Read the original article at The Daily Express

Shami Chakrabarti joins the ranks of those who buy an education for their children and then campaign to deny that education to others who cannot afford it.

Chakrabarti fights against selective education – then sends her son to £18,000 a year public school

When Harriet Harman sent her son to a grammar school and Diane Abbott sent hers to a private school they were merely carrying on a well-established tradition in the Labour Party of believing in comprehensive education for everybody except their own children. 

Ms Chakrabarti says she is not a hypocrite. She argues that she lives in a big house and eats well while neighbours may use food banks yet nobody says that is hypocritical so why should she not spend on her own child’s education while neighbours cannot. I can only hope that her son will learn rather better logic at his school, the exclusive and rigorous Dulwich College. 

The difference, Shami, is really very simple. You live in a big house but do not campaign for everybody else to live in a small one. You eat pleasant food but do not campaign for everybody else to starve. But you send your son to a first-class school while campaigning to deny the same opportunities to your neighbours who can obtain such an education only if it is supplied by the state. It is that and not your laudable desire to do the best you can for your own offspring which makes you a hypocrite. 

Indeed I have more respect for those who buy the best education for their children than for those who, for purely political rather than financial reasons, send their children to state schools but make quite certain that the schools in question are the best the state offers. The respect only disappears when such parents want to keep such education the exclusive preserve of the moneyed instead of widely extending it through selective state education. 

Grammar schools offer the sort of education to the poor for which the wealthy spend a fortune in the independent sector. A campaign against them is therefore a campaign to deny the poor and Ms Chakrabarti should be ashamed of herself. She would do better to admit that her principles simply do not extend to herself and her family or that she has been too weak to implement them. That at least would be upfront and honest.