Drawing the line - 18/06/07
It has come to my attention that a fellow called Jonathan Cruddas, who’s been in the news recently as he’s standing for deputy leader of the Labour Party, is living in Notting Hill. Cruddas, who prefers the more egalitarian Jon, is a member of parliament, not in itself grounds for disqualification from the human race. But strangely, he’s not the representative of the area he lives in.

He is in fact the MP for Dagenham, a constituency that lies some 18 miles to the east of Notting Hill. It’s a very different place to the Hill; in Dagenham, you can buy a three-bedroom house for about £200,000. You won’t find a three bedroom house around these parts for less than £1.5 million.

So why would you happily accept the votes of the people of Dagenham and then swan off and live in Notting Hill? Well, on top of the fact that no sane person would live in Dagenham if they had a choice, it turns out that this man Cruddas has another motive.

He’s picked his current address because it means he can send his children to an elite Catholic secondary school, thereby side-stepping the need for them to go to a school in Dagenham, where the majority of the pupils would be working class.

Despite the fact that Jon has got into parliament with the votes of his working class constituency, he clearly recognises how much superior are the ways of the middle class. This is despite his claim to be a hardy proletarian representing the underdog.

A flavour of the calibre of this man is that he supported the invasion of Iraq, only to recant as soon as he realised this was an unpopular stance. I doubt if he has much taste for criticism either; he signed an open letter to a national newspaper in support of President Chavez of Venezuela shutting down an opposition TV station recently.

By the way, these elite religious schools (Tony Blair sent his kids to another Catholic one; Church of England ones are also popular) are a sure-fire way to make me accelerate from calm and collected to red-faced and screaming in under five seconds. If people want to believe in religion, that’s their business. But these religious schools are 90 per cent funded by the taxpayer, one of whom is me.

As it happens, I have no desire to expose my children to the bigotry and falsehood that these schools are founded on. Yet if I did apply to get them into this so-called state school, the first question I would be asked would be, ‘what are your religious beliefs?’ When I answered, ’I’m an atheist’, my children would be automatically denied entry.

If these schools were independent of the state, I’d have no problem with them. But I very strongly object to financing them out of my pocket. If they excluded my children on almost any grounds other than the fact that I do not share their beliefs, which I consider to be deluded, the exclusion would be discriminatory and illegal.

But back to Jon, who, including expenses, earned £129,816 last year. As well as a his Notting Hill pad, he owns a house in Dagenham, one which his neighbours say he and his family are rarely seen at.

Notting Hill, one of the most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods anywhere, has a strong tradition of welcoming people from all over the world, a tradition which I’m extremely proud to be part of. But we should surely draw the line somewhere. So, my message to Cruddas is, ‘why don’t you clear off back to Dagenham?’