The Perils Of An Incomplete Classical Education.

Andrew Mitchell born in Hampstead the son of another Tory MP, Sir David Mitchell, was educated at Rugby school, studied history at Jesus College Cambridge and was an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment. A typical Tory then, born into a privileged world, the beneficiary of an expensive education, arrogant, rude and prone to approaching every problem with an open mouth. A pity then that he doesn't seem to have learned very much during his stellar career. It's never a good idea to badmouth a copper, as any working class kid could have told him, but its even a worse idea to take a newspaper into court on a flimsy charge of libel. He should have known better. That he didn't probably explains his use of the term "pleb" as an insult. His classical education should surely have informed him that in ancient Rome such an insult would have made no sense. During the early phase of its history Roman society was indeed divided between a privileged and wealthy patrician class and an underprivileged and much poorer plebeian class. However, over time many in the patrician class lost much of their wealth and their privileged position while many in the plebeian class gained both wealth and positions of great influence. During the Republic the Tribune of the Plebs, who by law had to be a member of the plebeian class, was the only politician who could enact legislation and could veto any law proposed by a Senate that could only only suggest new laws and not enact them. Marcus Antonius (Mark Anthony) was a plebeian as was Gaius Marius, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great). In fact the policemen that Andrew Mitchell called "f*****g plebs" are in very good company - except, perhaps, when dealing with an ill-educated lout like Andrew Mitchell.

Yet Another Tory Parades His Ignorance.

As the Tory party reels from the shock disclosure by Andrew Mitchell as to how they regard the rest of us, they also seem compelled to line up in order to underline the message. George Osborne, for instance, seems completely unconcerned that he is willing to spend £180 of taxpayers money to avoid sitting with the plebs on a train. The latest suicidally stupid Tory to get in on the act is Mark Hoban, the Employment Minister, who is urging the uenemployed to “roll up their sleeves” and get a job. The fact that the Tory party has done its absolute level best to make sure that there are no jobs to get doesn't bother him at all. Nor does the fact that taking money from the unemployed, as he will begin to do from tomorrow, will not create a single job but, instead, will simply add to the sum total of human misery that the Tories are inflicting on the country so they and their rich pals don't have to pay tax. The reason that Mr.Hoban can be both so stupid and so lacking in empathy is easy to understand. He has spent his entire working life in the finance industry where ineptitude is par for the course and is positively encouraged while fraud is considered to be the pinacle of achievement. In 2011 he was happy to secretly meet with banking lobbyists intent on watering down the controls that the Vickers Report was urging to stop banks from taking insane risks with our money. He neither understands what it is like to be unemployed nor does he care. He is only concerned with making sure that bankers can continue to defraud the rest of us, while the problems of the plebs remains eternally beyond the scope of his limited imagination. For him it is axiomatic that the rich have to be rewarded to make them productive while the plebs have to be punished because that self-serving philosophy is the foundation of all Tory philosophy.