Worst Opinion of the Week: 'Rich People Are Genetically Smarter Than Poor People'

What's the story? Labour party votes to abolish private schools at their autumn party conference.

Reasonable take: This is a step towards equality for all school children in the UK.

Brain rot: "It wont make a difference, poor people are naturally stupid" – Charlotte Gill.

After Labour endorsed plans this week to remove charitable status from private schools and redistribute their properties, endowments and investments to the state sector, we were always going to see swathes of sumptuous analysis from commentators about how "unfair" this is. However, I still didn't foresee Charlotte Gill, columnist for Free Market Conservatives and contributor to the Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and The Times, offering up the truly sublime hot take of: being rich is some sort of genetic trait that decides intelligence.

Gill wrote that scrapping private schools "wouldn't make as much difference as the Left thinks" because "educational performance has high genetic component, meaning it can only be socially engineered so much", and that "private schools facilitate genetic potential better than state".

It seems we've now reached a point at which it's very good and normal to engage in widely discredited quackery. Why don't we just whip the callipers out and start measuring people's bonces again like those phrenology cunts looking for a scientific basis for their bigotry, and just assign people their plebian role in society based on their skulls? "Your cranium measurements are telling me that you show a propensity to 'live, laugh, love', Pauline. Your position will be 'irritating office administrator'."

All I'm getting from Gill's argument is that the "high genetic component" at play in someone’s educational excellence is their dad owning a street's worth of crumbling For Rent properties and a wardrobe full of pastel chinos. It’s simply astonishing that, in 2019, people are still willing to defend wealth inequality by defaulting to pseudo-science and ideas about "social engineering" to convince you that the middle-to-upper classes are pre-ordained to have virtuoso DNA, and the rest of us are meant to be bedpan emptiers or bramble pickers. I’d respect it more if they just said "please, we need to keep private schools for the posh English children as it's the only thing separating us from the scum", rather than talking absolute guff about them "facilitating genetic potential".

The headmaster of Eton College – world-famous training school for little Tory bastards – Simon Henderson, hit back at Labour’s plan to put an end to private education by saying the system is unequal, but that "abolishing excellence" is not the solution. He insisted the school, with annual fees of more than £40,000, had changed significantly from the school that produced the current Prime Minister, Brexit master-cunt David Cameron, and the sentient Quentin Blake illustration, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

"I don't think it will improve equality within the education system," Henderson said, insisting that Eton supports state schools by sponsoring deserving students from "non-wealthy backgrounds" through scholarships and bursaries, which ensure that more than 90 boys out of 1,300 at the school pay no fees at all. So he's basically saying 14 percent of Eton boys are from "poor" backgrounds, which is families who can't afford the yearly school fees that are 38 percent greater than the average UK annual salary, and that's fine.

Media commentators are barely able to conceal their outrage about their children losing their unwarranted place in the old boys club as they argue "we should have the right to choose to where we send our children for education", completely oblivious to the obvious fact that poor people have never had that choice.

It’s impossible for the UK to be a fair country until we chisel away at the classism in all aspects of society that exist merely to strengthen ruling class solidarity, where opportunities and connections are made to ensure all the top jobs and highest wages are kept among themselves and the status quo maintained. Finland famously has no fee-paying private schools and is routinely ranked as having the best school system in the world, where all pupils – regardless of social standing, wealth or ability – are taught in the same classes, which ensures the "gap between the weakest and the strongest pupils is the smallest in the world". This gives us a glimpse of what we can achieve in the UK if we had the courage to just to fuck off the elites instead of merely existing around them.

Anyone actually bothered by the idea of working class and privileged kids going to school together is only worried about the possibility of a level playing field, and that their offspring might actually have to have some discernible talent or work ethic in addition to a double barrelled surname.

@MULLET_FAN_NEO