Grammar Schools

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 27 November 1964.

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Photo of Mr Quintin Hogg Mr Quintin Hogg , St Marylebone 12:00, 27 November 1964

The Secretary of State has just given us a most interesting and, in many ways, remarkable speech. I think I should be doing it a bad service if I sought to answer it in detail without reading it at least once again in HANSARD to see what it really said. I am certainly not going to accuse the right hon. Gentleman, as he appeared at one time to fear that I might, of being either doctrinaire or equivocal.

The only feeling of disappointment that I had about the speech—I know the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me for saying this—is that he did not answer what seemed to me to be the three crucial questions in this most interesting subject. The first is how far he is prepared to coerce local education authorities which have the misfortune not to agree with his vision of secondary reorganisation, what powers he will use and how he will use them. The second is to what extent he proposes to coerce the local authorities which have the good fortune to agree with him to prevent them proceeding in a way which many people think is unreasonable and oppressive. The third is to what extent he thinks that at any rate in our great cities—in which I include those which have been mentioned, particularly Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and, above all, London—the two main systems of education can co-exist with a reasonable degree of mutual tolerance for some time to come.

These seem to me to be the practical issues. I have failed to see—it may be that I am speaking too quickly and that there may have been more in it than I thought—in the Secretary of State's remarkable speech a clear answer to any one of those three questions.