Doing a gig in Cambridge tonight and it might be a ridiculous thing to say – but I have always found the place intimidating – as if all the people in the audience will be university students and therefore super bright.
Or more accurately perhaps, super privileged?
Because so many kids at Oxbridge have been groomed for the place their entire lives and attending expensive feeder schools helps them along enormously.
Which is money well spent perhaps since the Oxbridge degree is the degree that never stops giving and explains why students fight to get in.
But at the risk of sliding in to the politics of envy here – as a comprehensive schoolboy myself, I resent the stranglehold that Oxbridge has on society’s most hallowed positions especially in the more subjective arts.
And I get that kids getting in to Oxbridge are very able – and so it stands to reason then that they might go on to prevail in whatever field they choose?
But if their degrees are going to be a constant qualification – then we should have a system whereby those Oxbridge students with a privileged background are somehow forced to give a nod to their good fortune – especially lefty and worthy types like Tony Blair, Tristram Hunt, Stephanie Flanders and Robert Peston.
I don’t know what exactly.
A constant need to apologise perhaps?
Or maybe a new high rate tax band for public school kids with an Oxbridge degree – say 70%?
No, this seems bitter and a libertarian, I am never for higher taxes –
So perhaps a further anagram that must be used after the OXON that denotes the Oxbridge degree.
So for the privileged types – something like
MA (OXON) (PSSI) – (posh school, shoe in)
And for the ordinary but clever kids from state school
MA (OXON) (SSNSPJSP) (state school, no strings pulled, just bloody clever)
Just a thought