Great piece John but I’d suggest harking back to previous governments and operatives is counter-productive. Trevor Mallard or whoever – all people in politics make wrong judgement calls at some stage (does anyone remember KDC?)

Critique the Now things and today’s personnel. You’re good at that John. Keep sweet, be fair and do care and compassion – cos that is what you are and do!!

… except it’s not all about you.

And because his mates were going there. He and his many friends turned out to be perfectly decent people and he never saw himself as being better for having that education.

They sent me to Burnside because I wanted to go there. And my mates were going there. I and my mates turned out fine too.

So this typical Minto line about a socially cleansed environment doesn’t hold any water with me.

What part is wrong?

The idea that private schools should get public funding. They shouldn’t because it’s the choice of the parents not to use state schooling.

You could say the same about roads, we tax fuel, vehicle registration, RUC etc to pay for roads but pedestrians, cyclists that use roads don’t pay any of these taxes.

But they probably do pay rates which pays for the roads that they do use. Not all roads are paid for by the state and the taxes that you mention.

…but to move to a society where state education is the only option would be a backward step.

I didn’t say that should happen. Sure, it probably would be the result of removing state subsidies from for profit education but in what way would it be a backward step?

When working families can afford their own home…

If we had good provision of state homes then people wouldn’t need to be able to afford their own homes and then we wouldn’t get the massive imbalance of housing that we have today.

Home ownership is actually the problem.

That’s integrated schools, not private. There’s a difference.

And all the government really had to do there was to buy up the school and make it a full state school.

No, that’s not true.

The Catholic school system run out of people from religious orders who could teach for free. They didn’t have the money to pay for teachers and upkeep so they went to the government and said that they were going to have to close. The government saw that the public system couldn’t cope with all these Catholic students arriving so they said they’d fund some of the costs if the Catholic schools maintained the buildings etc. It was win-win – the Catholic schools stayed open at a much lower cost to the government than if they closed.

Your first 7 words were quite accurate.