My Lords, I found the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Bates, a breath of fresh air. It brought some reality to our debate by identifying the problem of inequality of expectation in Britain. I am
very sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, is no longer in her place, because, having listened to her, I thought that I should make different speech from the one that I was proposing. She talked about the problem of the difference in confidence between public schools and private schools and the rest. Well, it is a zero-sum game: people with all the facilities and all the privilege will be more confident, and that is what their parents are buying. Let us face it, with the apartheid that exists in our educational system, people have an incentive if not to pull up the drawbridge then to want to get the greatest return on their investment in private education. That is perhaps not a very polite thing to say, but I challenge anybody to say what is wrong with that analysis.
Some years ago, as a member of the Franco-British Council, I was on a sub-committee dealing with forward planning of seminars, or colloques, as they were called. We were looking around the table for ideas and this French chap said, “I propose we have a colloque on the education of the elite”. The British representatives around the table nearly dived under it—“The education of the elite? How can you say such a thing?” I was thinking about this. Did they react in that way because what they were talking about was not something that they recognised? Oh, no, it was not that; it was their embarrassment that anybody had said that that was what they were talking about—the education of the elite.
Here we are today in the House of Lords. A look at the figures shows that 79% of the Conservative Benches in the House of Lords went to public school. The figure for the Liberal Democrats is 54%, 34% for Labour and 76% of the Cross-Benchers—I am not saying that that is true of the people here today, but it is the overall statistic from the Sutton Trust. That makes us very unrepresentative of the British people, 7% of whom went to public schools. The noble Baroness who introduced the debate is therefore very representative of the House of Lords in having been to a public school, but that majority is not representative of the British people.
The noble Lord, Lord Baker, touched on how different we are from Germany in so many ways, and this is one of them. It is our caste system in Britain. When we think about what happens in India, we think, “Oh, that’s India. It’s quite exotic and totally different”, but, statistically, our position in Britain and that of the Brahmins are very similar, which is one of the reasons why our society is not as dynamic as some others. I agree that there are many modern societies which we would not want to give a second thought to; for example, China. I am not advocating anything like that, but I am advocating the system in some of the more modern European economies. It is not sufficient to say, as the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, has done, that we should look just to the excellence of our universities without looking at the excellence of our economy as whole; for example, compared with Germany.
Finally, I point out the very interesting report published today. The Milburn report, commissioned by the Government, makes some very damning criticisms of the Government’s policy. Scrapping the EMA was a “very bad mistake”, it states. At a time when we are
looking forward to the school leaving age going up to 17 next year and to 18 in 2015, what will be the position of those youngsters, particularly black youth? I really think that there is a bit too much self-congratulation in the analysis in this Chamber today.
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