Do we really want our politicians to be uneducated?
The interesting thing about political pendulums is that they always over-swing. In the campaign for this week’s Gorton and Denton by-election, one of the main lines of attack on the Reform candidate is that he used to be an academic and is therefore ill-suited to being the area’s parliamentary representative. The candidate who has suffered these attacks – Matt Goodwin – has countered that he is the first person in his family to have gone to university. He has also stressed that he was brought up in a one-parent household. That hasn’t cut it with the class-warriors of his rivals like the Green party’s Hannah Spencer. In one of her campaign videos, Ms Spencer has gone so far as to do a speech to camera while preparing some plaster for a wall.
