MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Labour fears Farage far more than it cares about the white working class

The long, miserable saga of the Labour Party 's war on good state education stretches back through many decades of 'progressive' experiments and plain neglect.
It is tempting to think that their parallel hostility to private schools is partly motivated by the proof fee-charging schools provide, that good schooling is still possible.
If they could tax them out of existence and drive them abroad, it would be easier to pretend that publicly funded education is satisfactory.
Well, of course it is – for some children. The Labour elite know this very well, as they take elaborate steps to avoid the sorts of schooling most children have to endure, hiring private tutors, moving into costly catchment areas of exceptional academies, or developing a convenient enthusiasm for religion.
Catholic schools, schools in pleasant rural areas, schools in well-off suburbs and above all schools whose pupils generally have the support of strong, stable families do reasonably well, even despite the crazy, ever-changing policies visited on them by Leftist ideologues.
But the worst losers from all this experimentation have been the white working class, who have suffered from the death of traditional industry, the general decline of stable married families, the absence of fathers and the resulting break-up of family and kinship in urban areas.
This is typical of Left-wing policies in modern Britain. The ideas most warmly embraced by the north London Leftist elite are also the ideas that do the most damage to the voters who have for decades kept Labour in power.
For a long time there really was not much those traditional voters could do about this gap between promise and fulfilment.
Now, thanks to the rapid growth of Nigel Farage's Reform UK party, there is. In fact, Mr Farage is so keen to appeal to Labour defectors that he is becoming quite Left-wing in his late middle age.
Whether this is sincere or not, we have yet to discover. But it is certainly working. Labour voters are deserting their ancestral party.
And the Labour high command are panicking. The latest to do so is Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson.
She has led the charge against private schools, using punitive taxes to drive poorer families into the state sector.
Now Ms Phillipson is moving in on Mr Farage's left flank, complaining that white working-class children are being betrayed and left behind.
She is quite right to say this. New data shows that such children are doing acceptably well only in a tiny 21 of the 3,400 secondary schools in England.
She promises an inquiry into this shocking failure, which may even report while she is still in office.
But what will it tell us that we do not already know? The poorer your area, the worse your school is likely to be.
Ms Phillipson's actions haven't been much help so far. Shadow Schools Minister Neil O'Brien accuses her of cutting support for able pupils in mathematics, physics, Latin and computing.
The grim truth is that, despite its claimed preoccupation with education, Labour has never had much of a plan for helping the children of the poor.
Its obsession with encouraging mass migration and 'rubbing the Right's nose in diversity' meant it tended to view the white working class not as friends but as bigots, for it was among such citizens that the tougher consequences of such immigration were most keenly felt.
New Labour's shiny New Britain never arrived in the grim housing estates, blasted by unemployment and anti-social behaviour, where good education is still a dream.

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