This last week saw the announcement that the independent Birkenhead High School is set to be taken over by the government, becoming a city academy. The school is the third independent school to become a city academy, after schools in Toxteth and Manchester, and marks another step in the United Kingdom’s concerted drive towards mediocrity.

Birkenhead is currently run by the Girls’ Day School Trust (GDST), which in charge of 26 all-girls schools in England and Wales. The GDST has found many of its schools under increasing pressure from government, with the state taxing those parents that would sent their children to independent schools more to sink yet more money into our failing state schools.

Given this, it can come as no surprise that the two schools that the GDST has handed over to the government are in poorer areas of the northwest - Birkenhead and Toxteth - while the two schools that they are adding are in wealthier areas of the southeast - Kensington and Tonbridge.

By pursuing their strategy of pressuring independent schools, the people that suffer aren’t the fabulously wealthy, who can afford to pay the spiralling school fees of the major public schools, but the aspirational class that was so feted at the Conservative Party conference. Forcing independent schools in poorer neighbourhoods out of business severely limits the opportunities that children from traditionally-poorer backgrounds have: compounded by the extinction of grammar schools in most areas.

This truth, and others, are lost entirely on the so-called ‘analyst’ on the BBC website, who parades his opinion like nobody’s business.

Have they rediscovered their social conscience or are they just finding new ways to survive in cash-strapped times?

The GDST is a not-for-profit charity. It’s a charitable school. It is much the epitome of a social conscience. The government, particularly this one, is the epitome of a thief.

As it happened the independent schools had little to fear. Far from being savaged, they have been gently seduced.

Gently seduced? They’re having their charitable status revoked, and that’s not savagery? It’s either greater tax revenue or more kids getting a good education, Gordon. Make your choice.

And, of course, the origins of many of today’s top fee-charging schools were rooted in very similar charitable aims. Sometimes those origins seem to have been forgotten.

Forgotten by whom? The BBC? Schools minister Ed Balls? Fellow ex-public schoolboy Lord Adonis? Certainly not the GDST, which remains a non-profit charity, as it always has been.

That is a big difference. It might just help to break the very common misconception that, somehow, educational excellence is something that can only be achieved by financial and academic selection.

Money and ability aren’t important, eh? OK, then walk the walk. Go to a comprehensive school in Birkenhead, down the road from Birkenhead High School, and try to find a kid whose full potential is being realised. Heck, find a pupil that isn’t perpetually under the threat of gun or knife violence in the playground. If you can’t, shut up.

If some of them are now willing to educate all in their local community, irrespective of ability or financial means, then that does look like the start of a revolution. Could it be the beginning of the end for England’s divided school system, which remains one of the most hierarchical in the world?

Perhaps so, but also the beginning of the end for England’s superb public school system, which remains by far the most admired and copied in the world. This ‘revolution’ is not a benign one, but the death of a sort of school that provides hope for children from a certain neighbourhood, and freedom from the low standards and violence that pervades the state sector.

If the government wants to blur the lines between the state and independent schools, whilst maintaining educational standards, there’s a very easy way to achieve that, and that’s by introducing a voucher system. The government would hand out to each parent education vouchers, worth the amount the state spends on schooling, and allow parents to shop around for the best education: with the chance to top up the vouchers with their own money if they choose.

Instead of making it impossible for the poor to go to good schools, it would allow them to choose which school to attend. Instead of having a definite line between the bad state schools and the good independent schools, there would be none at all: the hierarchy would disappear in one fell swoop.

I still don’t think the voucher system is a fantastic way to run an education system (if Eton gets the best results in the country, let all schools be like Eton and privatise them). However, the principled political pragmatist sees the voucher system as a perfectly adequate solution: empowering parents to make choices based on their circumstances, and encouraging schools to improve standards to match those of the existing independent schools.

The alternative is the death of our independent sector by stealth, by the usurpation of their heritage and contribution to communities by the state, and by the statist agenda of the likes of the BBC. That would be a disaster, not the rich that the crusading left want to eat alive, but for the working class that the same supposedly want to help.

Since becoming its leader, David Cameron has changed the Conservative Party beyond almost all recognition. Focusing on so-called ’social justice’, he has embarked on a wide-ranging reform programme. In a major policy announcement, Cameron today unveiled plans for the conscription of teenagers into what he calls the ‘National Citizen Service’. This bold action marks the completion of the Conservatives’ metamorphosis: not to acceptable and laudable electability, but to irredeemable statism, socialism, and suicide.

