I have seen the future, and there's no money in it.

Labour insist that the education system has improved under their stewardship. To prove it, they point to A-level results that are based on exam questions that would have been laughable in the old eleven-plus. Then again, education was never what Labour wanted, was it? Educated people tend to be dissatisfied with the Stella-and-TV lifestyle of the majority of Labour voters. Once educated, they want to make use of their education to improve their lives. Social mobility in an upwards direction is what people want. Labour have opted for social mobility in a downwards direction instead. It's so much easier and it boosts their drone-voter base.

So schools have held back anyone destined for a life of achievement, to make sure they remain equal to that trainee couch potato at the back whose idea of hard work is having the TV remote out of reach. Social mobility? Oh, sure, but you have to carry the dead weight of the worthless with you or you stay where you are.

Intelligence has nothing to do with how much money your parents have in the bank. Neither does a work ethic. The only effect of being poor on progress is the time available. At the top end of the rich scale there are families with maids and other staff to look after the house so the parents can spend more time with the children. Often, they don't, preferring to hand them over to a nanny for rearing, but equally often, they do. At the bottom end of the scale, the kids might come home from school to an empty house and have to get through some housework before their parents get home from work, too tired to help them with homework as much as they'd like. At this end also lie the can't-be-bothered brigade who had kids for the free house or because they were too drunk to read the instructions on the condom packet.

See that? At each end of the rich scale are parents who care about their children and parents who don't. At every point in between, too. It is not connected to how much money they have. It is all about what they are like as people.

Labour, and other socialists, will never understand this. To them, it is all about money. There is nothing else. To them, everyone is exactly the same, wants the same things, wants to live their lives the same way and everyone should get exactly the same because everyone is exactly the same.

Some people, rich and poor, want to work for a living. Some people, rich and poor, are lazy shits who can't be bothered. The rich permanent-party playboy who inherited his money is no more and no less contemptible than the council-house chav who prefers to live on benefits. They are the same. Socialists are incapable of seeing that. All they see is the money. If everyone had the same amount of money, the logic goes, they would all be equally intelligent and all would be well with the world. It is evident nonsense and yet they persist.

I'm sure there are many of these socialists who genuinely can't understand that some kids don't do well in school not because they are poor, nor because they are dim, but because they simply cannot be bothered. These kids have already decided to live life on benefits. Where did they get the idea this was a viable proposition? Why, from the socialists of course. Those who promise them housing, food and cash even if they make no attempt to work.

Given that option, is it surprising that many don't see the purpose of gaining an education? What for? It just means you'll be expected to work. If you have qualifications then that jobcentre might find you a job. If you have none, you can live for free. So are they stupid, these kids, or are they smart? Have they, in fact, worked out how the system can be played to give them a life of leisure? It's hard work being the host but it's an easy life being the parasite.

Labour don't see it. Let's examine the intelligence of a couple of Labour ministers. There's an election coming up, many of Labour's specially-bred parasites are at home with their beer, TV and cigarettes and Andy Burnham decides to announce that he will stop them smoking in their own homes. Labour have already wrecked their pub lives, now the smoke police will follow them home. For the cheeeldren. Meanwhile, the paedophiles, rapists and murderers get let out of jail early and everyone's too busy chasing smokers to notice. Ask yourself how much they really care about the children.

The Brown Gorgon says that all the poor kids will get preferential entry into universities, and with an election looming and seven applicants for every university place, he cuts the teaching budget for the universities - including the special fund for that preferential treatment scam. Bye-bye, poor. Labour have left you behind again. There's also the small matter of all those university staff and students, who have always had a heavy leftward lean. What a vote-winner, Labour! It's safe to assume that we are not dealing with the most clued-in people on the planet here.

When the Gorgon says 'class war' he does not mean rich vs. poor. He means the political class against the rest of us.

It's never been about education. It's always been about social control. Labour use children to spy on adults and as a weapon to force through idiotic legislation 'for the cheeeldren'. That's all Labour see them as. Tools to be used for control. They don't see people. They see an amorphous mass ready to be moulded into what they want. Never mind what any of the rest of us want, it's what Labour wants that matters.

They learn no lessons from their mistakes because they are incapable of learning and incapable of admitting mistakes. They say they will listen but what they are hearing is not what we are saying. They claim to represent us but believe they own us. They will not allow children to be educated to the point where they might realise all this.

