Livre d'Or

Yes. My dad was told by his parents that Cambridge wasn't for the likes of them, after he'd won a scholarship to go. (The school talked them round.) He got a starred first and a PhD and a lectureship, and his mum asked him when he was going to get a proper job. There's absolutely no possibility that he would have done any of it at all if it had been loan-funded.

I think the social mobility thing is double-edged. You're taking the best and the brightest kids out of their families and communities and, basically, teaching them to be Citizens of Nowhere and look down on their origins as parochial. The families and communities that lose those kids will resent it. (I wonder whether this feeds into the hostility to Queerness, as something that happens elsewhere, with the assumption that the causality goes in the other direction.) We-as-the-gentry would have done much better to invest in improving poor areas rather than harvesting bright kids out of them and telling the rest that they deserve their poverty.

The Labour party is increasingly full of people who went into politics straight from PPE at Balliol. You can see why this might turn off their traditional voters.