The New Tory plan is for all 16-year olds to take part in a six-week social engineering programme at the end of compulsory education, which the Tories rightly believe should end at 16, and not 18 as Labour intends to make it. During the programme, the participants would be forced to do rather pointless things like paint community centres and mow grass verges in a vain attempt to gain ‘inspiration’ and ‘respect for others’.

Cameron hasn’t done much to mask the collectivist ideology underpinning and undermining the new policy. Its name says it all really; ‘National Citizen Service’ combins connotations of the socialism of the National Health Serice with the nationalism of national service conscription, adulterated only by submission to the state for participants, and submission to second-class citizenship for those that deign to argue.

The policy has been heavily promoted by today’s Sun, which congratulates Cameron and itself for succumbing to the populism that the Sun has long espoused. Big government, nationalism, and slave labour in the guise of preserving law and order are the Sun’s favourite cocktail.

It will mix people from different backgrounds. North and south, black and white, rich and poor. They will be putting something back into the community.

And if they want to put something back into the community, they’ll do just that, by working through charities, the Scouts, religious groups, or other similar volunteer programmes. This method intrudes on people’s lives, forcing them to do the bidding of the state, regardless of circumstances, regardless of choice. Cameron’s message is, no matter where you live, no matter what your skin colour, no matter what your parents income, you can’t hide from Big Brother.

It will be away of learning respect for our country and each other, just like national service was.

National service was about forcing people to do what the people with guns said: a way to get cheap meat for the grinder of the expected apocalyptic war with the Soviet Union. If you think that’s a fair comparison, Mr Cameron, you dig your own grave.

Whether individuals are leaving school, moving on from their GCSEs to another qualification, or have dropped out of the system altogether, our national programme would take them out of their comfort zone, provide them with a chance to mix with others away from home.

Take people of ouf the comfort zone? So the New Tories think that it’s the role and responsibility of the state to make people’s lives uncomfortable? Misery may be the currency of oppression, but it certainly shouldn’t be the raison d’etre for it.

The Sun picks up where Dave leaves off.

Bookish swots will be shown there is more to life than just exams.

The dangerous intellectuals must learn the values of national solidarity and service to the greater ideal that they can’t learn in books. Well, except in books that were banned during the Second World War. In fact, let’s just burn all the books to prevent subversive decadent ideas like ‘liberty’, ‘education’, and ‘personal betterment’ spreading.

Teenagers will not be forced by law to take part in the NCS. … Instead, it will become so attractive it will become a natural part of growing up.

So the state will force people using ’soft’ power. It’s already been implied that employers will be forced to give preference to participants. They’d probably ban all non-participants going into higher education. They might increase the tax rate for those that refuse to bow to their demands. Or they might just make it compulsory further down the line when people have stopped caring. I wonder who it was that did that…

Der Stürmer’s own editorial urges us to ‘give it a chance’.

The Boy Scouts offered this sort of community training for more than half a century. The Duke of Edinburgh scheme and Outward Bound courses have been amazingly successful.

And, despite the Sun’s ignorant use of the past tense, they continue to be. For a century, the Scouts have done all that Dave wants to accomplish. And they’ve achieved it all without the heavy hand of the state forcing them.

… not all youngsters are tearaways looking for someone to mug. The vast majority are decent, considerate, and appalled by bad behaviour.

After a two-page spread of belligerent idiocy on the part of the world’s favourite newspaper, we get some sense. Not everyone is a tearaway. Most aren’t. So why does the government think it’s its responsibility to employ this one-size-fits-all national service? By forcing teenagers to work, they do nothing but alienate and belittle them: telling them that their libery is a luxury that the state won’t afford them, and that their future will be a future of compulsion, slavery, and misery. When the outlook’s that bleak, no wonder we have so much under-age drinking.

When Cameron told the world, “There is such a thing as society. It’s not just the same thing as the state”, I rejoiced. Not that I disagreed with Thatcher’s assessment to begin with, but it was refreshing to hear that a politician whose very value comes from his centrism was espousing a fundamentally libertarian argument.

This monstrosity of a policy undermines that. It is a concession by Cameron that individualism is dead, and that liberty has lost. It is a surrender of the big citizen to big government. It’s sad that this leaves no major party’s leadership willing to stand up for rights. Fortunately, it matters not one jot to the friends of freedom that Cameron has thrown in the towel. To us, it only proves that we can’t rely on others to make the case for so long as we have voices ourselves.