Get mad at this A Level Fiasco
2020 is proving to be annus horribilis, the sort of year the Queen projectile vomits into her Christmas speech. The sort of year where people hunker down and hope for their government to at least have a modicum of control and expertise in steering the ship of state. Britain and 2020 were always going to have a stormy relationship, and thanks to Covid’s jaundiced arrow to the heart it is now a force five shit storm. In any given year A Levels are contentious, with rich kids getting into the best universities, their grades plumped up with parental money and private education. The rest in state schools are left to fend for themselves, desperately seeking help with the limited resources their teachers can provide. In 2020 the heavy hand of the state, rather than offering a lifeline and beacon of hope, had landed square on these kids heads and plunged them deeper into cauldron of despair. Why work hard when the State will strip you of your worth?
This matters, because we have British government ministers who state that they don’t want state educated kids getting above their station. You have Tory MPs frothing at the mouth over immigrants on small boats in the English Channel, who’s very struggles are about ensuring their children’s future. We have disposed and under-privileged communities ravaged by years of austerity and Thatcherite asset stripping, where a fair crack of the whip appears to be a bottom rank college or university on the verge of Covid-19 disillusion. Why offer them the buffet of life, when a shit sandwich will do.
Children deserve every opportunity to succeed, every path to a life fulfilled. To strip them at the last hurdle of their right to a fair education is beyond injustice. It cuts away dignity, empathy, and the right to exist alongside their fellow students who just happened to born in the right postcode. Tory Britain in 2020 is about the rich sticking their hand in the cookie jar, pulling out all the cookies, handing one to you, and then blaming the immigrant for want to take your one cookie while they hoard the rest. The same goes for education. Healthcare. Access to housing. Justice. You name it, if you have the money, or better yet the connections, you too can have a £100 start-up gain a £100 million contract for PPE. Your kids can get into private schools, and your kids will get the right A Levels to get into the right universities. Screw anyone unlucky enough to go to a state school and strive for something better.
Injustice comes in many forms, and the fact that I have to even write this sickens me. We let a lot slide for the sake of pulling together in dark times, yet to strip out youth, the flower of our hope, of their future is a singular crime. We protest for rights, we demand change, and this is what this Tory government serves up. A kleptocracy designed to siphon what little money is in the bank for the aggrandizement of their mates, a chumocracy where their mates profit and our mates suffer indignity after indignity. Our children deserve a future fit for tackling the challenges in the decades ahead; instead, Tarquin and Tamara swan off to Oxford, while your kids get strung up and left to dry on Covid’s poverty line.
Get mad, get angry, protest, because these children’s future is our shared future. In a word where their energy, imagination, and guts will be the lynch pin we cannot afford to sell them short. Their future is our future, lock step. In Tory Britain, where class and privilege are open and nakedly abused, where holding government to account has gone from national sport to mere bylines on Twitter, it will take all our rage to force any meaningful change. Our kids deserve their future, have worked hard for it, and it is up to us to fight for them.
You may question the logic, the reasoning behind this anger. You may not have kids, or may agree completely with the Tory’s policies. All I will say is that you are just as reliant on these teenagers as their parents are. Your future care and pension depend on their hard work and effort. In a society were wealth is spread so iniquitously, can you really afford to be so indifferent? If you want a selfish reason to see state school children at highly selective universities, they are usually the ones with the spark and drive to achieve, they are the ones who push through amazing ideas and social change. They will shape our futures in profound and unexpected ways. By supporting them and raging at this in justice we build a better and richer society.
There are no side lines in this debate. The Scottish government have already committed a u-turn, and the tide appears to be turning against this injustice, but it may be too late for the hard working children denied on exam day. 2020’s storm lashed shores are eroding further their future, and unless we unite it will collapse them into raging currents beyond their ability to adapt and thrive. Get mad, rage against this abomination, strike hard against this injustice. For their future is our shared path, and we must do everything in our power to ensure we weather this storm together.
