Johnson, Eton. Cameron, Eton. Douglas-Home, Eton. Macmillan, Eton. Eden, Eton. I am not sure what you are trying to prove to yourself. You are grasping as straws trying to prove that Blair, who went to fee-paying schools was actually a working-class man of the people...why? It is a very odd exercise (do you not understand that becoming a Minister is a different process to joining the FCO as a civil servant? If you just Google, 55% of diplomats went to a public school and 33% went to a public school and Oxbridge...the only job with a higher proportion in the UK are senior judges...btw, this is nearly double the rate for chief executives). Does Philips-Exeter and Groton have the same route into govt specifically (which is surprising given that money is more important in US politics, and the US has far wealthier people at the top end)? No. It is a very odd argument to take (and btw, not one made by anyone in these positions, the FCO has said publicly they need to change hiring and have been trying for years now, the Tory party came to this conclusion about two decades ago...you have picked the strangest hill to die on).
No, I am not referring to rotten boroughs. I am referring to how MPs are selected. That is why I said specifically that not many people understand this (because not many people actually know about their political parties work or know MPs). All you have to do is convince the local constituency party or some other small group of people in a safe seat (again, both Cameron and Blair have reformed this, although Labour's recent issues with selection should demonstrate that the system is still problematic). The US has primaries, it has caucuses...there are some safe Tory seats where the constituency party is literally 10-20 people, the selection process for Labour can be even more opaque (again, this is why the Tories decided to reform, they just kept selecting the clubbable old boys but they still have issues, particularly in Scotland, where the constituency party is very small/weak...one recent addition to the Scottish Parliament was the 21 year old son of a current MSP...meritocracy?).
Yes, the UK doesn't have gerrymandering...how did the Sixth Boundary Review work out? No controversy according to you? Ofc. It is nothing to do with a small number of votes deciding elections, that is just irrelevant, the outcome of an election is the outcome, it being close has nothing to do with anything.
FPTP isn't undemocratic. I would look at what the word democratic means. It is unrepresentative, it is most certainly not undemocratic. And there is nothing wrong with unrepresentative democracy (and that has nothing to do with the topic either).
It does your career good because you can get into Oxbridge with very little competition from students who go to schools that don't teach those subjects, and get a job in the Civil Service...or advertising, or banking, or PR, or any of the professional jobs that overindex towards people with a the right background. The point is that it has no value, and that things that have no value are rewarded. You can believe that there is no advantage (again, an odd take given the preponderance of evidence and the fact that most institutions have accepted this is happening)...all that would indicate to me is that you don't actually know anyone who works in any of the places I mention...that is it.
If you were a scholarship boy, don't try to waggishly quote Latin. People can see through you like a window, it impresses no-one.
> You are grasping as straws trying to prove that Blair, who went to fee-paying schools was actually a working-class man of the people...why?
I did not claim that Blair was a 'man of the people', though there are plenty of people who might credibly be described in those terms who have been involved in ruling the UK. You stated above that 'if you are a Brit, you understand that almost all of the people you name went to the same high school and have the same background'. I am British, and I know your statement is an exaggeration, which is why I noted examples of the backgrounds of some of the people referred to. I agree with you that it is relevant to a discussion of this topic that Tony Blair attended a fee-paying school, but I also think it is relevant — if background is important as you suggest — that the decision to send him to a fee-paying school was made by a mother who was the daughter of a butcher, and a father who was adopted into a working class family as a baby and grew up in a tenement in Glasgow. You can draw whatever conclusions you want from that, but to me, a reasonable consideration of that example, and others like the ones I noted, illustrate that it is not correct that 'almost all' of the British ruling class have the same cultural background.
> Does Philips-Exeter and Groton have the same route into govt specifically (which is surprising given that money is more important in US politics, and the US has far wealthier people at the top end)? No.
I'm no expert on American prep schools, but a quick look at the alumni of the ones you mention reveals two presidents, three secretaries of state, four treasury secretaries, dozens of governors, the founder of the Republican Party, the first Director of the CIA, the first Director of National Intelligence, the founder of Facebook, and too many senators, members of congress, federal judges and ambassadors etc. to list. It is curious to me that you don't believe this indicates that attending these schools provides a route into government, whereas a similar list of the alumni of a British school like Eton does. In looking up Groton alumni I found an observation about the school from one of them, who was a friend of Franklin Roosevelt's (another Groton alumnus). He wrote 'Ninety-five percent of the boys came from what they considered the aristocracy of America [...] Among them was a goodly slice of the wealth of the nation.' It seems to me that Eton and Groton are not dissimilar in that regard.
