Kettle comes to the boil

Martin Kettle in today's Guardian is rightly critical of the deputy prime minister's recent intervention in the education debate:

John Prescott should be nobody's hero for his extraordinary attack this week on the government's education plans. "If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that everyone wants to go there," he told the Sunday Telegraph. The great danger? What world is he living in? Certainly not the Hull of his constituents, whose schools consistently produce the worst GCSE results of any local authority in the whole of England. A few good schools there would be just what the city's next generation needs

Overall it is an even-handed piece and worth reading.