NADINE DORRIES: Labour want to ban school uniform – they couldn’t be more wrong

Governments — and I mean all governments — must stop using children as guinea pigs.

Anyone who lived through Labour’s comprehensive school experiment in the 1970s will have cringed on hearing the comments by the party’s shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, this weekend.

She said she wants schools to stop demanding that pupils wear branded items such as a school blazer. Labour would set a limit of three items that schools could insist on being branded items.

Her words were nothing more than a regurgitation of standard socialist education policy from days gone by.

But I suspect she is inadvertently revealing the conversation currently taking place among the Labour shadow front bench and MPs who want school uniform banned altogether — with little regard for the benefits a mandatory uniform policy provides to children from deprived backgrounds.

School uniform is a life saver for hard-pressed families, as I know from experience.

When I started at my secondary modern, everyone wore uniform. For girls, it was a grey pinafore, white shirt, a black tie with white stripes and a bottle-green V-neck jumper or cardigan. It was hideous, but in that uniform we were all equal.

Or we were until, under a Labour government, my school became a comprehensive overnight. The requirement to wear a school uniform was removed.

Many of us continued to wear it — not as a protest but because the cost of wearing a different outfit every day was too much for parents. But, of course, that wasn’t the case for every family, and we all know how competitive some children can be.

Week by week, the now obvious poverty gap widened between the kids in uniform and those able to show off in a range of fashionable items.

Our school uniform had been a tool of inclusivity and equality. It had fostered a sense of oneness, that we were all on the same team and part of a cohesive community.

That…