Not All Education is Created Equal

It’s often said that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to lean to the left. And broadly speaking, that holds true – especially among graduates who’ve actually had their worldviews challenged. But if that’s the case, how do we explain the endless parade of Eton- and Harrow-educated politicians thundering away from the right-hand side of the Dispatch Box, slashing budgets while quoting Cicero?

Simple: not all education is created equal.

When we say “education makes people left-wing,” we mean the real kind – the sort that pries open your assumptions, exposes you to the lives of people not like you, and teaches you to question where power comes from and who it serves. Universities – especially those that haven’t been hollowed out into corporate vending machines – still manage, at their best, to do this. Not always. But enough.

That is not the sort of education you get at Eton, Harrow, Winchester, or any of the other fortified nurseries of Britain’s ruling class. These institutions don’t educate – they inculcate. They don’t expand minds – they reinforce hierarchies. Their job is not to lift the veil on injustice, but to polish the self-belief of those destined to inherit power, wealth, and the unshakable conviction that the world should be run by people like them.

And it works. The result is an upper crust of beautifully spoken reactionaries – men (and it’s still mostly men) who treat food banks as regrettable PR issues, regard protest as vulgarity, and see social mobility as a threat to be managed, not a goal to be encouraged. They’re not the best and brightest – they’re the most entitled and least troubled by doubt. Groomed to rule, fluent in obfuscation, and incapable of saying "I don’t know" without prefixing it with "Well, as Aristotle said..."

Take Boris Johnson – a man whose idea of statesmanship was Churchill cosplay mixed with undergraduate mayhem. He wasn’t educated; he was trained to perform intelligence. Or Jacob Rees-Mogg, who seems to think compassion went out with the Corn Laws. His brand of genteel cruelty didn’t come from books – it came from an environment where the poor are a theory, not a presence.

And then there’s Liz Truss. Not Etonian, true, but Oxford through and through – and a fine example of how elite education can inflate certainty while starving judgment. Her brief tenure was like handing a box of fireworks to someone who thinks warning labels are for Remainers.

But even beyond the gilded halls of Eton and Oxford, the same pattern holds. Nigel Farage – the pint-wielding "man of the people" – was educated at Dulwich College, an old, respectable public school founded to churn out the next generation of City boys. And lo, straight from Dulwich he marched into the commodities markets, pint in one hand, deregulation manual in the other. Farage didn’t go to university – but he didn’t need to. His views were already fully formed by the time he left a school where Empire nostalgia came with the blazer.

So this isn’t about envy. It’s about a structural flaw: a society that confuses polish for depth, and schooling for wisdom. These people weren’t educated to lead us – they were programmed to run us. And the programme hasn’t changed in centuries. Keep calm. Carry on. Preserve the order. Protect the interests. Look plausible while doing it.

The next time someone tries to defend Britain’s privately educated elite by pointing to their academic credentials, remind them: it’s entirely possible to be highly schooled and politically barren. Eton doesn’t make you woke. Nor does Dulwich. They make you Farage with better cutlery – angry at the world, but too well brought-up to shout. Except when it's about boats.