SMFS
Since Lord Willoughby de Broke left Le Rosey about 27 years before Kim Jong-Un was born, there is no polite answer to your post.
Your ignorance is excusable but your ill-thought sneers (“Money can’t buy experience like that. Although, considering it is a boarding school, perhaps there is a niche Gay porn market out there.”) are still offensive. The whole “male boarding schools are centres of homosexuality” is a brain-dead fiction due to the American use of “faggot” instead of “queer” and their stupid equivalisation of “fag” meaning a first-year required to carry out menial tasks, thereby learning how to look after oneself, with “faggot”. Just not true. In my four years at boarding school there was just one incident of homosexuality, with the older boy, assumed to be the perpetrator, being expelled making an incidence of 0.13% – an order of magnitude smaller than the apparent level in the general population.