12-07-2020, 01:41 AM
Peter Hitchens: In 20 years’ time Eton will be just a pricey Bog Lane comprehensive flying the Black Lives Matter flag on its gatehouse
The cleverest revolutions are the ones where everything looks the same from the outside, but it has been totally altered on the inside.
People find it hard to oppose or resist changes they cannot actually see. In recent years, the police, the BBC and the National Trust, for instance, have been transformed into nests of wokeness.
But it wasn’t obvious until it was far too late to do anything. So nobody did.
Most do not spot these changes until it affects them personally. Even then, if there’s no actual announcement, many do not realise.
Long ago I worked for another newspaper, a mighty daily which had once been a great defender of traditional Britain. It changed hands.
And one evening in the late 1990s, its senior writers (including me) were summoned to a dinner in the boardroom. There we were told the paper would from now on support New Labour and the ghastly Blair creature.
Those of us who found this repellent expected the readers to revolt when they discovered what was being done to their newspaper. But no such thing happened. Most of them did not even notice. The outward appearance stayed the same, and that did the trick.
So it is with Eton College and our supposedly conservative private schools. Parents in despair at the propaganda of the state schools may have thought they could escape it by paying huge fees. No chance. The forces of Cultural Revolution are in there too.
Read more: Peter Hitchens: In 20 years’ time Eton will be just a pricey Bog Lane comprehensive flying the Black Lives Matter flag on its gatehouse
The cleverest revolutions are the ones where everything looks the same from the outside, but it has been totally altered on the inside.
People find it hard to oppose or resist changes they cannot actually see. In recent years, the police, the BBC and the National Trust, for instance, have been transformed into nests of wokeness.
But it wasn’t obvious until it was far too late to do anything. So nobody did.
Most do not spot these changes until it affects them personally. Even then, if there’s no actual announcement, many do not realise.
Long ago I worked for another newspaper, a mighty daily which had once been a great defender of traditional Britain. It changed hands.
And one evening in the late 1990s, its senior writers (including me) were summoned to a dinner in the boardroom. There we were told the paper would from now on support New Labour and the ghastly Blair creature.
Those of us who found this repellent expected the readers to revolt when they discovered what was being done to their newspaper. But no such thing happened. Most of them did not even notice. The outward appearance stayed the same, and that did the trick.
So it is with Eton College and our supposedly conservative private schools. Parents in despair at the propaganda of the state schools may have thought they could escape it by paying huge fees. No chance. The forces of Cultural Revolution are in there too.
Read more: Peter Hitchens: In 20 years’ time Eton will be just a pricey Bog Lane comprehensive flying the Black Lives Matter flag on its gatehouse