It's time to leave 1970s politics in the past

WE ARE hobbled by an economic crisis, picket lines are back, and angry marchers across the land are reprising an old refrain – the one about the "no ifs, no buts" as they fight "the cuts".

Only one element of this 1970s nostalgia was missing – the leftist rhetoric of the class war. Right on cue, along has come a Labour politician to complete the revival.

The call for the nationalisation of Scotland's independent schools comes from the Labour peer and some time MSP, Lord George Foulkes. Echoing Conservative policy in England, he has revisited the attempt he made as a councillor in – you guessed it – the 1970s to turn some private schools into comprehensives.

Yet his remarks fly in the face of the policy-making in education in his own party, as well as the Tories and the SNP, which now backs diversity rather than uniformity.

His noble Lordship should remember the storm of opposition his original plans generated. Today, private schools are in a stronger position and without the schools' support it would be impossible bring them into the state sector without Bolshevik-style commandeering.

His Lordship was elected to Holyrood under the list system on the slogan, "For Foulkes sake, vote Labour". For all our sakes Lord Foulkes might be wise to consider his position before the 2011 Holyrood election and see out his time in the cosy expenses-cushioned life in that bastion of 1970s revolutionary thinking: the House of Lords.