iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I love to work hard for comrade Xi by *checks notes* googling for publicly available information on MPs Wikipedia pages

010

Plenty of people, but not smug liberals

000

Yes, I think your views are entirely worthless, your politics are vapid liberal guff, youre either an active participant or willing stooge to the class systems, institutions and right wing politics of this country, and you're personally smug, blinkered and extremely annoying, and I don't respect you

120

Not to the rigour that I'd put a label on - but either you went to Oxbridge/private school, so you're so invested in defending these institutions of reinforcement of the class system, or (and this is somehow sadder and worse) you didn't, but you love the taste of boot so much you defend them anyway

000

Yes (though the admissions process is severely skewed) and its a machine that turns them into people who support Jeremy Hunt and write for the Times.

000

You have mashed potatoes for brains. Don't know why I expected better from a lib dem councillor, but still. Show me how campaigning and the ballot box is working out, eh?

120

Hahahahaha well that basically answers the question doesn't it

And I've read enough guff from Tories thankyou, I've been reading your posts all morning (did you know Syed did PPE at Oxford? Interesting)

I recommend opening your fucking eyes What school/uni did you go to btw?

210

Education or other class signifiers that they can then use in service of good causes etc - class traitors in the entirely positive sense)

000

Direct action, the ones picketing landlords or smashing up Israeli weapon factories or going out on strike or freeing people from fascist immigration vans etc etc. (Not to ignore the small chunk of people who have, and importantly*recognise* the privilege of wealthy families or private/Oxbridge

I mean electoral politics is dead and useless for anyone on the left anyway, we're locked into an increasingly right wing ratchet, but it's entirely possible for non-toffs, non-private school people and non-oxbridge grads to get involved with democracy - and in fact they do - theyre the ones at the

210

Fucking hell it takes a special kind of "I'm ignoring everything around me" to literally have the data in front of you about how much of an old boys club UK party politics is, and still parrot: "it's not a closed shop!" - but what can you expect from a lib dem I suppose

Most of the big media figures accounts on here too are "centrist" (again,RW but laundering their reputation) - the big obvious far right wingers like Gove, Johnson, Clarkson, Cameron, Kendrick, Heffer, Melanie Philips, either aren't here or haven't built up enough following to be referred to me

000

Accounts - for example there are a large number of labour MPs with bluesky accounts, and I think only one conservative currently (Ben obese-jecty, who you'll find with a Sandhurst label from this labeller/on the Sandhurst list)

100

There *are* more people that I've hit with the labeller who are nominally centrist or centre left (at least in how they tend to be described by the common, vastly shifted, view of British politics) - but that's because of the platform - I've populated this by working down lists of MPs and big media

100

In the skeet you're quoting. There's also Sophy ridge who works for the right wing sky news, Hugh zeffman who works for the right wing BBC, and David Aaronovitch, a frothing war hawk with dog shit politics who writes for the right wing Times

Sam Freedman, a former advisor to Michael Gove and rabidly right wing little freak, is literally the second person on the list

We do *not* live in a meritocracy

030

- it's the downstream effects that are important - people from Oxbridge are vastly overrepresented in British media and politics - don't you think it's relevant that a big chunk of the MPs in this country went on the same course at the same uni? Or that half the Journos went there too?

230

A) we do not live in a meritocracy - the admission process (esp. at Oxbridge where it's interview based) is skewed towards people with connections etc B) the main focus of this though is not *how* someone got to Oxbridge - same as how I don't care if someone went to private school on a scholarship

120

Oh I see you've met some Army officers

100

Leg up, but now I work to change that system/use that privilege to help people who didn't have it, or are just honest about it and how it affects their career and views etc.

000

I'm not saying I've got to every single Journo on here etc, and some people I've not found information for yet - but I've been clear and open about the methodology - plenty of people, with this and the private school labeller, have put their hands up and said "hey yeah, I went to X, obv it gave me a

100

Further - to populate this I worked down lists of MPs, journalists, etc. I checked *all* of them and labelled all that I could find information confirming - I'm not going to leave particular people off because I respect their politics, that's just inviting claims this is all about personal bias

A journalist or an MP having gone to Oxbridge is relevant information and context, both to their career in the notoriously old-boys-club-infested British system, but also to their later writing and views

I know the guardian is a neoliberal transphobe rag, but I'd think their journalists might have enough in them to recognise e.g. the % of modern prime ministers who did PPE at Oxford, or the number of editors/senior correspondents who went to Oxbridge. Britain is not a meritocracy - why pretend?

Or Corbyn is on the private school list, as are one or two of the only journalists I respect. However, there's a significant overrepresentation of people from private schools in UK media/politics, and the same is true of people who went to Oxbridge.

As with the private school list, it's not automatically a "this person is 100% shit" badge, and there's people labelled who I admire a lot (Abbott, for example, is a pioneering MP and tireless social justice campaigner, though sadly took a swerve into SWERF territory at some points)

The BBC especially is a very insular and classist institution, and one stuffed to the brim, especially in the upper levels, with people who went to Oxbridge and/or private schools. They look out for their own, on the whole.

000

Anyone who's lived in Britain more than five minutes (and is being honest) knows it's not a meritocracy. I'm not saying "oh yeah every successful comedian got their entirely because of their uni" but it's a contributing factor, it influences people, it opens doors.

100

Oh yeah, I know Alex is on the show because he created it - but what I'm saying is while I enjoy taskmaster and Alex Horne's work a lot, it's a fairly simple premise and the cynic in me suggests some others with different backgrounds may have had a harder time pitching it.

020

Yeah -by the looks of it there is a divide between the panel shows (which do tend to be heavily Oxbridge weighted) and Apollo (I could find Jimmy Carr, Al Murray, Andy Parsons, Phil Wang, Sindhu Vee - still I think more than any other uni except specific performing arts places, but not as dominant)

Yes it's a structural issue, but what's the problem in highlighting it? Besides, doing PPE at Oxford especially (and often studying at Oxbridge at all) regularly gives people massively fucked vibes

100

I know the guardian is a neoliberal transphobe rag, but I'd expect that a former political editor, even there, would be able to see relevance of e.g. a big chunk of the political journalists in the country going to the same course/uni as a load of MPs - or, say, the %of modern PMs who did PPE at Ox?

000

Does tony Slattery have a bluesky account? He's not in the list above h though if he does I'll add him, as he went to Cambridge

200