> All you have to do is convince the local constituency party or some other small group of people in a safe seat (again, both Cameron and Blair have reformed this, although Labour's recent issues with selection should demonstrate that the system is still problematic).
This is a description of the process required to be selected as a candidate for a particular party. In order to become an MP the candidate must then win an election that returns them as the most popular candidate. It may be disappointing that voters in safe seats reliably opt for the candidates of a particular party, but that does not necessarily make their election 'hugely undemocratic'. If the people in these constituencies objected to the candidate of the party that traditionally wins there, they could democratically elect someone else instead.
> It is nothing to do with a small number of votes deciding elections, that is just irrelevant, the outcome of an election is the outcome, it being close has nothing to do with anything.
It would be relevant if that is what you had meant when you wrote that becoming an MP in the UK only requires winning over a small number of people. You have clarified that what you actually meant is that being selected as a candidate for a particular party in parliamentary elections might only involve winning over a small number of people in a local constituency party. Those candidates must then secure the votes of a much larger number of people in an election if they are to become MPs. You neglected to mention that latter fact, presumably because you felt that elections in safe seats are somehow undemocratic because the local population reliably elects candidates from a particular party.
> FPTP isn't undemocratic. I would look at what the word democratic means. It is unrepresentative, it is most certainly not undemocratic.
In the UK, the first past the past system nearly always produces a result in which a substantial majority of voters are not represented by the MP they voted for. British governments are therefore typically controlled by a party that has been rejected by a majority of voters. The governing party in the UK hasn't won a majority of the votes in a general election since the 1930s. I would argue that the UK is a democracy in some sense of the word in spite of this, but the first past the post system is not guaranteed to produce democratic results, and in Britain it usually doesn't.
> If you were a scholarship boy, don't try to waggishly quote Latin. People can see through you like a window, it impresses no-one.
I think we're in agreement here. If quoting Latin impresses no-one, it's unclear to me why you think it is important that some old-fashioned schools briefly force their pupils to study it. It can be studied at Oxford and Cambridge and many other universities, but classics has been a niche subject for a long time, and it doesn't confer any particular career advantage over more popular subjects like economics and history that are taught at all schools. I doubt it is any easier to obtain a degree in classics from a prestigious university due to a lack of competition from applicants who were not educated at private schools than it is to obtain a degree in any other niche subject that is more widely taught. It is true that there is less competition for places to study classics than many subjects due to a lack of interest, but that is also true of courses in language and religion — subjects which are very widely taught outside private schools. [1]
Classics was already an outdated choice of university subject by the time Johnson was studying it in the eighties, which perhaps explains why prior to the 2019 election no Prime Minister or opposition leader with a classics degree had contested a general election for six decades.
No, I am not referring to rotten boroughs. I am referring to how MPs are selected. That is why I said specifically that not many people understand this (because not many people actually know about their political parties work or know MPs). All you have to do is convince the local constituency party or some other small group of people in a safe seat (again, both Cameron and Blair have reformed this, although Labour's recent issues with selection should demonstrate that the system is still problematic). The US has primaries, it has caucuses...there are some safe Tory seats where the constituency party is literally 10-20 people, the selection process for Labour can be even more opaque (again, this is why the Tories decided to reform, they just kept selecting the clubbable old boys but they still have issues, particularly in Scotland, where the constituency party is very small/weak...one recent addition to the Scottish Parliament was the 21 year old son of a current MSP...meritocracy?).
Yes, the UK doesn't have gerrymandering...how did the Sixth Boundary Review work out? No controversy according to you? Ofc. It is nothing to do with a small number of votes deciding elections, that is just irrelevant, the outcome of an election is the outcome, it being close has nothing to do with anything.
FPTP isn't undemocratic. I would look at what the word democratic means. It is unrepresentative, it is most certainly not undemocratic. And there is nothing wrong with unrepresentative democracy (and that has nothing to do with the topic either).
It does your career good because you can get into Oxbridge with very little competition from students who go to schools that don't teach those subjects, and get a job in the Civil Service...or advertising, or banking, or PR, or any of the professional jobs that overindex towards people with a the right background. The point is that it has no value, and that things that have no value are rewarded. You can believe that there is no advantage (again, an odd take given the preponderance of evidence and the fact that most institutions have accepted this is happening)...all that would indicate to me is that you don't actually know anyone who works in any of the places I mention...that is it.
If you were a scholarship boy, don't try to waggishly quote Latin. People can see through you like a window, it impresses no-one.