Behind the barricades  David Newnham finds his old grammar
school flourishing under a Labour government  It was, I imagine,
like reading in the papers that a long-dead colleague had just
won the lottery. The 1970s were picking up speed, I was working
in London, and for years now I hadn't given my old school more
than a moment's thought.  But there it was in black and white.
Colchester Royal grammar had come first at something or other.
No surprise there. CRGS was always coming first. Except that
grammar schools had been abolished. Hadn't they?  Perhaps, I
thought, the name alone had survived. But a call to my parents
brought me up to date. Essex, they said, had refused to abandon
selection. True, the "sec mods", where generations of 11-plus
failures had been unceremoniously dumped, no longer existed, and
most towns now had at least one comprehensive. But the county's
top grammars, in Colchester, Chelmsford and Southend - well,
they just went marching on.  It was, it seemed to me then, as
clear an example of T