The old, old question: do you put your family or the larger common good first? This is not a question of concern for the right wing -- they have no interest in society -- nor much concern for the family, since their brand of capitalism is destroying the family faster than anything socialists ever thought of, but that is for another day. There is a difference between suffering yourself in order to promote the larger good, and making your children suffer (the classic example is the do-gooder with neglected children). Still, it does seem to me that someone who is spending 10,000 pounds a year on her child cannot be living in a poor district -- the public school must be pretty good where she is. How the child can suffer in a well-off British public school, unless they have become complete crap, is a mystery to me. I assume it is because New Labour is full of the intensely upwardly mobile, and the idea that their children might actually benefit from being in a pretty good ordinary high school rather than an intensely driven private school probably never occurs to them. The poor kid is probably doing French, and ballet lessons, and summer computer camp, and god knows what else.


yours, Peter T.