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Is it wise to selectively apply parts of the bigger story
Cash for peerages into the biography of the individuals involved?
for example, the Diane Abbott quote, while important, is already in the main piece and may not add much in the Dromey bio. There is also risk that the entire saga becomes paraphrased in Dromey's (and others) pages?
Maybe it was just a technical mix-up, but even if it wasn't, I suggest that this was a private matter between him and his wife, not the sort of tittle-tattle appropriate for an encyclopedia (and anyway we don't regard the Daily Mail as a reliable source).
PatGallacher (
talk)
21:39, 7 January 2022 (UTC)reply
It may well be the policy of the Labour Party to support comprehensive schools, but I am not sure that it is against policy to condemn those who send their children to grammar schools where they exist. Some people might consider that it may not always be realistic to expect people to resist social issues like this on an individual basis.
PatGallacher (
talk)
19:30, 7 January 2022 (UTC)reply
It wasn't so much a matter of policy as of charges of hypocrisy though this really belongs in Harman's article as she was in the Shadow Cabinet at the time. The couple sent their elder son to a grant maintained school despite it being Labour policy to abolish them and there was a big row. Then the Blairs did the same and there came a bigger row. Then Dromey and Harman set their younger son to a grammar school despite the party policy being firmly opposed to selection and there was a huge row that turned out to be Blair's biggest crisis as Leader of the Opposition.
It should be noted that neither couple was living in a city or county where the entire school system is selective and there were no comprehensives available so these weren't cases of opposition politician parents who couldn't wait for their party to come to power and change the school system in time (in contrast to, say, Rosie Duffield in Kent) but rather politicians choosing something for themselves that they wanted to deny others.
I don't recall much public criticism of Dromey who was pretty low profile then. There was huge criticism of Harman but the problem is that it was in a period that's something of a black hole online - recent enough to not yet be well covered in historic pieces but old enough to predate widespread online news media in the UK and few papers have put much pre internet stuff online. The main contemporary stuff I can find with Google is
this in the Independent and
this in the Irish Times. Otherwise you'd have to dig into the newspaper archives and various books on the early development of New Labour.
Timrollpickering (
talk)
15:31, 14 January 2022 (UTC)reply