Hacker News Reader

Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

That's not even remotely true. The Leader of the Opposition (Keir Starmer) went to Reigate, then to Leeds University. Gordon Brown went to Edinburgh University, Jeremy Corbyn went to North London Poly.

Only Ed Milliband and Tony Blair went to Oxford, which is where (of the Conservative Party): David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss went.

Saying "living under both sides is the same thing" is also observably false, as anyone raised under the Labour governments of 1997 to 2010 can attest and compare to the Conservative governments since.

View on HN

So all the names of PMs you mentioned bar one went to Oxford...

Considering the LAST FOUR PMs came from the Conservative party, that's not the epic own you think it is.

I wasn't trying to do an "epic own" and it sounds like you're implying I'm a Tory which is very funny :)

edit: oh lol I get it now, in the post I replied to you're doing a very literal interpretation of "they all went to the same schools" and refusing to interpret this as it's very clearly intended (that a huge amount of MPs went to a couple of schools)

And American top politicians don’t go to top schools?

Man I really do not care where American politicians go to school. But it sounds like you're not aware of the really outsized representation that Oxford graduates of PPE have in UK politics: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford...

https://www.collegeraptor.com/find-colleges/articles/college...

30% of our House went to a top 100 university which isn't necessarily saying much - that list includes many state universities and I'd say that's a perfectly appropriate number.

20% of the British Parliament went to Oxbridge alone.

Looking at American politics from the outside, I feel like (in most cases), you're lucky if your elected representatives know how to spell the names of common vegetables and know that the US doesn't share a border with Afghanistan.

Eh, that's true to an extent, especially in the House and double especially in state government, but don't take John Oliver or Daily Show as completely representative. Watching those shows, you'd probably never know, for example, that Ron DeSantis, who is currently one of the Republican frontrunners for 2024, went to Yale and Harvard Law School.

Corbyn did go to private school, though.

//edit// ..and had a privileged upbringing, so was the same class as the others.

> The difference is they all went to the same schools together.

He went to neither Eton nor Oxford so no, he didn't go to the same schools as the Conservative leaders he faced.

> Labour governments of 1997 to 2010

Ahh yeah the “WMD” Iraq war and introduction of University top up fees.

Why wouldn't you be honest about this? It's on Wikipedia!

Starmer went to Oxford. "gained a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law degree at St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford in 1986."

In the past 50 years there have only been 3 PMs not from Oxford. It has nothing to do with conservatives or labor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_t...

Postgraduate degrees are VERY different from undergraduate degrees, typically being a year long and being a lot less integrated into the "student lifestyle." Where you spend your time as an undergrad is a lot more impactful on who you interact with and how your worldview is formed than the time you may spend as a postgrad.

He has a degree from Oxford. Which you left out to make your side look better.

I think it's time to look in the mirror and see that your preconceptions and biases are making you overlook reality. Like.. obvious reality. Reality that's so obvious it's in Wikipedia info boxes.

> The difference is they all went to the same schools together.

There's a number of components to the sentence I responded to:

> same schools

and

> together

An undergrad studying PPE and postgrad studying Law are not "going to Oxford together." Instead of trying to uncover some insidious bias on my end, I'd strongly recommend doing more than a surface level scan of Wikipedia pages to "win the argument," so to speak.

The experience of doing a postgraduate degree is so far away from the experience of studying at Oxford as an undergraduate that they may as well be different universities. Different demographic makeup (much fewer private school kids, much more international students), different teaching methods (no training in 'blagging' a 1:1 tutorial with minimal reading, a very transferable skill to politics) and no time to hack around at the Union or make a name in one of the political clubs.

Honestly, the problem isn't even with all Oxford undergraduate degrees, just a slice of PPE and adjacent students who are vastly overrepresented in politics.

(My background: Leeds BA, Oxford MSc/DPhil. Don't like Starmer, though, despite our similar university choices...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com