Repeating myself. Told this story very often. Trump now adds an edge to it.

There we were in the senate room of University College London sitting at a big round table. Outside the door, keeping guard in a sentry box on wheels was the mummified body of Jeremy Bentham. We should have brought him into the meeting.

We were putting the final touches to the Report on Political Education and Political Literacy. The year was 1978.

1979? We got Thatcher, “There is no such thing as society” Thatcher.

Having attended overcrowded meetings of school teachers assessing the work of young people who enthusiastically studied government and politics I was slow to realise that the subject was now on its way out.

The best feedback of my time as the chief examiner for GCSE Government and Politics was when a lad told his teacher, “Hey Sir, that was a really interesting exam.”

Young people were not required to regurgitate facts, they engaged with the subject.

The Trump result?

Yes it was in a different country, but not such a different culture. I feel that we were witnessing voters engaging with their prejudices.

Harris made the mistake of addressing the rational and informed electorate. That was not a mistake made by Trump.

Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason, 2008, is not the only published work on The Dumbing Down of America. I think that we see something not so different in the U.K. And here it is made worse by indifference. In the last general election forty percent of voters did not bother to vote. All those stories in our school history books about the fights to extend the franchise and so many people could not be arsed to go out and vote.

Who wants us to be politically illiterate? Look at the trillionairs supporting Trump. We are no more than the consumers who put money into their pockets. Political literacy is not in their interests. They want the exploited people to be docile.

The ‘system’ works for ‘them’, it does not work for ‘us’.

Revolution?