Parity, parity, parity.

The Blair thing was education reforms. Of all the items on a long and distinguished list of matters on which I and various unreconstructed members of the Labour Party (which is to say the vast majority of the Labour Party, its dissimulating foremost members aside) are in violent disagreement, education is perhaps the highest. The Labour shibboleth concerning academic selection, memorably encapsualted by the villainous Anthony Crosland as a desire to "smash every fucking grammar school in the country", has wrought more damage to the prospects of this nation's youth than any amount of drugs on the streets or violence in popular culture. There can be no justification for bright kids being hamstrung by an ideological imperative that confuses equality of opportunity with parity of outcome. Worries about a "hierarchy in education" seem to overlook the undeniable hierarchy in kids' aptitude (which is no different from "ability", by the way, and any attempt to suggest otherwise is simply sleight of hand). We can't change the latter, so why avoid the former? Gifted kids have too long been held hostage to dubious and ill-conceived ideals. They need pushing, not constraining.

So Blair saying that he was a parent first and a politician second was, at least on the face of things, welcome. That fact that it was a consummately political thing to say appears to have escaped many people, and the fact that his education reforms, while being just about sensible enough to infuriate the nationalised egalitarian cranks on his backbenches, are in fact worth neither the tremendous cost to him personally in what little political capital remains to him nor the vast swath of Parliamentary time that will be wasted introducing the recalcitrant Labour Left to the notion of real life wherein selection by ability is a constant factor, is also unfortunate: if it were going to cost this much, they might as well be genuinely radical. Nonetheless, anything that goes even an inch to undo the catastrophic orthodoxy that poisons our education system at the moment is to be applauded. Maybe one day our kids will be sufficiently stretched that our exams could even become tough again.