Here's a snippet from that first article, something I hadn't thought to include in a fictional dystopia because it's something Pol Pot might have done before starting his massacres, if he'd thought of it. An idea of such callous forethought that an editor might strike it from fiction as being just too incredible.

Separate cash for out-of-school master classes, workshops and summer schools will also be withdrawn and a national register of bright children is being abolished.

They can't afford it now, but... a national register of bright children? Pol Pot would have found that very useful indeed. Why chase down the intelligent for extermination later, when it's difficult to find them? Simply record who they are as they grow up. Come the revolution, you have a handy list of everyone who could be a problem.

Oh, that is going in the book. Someone is going to be horrified when told that their child has won a place on the national register of bright children, because that someone is in a position to know what it means. I just hope that by the time it's written, Labour have left enough literacy in the population so someone can read it.

They have systematically removed actual practical subjects from schools and replaced them with a shell of social manipulation disguised as learning. Biology is now all about global warming and tobacco and alcohol control. History teaches that we are at war with Eastasia and always have been. English classes use the random spelling techniques this country had before Dr. Johnson's dictionary standardised English spelling. Illiteracy is on the rise. Shops can't get staff who can add up simple numbers.

Those of us who were brought up before decimalisation find it impossible to understand how anyone can fail to cope with a system in which everything is divisible by ten. How would they have managed with gills, pints and gallons, with inches, feet, yards, furlongs, miles, with ounces, pounds, stones, hundredweights or for that matter, with pounds, shillings and pence? Each had its own number of subunits and there was no way to work it out from first principles. You just had to learn it all. None of them were based on ten, either. Labour's current education system could never have coped.

They have destroyed education like they've destroyed the economy and through it all they have insisted everything is fine and promised nothing but more of the same. Every new 'initiative' makes it worse. They fiddle with the curriculum until no teacher knows what this week's preferred methods are and no pupil knows what they will be hearing in the next lesson. They drag back any pupil who moves ahead of the class because doing so makes them 'elitist'. The bitter irony of being accused of elitism by someone who believes they are better than everyone else is beyond their ability to appreciate.

Labour have turned the children into Orwell's Junior Spies and ruined their education and their lives in the process. They will lose the next election. They are evidently deliberately trying to do just that.

Then we will have the Tories trying to emulate Labour with nannying and meddling under the guise of 'nudge'.

Consider this, Tories. You will inherit a debt greater than the amount of money in existence. You will need to use tax money to reduce it. Where will you get this tax money?

By taxing those who work, you will say. Well, good luck with that. The generation you're expecting to pay it are uneducated, unskilled and competely devoid of motivation. There are few new-business builders coming up and those that can, will leave because it is now just too much bother to start a business here. It is ten times easier to move to another country first, and start it there. Existing businesses are moving away already. As for the rest of us, we are already toying with the idea of emigration even though we are far below the 'rich' label. Tax us more and watch the exodus.

To somewhere where the State doesn't want to run every waking moment of everyone's life. Somewhere where people can be left alone to enjoy their leisure time in any way they see fit. Somewhere that doesn't have smoke inspectors, drink police, internet monitoring, phone and Email collection, salt rationing, fat prevention, special taxes on heating in sub-zero temperatures to combat global warming, cameras on every corner watching our movements. Somewhere where businesses are not subject to laws telling them who they must and must not employ, based on a pressure group's idea of 'equality' rather than on who can best do the job. Somewhere where the minimum requirement for any State job is the possession of a functioning brain, preferably one without sociopathic tendencies. Somewhere where school means school and not political indoctrination.

There used to be such a place. I used to live in it. It was called Britain. Anyone remember it? It's gone now. It sank into the sea like Atlantis under the weight of regulation, beurocracy and idiotic, petty and spiteful legislation. All that's left above the waves is the paperwork stamped by weasel-faced officials and fine collectors. A place of simmering resentment and a fury that is almost, but not quite, at critical mass.

Tories, you are about to inherit a powderkeg. A huge debt and a non-functioning future workforce currently paid for by an enraged working man. Real ones, I mean, not New Labour ones.

I'd say be careful with those matches but I'm afraid the fuse is already lit. It could go off at any time.

One more 'nudge' could do it.