I'm watchng numerous posts askng "Why is t UK govt stoppng refugee Ukrainians at t border in France whn they are married to UK nationals?" I think @BeardRichard on 'Private Schools & The Ruin of England' offers insights. So here's a THREAD. I do think everybody shd read ths book. 
2. In case those posts haven't come across your Timeline, here's one frm @KenboStewart, who has a 2 week infant son in t car with him. And a Ukrainian wife. He has referred to t UK govt as a "heartless bunch" with "zero compassion" for Ukrainian refugees.
https://twitter.com/KenboStewart/status/1497730561619730437?s=20&t=DqGvTp8dGHfq7ym-XEKrHQ
3. Okay, so how did we end up with a "heartless govt"? That's what @BeardRichard is trying to help us understand in his book on boarding school. A boy who boarded himself, he tries to show us HOW emotions of care & empathy were *intentionally* squashed by that system.
4. @BeardRichard talks of the “emotional austerity” that starts “the moment your parents drive away” - the way you have to repress need & longing & pain. That pain is a price. It buys you something important: A future of status & power. So endure it. Nobody is coming to help.
5. And thn that stiff upper lip of repressed emotion enables you to “embody t idealised national character”. T child comes to believe that to “be British” is to BE “emotionlly distanced”. You hv been sent away to school to acquire that nationalised identity: An English Gentleman.
6. Look again at that passage. It actually quotes the same phrase as @KenboStewart : “the hardness of heart [of the educated]”. @BeardRichard is quoting Mahatma Gandhi there, talking of the colonial demands for which public school boys were for so long being ‘hardened’.
7. @BeardRichard talks about a boarding school as a ‘total institution’. That’s a closed-off setting, which inevitably “generates assumptions about identity”. He says British boarding schools led its children to have “delusions about who we were” or “who we ought to want to be”.
8. Ok, so governing politicians in t U.K. today were fed childhood ideas abt their British identity. That training was based in emotional disconnection, in repressing your own distress. “Several times a year, our attachment were broken. We lost everything, pets, toys, siblings.”
9. What happens when your childhood is soaked in unbuffered, unremitting grief & loss? When “you can cry but no one will help”? Well, easy. “Later in life, when we saw other people cry, we felt no need to go to their aid.” YOU BECOME HARD HEARTED.
10. “We were encouraged to disbelieve in what we were feeling and therefore gradually in any inner emotional core. Our brains were used to depersonalise our selves. This was not an optimal psychological outcome, not for England’s leaders, not for anyone.”
11. So when author @archer_rs talks about Ukrainians being turned back from Britain’s border & asks “What has Britain become?”, that’s, sadly, a very timely question. @BeardRichard wrote his book because he’s trying to help the public make sense of just that.
https://twitter.com/archer_rs/status/1497844090070872068
12. Here’s an interestng part of t uncomfortable answer that @BeardRichard offers us: “The Empire saved England from the worst excesses of boys with this particular English education. By the 1980s though, this outlet for t TRAINED HARDNESS OF OUR HEARTS was no longer available.”
13. So there you have a weaving together of lots of themes we have witnessed in the recent past: Brexit, refugees arriving by boat, Covid deaths, parties at Downing Street. England is itself now faced with the hard heartedness it used to be able to export.
14. So - If you hv been raised by an institution to believe that yr personal character is synonymous with “being British”, (in Beard’s terms, your “manifest destiny”) then of course you think t government’s money is YOUR money. It doesn’t belong to taxpayers. It belongs to YOU.
https://twitter.com/dr_pam_jarvis/status/1497733293097328643
15. So am I arguing that childhood expernces of powerful politicns shd be a sort of public property? I guess I am. Its what @BeardRichard is sayng too. He’s trying to get us to see we ALL suffer if ppl who govern us hv been trained to be hard hearted - inc fathers at our borders.
16. Notably, there’s another illustration of my point also available right now on all our TV screens. Here’s the story of #Ukrainian President Zelensky’s family history. He is the descendant of a family traumatised by the Holocaust. Another childhood yielding impact right now…
https://twitter.com/stvengoldstein/status/1497708712936550404
17. When @DeborahMeaden of Dragons Den retweeted that last tweet about President Zelensky’s family history, she said simply “Now I understand”. I think @BeardRichard book does essentially the same thing: It helps us understand (who/what Britain is becoming. And why.).
https://twitter.com/DeborahMeaden/status/1497733140076544000
18/end. I believe understandng t WHY of a thing reduces confusion &fear. That’s why I keep talking abt this stuff. Childhoods matter monumentally. Between inflicted UK poverty & inflicted Russian war, millions more childhoods are ths very week being reshaped.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks for reading.
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